How to speak Zionist: A beginners' guide to 'antisemitism'

Zionist is a foreign language. It is not readily accessible, because it seems to be counter-intuitive.

Some prominent translations highlight the difficulty:

"antisemitism": any criticism of Israel;
"terrorism": any resistance to Israeli oppression, aggression, ethnic cleansing and genocide;
"globalise the Intifada": kill all Jews;
"apartheid": doesn’t compute, not in the lexicon; and
"genocide": doesn’t compute, not in the lexicon.

Western political leaders learn stock Zionist phrases by rote and repeat them without understanding. Terrified, they do understand that life is easier by doing so.

Zionist is a difficult language to learn, which is why it’s important to brainwash children from a young age — hence the importance of Jewish ‘faith’ schools.

The ready key to grasping this peculiarity is that the language, of course, is all about the concept and the state of Israel. Israel is the promised land (peculiarly, the messiah is yet to come). Israel is a secular entity that is adorned with religious trappings to ensure the support of the faithful.

I ignore the Murdoch media to save my mental health. Yet the "Nine" papers (especially the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age) regularly publish op-eds and letters from people who are evidently fluent in Zionist. They are for Israel über alles.

For example:

A.F. (SMH, 18 December 2025): ‘Let’s not forget that for extremists, Israel’s existence alone was cause for violence and hatred long before Israel’s military campaign in Gaza began. The continuation of that antisemitism has been fed by the constant demonisation of Israel, with lies about genocide and rallies demanding Israel’s destruction. This needs to end.’

S.C. (SMH, 19 December 2025): ‘The perpetrators of the Bondi atrocity would have realised that the Government had taken a softly-softly approach to rising antisemitism. Would this have anything to do with the Middle Eastern vote?’

G.F. (SMH, 20 December 2025): ‘There have been calls for greater education in our schools and universities regarding the Holocaust. I fully support the idea, and would add the history of Israel from the first Zionist conference in Switzerland in 1897 to the present day.’

A.S. (SMH, 9 January 2026): ‘President Herzog is the legitimate head of state of the internationally recognised democratic state of Israel, rightfully invited to commiserate with Australians after the appalling terrorist atrocity at Bondi, in which predominantly Jewish people were murdered and injured.'

G.F. (Age, 5 March 2026): ‘Iran openly boasted in the recent negotiations with the US about having a large enough stockpile of enriched uranium to be able to make 11 nuclear bombs within ten days.’ [Widely reported but false: Steve Witkoff made it up.]

G.H. (Age, 12 March 2026): ‘Sending a surveillance aircraft and a handful of defence personnel to the United Arab Emirates is the correct thing to do in the face of Iran’s unjustified aggression …’

And so on...

The Zionist language is rather cloistered. It is more conducive to catechisms than to facilitating intelligence.

At the same time Zionist facilitates a certain fertile, if quarantined, imagination.

Thus: "There is no such thing as Palestine"; "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East"; "the IDF [Purity of Arms] is the most moral army in the world"; "Hamas uses civilians as human shields"; aid workers killed by the IDF in March 2025 were "Hamas terrorists"; and etcetera.

A recent masterpiece of Zionist literature is the Segal Report, 'Special Envoy’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism', July 2025. Jillian Segal is a Professor of Zionist and knows of which she speaks — a wise selection as antisemitism envoy by rote-learner Prime Minister Albanese in July 2024.

Learning another language is normally an exciting and enlightening affair. But the novice with Zionist is readily confronted with a dilemma. Nothing makes sense. Translations into conventional English defy intelligence, common sense. Indeed, they inhibit the capacity to think morally, to act humanely. Worse, it is a colonising language intended to disarm the capacity of other languages to convey meaning. Quadrant magazine has signed up for the linguistic battle.

The Segal Report is a mini-Exhibit A for mind control exhortation. The Segal Report demands that all those in authority and in positions of influence (teachers, media personnel) learn Zionist and cater to its norm. It demands a permanent surveillance and censorship operation to stamp out contrary thought.

I have previously analysed the travesty that is the Segal Report (21 August 2025 and 23 August 2025). The Report immediately received sober and damning critique from UNSW legal academic Louise Chappell and governance analyst Jason Masters. Sensing the threat to university life in general, a petition organised under 'Academics against racism’ readily gathered over 1,000 signatures demanding that the Labor Government bin the toxic Segal Report. Water off a duck’s back.

At the Lenin Shipyard

By coincidence, I recently read American-born Canadian Stan Persky’s 1981 At the Lenin Shipyard: Poland and the Rise of the Solidarity Trade Union.

In August 1980, revolt against myriad grievances merged into the nucleus of the Solidarity movement. Against which the state declaimed "your strikes are threatening anarchy" and "chaos".

