Australia / Israel Review

As exposed previously in AIR, the Australian website Gumshoe News is a one-stop-shop for everything conspiratorial, extremist and antisemitic, including large doses of anti-Israel hatred and holocaust denial.

US-born Adelaide resident Mary W. Maxwell is one of Gumshoe News’ most prolific contributors and editors. One of her favourite topics is the Jews, as well as what she calls “Holocaust history revisionism” – she almost obsessively promotes various forms of Holocaust denial. Maxwell has continued her campaign in recent months, publishing long, convoluted and confusing “analyses”, incorporating age-old libels about secret Jewish cabals, lies about the Holocaust and conspiracy theories about ‘dark forces controlling the world’. Yet bizarrely, she seems to regard herself as being a friend of “the Jews”.

The Jewish Evil Cabal

Her article, “Of What Religions and Ethnicities Are the Cabal Members?” (published in Gumshoe News on Oct. 22, 2022) opens a “discussion” about the religion of an alleged evil cabal dominating the globe. Her answer is – unsurprisingly – Jewish.

She starts with a bit of uncertainty: “Maybe you think ‘They’re Jews.’ I often hear accusations against Jews, Freemasons, and ‘the Vatican’. There is evidence for all three, plus evidence that some of our rulers don’t belong to any of those groups.”

But then Maxwell focuses in, citing all sorts of “evidence” about “Jews as world-rulers”, mentioning historic figures, including 18th century Adam Weishaupt, “a Jewish Jesuit in Germany” who founded the Illuminati movement, and claiming that “there was a major Jewish influence in the French Revolution.” Maxwell is also adamant that the Jews “indisputably did the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.”

Maxwell then regurgitates the old anti-Jewish claims that today’s Jews are actually not really Jews, but are instead “unrelated to the Semites of the Middle East. Jews born in Europe are likely to be the descendants of an ethnic group, the Khazars, who lived in the area now known as Ukraine.”

The US President, US Congress and the two leading American parties (Republican and Democratic) are all controlled by Israel and the Jews, Maxwell asserts:

“It’s at least conceivable that both RNC [Republican National Committee] and DNC [Democratic National Committee] answer to … [Israeli PM] Bibi Netanyahu. He says that they do! … As for President Biden, I think I [sic] we can deduce that he is in some way answering to a Jewish boss, insofar as he is putting socialism into practice.”

Biden is applying an up-to-date version of the “Russian revolution”, she says, adding, “Does this mean Jews are in charge? Maybe.”

Moving on to another popular conspiracy about “a new world order” where the global population will be reduced in a “genocide”, Maxwell again ties it all to the Jews and to Israel in a segment dripping with crude irony and innuendo:

“While the Netanyahus of this world (the [former Israeli PMs] Ariel Sharons, the Menachim Begins, etc) sometimes talk of Greater Israel, I do not think there is any such plan. Surely there’s no plan afoot to scoop up the Jewish people and save them whilst genociding the Gentiles. Surely the monsters at the top do not have a fatherly love for their special people.” 

The proof Maxwell brings to support her Jewish-evil world government nexus fable is none other than the fabrication at the root of much of the 20th-century’s worst antisemitism, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

What if all the people of the cabal, muses Maxwell, “turned out to be Jewish? I would say they are not Jewish. Even if they claim they are.” Generalising on what it really means to be Jewish – a typical antisemitic line of argument – Maxwell “disagrees” that “the projected behaviour of the cabal is ‘quintessentially Jewish’. Nonsense. It’s plain old nasty human stuff. Is geo-engineering Jew-like? I don’t think so. Is total surveillance Jew-like?? Nope. Is trying to weaken the minds of children a Jewish habit? Absolutely not, the opposite is true. But trying to take control is standard human stuff.”

Believe it or not, Maxwell seems to be saying a Jewish cabal is likely behind a global conspiracy to take over the world and kill off most of its inhabitants – but she’s not being antisemitic because they are not doing it because they are Jewish!

