The Sydney criminologist accused of calling Alex Ryvchin an ‘evil Zionist’ is also being prosecuted for putting out her garbage. Michael West reports.

The Sydney criminologist and public servant accused of calling Alex Ryvchin an ‘evil Zionist’ on the lawns above Bondi Beach – a claim she strongly denies – is also being dragged through the courts over extraordinary allegations of planting a bomb outside a synagogue.

Or at least something that somebody thought might be a bomb, or had bomb-like attributes, or was being planted deliberately to create fear that it might be construed as a bomb.

In fact, Francine Clough, the next door neighbour, was putting out her garbage.  

On July 25 last year, police shut down Old South Head road in Bondi for a ‘bomb threat’. A suspicious package had been found outside a synagogue.

The ‘bomb plot’ suspect is Francine Clough. The next door neighbour. She was putting out her garbage and the small brown Coles bag was deemed by a synagogue security guard to be a possible bomb.

Police arrived quickly at the scene. Media were onto it quickly too, as they were in the wake of the ‘evil Zionist’ altercation at Bondi.

Having shut down Old South Head Road in both directions, the suspicious package was found to be a Coles paper bag containing routine household rubbish. Nonetheless, Clough now faces three charges; two for the Coles bomb bag and one for the ‘evil Zionist’ incident. 

And the matter, according to sources, has been elevated to an elite special prosecutions team.

The charges against Clough are: ‘send/leave an object/substance’ with the intention of causing fear and ‘intimidation/stalking’. The alleged actions allegedly caused a security guard to be fearful – and now a new charge has been made in the wake of the Bondi incident of deploying offensive language in a public place. 

Clough has been suspended from work for the past year since the ‘Coles bomb plot’ incident after a rash of anonymous complaints were made to her workplace.

There is a pattern here, a pattern evident in both the ‘Undercover Jew’ operation by Newscorp at the Cairo Takeaway and the arrest of Andrew Brown for wearing a ‘F… Israel’ tee shirt at Bondi.

The pattern is: dramatic allegations made by Israel lobby operatives, immediate police involvement, then legal oppression. In the case of Brown, the charges were dropped after a year of legal pressure and allegations by the Israel lobby and the Murdoch press.

In Cairo Takeaway, the matter descended into claims and counterclaims and ended up in civil proceedings where the Judge criticised the behaviour of the Cairo cafe accuser. It was a stunt gone wrong.

Besides the rash of assault claims arising from NSW Police brutality against protestors at Town Hall during the visit of Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, and the ‘antisemitism’ cases against Mary Kostakidis, John Keane and Nick Riemer, the Francine Clough prosecution can only create antipathy.

Clough declined to be interviewed for this story, but piecing together the public evidence surrounding the ‘evil Zionist’ and ‘Coles rubbish bag’ incidents it is reasonable to say that this entire matter is yet another waste of public resources which will only diminish ‘social cohesion’ and must surely be contemplated by the Royal Commission into Antisemitism as factors in rising antisemitism in Australia.

The idea of punishing a woman for putting out her garbage because somebody complained they thought it was a bomb is preposterous. We don’t know what words were spoken, what might have inflamed feelings on the night, but they are words.

All of these incidents moreover are about words – mere words not physical violence – and all entail authorities victimising critics of a foreign state, Israel, by use of public resources.

In the ‘evil Zionist’ fracas, Clough was at Bondi Beach park to welcome the marathon runner Chad Aziz at the end of his run across Australia to raise funds for youth mental health.

Banners were up, and numerous reporters and camera people, supporters and onlookers were there in the park. Alex Ryvchin and his companion were talking to reporters and a cameraman. There was a brief argument between Ryvchin and Clough. Their accounts of what was said differ.

Ryvchin left the scene. Later, Clough was called by a Newscorp reporter with the Daily Telegraph who quizzed her on various allegations. She denied calling Ryvchin an ‘evil Zionist’. She was charged.

How did the Daily Telegraph get her number? There are many questions. Who doxed Clough to her superiors at work regarding the ‘Coles bomb incident’? If she did say ‘evil Zionist’, does that break any law? She denies it, so why is she being charged?

