Front groups working with Zionist actors are promoting Islamophobia

Australian front groups have been working to promote the idea that the Greens make many cultural identities less safe. Zionists are incorporating Hindu and Iranian figures, depicting a fake “threat.”

Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon are tracking the Zionist disinformation strategies that have been at work in the Australian local, state and federal political information space recently.

In this information project, any speech act or protest supporting peace and rights for Palestinians is depicted as an “antisemitic” threat that frightens Jewish people. The Greens are being tarred with the accusation that they pose a threat to many multicultural identities, not just Jewish. This of course distorts the fact that the Greens are the strongest party voice against prejudice in Australian politics – which includes opposing Zionist prejudice against Palestinians as well as antisemitism.

Protest is a speech act and must be protected – particularly when it is directed against matters as urgent as the climate catastrophe and genocide.

The project being carried out by the front groups investigated by Bacon and Aharon functions to foster anti Muslim sentiment. That work is inherent to the current shape of the transnational Right. Demonising Muslims is not new: in 2010, then Liberal Party MP Scott Morrison proposed targeting Muslims for political gain. His colleagues attempted to shame him for the divisive suggestion, but in the years since, that tactic has become mainstream for the political and media Right in Australia as well as abroad.

Morrison’s role flags the importance of Christian Zionists to this mission.(1) It is difficult to tease out the primary motivation. One role is to help Australia’s “conservative” politicians win elections. It is also potentially to keep out the Greens (and independents known as “teals”) to prevent genuine climate action, since the Labor Party appears to be constrained by state capture. The focus on Israel might be for Jewish Zionist interests or as part of the Christian Nationalist project aiming to control Australian politics. The Never Again is Now body speaks to that last motivation.

Advance – which was so active against the First Peoples’ Voice to Parliament and then committed over the last few months to destroying the Greens and “teal” independents – has been shown to have personnel links with Atlas Network partners in Australia. Advance has also received funding from the Liberal Party through the party’s Cormack Foundation.

Maurice Newman, who has a long track record of action around Atlas Network partners in Australia, was a Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) member from 1976. (The MPS is described as the functional steering committee of the Atlas Network and one of its major roles in recent years has been promoting climate denial.) Newman was also listed in 2014 as one of Australia’s 12 “most influential” climate deniers who used his time as ABC chairman to skew the coverage of the science. Newman was an “early driver” of Advance. In March this year, Newman described pro-Palestinian encampments on university campuses as one sign that “ideology” (rather than a moral compass) is taking over and stated, “We might as well be in communist China.”

Some Atlas Network partners have a history of promoting intervention in the Middle East, with the American Enterprise Institute’s neocons probably being the most influential in promoting “regime change” from within the White House. The Heritage Foundation claims to be no longer affiliated with the Atlas Network after decades of acting as one of its major partners. It too is engaging strongly in culture wars over purported antisemitism with Project Esther. As Axios observed, the project was as much about crushing Americans’ ability to protest. Jewish commentators also fear that the mechanism will cause blowback against Jewish Americans. As a part of the Christian Nationalist project, Esther’s strategy has been summarised as “a sweeping program of surveillance, propaganda, deportation, and criminalization.”

David Adler was a “founding board member and advisor” of Advance. He is best known as having founded the extreme Australian Jewish Association, a “private advocacy group” mimicking a peak body. Adler has spoken on rightwing media against doctors being vocal on the substantial threat that the climate crisis poses to health as leftist posturing. He disdainsclimate science as comparable to “gender issues.” Adler has recently stepped down as AJA “president.”

The degree to which Adler is a fringe figure in Jewish Australian opinion is conveyed by rejections such as:

“Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council national chairman Mark Leibler, a prominent Indigenous rights activist who co-chaired the Referendum Council, said that due to the AJA’s “misleading name”, it is very important for people within the Jewish community, but also people outside the Jewish community, to “understand that this organisation and this person, they do not speak for us”.

