On the anti-racism symposium, the infiltrator and Zionist media
Symposium Journal
I attended the recent Symposium Unifying Anti-racism, hosted by the Queensland University of Technology’s Carumba Institute in Magandjin.
It must be emphasised that, for those of us in attendance1, the outrage and bluster of Zionists and their media stenographers was entirely peripheral; barely acknowledged as we passed two days of solidarity, friendship, and collective imagining.
Given the thematic breadth and depth of the symposium, it's unfortunate to be writing now about the event’s infiltrator, and the ongoing media commotion. However, as many people are now engaging with the idea of Carumba’s symposium entirely through the warped lens of ‘journalists’ (who themselves did not attend) I think it's important to discuss, and dispose of, the garbage:
The infiltrator
During the final moments of the two-day symposium, event organiser Chelsea Watego announced that an attendee had been leaking recordings to pro-Israel media, a fact that organisers and panelists had been aware of throughout the conference.
Watego’s motivation for making this announcement was to ensure, due to the media gathering outside, that all attendees, particularly Elders, felt safe and supported leaving the venue.
‘How can you do anti-racist work if you haven’t got racists coming for you?’ Watego reassured us. ‘I know there’s going to be a whole lot of investigations and a whole lot of meetings that are to come from this, involving some of the individuals, and of course myself. It's not my first rodeo, let me just say that, so bring it on.’
In response to Watego’s announcement, some attendees called out ‘Shame!’, and one audience member was heard suggesting that the infiltrator be ‘punched in the throat’, a call-back to a hilariously satirical pre-symposium stand-up comedy debate presentation by Lorna Munro2, who argued that racists cannot be reasoned with or appealed to — and must therefore face the natural consequence of their violent impositions:
The specific brand of racism directed towards Blackfullas stems directly from colonial history, the genesis of it is our genocide in this illegally occupied continent now known as ‘Australia’. The solution to racism is a punch directly in the face, throat or gurras.
‘An Aussie academic has broken down in tears,’ gasped The Cairns Post the next day, ‘after being subject to “a coordinated humiliation” at a university.’
At no point, however, was this infiltrator named or publicly identified. To his evident annoyance, he was overwhelmingly ignored. At the conclusion of the event, unable to conjure up the persecution that he did not experience, he finally outed himself in an instagram reel: ‘The organisers of the conference,’ he sniffed, ‘did not use this moment to bring together all communities, including Jews like me who identify as Zionists.’3
The fact that the organisers did not invite racists to speak at an anti-racism symposium was unlikely an oversight.
This infiltrator-as-victim, we now know, was associate professor Yoni Nazaraty, a Zionist occupier, a former IOF soldier, and, more recently, a former developer for Rafael Systems, one of the Zionist entity’s largest weapons companies.
Rafael Systems was formed in 1948, during the Nakba. It now develops guided missiles and armed drones used to target and massacre Palestinian families in Gaza from both air and ground; to destroy residential neighbourhoods and refugee camps. Nazaraty, for example, was a ‘key developer’ of an airborne tactical radio communication system used by the Zionist entity’s occupying air force. In recent years, Rafael has also partnered with Raytheon and the Australian military4.
In 2018, writing on Medium, Nazaraty may have broken a record for the most frequent use of the word ‘Israel’ in a single paragraph:
I’ve lived in Israel for more than half my life, on and off. Two of my three children were born in Israel. My parents and some of my siblings live in Israel. My closest friends are in Israel. I have strong professional relationships with Israeli companies, Israeli institutions and Israeli academia. My heart is connected to the countryside of Israel. I’ve also served in danger in the Israeli military on almost all fronts possible. Then, in my Israeli civilian life, I’ve even contributed to defence systems via industry.
Through his miserable instagram reveal, Nazaraty claims that, as the symposium’s ‘only Zionist participant’, he attended the symposium as a representative of the ‘Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism’.