There are many questions but one sure thing. All this is doing nothing to enhance social cohesion. 

Our suggestion for a better law enforcement model, founded on common sense and a keen eye for the obvious, is that in all these situations the accusers and the accused be asked to sit down for an hour, without their minders and their media, have a cup of green tea or whatever, and talk it out.

It could save the public many of millions of dollars and free up law enforcement agencies to conduct activities such as law enforcement and prosecuting crime.

https://michaelwest.com.au/francine-clough-alex-rivchin-bondi/

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MEANWHILE:

Sara Cheikh Husain

The racial hierarchy of the Australian government’s response to its envoys’ recommendations leaves Muslims unprotected by the law.

Ten months after Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, released his report and its 54 recommendations, the Albanese government has finally responded — a delay the envoy himself criticised, warning the government not to wait for another Christchurch.

The government’s response gathers at the softest end of what he proposed: a review of the national curriculum for racial and religious tolerance, an Islamophobia Education Taskforce, expanded police community liaison teams, mental-health supports and multicultural grants. The more structural and state-related recommendations were rejected or deferred:

• endorse Recommendation 16 of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Anti-Racism Framework, and conduct an independent review of counter-terrorism laws, policies and practices;
• establish an advisory panel of representatives from diverse Muslim communities, to provide insight into the potential impacts and unintended consequences of new counter-terrorism legislation;
• endorse Recommendation 14 of the same Framework, and implement religious discrimination protections at the federal level; and
• establish a commission of inquiry into anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism, with terms of reference examining their extent, drivers, causes, impacts and experiences.

The accepted measures are not worthless. But the question is: why is the government reluctant to take note and do something about the structures that Muslims, scholars and the envoy himself, say help produce Islamophobia?

How the envoys’ terms of reference set the limits

Part of the answer was visible before either envoy reported. As I have pointed out from the onset, the two envoys’ terms of reference were embedded in a social cohesion agenda born of the War on Terror that has targeted Muslims for two decades. Those terms restricted Islamophobia to interpersonal discrimination and positioned Muslims’ safety as a contribution to Australia’s social cohesion and stability, while framing antisemitism as a national security risk, with Jewish safety an end for itself. The government’s responses to both envoys affirmed this distinction.

For more than two decades, scholars have documented the harms of the counterterrorism measures institutionalised through the US-led Global War on Terror, with Muslims profiled at the centre of their targets and governed as a suspect community. Those harms reached Muslims everywhere: an estimated 4.5 million killed, with no accountability, in the post-9/11 war zones of Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond; Palestinians enduring genocide in Gaza; and Muslims in the West living under suspicion and the disciplinary weight of ‘deradicalisation’ agendas, often disguised as social cohesion.

Against that record, an independent review of counter-terrorism legislation, and an advisory panel through which Muslim communities could communicate its ‘unintended consequences’, are modest proposals. But it seems the government finds them too radical.

Of course, a government that continues to view Muslim communities primarily through the framework of social cohesion as a national security threat cannot easily concede that Islamophobia is embedded in its counter-terrorism apparatus.

Because Muslims remain a ‘suspect community’, any structural protection or review that might limit the state’s own security powers to surveil and govern Muslims reads as an impossible ask.

The same machinery, a new assignment, the same target

Yet the very national security apparatus that emboldened Islamophobia has now been put in service to prosecute antisemitism.

On 9 December 2024, the Australian Federal Police established Special Operation Avalite, a squad of 21 ‘experienced counter terrorism investigators’. Avalite was followed by the National Security Investigations teams in October 2025 and then, after the Bondi Beach attack, by Operation Arques in December 2025.

In one year, the AFP stood up multiple specialised squads deploying antiterrorism operations specifically against ‘antisemitism crimes’. No criminal offence of ‘antisemitism’ exists in the Criminal Code Act 1995 or anywhere else in federal law. Yet the AFP lists ‘antisemitism’ as a distinct crime category on its website alongside ‘terrorism’ and ‘cybercrime’, and names ‘suspected terrorism-related antisemitism (Special Operation Avalite)’ among its terrorism investigations.

