Kostakidis Hasn’t Apologised for Criticising Israel on X, Despite The Australian’s Assertion

Despite assertions recently made in The Australian on 3 January, veteran journalist Mary Kostakidis has not apologised for certain posts she made on X earlier last year, which subsequently became the evidence cited in a racial vilification complaint raised against the former face of the nation’s only multicultural television network, SBS.

Instead, the Murdoch press has conveniently misrepresented what Kostakidis did say in a 2 January 2025 X post.

Alon Cassuto, the chief executive of the Zionist Federation of Australia, aimed high when he decided to raise the complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) last July, as from the choir of pro-Palestinian journalistic voices on social media platform X, posting about Israel wantonly murdering thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, he decided to take aim at Kostakidis.

Targeting Kostakidis was a highly unpopular move made by the Zionist Federation, or more broadly the Israel lobby itself, as for much of the constituency it’s a long stretch to consider the former prime time weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter would be propagating racial or religiously motivated prejudice of any sort online.

But of course, that may be why the Zionists took the legal complaint route against such a respected voice, who has been consistently countering the onslaught of disinformation and hasbara that’s been flooding mainstream media news channels, since Israel began its settler colonial genocide in the Gaza Strip early in October 2023.

In running its latest questionable piece, The Australian has distorted a recent statement made by Kostakidis, which she posted online in order to publicly clear up her position regarding the racial discrimination complaint, as she’d entered into mediation with the complainant and the AHRC on 11 December 2024, which had since stalled.

Zionist Federation versus Kostakidis

Just to put things in perspective, Cassuto made the complaint against Kostakidis as Israel was and continues to be perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, which consists of having “herded a couple of million people into a ghetto/open air prison”, as Mary puts it, and then launching a genocide.

Indeed, the Gaza Strip is surrounded by walls, so there’s been no escape from what’s now a 15-month-long project of slaughter and starvation.

In response to The Australian article, Kostakidis wrote on X on 5 January 2025 that an error had been made in deeming that she had apologised for her posts, as that was not the case. And she further clarified, she’d only “apologised for any distress and hurt it caused”.

Cassuto announced on X on 14 July last year, that he was going to lodge the racial discrimination complaint with the AHRC that day. And journalist Chip Le Grand further reported on the matter that same day, outlining that the Zionist Federation had raised more than 100 posts made by Kostakidis that they’ve been asserting are antisemitic.

The complaint emerged as the Australian government and the mainstream media were in the midst of propagating a campaign against ‘rising antisemitism’, which conflates real instances of Jewish prejudice with incidents involving political criticism of Israel, whilst this has also been accompanied by the not-so-subtle neglect to properly address rising instances of Islamophobia.

The major focus of the complaint is that Kostakidis featured two posts containing footage of a speech made by the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, in which he stated that there was no place for dual passport holders – holders of ‘British’ and ‘American’ passports – in Israel or the occupied Palestinian territory.

Cassuto labelled these words as advocating for the ethnic cleansing of Jewish people, while at that point, the Israeli state had been actively ethnic cleansing Palestinians from Gaza using extermination for nine months.

In response to the Murdoch rag misconstruing what she had said on 2 January, Kostakidis wrote three days later, “There is a very big difference, and I’m surprised The Australian failed in their comprehension of the statement.”

Although it might be noted that this miscomprehension led to a favourable framing of the situation in respect of the Israel lobby.

Clarifying does not amount to apologising

“Six months ago, a complaint was filed against me under 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act over posts I made on X sharing a speech of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah,” Kostakidis’ 2 January statement on her position reads. “A number of highly defamatory and gratuitous comments were made about me by several parties around the time of that filing.”

Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) makes it unlawful to publicly act in a manner that’s “reasonably likely” to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person or a group based on their “race, colour or national or ethnic origin”.

This is a controversial law, as the Abbott and Turnbull government waged a war against it in an effort to have “offend” and “insult” removed from the law, so that at least some currently outlawed racial slurs could be uttered in public.

As Abbott’s attorney general George Brandis then put it, “People do have a right to be bigots. In a free country, people do have rights to say things that other people find offensive or insulting or bigoted.”

Kostakidis continued her statement in saying, “I condemn antisemitism and racism of any kind. I did not, and do not, endorse the content of the speech made by Hassan Nasrallah, which I shared on my X account on 4 and 13 January 2024. I accept that some of his comments may be seen as antisemitic but that is not a barrier to reporting them.”

As renowned US gender theorist Judith Butler explained at a Paris forum last March, it wasn’t until the early 1970s that Israeli Zionists and those in the diaspora began conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel and Zionism, as it serves to suppress negative opinions on the nation and the doctrine in the public sphere for fear of being labelled antisemitic.

The federal Labor government, the Liberal opposition and the Australian mainstream media have all been actively propagating this conflation since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, as it serves to stifle criticism of Israel, while that nation is tearing down all the norms of international law via the mass commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

So, while the complaint against Kostakidis might have come out of left field, it too came out of a political climate that involved the progressive suppression of criticism of Israel and Zionism via this dangerous conflation, right across all Australian jurisdictions.

The journalist was not the only target but rather one of the most high-profile individuals caught up in this witch hunt that’s continuing to play out in the present.

Zionism is a 19th century political doctrine developed in Europe that advocates for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, a land that bears the same name as its people, the Palestinians. This ideology was spawned out of centuries of oppression and discrimination that Jewish people were subjected to at the hands of the Christians of Europe.

However, this ideology that led to the founding of Israel in 1948, simultaneously led to the Nakba of that same year, which involved the violent dispossession of Palestinians from the majority of their homelands and relegated to the Palestinian territories.

Not all Jewish people are Zionists, and not all Zionists are Jews. In the US, there are more white Christians evangelists supporting Zionism than Jewish people that do.

The doctrine of Zionism has currently led to the worst mass slaughter of humans since the Holocaust of World War II.

So, it’s rather rich of the Zionist Federation of Australia to be taking the moral high ground in the case against Kostakidis over some simple social media posts, when it’s an organisation advocating for a settler colonial doctrine that’s currently serving as the reason for the mass slaughter of innocent people in order to possess their land.

“To the Jews and/or Israelis in Australia who took my posts as an endorsement, I am sorry for their hurt, distress and pain,” Kostakidis said in finishing up her 2 January statement, in which she apologies for any offence caused but falls short of saying sorry for making her posts.

However, this is obviously too subtle a distinction for the blunt instruments at The Australian to discern.

Main photo: Mary Kostakidis after addressing a Free Julian Assange rally in Sydney in February 2020