Ok, now I invite you to take a quick break from reading this text, open a new tab, and visit the thoroughly unconvincing ‘5A’ website. I want you to fully appreciate the way in which a site with no original images, no articles, no disclosed affiliations, no scholarship, and not a scrap of useful information, can nonetheless pad itself out with perplexing non-sequiturs, cartoonishly robotic aphorisms and circuitous links to nowhere. Oh, and of course, an invitation to ‘donate to 5A’. If ever a thing was birthed from the isolation of a joyless basement, this website is it.
None of the above, of course, has prevented ‘5A’ from being cited, with undue authority and solemnity, by The Australian — or, for that matter, from receiving ‘registered charity status’ from the colony. One can easily imagine how comprehensively The Australian would question, probe and eviscerate the legitimacy of this ‘organisation’ if it represented an Arab community.
In a 23 January article, The Australian’s Noah Yim (an alumni of the Zionist-adjacent Lowy Institute and a cadet Israel propagandist) presumed to shock his readers with the revelation that ‘none of [5A’s] academic members were invited to speak at the conference’.
It remains unclear how Carumba Institute might have extended such hypothetical invitations. Although ‘5A’ boasts ‘over 230 members’, the only member I could identify by name (I searched high and low) is Nazaraty himself. Moreover, the ‘5A’ website URL was nothing but a broken link before and during the symposium. Only after I pointed out its non-existence on my Instagram stories did the website reappear.
To the extent that ‘5A’ can even be referred to straight-facedly as an ‘organisation’, it did not exist in any form before the decolonial resistance of October 7th. Registered in February the following year, ‘5A’ seems likely to have been assembled to counteract the widely circulated Statement of solidarity with Palestine from academics in Australian universities, to which a large number of academics confidently added their names.
On Zionist media
During the past 16 months, thanks in large part to the courageous reporting of Palestinian journalists (from the rubble of their own attempted extermination, no less), the systemic racism and imperialist agenda of western media has been laid bare. An unprecedented number of people now clearly recognise the genocidal complicity of both ‘liberal’ and conservative arms of conventional western ‘journalism’.
These realisations are the first small steps towards extracting ourselves from the moral wasteland of the Australian media ecosystem, whether as consumers or contributors, and towards building genuinely principled anti-imperialist alternatives.
Writing from Cuba in 2014, Assata Shakur observes:
The black press and the progressive media has historically played an essential role in the struggle for justice. We need to continue and to expand that tradition. We need to create media outlets that help to educate our people and our children, and not annihilate their minds. I am only one woman. I own no TV stations, or Radio Stations or Newspapers. But I feel that people need to be educated as to what is going on, and to understand the connection between the news media and the instruments of repression.
Today Zionists — and the instruments of repression through which they have for so long leveraged power and influence — are in crisis. Their extravagant propaganda machine is, for perhaps the first time, failing. While the global south has always understood Israel to be an illegitimate and bloodthirsty imperialist outpost, this revelation is now occurring on a significant scale throughout the anglosphere.
Naturally, then, the racism of western imperialist media was a recurring topic across the anti-racism symposium’s panels, perhaps described most succinctly by Faye Rosas Blanch as ‘institutional power. That talk about us. That hate us.'
At the pre-symposium comedy debate, Nazaraty was already leaking footage to NewsCorp. The Courier Mail published, deleted, and then republished its first hit piece mere hours after the event. The following morning, on the first day of the symposium, pro-Israel masthead The Australian attacked the conference from the front page of its print edition, in an article headlined ‘QUT anti-racism conference courts anti-Israel critics’.
Although ostensibly a report on a single moment from the debate presentation of Jewish human rights lawyer Sarah Schwartz, 'journalist' Yim uses this as a premise from which to regurgitate The Australian’s threadbare and oft-repeated smears against three of the Zionist lobby’s favourite targets: Lidia Thorpe, Randa Abdel-Fattah and Sara Saleh. These three were not even present in the debate audience, let alone onstage.
Yim’s article also triumphantly reveals that pro-Israel senator Sarah Henderson had made ‘urgent representations to the university’s vice-chancellor to cancel this event’.
The morning of the symposium’s second day brought a second hit piece from The Australian, again by-lined by Yim, using as its header an image from Schwartz’s presentation.
