The antisemitic assumption behind anti-Zionist libels ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, July 09, 2026

The antisemitic assumption behind anti-Zionist libels

Wendy Bacon is one of the most decorated investigative journalists Australia has produced. She won a Walkley Award, the country’s highest journalism honor, in 1984 for exposing police and official corruption in New South Wales; her reporting on the bribery and attempted murder of a detective became the basis for the acclaimed ABC series Blue Murder; she worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine, and SBS before spending two decades as Professor of Journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has been arrested some eighteen times for causes she believed in, from anti-censorship fights to environmental protests. She now writes for Michael West Media, and she describes herself openly as an investigative journalist who is also a political activist, one who wants her work to be useful to those resisting abuses of power.

Bacon would strenuously deny that she holds any antisemitic opinions, and she would be completely sincere in the denial. So would many of the prominent activist-journalists she works among. But as this piece will demonstrate, their arguments are antisemitic on two levels at once. Every judgment they reach consistently slants against the Jewish community and the Jewish state, and every claim rests on a shared, unspoken assumption of Jewish duplicity and inherent malice. They would deny this too, and point to Jewish friends they admire and Jewish allies they cite. An objective look at the structure of their position shows a pattern too consistent to be accidental.

Let’s go through Bacon’s recent interview on Bogan Intelligentsia, because it canbe generalized to much of the Leftist anti-Zionist thinking.

The interview makes three main points. The first is that ties between the Australian medical community and Israel are growing and that this should alarm us, because Israel is committing “medicide,” the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system as an instrument of genocide. The second is that the Australian Jewish community is working to silence pro-Palestinian voices in medicine, chiefly by pushing hospitals and regulators to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The third is the case of Professor Peter Macdonald, the St Vincent’s cardiologist suspended after a single comment, offered as proof of how the machinery punishes dissent.

Each point sounds like reporting. Each depends on an implicit assumption: that Jews support genocide and scheme to silence anyone who objects. Remove the assumption and all three points dissolve. Keep it, and the interview coheres into a single seamless narrative of Jewish power and Jewish malice.

Bacon never has to argue the assumption, because she trusts her audience to supply it.

The whole edifice rests on the word “medicide.” For those who bother to look, it is well documented - video, photos, first person testimony - that Hamas uses Gaza’s hospitals for military planning and attacks, it builds tunnels adjacent to and underneath the same hospitals for fighters, it held hostages in hospitals and it uses ambulances to transport terrorists. Both international law and basic morality allows targeting medical facilities that lose their protection by being used for military services. There is no “medicide” - there is only Hamas cynically using hospitals to defend its military. I’m not making this up, it is in the Geneva Conventions: “The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy.” “Medicide” assumes Israeli (and Jewish) intent to specifically harm the medical infrastructure, and Hamas’ use of that infrastructure is what endangered it.

The next floor is built using the same trick. In 2023, the New South Wales Liberal health minister signed a five-year memorandum of understanding between NSW Health and Sheba Medical Centre, Israel’s largest hospital and one of the ten best-rated in the world. St. Vincent’s hospital bought Israeli health software Datos.

The interview never answers a basic question: exactly how does partnering with an Israeli hospital or buying Israeli medical software endanger patients? An Australian hospital runs on its own clinical governance, its own ethics committees, its own regulators. For an Israeli MOU or a piece of Israeli scheduling software to harm anyone, you would have to believe that Australian hospitals are so bad they have no policies of their own to protect patients, or that their policies are so poorly written an outside consultant can twist them into murdering undesirable patients. The mechanism is never named because naming it would expose the assumption underneath. This is classic slander by association — the very fact that there is an Israeli involved is enough to make the entire enterprise suspect, and the means doesn’t even have to be described, because the Jews are assumed crafty enough to figure out how to get around any obstacle.

The alarm is selective because it was never really about conduct. It is Deadly Exchange logic, the campaign Jewish Voice for Peace launched in 2017 claiming that American police who trained with Israeli counterparts were importing Israeli brutality into American streets. The American Jewish Committee identified it as an antisemitic trope, and JVP itself eventually admitted the campaign “furthers an antisemitic ideology.” Swap police for hospitals and the mechanism is identical: contact with Jews spreads Jewish malevolence, so partnership becomes contamination.

Next comes Bacon’s claim that the Australian Jewish community is weaponizing antisemitism to protect Israel. The reality is the reverse of what Bacon describes. Jewish medical staff have faced open hostility inside Australian wards, colleagues wearing Palestinian flags while treating patients, WhatsApp groups organizing to target them, and a steady erosion of any sense of institutional safety. The campaign to adopt the IHRA definition is a response to that. Bacon inverts it, casting the IHRA definition as a gag on Palestinian doctors and a chilling of speech. The definition does nothing of the kind. It silences no one; it supplies a tool for recognizing when speech has crossed into antisemitism, which is a different thing entirely and threatens only those who would prefer antisemitism go unnamed.

Which brings us to Macdonald. At a public forum he declared it a “no-brainer” that Mossad, not Iran, was behind the firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue and the arson at a Sydney restaurant, contradicting ASIO and the Prime Minister, who had named Iran. He blamed Jews for attacking Jews, a false-flag fantasy that is antisemitic on its face. He was suspended for seven weeks and then reinstated, and the reinstatement is the part Bacon cannot fit into her frame, because it happened for a principled reason: his comment, made off duty as a private citizen, did not breach hospital policy. His later lecture invitation was withdrawn for an equally principled reason. He has every right to voice an antisemitic conspiracy theory, and an institution has every right to decline to hand him a prestigious platform and absorb the reputational cost of doing so. Speech is free; employers are not obligated to platform it.

Every one of these judgments runs in the same direction. The Israeli army is presumed guilty of a crime that its enemy’s conduct explains. Israeli hospitals are presumed complicit in a policy no evidence connects them to. Australian Jews demanding protection from documented harassment are presumed to be faking it in service of a foreign government. Real antisemitism, the firebombed synagogue, the fifteen thousand threats against a Jewish businessman that Bacon pauses to wonder aloud might not “actually” be antisemitic, gets downgraded, explained away, or reassigned to Mossad. The assumption cuts one way only. Jews scheme, Jews lie, Jews manufacture their own victimhood, and anything they say in their defense is evidence against them because they are presumed liars.

That one-directional flow is the whole structure, and it is built like a house of cards, each claim resting on the one before it. There is no medicide, so there is no genocidal policy for Israeli hospitals to serve. There is no link between an Israeli cardiac unit and a battlefield decision, so partnering with one endangers no one. Australian Jews are genuinely under attack, so their demand for protection is not a covert operation against Palestinians. Pull the bottom card and the tower falls, because every floor above was supported only by the libel beneath it, and every libel was supported only by the assumption that Jews lie and scheme at each stage. Without that assumption, nothing stands.

Naming this is not weaponizing antisemitism, the charge always leveled the moment anyone points it out. It is the opposite. It exposes the antisemitism that was load-bearing all along, the belief in Jewish malice that anti-Zionism of this kind needs at its foundation and works hardest to keep out of sight. When you remove that assumption, the entire anti-Zionist argument falls apart.

Wendy Bacon may be sincere, but sincere hate is still hate. And the only throughline that makes sense during her entire interview is that of Jewish deception at the national, institutional, and personal levels. Underneath the human-rights vocabulary sits the oldest assumption there is, asking only that no one look directly at it.

(h/t Jill)

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