Jewish groups have demanded a pro-Palestinian activist be banned from an Australian festival for sharing a link to the details of participants in a WhatsApp group, even though an affiliated organisation was behind a much larger leak of One Nation members.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) co-chief executive Peter Wertheim and the Anti-Defamation Commission’s Dvir Abramovich are among the Jewish leaders calling for feminist author Clementine Ford to be banned from the Writers’ Week at the Adelaide Festival, and both have recently lobbied for “doxxing” to be criminalised.
Earlier this month Prime Minister Anthony Albanese vowed to criminalise doxxing – the malicious publication of private or identifying information on the internet – after outrage from the same Jewish groups over the publication of the names and details of 600 members of a Jewish chat group of artists and creatives.
However, Jewish group the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), which often works closely with the ECAJ, famously published the names of 2000 Pauline Hanson’s One Nation members in the Australia/Israel Review monthly magazine in 1998.
AIJAC national chairman Mark Leibler at the time defended the publication of the list as necessary to stop racism.
His son Jeremy Leibler, Zionist Federation of Australia president, last week told The Australian Ms Ford should be de-platformed nationwide for disseminating leaked personal information.
Mr Wertheim told The Advertiser Ms Ford should be banned from the festival where she is scheduled to give a talk on her anti-marriage book.
“The doxxing behaviour focusing on the Jewish community that Clementine Ford and others have been engaged in has been condemned by a wide range of people including the Prime Minister, who has announced that conduct of that nature will soon be criminalised,” he said.
And Mr Abramovich said he “would not feel safe” at Writers’ Week if Ms Ford was allowed to speak.
But South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskus said that whiel he disagreed with Ms Ford on some issues, he would not engage in censorship at arts festivals.
Ms Ford said accusations against her were “spin ignoring of course that anti-Zionist Jewish people were involved in collating this info into this link” and “an attempt to distract and deflect from the bigoted rhetoric and organised aggression enacted by many in the Zionist group chat against activists, artists, academics and anyone who speaks up for Palestine”.