Schwartz herself, however, was conveniently cropped from the image, and was not mentioned in the article or even the image’s caption, presumably as this would complicate The Australian’s attempts to frame the symposium as an 'antisemitic' conference. Instead, the image is exploited as the basis for a renewed attack against Saleh and Abdel-Fattah who — I must repeat — had not yet even arrived in Magandjin.
Schwartz responded:
This week, during a comedy debate, I pilloried Peter Dutton's racist, ignorant and monolithic conception of Jewish people. In my presentation, I referred to this racist conception as 'Dutton's Jew' — Dutton's racist conception of Jews, not actual Jewish people. Against this conception, I spoke about how Jewish people are diverse and about how the Jewish community is not a monolith.
Conspicuously, The Australian and other pro-Israel media platforms have avoided reporting the fact that the symposium was Black-led, that well over 50% of its speakers were Black, and that the vast majority of panel discussions rightly centred the liberation struggles and sovereignties of Aboriginal Nations. The media’s obsessive focus on two Palestinians, then, is revealing.
During the event, attendee Melinda Mann tweeted:
The colony is shaking in its crusty boots about the anti racism symposium in Meanjin this week. When Blackfullas reject the colony's 'offer' of reconciliation and instead create solidarity with anti racist Arabs, Jews, Africans, and Asians, the Colony hyperventilates.
They aren't counting on us 'reconciling' with each other. They aren't counting on us fighting side by side against the racism that started and persists against Blackfullas. And as always, the Colony underestimates our capacity to love and protect ourselves and each other.
And, Mann again, this time writing reflectively during the symposium’s aftermath:
The symposium was attended by and coordinated by people who understand and live the reality of genocide and terror, of police harassment and deaths in their custody. It was a gift to sit, listen and learn about where we’ve come from and what is possible — to imagine our communities free from racism and liberated through relationships.
The focus of media and political attention on Jewish and Palestinian presences at the Symposium is diabolical. These relationships were held with care.
Eleven days have now passed since the symposium ended, and the media attacks have continued every day. The majority of these articles have carried the by-line of Yim and/or his colleague Natasha Bita, consolidating and escalating in a virulent campaign against the academic careers of Watego and Abdel-Fattah. These attacks are ongoing as I write.
The Australian describes Watego as:
…the Indigenous academic who invited anti-Israel activists as keynote speakers at a racism symposium that mocked ‘Dutton’s Jew’.
This is an example of the convoluted rhetorical needle-threading required to erase the agency and autonomy of Jewish speaker Schwartz.
Queensland University of Technology vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil has now ‘publicly apologised’ for the symposium, assuring The Australian ‘that she would hand all material from the conference to an inquiry to be headed by a lawyer or retired judge5, and would not rule out a potential referral to police’.
Abdel-Fattah, meanwhile, is facing an aggressive coordinated attack against her academic research. Politicians Jason Clare and Sarah Henderson have called for Abdel-Fattah’s current Australian Research Council (ARC) grant to be ‘urgently investigated’ following her symposium appearance, alleging that, in opposing the occupation and mass-killing of her people, Abdel-Fattah has ‘violated research protocols’.
Capitulating to this pressure, the ARC has directed Macquarie6 University to launch an ‘investigation’ into Abdel-Fattah’s distinguished academic work.
The Australian clutches its pearls:
In April, [Abdel-Fattah] led a ‘kids excursion’ to the University of Sydney's pro-Palestine encampment protest where primary school-aged children led each other in chants of ‘intifada’ and ‘Israel is a terrorist state’. More recently, Dr Abdel-Fattah publicly wished for 2025 to ‘be the end of Israel’ and for the ‘abolishment of the death cult of Zionism’.
In 2025, this surely echoes the wishes of any person with an internet connection, a conscience and a pulse. As Abdel-Fattah counters: ‘[This hit piece] frankly showcases my best work.’
Lets not forget that, while The Australian has been committed to producing a deluge of journalism about the implied or imagined violence of an anti-racism symposium (Ellen van Neerven’s ‘invisible spears’), it has comprehensively refused to report on the actual violence of a world-historic mass slaughter in Palestine, Lebanon and neighbouring homelands, or the actual violence that occupied Indigenous Nations on this continent must contend with daily.
