Numerous NSW Antisemitism Inquiry Witnesses Highlight McCarthyite Witch Hunt Underway

“I am here because… my experience is instructive and disturbing: because of its effects on others in the media. I was accused of antisemitism because my social media account relentlessly, but not exclusively, highlighted the slaughter of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government by retweeting updates from the conflict,” celebrated cricket journalist Peter Lalor outlined last week.

“I retweet because I feel helpless, sickened and ashamed because such injustices and inhumanity could occur in my lifetime,” Lalor put it plainly to the NSW parliamentary inquiry on antisemitism on 4 July 2025. “I continue to do it because I believe the mainstream media is derelict and compromised in its coverage of what for all intents and purposes is a war crime and ethnic cleansing.”

SEN Radio dropped Lalor from his position as cricket commentator in February because he was accused of being antisemitic because of his reposts, which evidently resulted in the sound of his voice making “people feel unsafe”.

The Federal Court of Australia recently ruled this is the reason why the ABC illegitimately sacked journalist Antoinette Lattouf, while former SBS Australia World News presenter Mary Kostakidis goes before court this month over the same issue.

The NSW Legislative Council Inquiry into Antisemitism in NSW was established on 12 February, when, despite repeated public warnings from NSW police deputy commissioner David Hudson that it could all be staged, the NSW government, with media in tow, continued to act in accordance with the state being subject to an antisemitic crimewave, which was revealed to be a criminal fraud in March.

But as the inquiry has continued to hear about the scourge of antisemitism the state is supposedly under the grips of, post-the exposure of the criminal hoax, which undoubtably terrorised the Jewish community, Lalor appeared last Friday because he wanted to “object” to the suppression of Israel’s crimes via the framing of criticism of the Gaza genocide as being antisemitic, and he was not alone.

The antisemitism witch hunt

Esteemed lawyer Damien Hazard appeared before the inquiry on 4 July as well. He recalled his experience of being sacked from his position of senior corporate partner by global law firm Herbert Smith Freehills last December, following an exchange of messages over social media platform X with Jeremy Leibler, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia.

Hazard read the messages verbatim that related to, as he put it, the “appalling act of antisemitism, which was the firebombing of the Addas Israel Synagogue in Melbourne on 6 December 2024”. Liebler’s initial message condemns the arson attack, and suggests it is related to the “hate that we have seen brazenly displayed on the streets of Melbourne every week for over a year”.

The senior lawyer’s response was that “it is never too soon for Jeremy Liebler to just invent a link to antigenocide protests”, as the ZFA head had implied that the attack on the synagogue was related to the pro-Palestinian protests that have been occurring in Naarm-Melbourne and on Gadigal land in Sydney ever since Israel commenced the mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza in October 2023.

Both Lalor and Hazard, and Lattouf and Kostakidis, have fallen foul of an Israel lobby campaign that involves framing criticism of Israeli human rights violations as antisemitic to silence such criticism.

Those who do speak out are framed as antisemitic, and attempts are made to see those who speak from positions of authority are taken down. And this campaign has right now reached fever pitch in this country.

In his tweet that saw his career thrown off track, Hazard outlined that the McCarthyite witch hunt that he eventually found himself the subject of comprises of a “disinformation campaign of conflating the genuine evil of antisemitism with the basic humanism of condemning Israeli genocide”.

“What I did not know,” Hazard told those MLCs gathered for the inquiry hearing, “was I had just put myself in the firing line of a concerted lobbying effort to destroy my reputation and my livelihood.”

The hypocrisy of the conflation

At a 2024 forum in Paris, renowned US professor Judith Butler outlined that Zionists began conflating criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism starting in the 1970s, in order to deflect criticism of Israel’s settler colonial project in historic Palestine.

The mechanism works as the charge of antisemitism carries with it the weight of the full horrors of the World War II Holocaust perpetrated against Jewish people by Nazi Germany.

In putting a question to Hazard following his testimony at last week’s upper house antisemitism inquiry, NSW Labor MLC Stephen Lawrence remarked that Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) president Nasser Mashni “once said to me that people that stand up for the Palestinians pay a price for it, and I think Mr Mashni is certainly right in your case.”

“I find one of the deep ironies of your case, Mr Hazard,” he continued, “is that Jeremy Liebler has a highly questionable history on Twitter himself. He has tweeted things that delegitimise the rights of the Palestinian people to exist. He has retweeted things that say, ‘a society that cultivates a culture of murder has no right to exist.’ One could question whether that is indeed a genocidal statement.”

Lawrence, a noted barrister, asked Hazard what he thought about “this irony that you lose your profession on account of what I would characterise as totally legitimate free speech, when he has this highly questionable Twitter history himself”. The senior lawyer responded that when he was asked to take down his tweet, he questioned why Liebler wasn’t being asked to do the same.

The silencing harms all

“Over the past 21 months, I have represented numerous people who have been targeted in like orchestrated attacks or smear campaigns of the pro-Israeli lobby, including Mr Liebler’s firm,” Sydney barrister Mahmud Hawila told the inquiry, following Hazard’s testimony. “The attacks have targeted anyone who speaks up from any profession, not just lawyers.”

According to the former NSW police prosecutor, medical practitioners and anyone who works in government, industry and trades have too been targeted, so that if “they exercise their right to speak up against the atrocities they are seeing livestreamed on their phones and on their TVs, then the reaction was swift and the attempt to silence was decisive and at times, devastating.”

Hawila underscored that everyone present and calling out the antisemitic witch hunt happening in this country are all on the same page when it comes to considering that hate crime and racism, whether it be antisemitic or Islamophobic or whatever form it takes, “is not welcome in Australia”, and he made certain that “antisemitism is an issue” that he “cares deeply about”.

To emphasis this, the barrister recalled that after moving into Black Chambers, which is next door to the Great Synagogue in Sydney, he got in contact with Rabbi Dr Benjamin Elton and asked to meet his new neighbour, of which he did at the place of worship, and the rabbi read from the old scrolls in Hebrew, while the Muslim man read from the Koran in Arabic, and “the similarities were profound”.

“It breaks my heart to hear members who have come to this committee from the pro-Israel lobby, who seek to use antisemitism as a weapon, because it means that the experiences of people who actually suffer antisemitism are diluted, and all the efforts to combat antisemitism are diluted,” said Hawila, as he testified before the NSW antisemitism inquiry, prior to Lalor taking the stand.

“The orchestrated efforts by the pro-Israel lobby to silence anyone who spoke up against the ongoing genocide in Palestine dilutes antisemitism and it harms Jewish safety,” the lawyer made clear.