Amnesty’s campaign to silence and endanger Australian Jews

Amnesty International Australia has just chosen to amplify one of the most disturbing “open letters” to emerge in years — a media release issued by a fringe coalition of activist groups, including a self-selected handful of fringe so-called Jewish organisations with no communal mandate, alongside several organisations that oppose a Gaza ceasefire and even express support for Hamas.

The letter urges the Australian Government to reject Special Envoy Jillian Segal’s Antisemitism Action Plan, discard the IHRA working definition that mainstream Jewish communities here and globally rely on, strip away every dedicated mechanism designed to protect Jews from rising hate by folding action on antisemitism back into a generic, slow-moving anti-racism framework. In short, it tells the Jewish community: “Your experience of antisemitism is not valid, your fear is inconvenient, and your protections must be dismantled.”

And Amnesty — a human rights organisation by branding, if not by behaviour — chose to publish, push, and legitimise this message through its own press office.

That choice is not neutral. It is not accidental. It is not a misunderstanding. It is a statement: when the target is Jews, Amnesty is prepared to champion a campaign that would never be directed at any other minority community in Australia.

That’s what this media release really is. Strip away the rhetoric about “democracy” and “free speech” and you are left with a stark proposition that when it comes to antisemitism, Jews don’t get what everyone else gets.

If this were in relation to Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, or anti-Asian hate, would Amnesty be fronting a campaign to abolish a dedicated envoy, delegitimise the community’s own definition of hatred and insist they go back to the queue? Of course not. Only Jews are told that specific protection is “anti-democratic”.

The logical contradiction at the heart of this letter is breathtaking. It admits that antisemitism is “real and serious”, acknowledges “issues around antisemitism and misconceptions about the Jewish community… that demand specific strategies”, and then insists that any specific strategies are wrong in principle. Why? Because they might constrain the one thing this coalition refuses to cede: the supposed “right” to attack Israel in any terms it chooses no matter how poisonous the consequences for Jewish people here.

That is the second sleight of hand. The letter claims the Special Envoy’s plan “conflates antisemitism with legitimate criticism of the State of Israel”. This is a slogan, not an argument. IHRA explicitly protects criticism of Israel “similar to that levelled against any other country”. What it does is call out particular forms of “criticism” that recycle classic antisemitic tropes: holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel, denying the Jewish people alone the right to self-determination, describing Israel as a uniquely satanic evil, or using Nazi analogies and blood libels. That is not silencing debate. It is drawing the same line for Jews that we already draw, as a matter of principle, for every other vulnerable group.

The letter never engages with that substance. It just asserts that because some people say they are “criticising Israel”, it cannot be antisemitic. That is intellectually lazy and morally incoherent. If someone denies the right of Kurds to a state on explicitly ethnic grounds, we recognise bigotry. If someone campaigns against “African crime” using conspiratorial tropes, we recognise racism. Only when the target is the Jewish state are we instructed to pretend that language and consequence magically detach themselves. In effect, the coalition demands a special exemption: anti-Israelism must be quarantined from scrutiny, even when it walks and quacks like antisemitism.

And Amnesty signs on to this. It chooses to stand with the a particularly aggressive minority faction of civic society that wants fewer protections for Jews, against the broad communal leadership that knows what antisemitism looks like in practice — because they deal with its victims every day.

And who exactly has Amnesty chosen to stand beside? A cluster of groups that include some who oppose a Gaza ceasefire — yes, oppose the humanitarian demand itself — and others who openly support Hamas, an actual fascist death cult whose charter calls for the annihilation of Jews everywhere.

Then there is the double standard that screams from every paragraph. When the Islamophobia Envoy produced a report that was, to put it politely, not beyond criticism — full of contestable assumptions, sweeping generalisations and methodological gaps — where was the wall-to-wall NGO campaign demanding the job be abolished, the definitions shelved, the powers stripped? There was robust debate, certainly. But there was also a basic respect for the principle that Muslim Australians, who face real prejudice, are entitled to targeted attention and dedicated policy focus. Their fear was not weaponised as a pretext to gut the mechanisms designed to protect them.