“No gassings in Auschwitz”

Two days later, Maxwell was at it again. On Oct. 24, 2022 Gumshoe News ran her “Maybe it’s not the Jews”, which opens by reminding readers of the conspiracy theory, repeated many times on Gumshoe News in various forms, of “Israel as the boss of the 9-11 disaster.”

The article again engages in a confused “debate” about whether the “top boss” of the evil world government is Jewish or not. After extensively quoting segments from the writings of notorious Holocaust denier Paul Eisen, Maxwell states: “Who knows, maybe all manner of horrible things in the world are happening at the command of Big Bro Jew, not Big Bro Gentile.”

Maxwell also refers to the 2002 case where her “pal”, Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben, was found guilty by the court of publishing racially offensive and anti-Jewish material on the Adelaide Institute website – after he was taken to the Human Rights Commission by AIJAC’s very own Jeremy Jones. Lamenting the fact that Toben was punished for claiming “there were no gassings at Auschwitz,” she complains that “meanwhile in Germany, tons of people have been judicially punished for questioning the bona fides of the Holocaust.” The paragraph finishes with Maxwell’s own blatant Holocaust denial: “By the way, there were no gassings at Auschwitz.”

Killing anyone with “a Jewish name” to “solve Covid”?

Another Maxwell “masterpiece”, titled “Jews, ‘the Jews,’ Jewry, etc.”, was published on Gumshoe News a few months previously, on March 22, 2022.

Maxwell opens by insisting that she is “a supporter of Jews (as I am frequently criticized for).” But then she repeats her by-now infamous antisemitic-flavoured stories about Jews being behind major events in recent history, as “proven” by well-known antisemitic fables. For example, she insists, “the bolshie[vik] revolution had crucial Jewish backers on Wall St – Warburg, for starters. And yes, his bro, Warburg in Germany, provided Lenin’s trek into Russia … And yes, the USSR of 1932 starved the Ukrainian people, probably under some kind of Jewish power-influence. And yes the ‘Protocols’ [of the Elders of Zion] of 1897 appear to have been what they say they are – the record of a meeting of the Learned Elders of Zion in 1897,” and finally, “thanks to research by historical revisionists, it’s now beyond dispute that the main planners of Bolshevism were Jews.”

Maxwell then sarcastically asks allegedly rhetorical questions. “But so what [if Jews are behind all these historical events]? Where do you go with that? Would you like to kill every person with a Jewish name today? Would that solve the problem of, say, Covid?”

Maxwell’s “defence” of Jews also crudely mixes antisemitic tropes of Jewish world domination and anti-Israel hatred: “If, today, you assume you’ve worked out all the bad things that are happening, and that they are plotted in a room in Israel (or in UK or US, by Jewish plotters) you are wrong. We don’t know the identity of the individuals at the very top, so we don’t know if they are Jews. But we do know they are not ‘the Jews’.”

Maxwell also again calls on governments to scrap laws protecting against Holocaust denial: “Will this [change] include rubbishing the laws that punish ‘holocaust deniers’ and ‘holocaust minimizers’ (i.e., fewer than 6 million died)? Sure, why not”. She finishes the paragraph by thanking Holocaust deniers Ernst Zundel, Fredrick Tobin, Robert Faurisson and “others for enduring jail” to promote the despicable views she shares with them.

Maxwell apparently sincerely believes that she is a friend of “the Jews” – even as she spreads the most blatantly antisemitic claims and Holocaust denial – because she does not believe that all Jews are behind her fantastic conspiracy theories, only some of them, and therefore thinks that genocide of all Jews is not the solution.

Of course, with “friends” like Maxwell, Jews don’t need enemies. And there is certainly room to ask if, like her late friend Fredrick Toben, Ms Maxwell’s incitement does not deserve some scrutiny under Commonwealth and South Australian racial hatred laws.

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