“There’s a real question of respons­ible journ­al­ism, and how the lack of it feeds into heated tensions in Australia. There are news outlets that take their respons­ib­il­ity very seriously. There are those who claim to do so, but will still publish ­material about the Middle East or Israel that is one-sided, and which agitates or causes agitation here in Australia; and then there are those – and this is more in the area of social media – that are com­pletely unreg­u­lated and irre­spons­ible

“It would be very useful for the ABC to be examined because they claim an absolute inde­pend­ence, but then the language and ­approach they use regarding Israel can lead to local agitation.

“One very recent example of that bias is both the ABC and the SBS refusing to adopt the Inter­na­tion­al Holocaust Remem­brance Alliance defin­i­tion of antisemitism in cir­cum­stances where the gov­ern­ment has adopted it, the royal com­mis­sion is adopting it and, fur­ther­more, the com­mis­sion­er has said that the defin­i­tion itself is not prob­lem­at­ic in any way.

“One has to ask why would the two public broad­casters funded by the gov­ern­ment take a different political position from the gov­ern­ment, in respect of antisemitism of all things.”

DANIEL AGHION KC
PRESIDENT, ECAJ