Interfaith Zionist Organisation to Hold Antisemitism Summit for Mayors

The two-year-long moral panic around antisemitism that’s overwhelmed the Australian public sphere, has now led to the holding of the inaugural 2025 Australian Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism on Yugambeh land on the Gold Coast, but unlike other such antisemitism initiatives of late, the Queensland forum appears to have both a Christian and Jewish Zionist influence.

The antisemitism event is being staged by global interfaith group the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), and the forum is being chaired by Gold Coast mayor Tom Tate, who’s known to have links to evangelical Christianity, with 2022 reports revealing that he’d hired Pastor Sue Baynes, who follows the Seven Mountains Mandate, as a spiritual advisor. 

The mayoral summit will bring together over 250 local government representatives, as organisers consider that mayors and councillors are “uniquely positioned on the frontline of communities to proactively confront hate”, and those gathered will be hearing from some of Australia’s leading Zionists, such as envoy Jillian Segal and Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s Alex Ryvchin.

Zionism is a political doctrine advocating for the founding of a Jewish state, or Israel, in historic Palestine. 

Only some Jewish people are Zionists, which means they believe that Palestine is theirs based on the authority of the bible, while some Christians are Zionists as well, although their interest in Jewish people reclaiming the “holy land” is about brining on the end of time. And both sorts of Zionists tend to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

So, while criticism is rising about yet another forum suggesting there’s a crisis in Jewish prejudice, which has been disputed statistically and even manufactured by criminals in large part, as police uncovered, the upcoming Zionist meet on the Gold Coast seems to have more of an interfaith flavour, with the usual aim of attempting to suppress reaction to Israel’s mass murder in Gaza.

Refusing the Zionist trap

“All of Inner West councillors were invited to the Combatting Antisemitism Movement summit happening in September on the Gold Coast,” said Greens Inner West councillor Olivia Barlow in a 21 August Instagram clip, that then featured her and fellow Greens councillors Liz Atkins and Izabella Antoniou, all declaring that they’d declined the invitation to the meeting.

“The event is being hosted by an organisation with strong links to the Israeli government, currently enacting a genocide against the Palestinian people,” Barlow further set out. “CAM also advocates for the adoption of the IHRA definition something that is used to silence criticism of Israel.”

Inner West mayor Darcy Byrne is attending the summit and speaking at it, and all Greens councillors on the Inner West Council have rejected the invitation to the summit themselves and have written to the mayor to ask him to do so as well.

As Antoniou stressed it is “incredibly dangerous” for council members to be attending a summit which involves speakers, who have spouted far-right rhetoric or supported or profited from the killing of Palestinians in Gaza.

The councillor further explained that Byrne has justified his presence at the summit as he will be launching the Inner West Council’s antiracism strategy, however Antonio adds that “he has continually brought up the misrepresentation of community members and their protest against Labor’s lack of support for a BDS audit of council last term, citing them as antisemitic”.

“Our community of inner westies doesn’t want this. They walked across the Harbour Bridge in their hundreds of thousands a few weeks ago, asking the government to take real action against the government of Israel: sanctions and expulsion of the Israeli ambassador,” Atkins made clear. And the trio added that they’d written to the mayor requesting he does not attend next week’s summit.

The Israel lobby and the Christian right 

According to conservative US thinktank Capital Research Centre, CAM was founded by philanthropist and Republican donor Adam Beren in 2019. Beren was appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council by US president Donald Trump in his first term. The group had 300 partner organisations in 2021, but that’s now jumped to around 700 mainly Jewish Zionist organisations.

CAM came under a storm of criticism in mid-2023 when it launched its campaign against “woke antisemitism”, which, it states, considers white people are bad, while Brown people are good. This “labelling system not only categorises Jews as oppressors,” the campaign video advises, “but also considers Israel as white and Palestinians as Brown”, so wokeism leads to anti-Israel sentiment.

The Jerusalem Post featured a March article about US evangelical group the National Religious Broadcasters, which is part of the CAM network, as it was hosting an antisemitism convention in Texas. CAM, the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, an evangelical institution, and Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency medical service, sponsored the event. 

The article featured CAM Christian Outreach and Engagement director EJ Kimball lamenting that antisemitism is on the rise, with the proof being pro-Palestinian protesters at the Rockefeller Centre during the tree-lighting ceremony, who he described as “pro-Hamas”. “This is a war of civilization versus barbarism,” he added. “This evil is real. This evil exists. This evil must be eradicated.”

The Gold Coast event is following in the footsteps of the 2024 North American mayoral summit against antisemitism, but it also has all the hallmarks of another annual Queensland event, which is known as the Church and State Summit, and has been held in Brisbane for the past seven years, and has featured a long list of prominent evangelical public figures.

Gold Coast mayor Tom Tate is hosting the antisemitism summit this year, and he garnered media attention in 2022, when he hired Pastor Susan Baynes, as his city’s spiritual advisor.

Baynes is a dominionist Christian, who advocates for the Seven Mountains Mandate, which calls on conservative Christians to infiltrate and dominate political and cultural institutions, so they gradually begin to adhere to their belief systems. The Church and State Summit has seven mountains in its logo. Pastor Baynes, along with Tate, will be speaking at the mayoral summit next week.

These ultraconservative Christians seek to influence seven social spheres, which includes family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government. Past speakers at the summit have included Liberal Nationals Senator Matt Canavan, former Liberal National MP George Christensen and Country Liberal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

The South Australian Liberal Party terminated the membership of 150 recently joined members in mid-2023, as they turned out to be Pentecostal Christians, who had an eye to influencing party policy towards a political position more in line with their faith. And at the time, 400 other newly joined members were asked to prove that they weren’t part of this conspiracy in order to remain a Liberal.

Interfaith Zionism

Not all Jewish people are Zionists. Not all Zionists are Jewish. Today, there are more Christian Zionists in the United States than there are Jewish Zionists.

There exists strong support amongst evangelical Christians for the Zionist project, or the establishment of a Jewish state of Israel in Palestine, which is based on the 1880s European political doctrine of Zionism, and it has the support of many evangelical Christians in the US and locally.

Yet, evangelical Christian support for the establishment of Israel is due to their belief that the establishment of a Jewish state in the holy land is a prerequisite to bring on the end times and the second coming of Jesus. This prophecy emerged out of 17th century English Puritanism, so Christian Zionism predates the Jewish political doctrine popularised by Theodor Herzl in the 1880s.

The end of times, according evangelicals, is called the rapture, which will see all Christians disappear from the Earth to be with Jesus, while the tribulation takes place, which is seven years of sheer horror and chaos, which precedes Christ’s second coming.

And following his coming, true believers in Christ will be saved and go to heaven, and those Jewish people, who have recognised the effects of the rapture and then converted to Christianity will too receive salvation. However, for those Jewish people who don’t take Christ into their hearts, they will be smote, along with all other nonbelievers, at that end point of time.