Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council

Sydney is a vibrant multicultural metropolis, built by people from many nationalities, ethnicities, cultures and religions. In the main street of Lakemba, for example, South, West and East Asian, and Anglo-Celtic sounds and sights are part of the rich communal tapestry. Amongst restaurants, gift s

SBS TV showed a four-part drama, "The Promise", from Britain's Channel 4 and France's Canal+ and Arte France, which was characterised by rampant and crudely propagandistic political messages directed against Israel and Jews, selective, distorted portrayals of historical events, and the sanitising of

Don't listen to the nuclear nonsense, screamed one of the main left-wing weeklies, the New Statesman, only days after a sober and authoritative International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report had laid bare Iran's pursuit of a nuclear bomb. Why do some of our intellectuals find it so very difficult

In December 2011, reports from several directions converged to suggest that Hamas is abandoning the sinking ship of Syria: that many senior cadres have already settled in Gaza and only the upper echelon of leadership that bears symbolic meaning still remains in Damascus. By and large those reports a

A decade after it last held power, and some two generations after losing its hegemonic sway over Israeli politics - the rehabilitation of Israel's Labor party seems finally underway. The election in September of Shelly (Rachel) Yachimovich as Labor Chairperson, the eighth election of a party leader

The real surprise is the emergence of the Salafist al-Nour party, a deeply theocratic organisation that bases its ideology on a literal reading of the Koran and Sunna and, most astoundingly, didn't exist until a few months ago. Although Salafist political activity was, unlike the Brotherhood, comple

When the Egyptian revolution came, we stayed home. We are young, liberal Egyptian activists who have dedicated our lives to bettering our country. But from the moment in January the crowds took over Tahrir Square calling for President Hosni Mubarak's ouster, we urged observers, particularly Western

In a year punctuated by dramatic highs (the All Blacks finally winning the Rugby World Cup) and heartbreaking lows (the Christchurch earthquakes, the aftermath of the Pike River mining disaster), New Zealand's general election seemed to creep up and take many Kiwis by surprise. The lowest voter turn

Both Palestinian groups and pro-Palestinian Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) often accuse Israel of seeking to "Judaise" Jerusalem. For instance, following their admission to the UN cultural organisation UNESCO in October, one of the things the Palestinian Authority said they wanted to do was sue

The US Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, addressing a conference on antisemitism on November 30, controversially insisted that Muslim "hatred and indeed sometimes... violence directed at Jews generally [is] a result of the continuing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian territories" and s