The Communist Party’s central committee labelled the movement’s leaders "antisocialist elements":

'Their demands threaten the essential security of the country. They put in danger our national survival, our common achievement and our unity built at such a high price…'

The 80-year old Cardinal Wyszinski was wheeled out to lecture the rebels on the need for ‘order, duty and responsibility’ (he was later brought around to the cause).

Members of Solidarity’s fledgling Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee (MKS) noted the immense irony and hypocrisy of the party hard-liners. The Polish Constitution guaranteed freedom of speech, the press and religion, yet the population was submerged in repeated censorship into political, social and cultural life. Add ongoing economic hardship. Pro-Solidarity activists were asking themselves: how can they continue to talk such transparent bullshit at us.

Persky brings the reader’s attention to an article by a Polish expatriate in Paris, Michael Szkolny (ps.), published in the London Review of Books, March 1981, titled ‘Revolution in Poland’; there we read:

The rulers of Poland, as of other East European countries, do not for the most part believe in the ideals of socialism or in Marxist theory; … the very meaning of the fundamental terms [of Marxism] has been transformed beyond recognition. Thus for example the Polish words for socialism, socialisation, and internationalism today designate respectively the existing social order, state ownership, and subordination to the interests of the Soviet Union. The term anti-socialist force is used to denote any form of political opposition, while the word anarchist is today reserved for those oppositionists who belong to some current of the European socialist tradition.

These examples form part of a general phenomenon of conceptual embezzlement which reaches deep into the vernacular. This Orwellian process fundamentally limits people's conceptual framework by rendering inexpressible a whole range of ideas. In consequence these ideas vanish deep into the collective subconscious from which they struggle to appear in periods of social crisis, often in the strangest of new clothes. Thus, for example, the original meanings of the terms cited above cannot be expressed in contemporary Polish without complicated circumlocutions.

A process of conceptual embezzlement precisely.

Antisemitism and terrorism

In the current case, "antisemitism" and "terrorism", and so on, have been twisted out of substantive utility for reasonably minded people. The acknowledged collapse of "social cohesion" in Australia supposedly claims as dominant victims the local pro-Israel gauleiters, whereas they themselves are responsible for it. One doesn’t build social cohesion by denying victims of and critics of Israel a voice.

We know about the Hasbara — the pro-Israel propaganda apparatus. It is a dense network to behold (c.f. my 'The Pro-Israel Propaganda Complex' — augmenting the list an ongoing enterprise). We are exposed to claims as to why Israel is the purist embodiment of millennia of Jewish longing, achieved and maintained only by repelling barbarian antagonists. But it is no longer a matter of rational detachment and sieving of argument and evidence. It becomes a matter of obligation to adhere to such claims. Beyond that, it becomes a matter of believing such as no alternative explanation is conceivable. We are to be subject to an Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Academic Marc Owen Jones (‘Evidencing alethocide: Israel’s war on truth in Gaza’, Foundation for Middle East Peace, March 2025) has coined a new term: "alethocide" — the killing of truth.

Disinformation becomes necessary when it is no longer possible to provide a truthful account of matters without admitting to breaches of universally accepted codes of morality.

Alethocide refers to a systematic strategy that not only erases truths around egregious acts of violence but also actively constructs false narratives that seek to reshape societal norms, manipulate public opinion, and dismantle solidarity movements seeking to end that violence. It is a symbiosis of both disinformation and propaganda. This process is both systemic and systematic…

That is, disinformation is an artefact of symbolic power used to construct a hegemonic version of reality, and alethocide is its most virile manifestation.

Conceptual embezzlement and alethocide. We all know of the adjective ‘Orwellian’ — but isn’t that a weapon of authoritarian regimes? Rather, it’s inside the tent. We are its perpetrators and its subjects.

Rashid Khalidi, a towering figure in Middle East scholarship, on his retirement from Columbia University has delivered the quintessential indictment of the academy’s capitulation to the Zionist lobby. Khalidi was due to give a course, as post-retirement ‘special lecturer’, in Middle East history to 300 enrollees but has cancelled the course.

Khalidi notes:

Specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.… Under this definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.…

Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions. Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.

Jillian Segal would have been reading the Columbia University script with approval.

The Australian Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion (sic) was established on 8 January 2026. In the Letters Patent blurb we read:

'AND that the Australian Government has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.'

Are you kidding? Who planted that bomb? Does Commissioner Virginia Bell AC realise that her long nurtured reputation is at stake?

It’s all over. Zionist is now the official language of Australia. What is the point of a Royal Commission anyhow, especially now that Dennis Richardson (with specialist orientation to the background of the Bondi murderers) has pulled out. Will it be less a Royal Commission than an Inquisition?