The JCOA’s ‘Dutton’s Jew’ by Philip Mendes

Back to a dark racist past: How the Jewish Council of Australia’s construction of ‘Dutton’s Jew’ resurrected an old Fascist prejudice 

In January 2025, a representative of the fringe Left Jewish Council of Australia (hereafter JCOA) presented a strange satirical paper titled ‘Dutton’s Jew’ at a Queensland University of Technology Symposium (Yim 2025). The paper included a slide of a man dressed in a superman cape labelled DJ who allegedly held right-wing values critical of immigrants, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims and political progressives, yet oddly framed Antisemitism as the only form of racism that was unacceptable. That slide reflected JCOA’s binary view of the world according to which all progressives are humanitarian supporters of the oppressed, and all conservatives are evil oppressors, so irrespective of their lived experience of arguably the oldest form of racial hatred, Jews should feel obliged to align with the supporters of the oppressed even if that paradoxically means partnering with some of the worst contemporary perpetrators of anti-Jewish racism.

The JCOA slide was widely condemned by a range of sources from across the ideological spectrum (Albrechtsen 2025; Langton 2025; Smidt et al 2025) in public debate, either because it seemed to imply that anti-Jewish racism was legitimate; or alternatively that any politician, particularly from the conservative side of politics, who chose to defend Jews from Antisemitism must be influenced by hidden malevolent intentions; or additionally that Jews should not be entitled to the same citizenship rights as any other ethno-cultural community to protect their interests in contemporary Australia. Indeed, the Vice Chancellor and President of the Queensland University of Technology, Professor Margaret Sheil, formally apologized ‘for the hurt caused to anyone within and outside the QUT community as a result of those images and what was said there’ (Sheil 2025: 10; see also Couacaud et al 2025).

The only defense of Dutton’s Jew came from a small number of progressive commentators who seemed to uncritically accept the JCOA’s evidence-free assertion that they were opposing rather than enabling Antisemitism. Some of these commentators (e.g. Bornstein 2025; JCOA 2025; Strakosch et al 2025) suggested wrongly that the only critics of Dutton’s Jew were various right-wing lobby groups, and some bizarrely misrepresented Dutton’s strong principled condemnation of Antisemitism, which I cite below, as somehow advancing Antisemitic stereotypes (JCOA 2025; Keane 2025; Strakosch et al 2025).

All of them failed miserably to name and condemn the close similarity between the JCOA images and the pre-World War Two fascist conspiratorial framings of defenders of Jews as tools of powerful Jewish interests.

For example, during the Weimar Republic, the Nazis regularly accused the left-wing Social Democratic party of Germany (the SPD) of defending Jews against Antisemitism not to uphold anti-racist or democratic values, but rather because it was allegedly financed by Jewish capitalists (Niewyk 1971: 59, 106, 116). Additionally, after World War two, Antisemitic Stalinists used similar racist language to denounce friends of the Jews. For example, the East German non-Jewish philo-semitic Communist Paul Merker was labelled a ‘Jew lackey’ (Boulder 2025: 283) for insisting that Jews as well as workers had been victims of Nazism, and hence deserved compensation from the Communist government (Mendes 2003).

So what were the reactionary political agendas that informed the JCOA’s resurrection of this hoary old political libel? One was to deny or minimize the major manifestations of anti-Jewish racism reported in Australia since October 7, 2023. Hence, the JCOA paper does not name any specific incidents of Antisemitism, or condemn any specific perpetrators of Antisemitism. This silence arguably reflects the fact that many of the alleged perpetrators are organizations or individuals that seem to be politically aligned with the JCOA. Hence, the JCOA has intervened in the two parliamentary inquiries into Antisemitism solely to obscure rather than to combat Antisemitism (Mendes 2024a; 2025a).

