Australia / Israel Review

The Australian Muslim Times (AMUST) has been featured in the AIR many times in the past as a platform that publishes antisemitic material, conspiracy theories and extremist incitement. This only intensified after Hamas perpetrated the October 7 terror attack on Israel, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Now the newspaper has literally gone “nuclear” in how far it is willing to take its conspiratorial anti-Zionism – publishing a feature story accusing Israel of using nuclear weapons in both Gaza and Lebanon.

On September 13, AMUST published “The use of nuclear weapons in Gaza: A call for justice” by Zaakiy Siddiqui, a regular contributor. This piece centres on a conspiracy theory that has also featured in Hezbollah’s media mouthpiece Al Mayadeen – a fact noted in the AMUST story itself. The report cites a supposed study by a controversial extreme left UK scientist, Christopher Busby, which claims to have located fragments of enriched uranium – a key ingredient of atomic bombs – in “soil samples taken from bomb craters in southern Lebanon.” Siddiqui than alleges – incorrectly – that these “findings” point “to the use of neutron bombs.”

In the rest of the article, Siddiqui claims that “Since 2008, evidence has been mounting that Israel has used nuclear weapons in its military operations in both Gaza and Lebanon. In 2021, scientists published the results of analyses from 65 soil and building material samples collected in Gaza, all of which contained enriched uranium.”

Needless to say, all of these claims are baseless – the use of nuclear weapons could not possibly be hidden from global radiation and satellite surveillance systems. Siddiqui’s allegations constitute just the latest in a long series of fake accusations alleging Israel is using atomic bombs in various cases (for example, the Beirut Port explosion in 2020 led to online speculation it was a nuclear weapon).

In addition to the nuclear conspiracy theory, here are more recent examples from AMUST and the newspaper’s habit of publishing antisemitic tropes, incitement and conspiracy theories in virtually every edition.

The evil ‘Zionist lobby’

In his report about the pro-Palestine University of Sydney (USyd) encampment, AMUST Editor-in-Chief Zia Ahmad (July 2) takes his readership down a rabbit hole for a tour of antisemitic conspiracy theories about alleged Jewish control of the media. He argues that Channel 9’s “60 Minutes” exposé about the central role the extremist and antisemitic Islamic movement Hizb ut-Tahrir had played in the USyd protest was “a concerted campaign” aimed at “discrediting” the encampment.

Ignoring testimonies that Sydney University’s campus was unsafe for Jews during the protests, Ahmad claims that it was “the Zionist lobby [who] put pressure on the University to take action against the encampment accusing it of creating fear amongst Jewish students, no go areas for Jews and of anti-Semitism.”

Addressing the Labor Government’s policy towards the war in Gaza (“ALP alienates growing proportion of Australians over abysmal inaction on the Palestinian holocaust”, June 29), AMUST contributor Daud Batchelor introduces antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories. He starts by falsely accusing Israel of “State-sanctioned massacres of women, and innocent children…; deaths by deliberate starvation and stealing of Palestinian lands.” Then he trivialises the Holocaust, stating that what is happening in Gaza “is clearly a ‘genocide’ rivalling the WW2 genocide of Jews.”

In a message corresponding with the infamous trope about overwhelming Jewish power controlling governments, Batchelor criticises what he calls the “inaction” of the ALP as a result of “cowardly ‘kowtowing’ to Zionist lobbies.” Any pretence of reporting or analysis disappears when Batchelor openly pushes that conspiracy theory as self-evidently true, stating: “Continued appalling appeasement of Zionist lobbies by President Biden for Israeli pogroms against Palestinians, even when genocidal intent is clear, is apparent to all Australians. The Lobby, neocons, Israeli dual-citizens and allies now control all key US state institutions.”

Commenting on Batchelor’s article, AMUST regular contributor Bilal Cleland parrots his conspiratorial views, concluding that “The betrayal of Labor values by all except Senator Payman means that the ALP has submitted to the local Zionist lobby.”

Holocaust trivialisation

Fadlullah Wilmot, in his “Genocides ignored: The Srebrenica Genocide and now the Gaza Genocide ignored by the West” (June 30), offers the same line of Holocaust distortion/trivialisation and contextualised antisemitism. Comparing the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre of 7,000 Muslim men by Serbian forces to the current war in Gaza, Wilmot argues to AMUST readers that “Just as in the case of Gaza today, the West played the role of voyeur – a silent witness and enabler of some of the worst atrocities and crimes against humanity to occur in Europe in this century.”

