More dishonesty at the Jerusalem Post

An opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post yesterday:

December 21, 2025. Bondi massacre was not about free speech – it’s the cost of normalizing antisemitism

It’s written by one Sharon Pardo, ¹ who begins:

The Hanukkah attack in Sydney was a terrorist act driven by antisemitism. It should force democracies to confront how years of indulging antisemitic intimidation have blurred the line between political criticism and targeted menace. Protecting vigorous debate about Gaza is essential. But so is restoring a moral and institutional clarity that condemns harassment, dehumanization, and the laundering of violence as “speech.” The failure to do so, the laxity, has made real-world attacks commonplace.

Only the first sentence is unproblematic. The rest is ignorance or worse on steroids. The father-and-son killers were inspired by Islamic State, whose wounded in the dirty war on Syria were patched up by Israeli medics – as the Jerusalem Post long ago admitted – then sent back into ‘combat’.

(Now that, of a piece with Western weaponising – “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” – of jihad going back to WW1, with Israel a late entrant, ² is what I call realpolitik! )

The ‘moral clarity’ demanded is that of the madhouse – or Dr Goebbels. What new variant of moral clarity can causally link fanatics inspired by (Western armed) jihadists – one of whose alumni governs ‘liberated’ Syria and shakes hands with French and American presidents – to placard-toting Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells?

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Ms Pardo goes on:

Start with the obvious, because it has been avoided. Jews celebrating a religious holiday were targeted not only to kill, but to broadcast fear. Terrorism aims far beyond its immediate victims. It signals to a minority that public presence carries danger.

Avoided!?! On what planet does this writer live? On mine it’s wall to wall that Jews – as Jews – were the targets of terrorism! That small factoid aside I agree, though as Israel is busy proving, the terrorism of a rogue state in bed with Western elites can “signal to a minority majority that public presence carries danger”.

At food distribution points on the Gaza strip, for instance.

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Ms Pardo continues:

Yet, almost immediately, the attack was reframed as a threat to free speech.

Woah, slow down there! Let me tidy this up a tad:

Almost immediately, the attack was with grim predictability leveraged by Israeli and Western spinmeisters to further erode the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Immediately targeted were two chants, “From the river to the sea”, and “Globalise the intifada”. It is these attacks, not Bondi Beach a week ago, that have been accurately described as a threat to free speech.

There, fixed it for you Ms Pardo. I’ll get to those two chants in a moment.

Any strong reaction, we were told, would be used to silence criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. This sounds like a defense of liberal values, but it functions as a diversion. It shifts attention away from what has been happening since October 7: not an expansion of democratic debate, but the normalization of antisemitic intimidation under the cover of political passion.

Starting the Palestine clock on October 7 2023 is as sure-fire a tell of Zionist narratives on Gaza as starting the Ukraine clock at February 24 2022 is of Western propaganda. Here it flags intent to paint, without a shred of evidence, ‘an expansion [!!!] of democratic debate as antisemitic’.

Criticism of Israel is legitimate and necessary. Democracies must allow sharp, even unsettling arguments. But over the past two years, political language has repeatedly been used to erase distinctions liberal societies depend on: between arguing about policies and menacing people; between condemning a state and treating Jews everywhere as its proxies; between protest that seeks persuasion and intimidation that seeks retreat.

And here we have it. In a paragraph combining mealy-mouthed with staggering reach, Ms Pardo never spells out what ‘political language’ she has in mind. She doesn’t need to. The West is now criminalising, at an alarming rate and by deceitful equations, effective opposition to a genocide.

Lie number one from Israel – and Western government which, for reasons given here and here, back it – is that Israel and Jewishness are one and the same. Absolutely not, say many Jews.

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Lie number two attributes to the two slogans currently most targeted a meaning twisted to suit the genocide enablers. See Waddya mean: “Globalise the intifada”?

The other slogan was targeted long before the Bondi Beach atrocity. Here’s an AI response to a query on Owen Jones and “from the river to the sea”:

Owen Jones, a prominent left-wing journalist and activist, frequently engages in the public debate surrounding the slogan “from the river to the sea” within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His stance on the issue, primarily expressed through social media posts, articles, and public speeches, can be summarised as follows:

• • Jones argues that when used by Palestinian solidarity activists, the slogan “from the river to the sea” is commonly understood as a call for freedom and equal rights for all people, both Israelis and Palestinians, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. He has explicitly supported a Labour MP who used a version of the phrase to call for “peaceful liberty” for all people in the region.

  • He highlights that the phrase “from the river to the sea” has also been used by Israeli leaders and is in the founding charter of the ruling Likud party, where it unambiguously means Israeli sovereignty over the entire area, implying “apartheid, oppression, land theft, illegal settlements and mass murder” of Palestinians.

  • Jones accuses critics of applying double standards by denouncing the slogan when used by pro-Palestinian protesters, while ignoring its use by Israeli officials in a context that he argues is genuinely “genocidal”. He suggests the focus on the slogan by Western media serves to distract from Israel’s actions in Gaza.

  • Jones is a strong advocate for Palestinian rights and campaigns for the end of the “occupation and apartheid” and for Palestine to be “free from the river to the sea,” making it clear that his goal is liberation and self-determination for the Palestinian people.

  • He dismisses accusations that supporting Palestinian human rights or using such slogans is inherently antisemitic, arguing that such claims are part of a broader “propaganda campaign” and “McCarthyite assault” designed to silence criticism of Israel and suppress support for Palestinians.

I agree. Ms Pardo, without naming either slogan specifically, does not. Read the rest of her short piece here, its lead photo showing a woman holding a placard which leaves open, as do I, the possibility of Bondi Beach as a false flag. ³ On the face of it that’s an odd choice of image. Or is the picture editor confident that JP readers will dutifully place a possibility legitimately raised – given, inter alia, Israel’s October 7 extension of its Hannibal Directive – in the same category as Blood Libel, Holocaust Denial and other incontestably antisemitic tropes?

Yup, I guess that’s it …

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1. Sharon Pardo is “a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a professor of European studies and international relations in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev”.
2. Look no further than Israel’s promotion of Hamas to weaken Fatah, as bewailed here by that infamously antisemitic mouthpiece, the Times of Israel
3. State false flag operations to create a casus belli  against another state, and/or legitimise the curtailing of civil rights at home, may take a hard form, with the deed done by agents of the state, or a soft form with the state forewarned but opting to look the other way. In the case of Bondi Beach, I wrote within minutes of hearing the news that:

   I have no evidence to support a false flag thesis. But Mossad’s record of disregard for the safety of individual Jews to advance the ‘greater good’ of Zionism – if only by stemming a 26 month haemorrhaging of good will, including that of Jews – means that I simply can’t, as with the Manchester synagogue attack, rule this out.