Antisemites Under the Bed: Full Blown McCarthyism Hits Australia

The last week suspension of a grant presented to renowned Palestinian academic and author Dr Randa Adel-Fatah has led commentators to declare that a version of 1950s US McCarthyism has now taken hold in Australia, with the latest iteration targeting local cultural figures evidently harbouring antisemitic thoughts, rather than any fears of “reds under the bed”.

Adel-Fatah has been a central figure of this witch-hunt and demonising smear campaign, as she’s someone who’s dared to transgress an unspoken social decree that considers public statements of solidarity with Palestinians being tantamount to expressions of antisemitism, or prejudice against adherents of Judaism, which in 20th century Europe led to the Holocaust.

The absurd quality of this conflation has been lost on none of those opposed to the mass slaughter of the Palestinians of Gaza by the apartheid state of Israel, as how can criticism of a nation and its government over the commission of genocide, with evidence widely available to support this claim, suddenly be misconstrued as proof of the critic displaying hatred towards a religious group?

McCarthyism, or the reds under the bed scare, involved a United States cold war crackdown on alleged domestic communist threats posed by left-wing figures. This commenced with government employees, and then spread through the private sector, as suspects were taken into custody and required to confess details about their secret allegiance to the Soviet Union or face incarceration.

Right now, the antisemites under the bed threat in this country is being fuelled by the local Israel Lobby in cahoots with the Coalition and the Murdoch press, via the propagation of the conflation of political criticism of Israel with the illegal expression of antisemitism, despite obvious discrepancies, as such political fear campaigns dispense with rationality early on and replace it with blind ignorance.

Suspended for opposing Israel

A prominent author of the last two decades, Dr Adel-Fatah has long spoken out about the Palestinian struggle against the settler colonial onslaught of the Israeli state in historic Palestine, and although she’s been joined by a chorus of others speaking on behalf of the cause since the outbreak of the Gaza genocide in October 2023, Randa had been a voice in the past when others hadn’t been.

The Australian Research Council awarded Adel-Fatah an $870,000 grant in 2022 to research Arab/Muslim Australian Social Movements since the 1970s. Yet, while her research topic and her outspokenness on the Palestine cause posed no apparent issue in terms of granting her the award three years back, the political climate has shifted significantly since the genocide commenced.

The ARC suspended Adel-Fatah’s grant on Wednesday, 26 February 2025 at the behest of Australian education minister Jason Clare, because she’d publicly stated that she’d broken the grant requirement of conducting an academic conference and instead held an online workshop. And this nonissue gave the establishment an excuse to attempt to silence Adel-Fatah, after Murdoch had been targeting her since April 2024.

That the establishment has taken action against Adel-Fatah based on such a trifle change to grant requirements is a clear example of how political fear campaigns, like McCarthyism, take hold, as any apparent anomaly was excuse enough to take action against the academic because of her outspoken advocacy on behalf of her people, no matter how unrelated the offending action may be.

A climate of fear and lies

The reason why the penalisation of Adel-Fatah has sparked the claim that Australia is now conducting its own political witch hunt against those speaking in opposition to a mass slaughter claiming that they’re antisemites, is that the Palestinian writer is only the latest in a long line of local cultural figures targeted for official cancelling due to their opposition to the Gaza genocide.

Those who have been demonised by this process include journalists Antoinette Lattouf, Mary Kostakidis, and Peter Lalor, along with the Jewish Council’s Sarah Schwartz, and University of Sydney linguist Dr Nick Riemer and politics academic Professor John Keane. And these are only the most high-profile figures subjected to claims of antisemitism when their derision has focused on Israel.

Since the outbreak of the genocide, Australia has learnt how strong the Israel Lobby is locally. During the first days of the killing spree Israel embarked upon in Gaza, there existed an unofficial prohibition on calling for a ceasefire, and despite federal Labor’s long support for Palestine, in government the party unquestionably kowtowed to Israel’s assertion that it has been acting in self-defence.

So distorted has the official version of the truth propagated by the political class and the mainstream media become that the witch hunt that’s targeted well known figures, who won’t be silenced about the attempt of Israel to usurp the Gaza Strip via the mass slaughter of its population, has flourished despite the obvious discrepancies in the accusations being cast against these people.

Universities Australia last week announced that the nation’s centres for tertiary learning are adopting a definition of antisemitism that follows that of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance), which includes criticism of the nation of Israel as a form of antisemitism.

With the establishment of the university definition, the fear is the Israel Lobby is now pushing for such a definition to be enshrined in federal law, so that criticism of Israel will not only be conflated with hatred towards Jewish people, but breaching the prohibition against the expression of antisemitism may result in being charged with a criminal offence for calling out Israeli state actions.

Settling in for the long haul

Despite the Gaza ceasefire having been in place since 18 January, or for over 40 days now, the antisemitism witch hunt has only increased. This has included fallout relating to an antisemitic crime wave that has had so much doubt cast upon the legitimacy of the apparent antisemitic motivations underlying a series of graffiti and arson attacks by police that it’s hard to know what to believe.

Indeed, Sky News held an antisemitism summit a fortnight ago, which saw the Israel Lobby calling for the establishment of a national emergency in respect of antisemitism, along with antisemitism training for law enforcement, antisemitism education in schools and for an advertising campaign to debunk antisemitic tropes.

So, while there is an official question mark over what is next to happen at the site of the genocide in Gaza, it would appear that in terms of the attempts to prohibit what Australian civilians are allowed to say in relation to Israeli attempts to wipeout the Palestinians of Gaza, the Israel Lobby is now moving to ensure that such restrictions hold permanently in this country moving forward.

So, with the recent appearance of the Universities Australia antisemitism definition, along with the Israel Lobby’s attempt to see it enshrined in law, one can be certain that the deplorable push to silence Dr Randa Abdel-Fatah will not be the last such attempt as part of the antisemitic witch hunt.