Central to the targeting of Abdel-Fattah’s ARC grant has been The Australian’s revelation that, during her symposium panel discussion, she admitted to ‘bending the rules’ as an academic. So let’s place this provocation from Abdel-Fattah’s talk in context:
We are surrounded by cowards, by mediocre pseudo-intellectuals, by people who rise the academic ladder through exploiting and mining our communities, who posture as progressive, and decolonial, and copy and paste acknowledgments of country in their email signatures but are protectors and sustainers of the white supremacist system to their core. To survive is to engage in istibak7—refuse to meet the institution on its terms, find points of friction and creative disruption.
Kwame Ture said people usually mobilise around issues but revolutionaries organise around systems. To be in a white supremacist system there are rules, ambitions, metrics. I know the system cannot be reformed. It is thoroughly rotten. So I look for ways to bend the rules, refuse them, subvert them, challenge the formal circuits of scholarship and knowledge production. There is creativity in applying a critical race theory lens to how one navigates a violent system. And sometimes there is joy in doing that, but always a bigger purpose.
Notable amongst this barrage of daily hit pieces was an article, again in The Australian’s print edition, authored by Marcia Langton, who did not attend the symposium. I am a target of Langton’s article, alongside Watego, Abdel-Fattah, Saleh, Schwartz, and my friend and creative collaborator Amy McQuire.
Langton writes:
The QUT Carumba Institute, led by Chelsea Watego, hosted the conference. Who invited Sarah Schwartz, Matt Chun, Sarah Saleh and Randa Abdel-Fattah? The views of these speakers are public knowledge. Any person whose judgement can be trusted would have known that there would likely have been an incident causing outrage.
Elsewhere in the article, Langton claims, incorrectly, that I was a speaker at the symposium. From this non-basis, she repeats a series of well-trodden Zionist accusations about my work and identity.
Langton’s attack on me in this article is personal, offensive and thoroughly erroneous. However, I don’t believe that it’s my role to respond with a personal critique of Langton. There’s already a significant amount of critical work by Black writers and thinkers that can be referred to, particularly regarding Langton’s relationship with the Zionist colonial project in Palestine, and with extractive industries, and with the Northern Territory Intervention.
Rather, my focus must remain on the power structures that seek to silence us, and advance their agendas. Because here’s the thing: I’m not convinced that Langton even knows who I am, or what my creative practice consists of. I’m not convinced that she has a strong personal feeling about me either way.
For 16 months now, the Zionist lobby has been running the most absurd and unrelenting hit pieces attacking Abdel-Fattah, Saleh, myself and certain other of our comrades. For 16 months, the same white ‘journalists’ have largely ‘authored’ these attacks: Chip le Grand, John Ferguson, Rosemary Neill, Alexi Dimitriadi, Danielle Gusmaroli, and others. I’ve read enough Zionist-astroturfed articles over the years to recognise the consistent prose: the clumsy self-entitlement, the lack of self-awareness, and the wilful disinterest in truth.
And each time they fail to silence Palestinians and their comrades, these articles become increasingly frenzied and more wildly deceitful. Zionists are freaking out. They recognise the need to escalate. Securing a Marcia Langton by-line represents one such escalation. Politicians smearing us in the Australian senate represents another.
And yet we aren’t shutting up, and we never will. We remain both unequivocal and visible in our commitment to principled action towards collective liberation.
Zionism is pure undiluted white supremacism, in its most hideous and unsophisticated form. And the reality for a ‘model minority’ stenographer like Noah Yim — or for any other non-white person acting to safeguard their own little piece of Zionist pie — is that a Zionist will never ever see you as a collaborator, much less an equal, much less a friend. You are a human shield. Whatever small material benefit you may personally extract from the relinquishment of your soul, the Zionist will always hate you.
Just ask Penny Wong.
The linguistic front
During the symposium’s first panel discussion, describing the way in which language is so frequently weaponised by media to obscure Israel’s horrific carceral atrocities, Saleh observes that ‘colonial violence is enacted linguistically; Israel tries to erase us through language … anti-racist ethics of practice demands an engagement with language’.