The ‘analysis’ continues with Wilmot spraying wild accusations that “Zionists” and Serbs are Islam-haters for various imaginary reasons: “The Serbs and Zionists harbour similar anti-Islam sentiments steeped in their own congenital rational [sic]. Serbs hate fellow Slavs for becoming Muslim and proclaiming their Bosnian identity while Zionists hate fellow Semites for becoming Muslim and proclaiming their Palestinian identity. Both deny them the right to a state of their own or that it ever existed.”

Referring to anti-Zionist Israeli historian Shlomo Sands, Wilmot argues that Zionists and Serbs “push the narrative of hatred and Islamophobia framing the narrative in a way that paints the aggressors – the Serbs and the Zionists – as the victims and the Bosnian and Palestinian victims as the aggressors who are a threat to ‘civilisation’ whose claims to a national identity have no basis and that the aggressors are reclaiming their historical rights to the land.”

The piece finishes with the famous exaggerated myth that Jews enjoyed a ‘golden age’ under Muslim rule in Spain and a claim they are now killing Muslims to cover up this “fact”: “They both ignore the history of centuries of Muslim tolerance and coexistence while using the conflict as an excuse to destroy the historical evidence of a Muslim presence and tradition.”

Ugly hints about ‘dual loyalty’

AMUST also reprinted several controversial opinion pieces about the war in Gaza.

Evan Jones’ “The elephant in the Zionist classroom” (June 20, originally published on the radical Independent Australia website) is a blatant attempt to soil the reputation of Australian Jewish schools with ugly innuendos about dual loyalty.

Jones opens his text by describing Israel in terms taken directly from blood libel tropes and infamous narratives aimed at discrediting its right to exist. The “raison d’être” of the Jewish state, he says, is “decidedly blood-soaked. The young Israel had been created out of settler colonialism and terrorism in a country with a majority Indigenous non-Jewish population.”

Jones then tries to ‘prove’ that “Australian Jewish schools in general put Israel, uncritically and devotionally, on the curriculum and into school culture.” While his “evidence” – cherry-picked snippets from Jewish schools’ websites – is unconvincing to say the least, his comment about the visit of Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu to Sydney’s Moriah College in 2017 hints that the Jewish schools do not foster a sense of loyalty to Australia – “How this show business affair enhanced the highly emotional primary school students’ sense of identity as Jewish Australians is not obvious.”

Finally, Jones asserts, without offering any evidence, that Jewish school camps “involve soldier training simulations that feed, whether directly through recruitment or in sympathy, into Israel’s militarised society and killing machine.”

The article finishes with a ‘warning’ by Jones that “An unqualified attachment by the Jewish school system to a pariah state sits uneasily with the system’s other ‘core values’ that emphasise critical thinking and Jewish ethics. Is this school system the nursery for the Israel lobby in Australia?”

Recommended: ‘Exhilarated’ by October 7

Hena Jawaid urges AMUST readers to read the writings of notorious anti-Zionist Jewish American writer Norman Finkelstein in “Why we need to read Norman Finkelstein?” (July 1). Why? Because, she alleges, “He was exhilarated when Hamas retaliated on Saturday, 7 October, 2023.”

Jawaid’s interpretation of Finkelstein’s work is that he backs a variety of pro-Palestinian conspiracy theories. Finkelstein “should be appreciated… for resiliently writing about Zionism-led atrocities which include killing the native people, grabbing their land, extending settlement areas, playing the victim card, spreading propaganda, influencing mainstream electronic media and social media, shaping mindset [sic] of people to think about Jews in reference with Holocaust only which would eventually make it easy for them to ignore their crimes and brutalities against helpless, weak and powerless indigenous people of Palestine.”

Facts and truths do not appear to concern AMUST when it comes to Israel, focussed as it is on spreading lies and hatred against the Jewish state even as it fights against Hamas terrorists.

Dr Ran Porat is a lecturer on Israel and Middle Eastern Affairs at Monash University and an affiliate research associate at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation. He is also a research associate at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) and a research fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Herzliya.