Witnesses to Antisemitism Royal Commission Face Vile Abuse, MP Says

Vile, threatening abuse is being levelled at witnesses to the antisemitism royal commission, the inquiry has heard, while a Labor MP has said attacks on his partner were heightened because they were stacked with misogyny.

Meanwhile, data analysis has shown how quickly factual reports are transformed into conspiracy theories online, and that while there was a spike in antisemitism after the Bondi terror attack, there was a “huge spike” in anti-Muslim hate.

The royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion is hearing evidence of “the dissemination of antisemitic content and other forms of hateful speech in the online environment, as well as antisemitism in traditional media and broadcasting”.

On Tuesday, Labor MP Josh Burns told the inquiry while he and his office receive thousands of abusive messages, his partner, Victorian Animal Justice MP Georgie Purcell, is attacked because of her association with him. He is Jewish, she is not.

He gave the commission examples of abuse directed at him, which included being called a “genocidal Zionist” and the suggestion an attack on his office was an inside job.

Comments sent to Purcell included comments about her relationship with him, such as: “You root a Zionist. You can’t be trusted.”

“The language in the examples reveals how antisemitic abuse directed at Georgie is compounded by misogynistic, often violence and sexualised commentary – directed at her because she is a woman,” Burns wrote in his submission.

Purcell also collated abusive comments sent after she gave birth to their daughter including: “Shut the fuck up. You got knocked up by a Zionist, you Nazi cunt.”

He told the inquiry about the impact of antisemitism on his staff after his office was vandalised, and said there had been more than 1,000 phone calls and 10,000 abusive social media messages.

He said “probably one of the hardest things” was to have someone you love get abused”.

Burns said the Online Safety Act and the social media platforms needed better ways to deal with the attacks.

“Instagram knows when I was looking for a new high chair for my six-month-old. They can do a better job of … making it a bit safer online,” he said.

Tahli Blicblau, chief executive officer of the Dor Foundation, established to combat antisemitism and hate, told the inquiry that those who came to the commission to give evidence about their experiences of antisemitism were “subjected to more of it”.

“They were targeted and abused online, at volume and across social media platforms,” she said.

“And that was true both for witnesses who held positions within the Jewish community and also witnesses who chose to give evidence under a pseudonym.”

She gave 275 examples of such posts, saying they were just some of “many, many hundreds more” that included explicit calls for violence and murder, dehumanising language, degrading abuse, admiration for Hitler, Holocaust glorification, and conspiracy theories about witnesses being crisis actors.

Research presented to the commission found before the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel there was a “very low baseline rate of hateful content targeting Jews” on X (formerly Twitter). But after that attack, there was an increase, and the level has stayed elevated.

Both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate spikes after major events, and stays elevated, the research found.

After the Bondi attack, there was a “small spike in the anti-Jewish hate”, associate professor Dr Matteo Vergani, from Deakin University’s Tackling Hate Lab, told the inquiry.

“But it represented a huge spike in volume of anti-Muslim hate.”

Vergani’s team also found that real incidents reported in the media then get circulated on social media. “So online hate is triggered by offline incidents,” he said.

He said the lab’s work with large sets of data tracking trends showed there should be a cost-effective way to track, intervene or prevent hate without “censorship and other hard and draconian interventions”.