The AFP has operationalised antisemitism as a national security crime inside the post-9/11 apparatus that was originally developed for, and targeted at, Muslim communities.

The multicultural affairs minister, Anne Aly, is troubled by the “consistent comparison” between the government’s responses to Islamophobia and antisemitism. “Both are worthy of pursuit in their own right”’ she says, and of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism: “I just really want to focus on Islamophobia…We need to be looking at Islamophobia in its entirety and in its own right, and what we did here was the right thing.”

But Aly cannot refuse such comparison, for a simple reason: the government invited it. The moment it named these two distinct forms of racism and granted each a special envoy at a volatile time, it made its two responses comparable and the difference between them a legitimate matter of public judgement.

Nor can the minister for multiculturalism treat the comparison as a nuisance because social cohesion within multicultural societies requires that communities feel heard and feel equal. Yet, Muslims’ concerns, many supported by the evidence of hierarchical treatment, are waved away rather than answered. This invalidation of a community’s experience of an inequity is a form racial gaslighting.

The deeper issue here, though, is that the manner in which the government has responded to antisemitism is itself a manifestation of Islamophobia. It undermines the very community the minister’s portfolio exists to serve. Anti-Palestinian racism is not a separate file to be set aside in order to ‘focus on Islamophobia’; it is tightly bound to it.

A hierarchy written into law

What the squads above began in practice, parliament then sedimented in law. The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Act 2026 carried the same counter-terrorism logic into serious new offences extending across national security and migration control. One is the government’s power to brand an organisation a ‘prohibited hate group’ on ASIO’s advice, and to criminalise – with penalties of up to 15 years – directing, joining, recruiting for or funding it.

The definitions that trigger criminal liability for hate crimes, prohibited symbols and vilification are pegged to groups ‘distinguished by race or national or ethnic origin’. Religion is absent. Yet, the Act names ‘antisemitism’ explicitly, places it at the centre of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security’s review of the Act’s effectiveness and offers ‘the Nazi salute’ as its example of a hate crime.

The combined effect is to give antisemitism a distinct legislative prominence and to institutionalise a hierarchy of protection that leaves other religious groups outside it.

Jewish Australians are already protected under the category of race in federal law – the Racial Discrimination Act 1975– while Muslim Australians are protected only where a link can also be drawn to their ethnicity.

Despite decades of scholars and advocates naming the dangers of this legislative gap in section 18C of the 1975 Act, comprehensive religious discrimination protections remain deferred.

The government rejected amendments to the Combating Antisemitism Act 2026 that would have extended equivalent protection to religiously motivated hatred. Protection was gatekept at precisely the point Muslims might have accessed it. Religion appears in the Act as a source of risk. The Act aggravates penalties for urging or advocating violence, to up to ten years’ imprisonment, where the speech is delivered by a ‘religious official or spiritual leader’.

The joint submission to the inquiry on the bill by leading Muslim legal organisations put the community’s concern plainly: ‘the underlying premise of this Bill risks conflating legitimate religious, academic or political expression with hatred and extremism and disproportionately burdens religious scholars and readers’. The Bill ‘unfairly targets minorities, including Muslims, while offering inadequate protections to them and could undermine genuine dialogue and cohesion rather than strengthen it’.

Since the Act passed, the AFP has confirmed it is ‘taking an even more aggressive approach’, including a standing operation – Operation ANTROBUS – to ‘disrupt’ those it describes as ‘hate preachers’. The category is not defined. But the Commissioner has warned that ‘these malicious manipulators’ are ‘getting legal advice to push their hate and their radical recruitment drives to the edge of what is lawful’ and affirms that hate speech ‘often masquerades as a right or freedom to do or say something’. Such radicalisation is driven by ‘personalised grievance… often connected to world events…‘[one’s] own sense of injustice’.

Consider what that logic does. Rights are recast as disguises. Grievance over world events – over a genocide, for instance – is framed as a pathway to violence.

