The Israel lobby gets the royal treatment

We cross this week to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion and other assorted grievances, but before we do, it’s important to note this is an inquiry the Albanese government were systematically bullied into in a coordinated campaign by the Israel lobby after the horrific Bondi massacres in late 2025.

The Albanese government believed a less reactive, more thorough approach was required, especially in light of any premature inquiry prejudicing the forthcoming criminal trial of the accused perpetrator, but the Israel lobby were not to be dissuaded by issues of due legal process and common sense and, as he does with monotonous regularity, Anthony Albanese capitulated to the Murdoch-Israeli bullying.

Initially Australians were told the inquiry would be examining, “the specific circumstances surrounding the antisemitic Bondi terrorist attack that occurred on December 14, 2025”. Beyond this initial selling point to the public, the inquiry’s terms have now broadened to include, “investigating the nature, prevalence, and key drivers of antisemitism in Australia, including its intersections with ideologically and religiously motivated extremism and radicalisation”,  as well as, “making any other recommendations arising out of the inquiry for strengthening social cohesion in Australia and countering the spread of ideologically and religiously motivated extremism in Australia.”  

You have to admit, that last part sounds promising. An inquiry investigating the spread of ideologically and religiously motivated extremism in Australia? Surely that would mean this inquiry looking into the Exclusive Bretheren, Thomas Sewell’s neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Network, the toxic online manosphere and maybe even Barnaby Joyce’s bizarre delusions about the tenets of the Catholic religion, (hint – adultery is not one of them). But you would be wrong.

To date, the inquiry has centred its focus on the thoughts and opinions of the pro-Israel lobby. (On a side note, one witness testified this week, he felt the term pro-Israel lobby was offensive, yet again employing the deliberate Israel lobby tactic of tightening and eradicating any language people may use against them.) And what Australians who’ve tuned into the inquiry may have noticed so far is the array of people giving testimony in a very different type of environment to a traditional court system.

A Royal Commission is, by its very legislative nature, an inquisitorial system whereby the subject matter is explored rather than tested. Witnesses appearing are for the most part, allowed to give their version of events untested, and, it would appear, without needing to provide corroborating evidence.

A traditional court hearing in Australia is operated on an adversarial model, meaning one side or sides, face off against each other. This means the standards for evidence are much higher and witness testimony is almost without exception, tested against the evidence or required to be substantiated in some way.

As Australians have observed, this is generally not the case with the current Royal Commission which has morphed into a platform for the pro-Israel lobby to perform grievance politics for the Australian public. An array of people have been allowed to give their subjective views, unfettered by the need to offer corroborating evidence or any evidence at all. Some people who are Jewish who walk past a pro-Palestine protest on a university campus feel “traumatised”, although to what extent and how they do is never tested, nor is a clinician’s diagnosis of trauma required to be submitted. Why are some students promoting the view that an anti-Israel protest affects them so deeply, when there is no evidence these protests are aimed at Jewish people and in fact in many instances, the protestors themselves are Jewish?

Over and over again we see the conflation of Jewish identity commingled with the nation of Israel – a construct most often in the minds of the perceived victims and rarely in the intentions or minds of the protestors.

Then we see the Antisemitism Envoy herself, Jillian Segal, unsurprisingly using the inquiry as a soap-box to go to war against the arts and universities and public broadcasters, ABC and SBS, in a grab bag of grievances that have little or nothing to do with strengthening social cohesion, and even less to do with the events leading up to the Bondi massacre.

Let’s take one statement Segal submitted as fact to the inquiry on July 13^th: “Culture shapes perception. Publicly funded institutions like arts festivals, galleries and public broadcasters must uphold anti-discrimination values and be accountable for the narratives they promote. While freedom of expression, particularly artistic expression is vital to cultural richness and should be protected, funding provided by Australian taxpayers should not be used to promote division or spread false or distorted narratives.”  (at 38:00)  

Due to the nature of this Royal Commission, that statement by Segal remained largely untested. But if we break it up, we can see how disingenuous it truly is. Arts festivals, galleries and public broadcasters…. must be accountable for the narratives they promote? But these institutions aren’t promoting these values, i.e, the values of their exhibitors or their patrons or their interview subjects. These institutions are merely vessels or platforms for others to use to express their views. Holding a writer’s festival personally accountable for a book someone has written is as ludicrous as the idea that we should hold the ABC accountable for an opinion expressed in an interview.

Segal also wants to claim that Australian’s tax money should be protected and monitored when it funds artistic expression, but the funds that support that artistic expression should only be policed and monitored by one particular sub-set of people who comprise just 0.46% of the Australian population, and only to further their views, not anybody else’s. In other words, they want to police the use of all Australian’s tax dollars, but only for the interests of a small, niche group of Australians who are the self-appointed keepers of what Australians may see and think.

In addition to Ms Segal’s fantastical fact-free statements, we also saw Ms Segal engage in her favourite pastime of evidence-free testimony. The ABC is producing false narratives against Israel and is biased against Israel, she claimed. Did she have any evidence at all for that? Well, no, but Ms Segal certainly had feelpinions about it. Universities had become hot beds of antisemitism and needed to be monitored so their funding could be cancelled accordingly, Ms Segal claimed. Did she have any data to back that up? Well, no, but Ms Segal certainly knew people who felt that and even people who knew people who might have felt that way, and as far as Ms Segal and the Israel lobby is concerned, that’s all they’re required to do thanks very much.

However, when it came to facts and stories presented on the Palestinian side of the equation, Ms Segal and other pro-Israel personnel, including legal counsel for the endless array of pro-Israel interests, demanded facts and figures at every instance. They pushed back at almost every claim. Ms Segal even went so far as claiming the Palestinian death figures in Gaza had been fabricated and were not to be relied upon, despite various international bodies including the United Nations, verifying those figures. When it came to uncomfortable feelings about words on stickers and signs, and vibes about whether the ABC was saying enough nice things about Israel, Ms Segal would like you to just accept her feelings about it all. But when it came to any opposing narratives, Ms Segal and her cohort will refuse to believe a word you say, even when presented with mountains of independent evidence.

Ms Segal also railed against the perceived biases of the ABC and SBS claiming professional journalists of many decades of experience do not check their sources thoroughly enough for her liking, and they even broadcast stories that show Israel “in a negative light”. This is something that is generally known as a news broadcast and Ms Segal seems to be blissfully unaware that a news service is not a popularity contest. In a moment of farce, Ms Segal even told the inquiry she’d like a positive story of Israel told for every negative story of Israel that appears on ABC, a demand that could see the national broadcaster follow every story on Israel bombing children alive in their tents with a nice story on the flowers in Netanyahu’s garden.

Following on from Ms Segal, Australians were then subjected to an American academic appearing on behalf of an internet-based group that call themselves Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism. You may recall AAAAA are the same group that derailed the Bendigo Writers’ Festival last year, causing thousands of participants and presenters to withdraw and losing millions of dollars in lost tourism, as well as diminishing the writers festival’s artistic reputation, something from which they may never recover.

But happily, the US citizen academic, who is a resident in Australia, was there to defend the rights of Israel and dictate to the Australian inquiry what he considered to be antisemitic. The academic even stated that antisemitism often boiled down to the use of a hyphen in the term anti-Zionist. Apparently not using a hyphen is antisemitic but using one is. And yes, these are the levels of pure absurdity we’re up against with the relentless push by the Israel lobby to have us all believe that white is black and up is down and hyphens are racist. 

Does Australia have an antisemitism problem? Of course we do, we are not alone in that. Is it the Australian national emergency the Israel lobby claims it to be? With the consistent lack of independent data (even the alleged antisemitism figures are compiled by the Exec Council of Australian Jewry without independent auditing) it is hard to say, especially given the deliberate confusion between what is actually racism directed at Jewish people and what is actually criticism of Israel. Is everybody appearing before the Royal Commission telling lies? No. Conversely – is everybody appearing before the Royal Commission telling the truth? Again, no.

We have learnt from this inquiry that as Australians who live in a relatively free nation, if we want to criticise any other country in the world or their leader, we may do so. But if we want to criticise Israel or their leader, we have to do so in a “respectful manner”, as Ms Segal and her cohort’s demand. Criticism of Iran or the US or the UK or Libya does not need to be “respectful”, but any critique of Israel absolutely must be. And why is that?

That’s because ever so subtly through this Royal Commission, you are being fed fear about a takeover of Australia by nefarious forces so you don’t realise that Israel already has.