“They do not communicate what, in any sense of the term, can be regarded as Jewish values,” Leibler said.

“Some of the things that Adler has said are frankly nothing short of horrific.”

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Peter Wertheim said Adler’s comments “are wrong, offensive and bigoted, and indicate that he lacks the same sensitivity to other forms of racism that he has for antisemitism”.

“These comments do not in any way represent or reflect the views of the mainstream Jewish community in Australia. They are contrary to Jewish values, and the teaching ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to others’,” Wertheim said.

“Despite its misleadingly generic name, the Australian Jewish Association is a private group led by a small number of unelected people promoting marginal, ideologically-blinkered views. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has been the peak, representative body of the Australian Jewish community since 1944.”

Given that none of the older peak bodies have been what might be described as particularly supportive of justice for Palestinians (leading to the formation of the progressive Jewish Council of Australia to fight for both Jewish and Palestinian safety), this condemnation speaks to the fringe nature of the AJA’s politics.

Bacon and Aharon have been tracking down several Zionist front groups. Better Australia began as Better Councils where the “Israel lobby,” as Bacon termed it, appeared to be attempting to disrupt and influence Sydney council elections. The pair have found connections with Liberal Party affiliates such as Alex Polson who owns Better’s ABN. He is a Liberal Party member and previously worked for Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham. Bacon and Aharon have also investigated the Queensland Jewish Collective (QJC) which appeared to be a reasonably significant player in the 2024 Queensland state election.

The Minority Impact Coalition (MIC) is a creation of the QJC. Alex McKinnon has reported some of the extremity of that body’s social media posts. The Australian depicted the group as a grassroots immigrant movement against Labor and the Greens.

Bacon and Aharon have tracked down loose connections of various kinds between Advance with the Zionist-affiliated groups. QJC accepted help from Advance. QJC’s MIC has claimed very limited connection with Advance. Better may have had early plans to work in cooperation with Advance. Bacon and Aharon have noted that Advance or AJA boost the social media posts of these micro bodies, creating the only occasions when their posts achieve traction. This suggests some degree of cooperation.

In her reporting on the Queensland election campaign, Bacon illustrates a graphic from the AJA that was used to advertise a webinar to introduce its members to Advance. That same image was later used on QJC billboards as well as on the MIC’s website.

The image features three individuals targeting the Greens as a “divisive hate group” for the represented ethnicities or cultural identities. One of the three is posed as representing a “Jewish Queenslander” who doesn’t feel safe in her own cities because of Greens repeating “slogans of the terrorists that wish [her] dead.”

The other two represent an identity coalition that the QJC (alone?) was forging in a “multicultural impact network meeting.”

The second individual is a “Hindu Queenslander” who is quoted on the graphic as asserting “The Greens glorify those that terrorise us. They make me scared for the future.”

This is not an outlier. The shared work of linking Muslims with terrorism is central to the Hindutva nationalist project, just as it is to Israel. Prime Minister Modi, for example, declared that both Israel and India face a shared threat from “radical Islam.”

The recent attack in Kashmir has led to calls to use the “Israel model” in Kashmir with suggestions that both Kashmir and Pakistan should be “flattened” like Gaza.

There is no inference made that the woman pictured supports Hindutva ideology.

It appears the Hindu Council of Australia (HCA) had a speaker at the QJC event in June 2024. The HCA may have no interest in the religio-ethnonationalist Hindutva ideology. It is noteworthy, however, that the HCA site hosts a post suggesting that an attempt to tackle Hindutva extremism is actually about “dismantling Hinduism” and an attempt to spread fear mongering against Hindus.

The MIC site claims to have the group Hindus of Australia as an endorsing body. That link is backed up by an Indian-Australian news site, which depicts MIC as protecting Australia from “imported hate.” In the aftermath of the election, the Hindus of Australia X account reposted a QJC post, with additional comment that the Greens had brought “degeneracy” to “Australian political and social lives.” It also made the strange claim that the Greens had “put targets on the backs of Australian Jewish and Hindu communities so that the terror and criminal elements now consider our communities soft targets.”

