See also : Jillian Segal and husband funding far-right group “Advance”, Anthony Klan, The Klaxon, July 12, 2025.
Jillian Segal — the South African–born Australian lawyer, business executive, and Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism — recently dropped another Report, ASECA Priorities. According to the Special Envoy, a newly-hatched “modern progressive antisemitism” … is taking “the hostility of Islamic extremism and far-left antisemitism, together with traditional antisemitic tropes”.
My first reaction on reading this passage was to recall the unforgettable 2014 framing by the Australian Defence League of the alleged “evil anarcho-pinko-anarchist-islamic cabal of dirt”; the wicked coalition then allegedly intent on turning Penrith into a no-go zone for patriots.
Fuckin’ poetry, that!
In any case, inre the Report, Jeffrey Loewenstein doesn’t hold back in It’s time to sack Jillian Segal (Deepcut News, November 2, 2026), the Jewish Council of Australia (October 30, 2026) has slammed it, and Jeff Sparrow has characterised it, not unfairly, as a Trumpian plan to curtail free speech (Crikey, November 2, 2026). The Report is also subject to critical scrutiny by Robert Manne, who examines it in On the Rise of Antisemitism in Australia (November 8, 2026), along with the thoughts of Lord Andrew Roberts and Sir Simon Schama on the subject of ‘antisemitism’. Manne concludes that:
Schama believes he can help combat the rise of antisemitism in the Diaspora by defending the indefensible, the war crimes of the IDF under Benjamin Netanyahu. I believe a more likely remedy would be for leading Diaspora thinkers, like Schama, and influential publishers, like Morry Schwartz, and the leaders in Australia of the principal Israel and Jewish lobbies, like Jillian Segal, to speak the truth about what, under Netanyahu and the two Kahanist-fascist members of his Government, Israel has become, and the moral revolution that has to happen in Israel if Jews in the Diaspora are to be spared from the dreadful rise of antisemitism that is spreading around the Western world.
FWIW, for over 20 years I’ve been attempting, inter alia, to monitor and document organised, public expressions of antisemitism and other racisms in Australia — the better to disrupt it. I’m also an anarchist, and one of many people to hold the view that the Israeli state has engaged in a genocidal assault upon Palestine in the three years since October 7 (the latest chapter in a much longer history of deadly state violence). On that basis, I assume that Segal et. al. would categorise myself as an exponent of ‘far-left antisemitism’, the meaning of which is elaborated upon in this passage:
Far-left antisemitism or issue-motivated antisemitism
Far-left ideology and associated activism feature a worldview that casts the world in terms of ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’. Within this binary framework, Israel is portrayed as a colonial project that is inherently racist and Jews who support Israel’s existence are portrayed as representatives of ‘whiteness’ (regardless of their ethnicity), privilege (regardless of their means), imperialism (notwithstanding the absence of an empire), greedy capitalism and the projection of Western power.
This framing allows longstanding antisemitic motifs to be repackaged in the academic language of anti-racism, decolonisation, human rights, social justice and intersectionality, often in service of a traditional Marxist revolutionary agenda.
When a cause is believed – with ideological fervour – to be absolutely just, its ends can come to justify any means and its adherents can feel free to vilify, harass and seek to destroy those who associate with what is framed as evil.
Over time, the language of human rights and its greatest crimes – apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, etc. – has increasingly been appropriated to portray Israel (and, relevantly, members of the Jewish community who support it) as morally evil, often to the point of being equated to Nazis.
In contemporary Australia, elements of Australia’s historically fringe radical left have sought to appeal to well-meaning mainstream progressive Australians who may perceive the Palestinian cause as a matter of social justice. This ‘gateway’ issue, of sorts, has been used by far-left activists to magnify their appeal and prominence and to attempt to introduce traditionally moderate Australians to radical and anti-Jewish propaganda that would previously have been of little interest.
The strange – but not unprecedented – alignment of Islamic extremist antisemitism in the modern day combined with far-left extremism finds a common ground in 3 things:
• an extreme hatred of Israel, including a desire to eliminate it
• the representation of Israel as a kind of uniquely evil, demonic, cruel force in the world
• a conspiratorial view of Israel and Zionism and of Jews as controlling Western governments, undermining Islam and causing world war.
Despite their many obvious ideological differences, the 2 groups coalesce around a shared desire to undermine or overturn the existing social structures and institutions of Western societies, including moderate political consensus and social cohesion.
Where to begin with this ideological porridge? If I was to address all its specious claims and historical revisionism in detail, I’d be writing many thousands more words, drawn from millions more, written by some very smart people, over a very long period of time. Instead, I’ll just note the following:
I started writing this on the 88th anniversary of Reichskristallnacht, the orgy of antisemitic violence that characterised November 9–10, 1938 in Nazi Germany. The events signalled a further dark turn in Nazi antisemitism, and was ‘the culmination of a third wave of antisemitic violence — worse than those of 1933 and 1935 — that had begun in the spring of 1938 and run on as the domestic accompaniment to the foreign-political crisis throughout the summer and autumn’ (Kershaw, p.131). In this context, I can remember being struck by the image that accompanied the double-page spread in the September 1993 edition of Love & Rage (by the North American Love & Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation: 1989–1998), which loudly declares:
- Remember Pogromnacht (“Kristallnacht”)
November 9, 1993
Day of Anti-Fascist Actions
According to Spencer Beswick:
Contemporary US antifa dates back to the late 1980s when anarchists and punks in Anti-Racist Action (ARA) developed a revitalized strategy of militant anti-fascism to combat the growing power of the far right. This history has received new attention since Trump’s election, and Anti-Racist Action was even featured in a 2021 PBS Frontline documentary. But despite this renewed attention, the foundational role played by revolutionary anarchism in the development of Anti-Racist Action has thus far gone under-examined in mainstream accounts, which has obscured the historical lessons it offers.