Saleh’s observation reminds me of a passage from Ghassan Kanafani’s 1967 title, On Zionist Literature8, in which, examining the ‘infernal machinations of the Zionist movement’, the revolutionary novelist suggests that the ‘linguistic front’ of Zionism, in fact, preceded its political counterpart:
… an extensive process of disinformation which eventually produced exceedingly dangerous results — chief among which is the wholesale indoctrination of humanity through what are ostensibly tools of enlightenment and truth.
Israel’s media campaign is therefore not a mere passing raid; this is conquest upon well-trodden terrain, striking deep into the consciousness of an audience that has long been deceived.
This, Kanafani argues, is the essential contradiction and ‘propagandistic requirement’ of Zionism. The Zionist ideology (to which we may add its Australian political sycophants and obedient media stenographers) is ‘not required to thoroughly explore the facts … On the contrary, it is required to invent new facts at any cost, and then protect them.’
In her recent title, Black Witness9, the staunchly independent Black journalist McQuire writes:
…it is here I want to speak of the Australian media’s lack of transparency when it comes to Palestine, because it is surely the most concerning case of the media’s lack of ethics. As Nazareth-based journalist Johnathan Cook wrote on Twitter: ‘All journalists are activists. The proper distinction is whether we declare our activism or not … What you should care about is whether journalists are independent’
So where is the scrutiny of the fact that for many years Australian journalists have been going on propaganda tours of Israel, funded by Zionist lobby groups? Are they ‘impartial’?
The linguistic front of colonialism, of course, is far from unique to Zionism. Before the Zionist’s ‘land without people’ came the Australian colony’s ‘Terra Nullius’ and European Christendom’s ‘doctrine of discovery’. These and many other infernal machinations are the direct, unbroken antecedents of the Australian colony’s contemporary media ecosystem.
McQuire again, this time speaking from the symposium panel she shared with Saleh:
Imperialist media entrenches power and enforces violence against Indigenous people. Anti-racist practice is how we resist that. Anti-racist practice is always going to be about resistance — and honouring resistance.
They use these acts of violence to steal our land. It always comes down to the land, and the entrenching of power.
Who gets to be human? Who gets to be mourned? Who’s worthy of justice? Who’s unworthy of justice?
Thanks to my partner Tess, whose exhaustive note-taking and camaraderie I have relied upon during the symposium and its aftermath.
Lorna Munro’s pre-symposium debate presentation:
A still from Yoni Nazaraty’s Instagram reel:
In 2018, Australian Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne launched ‘Varley Raphael Australia’, stating:
‘This partnership between one of Australia's best defence companies and a global success story like Rafael is another success story for Australian industry.’
Following publication of this article, Sheil was also interrogated by politician Josh Burns at a Parliamentary Commission on ‘Human Rights’ — an absurd show trial intended to leverage the scandal around the symposium to further damage the career of Abdel-Fattah, and further conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Read my post about this show trial here.
Of this colonial nomenclature, Abdel-Fattah says:
‘Feminist Scholar Sara Ahmed writes about “acts of naming”, how building names “can keep a certain history alive: in the surroundings you are surrounded by who was there before. A history of whiteness can be a history of befores.” I am at a university named after a genocidal coloniser and so I make sure whatever I do in this university is an act of resistance against that blood-soaked tribute. I owe it to my Indigenous siblings here and I owe it as the daughter of an Indigenous Palestinian to live defiantly as a mode of being.’
Abdel-Fattah explains:
‘[Bassel] Al-Araj was obsessed with books, knowledge, and disobedience. He developed a theory called ishtibak, entanglement and creative disruption. So instead of confronting your enemy on their terms, meeting them where they want, you create points of tension, friction, disruption and entangle them across multiple fields of engagement.’
Ghassan Kanafani, On Zionist Literature, English translation by Mahmoud Najib, Ebb Books, 2022
Amy McQuire, Black Witness, Queensland University Press, 2024
Thank you.