The Greens warned of the Act’s chilling effect: people may fall silent or abandon a cause, criticism of Israel, for instance, not because they have crossed a well defined line of what constitutes hate, but because the legislation is closing rings around speech in ways that can only be understood by reference to ‘new antisemitism’: the conflation of traditional antisemitism with anti-Zionism, which is being institutionalised through a second channel: the Antisemitism Envoy’s relentless push to embed the IHRA definition of antisemitism across every level of government and public institutions.

We need a clear definition of what constitutes antisemitic ‘hate preaching’ and what does not.

Without a clear definition of antisemitic ‘hate preaching’ in an increasingly hostile environment towards pro-Palestine movement and the relentless push to adopt the IHRA definition, coupled with harsher penalties for ‘religious official or spiritual leader’; Muslim communities campaigning against the genocide in Gaza risk facing prosecution.

Muslim advocacy is left under-protected and over-exposed.

Policed through the apparatus built in its name

Australian Muslims are now navigating one of the most vicious environments of structural Islamophobia in decades: grief over Israel’s unlawful aggression in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran may be labelled ‘hate’ and penalised through policy or codes of conduct. And deciding what counts as antisemitism is being left to the discretion of institutions and police, amid a public fury pressing toward the criminalisation of anti-Zionism.

In March, Queensland criminalised the phrases ‘from the river to the sea’ and ‘globalise the intifada’, with penalties of up to two years’ imprisonment; two protesters were charged within hours of the law taking effect.

That same month, police in Melbourne and Sydney conducted early-morning raids on the homes of women aged between 34 and 71 who had joined pro-Palestine demonstrations, in one case smashing open a front door and dragging a woman from her bed.

In February, protests against the Israeli president’s state visit were met with what Human Rights Watch documented as excessive force: demonstrators punched and pepper-sprayed, praying Muslim men violently dispersed.

In Victoria, expanded stop-and-search powers over ‘designated areas’ have reached a Ramadan night market in Dandenong. None of these people were charged with antisemitism. But they were policed through the apparatus built in its name.

And what fills the category of ‘antisemitism’ in police hands has already been documented, and negated. At a NSW parliamentary inquiry in October, police conceded that a ‘significant number’ of the antisemitic incidents in their official records – invoked to justify the state’s anti-protest and hate speech laws – ‘do not meet the criteria for antisemitism’. Deepcut News’ analysis of the police list found significant errors in the incidents listed.

Without a clear articulation of what is not antisemitic, Muslims, Palestinians, Lebanese and Arabs may find their opposition to Zionism policed by the same apparatus that has surveilled and governed Australian Muslims for two decades: the apparatus that the Islamophobia Envoy and an abundance of scholars have concluded causes Islamophobia.

Why the refusals fit together

Let’s return, then, to the rejected recommendations. The four rejected recommendations share a feature worth noticing: each would have required the government to inspect its own laws, its own agencies and its own conduct. An independent review of counter-terrorism laws would examine the mechanism through which the state has surveilled and governed Muslims for two decades, which it has now assigned, through Avalite, Arques and the 2026 Act, to prosecute antisemitism. And an inquiry into anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism would examine how that same mechanism, joined to a definition of antisemitism that absorbs anti-Zionism, is being used against pro-Palestinian advocacy.

The government declined both reviews because the legislative and institutional structure built to protect Australian Zionist Jews is built by, and for the purpose of, subverting Australian pro-Palestine movements. An inquiry into anti-Palestinian racism would be an inquiry into that structure itself.

Within this zero-sum architecture, the protection of Zionist feelings and wellbeing is secured by systematically undermining the voices, the grief and the political claims of Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians and their supporters.

Both communities deserve safety. What the government’s response to its Islamophobia envoy reveals is what it is prepared to offer Muslims: education about their pain, grants for their resilience, liaison officers for their reporting, and what it is not: a review of the powers that police them, protection under federal law, and an inquiry into the racism that targets them now.