Modi and his party have a long history of targeting Muslims, including Modi campaigning on the fear of being outbred by Muslims at the last election.

Israel and India are bonded over these parallels.

The third individual on the AJA graphic represents Iranians. A speaker at the event is reported to have represented the Iranian Novin Party (INP). Hesam Orujee, a member of the INP, is featured on the AJA Facebook page as a member of the QJC.

The Iran Novin Party is “Pahlavist.” That is, they support the Pahlavi family to replace the Iranian Islamist regime. The QJC site claims that the Greens “support the Iranian regime’s terror proxies.” This is, of course, nonsense. (The MIC site also targets Labor for not attacking these groups’ issues aggressively enough.)

The Iranian monarchist community is connected to the NatCon religio-ethnonationalist project. The last conference in Washington (where JD Vance was soft launched at the final dinner just before being announced as Trump’s running partner) featured Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.

Iranian monarchists are reportedly working with Israel in their efforts to overthrow the regime and reinstall their Shah.

It is also reported that the Iranian MEK has funnelled Saudi money into the creation of the Spanish Far Right Vox party that is militantly Islamophobic as well as socially ultra-conservative.

The J-United group from Melbourne is on record as being backed by Advance in its targeting of Greens candidates. Australian Jewish News described J-United’s political campaign as having “received support from diverse community groups including Iranian, Hindu and Christian organisations.”

Letters were circulated in the electorate of Goldstein shortly before the election last weekend falsely accusing climate independent (“teal”) Zoe Daniel of being antisemitic in conspiracist terms. It is not known which individual or group circulated the anonymous letters.

Daniel’s Liberal Party rival was affiliated with the Atlas Network partner the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society the last time the list was leaked. Tim Wilson’s most significant moment with the international Atlas Network-connected activity was breaking Australia’s carbon price mechanism. In recognition of this, his IPA team was shortlisted for the Atlas Network’s most prestigious global prize.

Advance and the AJA have several reasons for welcoming losses of Greens seats in parliament. For the former, this signals fewer politicians to defend climate action and social justice. The AJA rejects politicians supporting a peaceful resolution for Palestine. The work of the front groups suggests both groups to be loosely part of the NatCon project that aims to unite Christian Nationalists, Israeli Jewish Nationalists and Hindu Nationalists against Muslims, against modernity and against climate action. The Iranian monarchists’ role in that coalition is noteworthy.

The Australian Right is more strongly represented in the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s (ARC) version of NatCon messaging.

Tony Abbott was an advisor to Advance. Abbott is a Distinguished Fellow at the IPA and is also on the ARC Advisory Board alongside several other past and serving Australian politicians.(2) ARC co-founder John Anderson AO has posted this disturbing interview about Israel and Islam with Douglas Murray, another board member, on his YouTube channel.(3) ARC is a strongly climate denial project, loosely promoting NatCon ideology. NatCon ideology is backed by the Edmund Burke Foundation which has important Zionist connections.

The fact that Advance is so closely connected with a Zionist group such as the AJA, which real Jewish peak bodies depict as “marginal” and “ideologically blinkered,” not to mention expressing “horrific” views, is an important feature.

It is natural that immigrant and other minority groups will hold opinions on ways nations they are affiliated with could be better. It is also to be expected that some fringe elements will hold views that incorporate prejudice.

Australia’s multicultural project is, however, a precious and vulnerable experiment. It is reckless to allow strategists to undermine it for political goals. The Australian majority was revealed in this election to reject divisive culture war games: we cannot ignore the inherent Islamophobia that is core to the religio-ethnonationalist NatCon ideology. It is even more dangerous when bodies founded to foster dis- and misinformation bring together those fringe elements of our multicultural communities, promoting the demonisation of one category of Australian citizen.

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