Backed by their cheerleader-in-chief, Chris Minns, when you thought Murdoch writers couldn’t stoop any lower, they did. Andrew Brown was there.
On October 7, the Daily Telegraph told Sydney that “subhuman ghouls” were gathering again to celebrate a slaughter of innocents. I was at that gathering. It was a candlelight vigil at Town Hall, organised by Jews Against the Occupation ’48. About 200 people came, mostly older Australians.
They prayed for the Jewish and Palestinian dead.
Chris Minns called the vigil “heartless”. Four days later, last Sunday, October 11, thousands marched for Gaza, and Minns called them “disgraceful”. Alex Ryvchin of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry called the marchers “obsessive, extreme and hateful”.
He then announced that “the only attempt at racial extermination occurred on October 7 and was carried out by Palestinians”.
Arsen Ostrovsky of the Israel lobby AIJAC used the Telegraph to brand the rally a hate march and to blame such marches for the Bondi massacre.
Their evidence is a handful of placards. Against it stands a United Nations finding that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, more than 72,000 Palestinian dead, and an estimated 300,000 Australians who crossed the Harbour Bridge.
“Social cohesion?”
The mourners are not wrecking social cohesion. The men who call grief hatred are wrecking it, and they are pushing a narrative Israel spends $730 million a year to spread.
The Telegraph’s front page read SYDNEY’S DAY OF SHAME. Below, it said subhuman ghouls gathered in 2023 to celebrate a slaughter, and “they gather again”. Page four carried the headline “Vile rallies ‘celebrating the slaughter’ of Jews”. The paper went to print before a single candle was lit. It convicted us without waiting to see what we did.
Subhuman. A Sydney newspaper pinned that word on older Jewish Australians gathering to mourn. The word has a history, and every editor at Holt Street knows it.
Chris Minns has a word for candles. Heartless. He lit the Opera House for Israel’s dead within days. The sails have never been lit for Gaza’s. Hind Rajab was six. She begged rescuers for hours from a car full of her dead relatives until Israeli fire killed her too. Minns never called that heartless.
American Jewish surgeon Dr Mark Perlmutter treated Gaza’s children for sniper wounds. The United Nations inquiry on which Australian Chris Sidoti sits found Israeli forces deliberately targeted children. Children had limbs amputated without anaesthetic while a doctor sang them a lullaby. Minns never called that heartless either.
Then 200 people prayed for the dead of both peoples, and he found the word.
This is compassion rationed by nationality.
Minns is no peacekeeper. He is a partisan with a police force, and the Jewish group behind the vigil has taken him to the Supreme Court over his laws against protest. Were all 300,000 on the bridge ghouls too, Premier?
“Lewd gatherings”
Ryvchin called Sunday’s rallies “lewd gatherings”. He said the marchers cannot oppose war “because the war is over”. Then he blamed October 7 on Palestinians. Not on Hamas. On Palestinians.
That is collective guilt, the exact offence he accuses the marchers of committing against Jews. If a marcher said Jews carried out the destruction of Gaza, Ryvchin would call it antisemitism. He has done the same thing to another people.
In the same sentence, he denied the genocide a United Nations commission of inquiry found in September 2025.
Ryvchin looked at 72,000 graves and announced that nothing happened there.
I answered him in public. Declaring the war over does not resurrect a single child. Accountability does not expire when Alex Ryvchin decides the public should stop caring.
If a marcher promotes an antisemitic conspiracy, name the conduct and condemn it. Smearing an entire movement is lazy, and it poisons the cohesion he claims to defend. He offered contempt where evidence was needed and collective blame where precision was essential.
Blaming the blameless
Then Ostrovsky, who runs the Sydney office of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council. He wrote that marches like Sunday’s built the Bondi massacre one chant at a time.
Ostrovsky survived Bondi, and his grief is real, but his claim is a smear without evidence. He ties the gunmen to people who want children to stop dying, and he uses the Bondi dead to do it.
The Australian prints the line and Sharri Markson broadcasts it nightly.
News24 reported the backlash to our vigil before it began.
The hasbara campaign
None of this is spontaneous. Israel has budgeted $730 million this year for hasbara, its global campaign to shape foreign opinion. The narrative is designed there. Palestinians and all who stand with them are the enemy. Israel is the only victim.
Our Premier, the Israel lobby and the Murdoch machine push that narrative here. Whether by instruction or by instinct, they do its work.
The Telegraph has discovered that a day of mourning is sacred. Every January 26 First Nations people mourn invasion and dispossession, and every January 26 the Telegraph cheers the party on. Its columnist Anthony Dillon dismissed “attempts to shame us” for celebrating. At Holt Street,
grief is sacred when it serves Israel and a nuisance when it belongs to Aboriginal people.
These men cheapen the word antisemitism at the very moment Jewish Australians need it to mean something.
I stood among the ghouls. They prayed for every child killed since that day, Israeli and Palestinian alike.
The Telegraph looked at that and saw something less than human. That tells you nothing about the vigil.
It tells you everything about the Telegraph and those who work there.
Chris Minns’ fashion police. Being Palestinian is now a public order offence
Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist