Fresh Air

The Arabic language El-Telegraph newspaper, published in Sydney since 1970 and edited by Antoine Kazi OAM, prides itself on being the “Largest Lebanese and Arabic Daily Newspaper in Australia.”

As exposed by AIJAC over the last few years (see here, here, and here), El-Telegraph has become a platform for spreading antisemitic tropes and wild conspiracy theories among Arabic readers in Australia. The paper has hosted claims that Israel is plotting to take over the Middle East, that Jerusalem secretly controls Islamic State and was responsible for the devastating Beirut Port blast in 2020, and Zionists (together with others) are running a world government which created the coronavirus, is controlling the weather and caused last year’s deadly bush fires in Australia.

A column by Sydneysider Michael Hadad, published on February 22 on El-Telegraph, continued this ignoble tradition. In his piece titled “Normalise with virility?”, the author claims that Israel sent women to give sexual favours to the rulers of the Gulf states in exchange for their normalisation of ties with Jerusalem.

There is nothing new in Hadad’s unfounded claims, which are in fact nothing more than recycling and expanding on a familiar falsehood about Israel’s spy agency, the Mossad, using female operatives as prostitutes, refuted by Israeli officials and by female Mossad operatives.

Hadad claims that the Yossi Cohen, the head of the Mossad, has recently praised eight “civil Zionist prostitutes, fluent in the Arabic language” working as “spying and seducing agents, as they are among the most attractive girls in the world.” These women fall on their knees, says Hadad, performing “sexual relations with senior officials and decision-makers to obtain from them espionage and intelligence information, and seducing them with sex and obtaining profits in order to serve the Zionist entity.”

Hadad falsely alleges that Cohen admitted to sending these prostitutes to the Persian Gulf states. They supposedly entered seperately so not to raise suspicion, posing as businesswomen who came to invest in these countries.

“With the help of (insiders) who have direct relationships with decision-makers [in the Gulf states], they [the Israeli women] were able to reach them and reside for a long time in the sheikhdoms and play major roles [there]. [Establishing] close relations (especially) in various situations with officials and decision-makers in the sheikhdoms, [the latter] were subsequently persuaded to approach the usurper entity [Israel] and normalise [relations] with it,” Haddad writes.

Hadad also mentions former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni who was a Mossad agent before going into politics. “This reminds us of the veteran former Mossad prostitute agent”, says Hadad, who was “proud of her establishment of sexual relations with some of the PLO officials and Qatar sheikhs in the interests of Israel and in return for concessions and gains for [Israel].”

In another case,  Hadad claims – again with no proof – Israel’s Trade Representation Office in Doha, Qatar, was opened “as a result of intimate sexual relations” which in turn led later to visits to Qatar by Israeli officials Shimon Peres (2007) and Ehud Barak (2008).

The famous cliché says that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people eventually start believing it. El-Telegraph should not be allowed to continue poisoning the minds of Australians by publishing such lies and slanders – the paper’s indefensible behaviour must be exposed and confronted.

Dr. Ran Porat is an AIJAC Research Associate. He is also a Research Associate at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University, a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya and a Research Associate at the Future Directions International Research Institute, Western Australia.