Love and Rage regularly published writings on anti-fascism and anti-racism. And, oddly enough, the same edition promoting remembering Pogromnacht also contains the first installment of Ron Taber’s anarchist critique of Marxism. (FWIW, Taber also wrote A Look A Leninism, originally published by the Revolutionary Socialist League (1973–1989) in 1988; the RSL dissolved into L&R at its foundation. See also : The Utopian, which Taber and others published following L&R’s dissolution.) The point being, I guess: historical and contemporary anarchists have always fought, and continue to fight, fascism; critiques of capitalism and the state, colonialism and nationalism and so on are hardly confined to The Academy, or to Marxism.
In any case, while the analysis of ‘far-left antisemitism’ barely rises above the level of an average undergraduate essay, I’m nonetheless tickled that Segal’s Report suggests that the authors are familiar with Jordan Peterson’s Weltanschauung: ‘far-left ideology and associated activism feature a worldview that casts the world in terms of ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed”, after all. Otherwise, there are two (2) references cited in the passage on far-left antisemitism: 1) L Klaff, ‘A new form of the oldest hatred: mapping antisemitism today’ (in A Johnson (ed), Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays, Routledge, London and New York, 2024, pp.13–27 [PDF]), and 2) Dr Dave Rich MBE, Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, transcript, Hearing Block 1, Day 8, 14 May 2026, p.723. Both are available online, and while the new (new) antisemitism is actually a few decades-old, at the Royal Commission Dr Rich was subject to cross-examination by Peggy Dwyer on behalf of the JCA, and is the author of The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti‑Semitism (Biteback, 2016). Corbyn and antisemitism is a whole other kettle of fish but, for the defence, Nathan Robinson argued in Current Affairs in 2020 that ‘Corbyn’s suspension from the Labour Party is the culmination of an absurd series of attacks. It’s a lesson in how ruthlessly the left’s opponents will try to destroy it’, while Jake Romm argues that Zionism itself is ‘an antisemitism’ (Elements of Anti-Semitism: The limits of Zionism, Parapraxis, November 2024).
What’s in a word eh?
In general, then:
• I view Zionism as one particular expression of generic nationalism — a hegemonic discourse and political and structure which, as an anarchist, I reject.
• Zionism was initially conceptualised by its proponents in the nineteenth century as a form of colonialism which, contra other strands of Jewish thought (especially but not only Bundism), conceived of the Jews as a racial-national category which, like other nations, can and should construct its own state.
• It is both possible and desirable to reject the state form — as German Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) argued, “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another … We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community”.
• On the subject of Jews and whiteness, see, for example, Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism (One World, 2024) by Rachel Shabi (reviewed here by Natasha Walter), who was also interviewed by Max Kaiser last year during her book tour.
• The idea that Australia — fulla ‘traditionally moderate Australians’, apparently — has always been a welcoming territory for Jewish peoples, but that recent events have disrupted this openness, brings to mind the Evian conference of July 1938, at which delegates from 32 countries, including Australia, confirmed their unwillingness to increase immigration quotas for Jews. In which context, the JCA writes: ‘Rhetoric directed against Palestinian refugees is reminiscent of the same rhetoric used to vilify Jewish refugees in the 1940s and 1950s who were frequently labeled ‘security risks’. T.H. White, Australia’s delegate to the 1938 Evian Conference famously said with reference to German and Austrian Jewish refugees, Australia has “no real racial problem [and is] not desirous of importing one”. This rhetoric is also part of a long history of racism and exclusion in Australia, from the White Australia Policy to the War on Terror’s exclusion of people from the Middle East.’
• Opposition to the genocidal assault upon Palestine neither requires nor is it assisted by a false notion, attributed by the Report to the ‘far left’, that ‘Israel [is] a kind of uniquely evil, demonic, cruel force in the world’. On the contrary, even a brief glimpse at modern history reveals that one of the main functions of the state is as an engine of war and colonialism.
• Along with being an expression of the simple-minded liberal fatuities that saturate the text, to seek to ‘undermine or overturn the existing social structures and institutions of Western societies, including moderate political consensus and social cohesion’ may be a very wrogn-headed proposition for the Report’s authors, but: 1) as Some Guy said, ‘Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it’; 2) I make a modest, alternative, proposal: dismantle the rule of state, capital and patriarchy, and reconstruct a free society in harmony with non-human nature: a good thing for ecological sustainability and a critical contribution to establishing a genuine, egalitarian form of ‘social cohesion’.
