I have written a few times before about a law firm in Australia called Sydney Criminal Lawyers®, which has a strange and disturbing habit of posting anti-Israel and arguably antisemitic content to their website. In my last post on them from two years ago, I posited they might be in contravention of the Law Society of New South Wales Statement of Ethics.
I decided to see what they were up to these days, especially in the wake of the Bondi massacre of a few weeks ago.
The first article they published on their website following the massacre has a fair sounding title: Antisemitic Mass Murder at Bondi Beach Robs Us All of Our Common Humanity
Except when you read it, you are robbed of more than just your humanity; also your brain cells. Here’s an excerpt:
In attempting to blame Australian PM Anthony Albanese for the premeditated assault on local Jewish people, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has been his regular dickhead self. The wanted war criminal, who’s overseen one of the worst atrocities ever, the Gaza genocide, claimed he’d warned this would occur, and he suggested that somehow local pro-Palestinian protests are a key cause of the crime.
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There is no suggestion whatsoever that Palestinian locals or their allies in the ongoing antigenocide movement had anything to do with Sunday’s mass shooting.
However, the labelling of people as antisemitic has been used by Israel to stifle criticism of the nation’s human rights abuses against Palestinians since the late 1960s. So, whilst undeniable Jewish hatred fuelled the Bondi killings, terming it as antisemitic in the present is complicated as people marching to call for an end to the mass killing of Palestinians, are too being framed as antisemitic.
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Segal has been obsessed with implementing her plan to combat antisemitism, which at its heart seeks to install the IHRA working definition of antisemitism into the nation’s institutions that includes criticism of Israel, which, therefore, serves to block criticism of Tel Aviv’s apartheid regime that for decades now has been systematically perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians of the land.
The issue for civil society right now is that the tragedy of the Bondi Beach massacre will be used to further the agenda to stamp out criticism of Israel, despite its mass commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Gaza Strip over the last 26 months.
The antisemitism envoy above cites the 3 August march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge by more than 100,000 locals, as akin to the Bondi Beach massacre, when the civil society procession of three months ago, involved calling on Israel to stop killing innocent Palestinian children, women and men en masse in the Gaza Strip. To correlate this with a massacre is straight out bastardry.
Besides the very juvenile, unprofessional style of writing not appropriate for a supposedly serious law firm, I repeat my concerns from two years ago: Imagine being a Jewish or Israel person seeking their representation.
Not only that, but this is a law firm who defends people on criminal charges. In Australian criminal law, the burden of proof is on the prosecution, and the standard is beyond reasonable doubt. Yet here they are, finding Israel guilty of things like a genocide in Gaza and apartheid in Israel, things that cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt because they do not exist. “Beyond reasonable doubt” is not a vibe, a chant, or a political preference. It is a discipline. And yet here we have a firm that casually declares “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “war crimes” as settled facts, without evidence, without legal findings, and without shame.
If this is how Sydney Criminal Lawyers® approach facts, evidence, and burden of proof on their own website – emotive language, predetermined guilt, slogans masquerading as legal conclusions – one would hope they suddenly rediscover legal rigor inside a courtroom.