Protection for some and pedagogy for others is not a settlement a fair multicultural state can defend.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/07/protection-for-some-pedagogy-for-others/

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on the Ukrainian government's desperate hosting of Laura Loomer, an enthusiastic supporter of the Gaza genocide and anti-Muslim fanatic who recently claimed to have called the FBI on Blumenthal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1uxfoP-vI4

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

Good Liberals Hate International Law And Love Laura Loomer

Nate Bear Do Not Panic 

The US has openly announced its intention to dismantle the International Criminal Court and liberal journalists who for years have screeched about the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump have had absolutely nothing to say.

Neither the New York Times or the Washington Post (which maintains a “democracy in America” section to document how the Trump administration is targeting US legal institutions), have run a single editorial or opinion piece opposing the efforts to dismantle the highest legal authority on the planet “brick by brick,” in the words of Marco Rubio.

Neither of them have had anything to say about the attempt to bring about, in the most real and practical way, the end of international law. The great liberal opinion setters, the self-proclaimed guardians of the rule of law, the “democracy dies in darkness” people have decided that international law can die in darkness, thank you.

Why? Because they are Zionists, imperialists and nationalists. Because they agree with Rubio’s rationale that the court, in its pursuit of justice, is a threat to US interests, sovereignty, and to Israel. Because they believe that the US and Israel should be able to run the world unhindered by the rule of law, that they should be able to commit genocide and war crimes if they want to. They believe, like Trump and Rubio, that the US, not a global court of experts, is the highest political authority on the planet. Because they believe, in the words of the disgracefully departed Lindsey Graham that the court is “designed for Africans and thugs like Putin,” not the masters of the imperial universe. Because justice for Gaza would threaten the foundations of a Zionism they hold so close to their fetid, sickly hearts.

There is a sickness at the core of the liberal. A sickness that allows them to support genocide, deny justice, and still pretend they’re the good guys. As I’ve written before, my ire is reserved overwhelmingly for liberals because of their moralising double-standards and hypocrisy. Because of their snooty claims to moral and intellectual superiority over the right despite being, in flavour if not decorum, essentially their mirror image. Because they get good people to support bad things.

The biggest joke of all is that ICC has been a good friend to American war criminals. Despite the abundance of evidence that US troops committed heinous war crimes in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the court refused to investigate possible US crimes, despite repeated and sustained appeals from victims, their lawyers, and human rights organisations. Numerous organisations submitted evidence and legal filings to the court documenting allegations of torture in CIA black sites, abuse and murder at detention facilities, and the mass murder of civilians. Even Karim Khan, now in the gunsights of the Zionists for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, himself acted to block investigations into US war crimes. When he became the head of the ICC in 2021, he announced he would deprioritise investigations into war crimes by US forces and instead focus resources on investigating the crimes of the Taliban.

And look what he got in return for this act of imperial solidarity!

Last week the newly minted US protectorate of Venezuela announced it was withdrawing from the ICC. Was there outage in the liberal media? Of course not. Can you imagine if Venezuela under Chavez or Maduro had announced the country was withdrawing from the ICC? Scribes for empire would have denounced it as proof positive that Venezuela was run by an authoritarian regime with a brazen disregard for the rule of law. But because the country is now a compliant imperial puppet and dutifully serves empire, liberal media passed over it without comment.

Liberals are like this about everything.

Last week the deformed MAGA nutjob Laura Loomer visited Ukraine and renounced her previous support for Russia, saying she had been misled. From PBS to the Washington Post to the Guardian, outlets across the west ran with news about a grifting social media loon going to Ukraine as if it was a defining geopolitical moment of the 21st century. The New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeted that he now admired Loomer. The Guardian had an 800-word analysis about its political significance! These supposedly progressive outlets reported on her damascene conversion it as if can tell us something essential about war and peace and international relations, and it wasn’t just a massive grift and a switch of paymasters. When looney Loomer got back to the US she tweeted that Muslims are polluting the US “like an incurable disease” and she liked Ukraine because there wasn’t a Muslim in sight.

I guess being a hateful, evil racist is forgivable and fine if you support Ukraine in the end!

But liberals aren’t racist, ok.

And as long as they serve empire, liberals just love the rule of law and legal institutions.

(If you appreciate my work you can buy me a coffee here or upgrade your sub)

https://substack.com/home/post/p-208673870

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….