Publisher drops Chun over comments

Several authors have boycotted University of Queensland Press after it cancelled a children’s book illustrated by anti-Zionist Matt Chun, who claimed Australians “impulsively mourned” Bondi Beach massacre victims due to their “whiteness, Jewishness”.

Authors boycotting UQP include Randa Abdel-Fattah, Melissa Lucashenko, Omar Sakr, Sara Haddad, Dženana Vucic and Natalia Figueroa Barroso.

UQP cancelled the children’s book Bila: A River Cycle, written by Indigenous poet Jazz Money and illustrated by Chun, after the Bondi massacre.

In an essay titled “We Don’t Mourn Fascists”, Chun claimed Australians had “impulsively mourned the loss of ‘innocent lives’ … Whiteness, Jewishness, and the backdrop of Bondi Beach were enough to bestow every person killed with default innocence and virtue”.

Chun added: “This played directly into the hands of Zionists and their calculated media. As a result, few people would have known that the targeted event was the broad-daylight celebration of a violent supremacist organisation deeply complicit in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.”