Yet when it comes to antisemitism, suddenly dedicated focus is “exceptionalising Jews”, a “hierarchy of discrimination”, a threat to “democracy”. This is grotesque. Nobody says that having specific strategies against violence towards women undermines the fight against all violence. Nobody claims that targeted programs on anti-Asian hate “divide” minorities. Only Jews are told that any specific recognition of their vulnerability is somehow an attack on universalism. In practice, that is not an argument for equality. It is an argument that Jews alone must forgo tools everyone else may use.

And there is something else — something eerie, something Australians should recognise instantly from the darker chapters of our own recent memory. The sudden insistence that Jewish fears must be silenced, delegitimised, or re-routed through “general” anti-racism frameworks has an uncomfortable echo in the National Socialist stunt outside the NSW Parliament, where neo-Nazis unfurled a giant banner demanding: “Abolish the Jewish Lobby.” On that day, everyone understood exactly what was happening: an attempt to tell Jews that their political concerns are illegitimate, their voice unwelcome, their security a nuisance, to be left completely at the mercy of others to decide their role in society – echoes of an epigenetic historical trauma that dares repeat itself in the Twenty-First century. Yet when Amnesty promotes a letter insisting that the Jewish community’s own definitions, own envoy and own safeguards be dismantled, the logic is chillingly similar. Only the rhetoric has changed.

Has Amnesty forgotten the oldest and bitterest political truth of all — that the far-left and the far-right always, always meet when it comes to the Jews? That the horseshoe closes with uncanny precision? When Amnesty acts as the amplifier for groups who defend a totalitarian militia and attack the protections that Jews rely on, it crosses from naïveté into moral dereliction. This is not human rights work. This is the laundering of extremism.

The letter’s rhetoric about “foreign policy” and an “oppressive regime” is similarly dishonest. Even if you accept their maximalist reading of Israeli guilt, it does not follow that Australian Jews lose the right to define the hatred that targets them, or to seek protection from it. The authors slide seamlessly from “we oppose Israel” to “therefore we oppose the tools used to protect Jews from hate”. That is the very chasm they claim does not exist between anti-Israelism and antisemitism, opening up in real time.

Amnesty, by attaching its brand and its media office to this campaign, crosses a line. It is no longer merely passively misreading the Jewish experience of antisemitism. It is now actively working to discredit the definition that Jews overwhelmingly use, to dismantle the envoy tasked with protecting them, and to legitimise a narrative that treats Jewish fear as a political inconvenience. That is what racial discrimination looks like at the institutional level: denying one minority the protections you proudly champion for others.

So what do we do?

We do what democrats do when institutions betray their own stated values. We hold them to account.

Write to Amnesty International Australia. Flood their inbox — courteously, firmly, relentlessly — with one simple question: How dare you call yourself a human rights organisation while fronting a campaign that strips Jews of the very protections you demand for every other targeted group? Ask them to withdraw their endorsement of this open letter, to meet with the mainstream Jewish leadership they conspicuously ignore, and to explain why their press office is being used to undermine, not uphold, the fight against antisemitism.

And write to your federal MPs and senators. Ask them why taxpayer money should fund NGOs that vilify Israel in ways that bleed into hostility toward Jews, that delegitimise the community’s own definition of hatred, and that demand Jews accept less protection than anyone else. Tell them that real anti-racism does not mean tearing down Jewish safeguards in order to appease those who insist their “right” to demonise Israel must remain unchecked.

We do not have to accept this. Not from fringe groups trading on Jewish labels, and certainly not from Amnesty International. Human rights either apply to Jews or they don’t. Amnesty has just given us a very clear indication of where it stands. It’s time we answered them and pushed back against being defined by those who seek to delegitimise us.

Adam Slonim is a member of Jewish Labor, businessman and podcaster.