A second agenda was to reverse the actual perpetrators and victims of Antisemitism (Mendes 2025a). In particular, the JCOA seeks to discredit the many principled examples of anti-racist solidarity with the Australian Jewish community advanced by political conservatives. The Liberal National Party Coalition led by Peter Dutton has widely supported Jewish concerns about the Antisemitism crisis. For example, Dutton stated at a conference in Adelaide:

I look at what’s happened to the Jewish community. I was at the Central Synagogue in Sydney yesterday…There are guards, there are bomb proof shelters, there are kids who are being pulled out of Jewish child care centres, people are being doxxed. This has no place in our country whatsoever. I don’t care whether it’s the Jewish people, whether its Indians, whether it’s people of Greek descent, whether it’s Asian Australians…I’m not going to stand by and watch a segment of our population be vilified, and the racism that we’ve seen, the antisemitism that we’ve seen, needs to be stamped out (cited in Maiden 2025).

That is an unqualified anti-racist statement, and the type of call for action against Antisemitism that most on the Left historically would have strongly supported. Similar anti-racist views have also been consistently presented by News Corp print and media publications such as The Australian newspaper and Sky News, by the free market think tanks, the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies, and by the smaller right-wing journals such as Quadrant and the Spectator. Even left-wing Jews such as myself – who strongly disagree with these groups on most other domestic political issues – can only express our unreserved gratitude for the anti-racist stand they have taken.

It may be that contemporary conservatives have their own complex motives for opposing anti-Jewish racism just as did progressives in past years. But the Jewish community is hardly a passive collective with no agency. To the contrary, they have actively sought and welcomed anti-racist support from across the political spectrum. One of the reasons that Dutton and other philo-semitic conservatives have stood out is because the trade unions, civil society groups, and progressive media outlets such as the ABC that are usually vocal in opposing any forms of ethnic and cultural prejudice have miserably failed to critique the multiple public manifestations of Antisemitism. Instead, they have mostly sat by as passive bystanders (Mendes 2024b).

It is also arguable that we would not even be having this mad hatter discussion if the JCOA did not have the term ‘Jewish’ in their title. If non-Jewish groups advanced similar age-old anti-Jewish tropes, nobody would deny they were bigots. But because the JCOA are wrongly framed by some progressives as representing a significant Jewish cohort, their evidence-free opinions are then used as a ‘kosher’ rationale for defending hateful views (Freeman 2025: 243).

However, there is no inherent connection between having a Jewish cultural background and being informed on Jewish affairs. Just because a small number of people were born into the Jewish community or even in some cases attended Jewish schools or youth groups as children, that does not mean they will have an informed let alone specialist understanding as adults of global Jewish history and politics including particularly the long history of oppression of Jews in both the Global North and Global South and the associated intergenerational trauma impact on Jews today.

In contrast, one can argue that if the JCOA were genuinely the experts on Antisemitism they claim to be on their website, their presentation to the QUT Symposium would have sought to educate that audience along the following anti-racist lines.

In the early years of the Socialist movement, some Russian Populists and some other progressive groups defended Antisemitism (i.e. the Russian pogroms, the Dreyfus trial etc.) on the grounds that it signaled the beginnings (albeit in immature form) of an anti-capitalist movement. They also feared that a condemnation of Antisemitism would alienate them from the peasants or workers that held these prejudices.

But over time, most Socialists (and particularly Marxists) rejected anti-Jewish racism on two grounds. One was that a class analysis of society precluded discrimination on national or religious premises. The second was that Antisemitism in practice only advanced conservative rather than anti-capitalist interests. Those arguments underpinned the famous Socialism of Fools statement by the German Socialist (SPD) leader Auguste Bebel in 1893 which attacked the stupidity of German workers who were attracted to the Antisemitic movement.

To be sure, Bebel was not an unconditional lover or admirer of Jews, and in fact shared many of the popular prejudices of the time about alleged negative Jewish cultural characteristics. But he stood firmly against political Antisemitism, and in favor of equal rights for Jews (Mendes 2014: 37-55). And so does Peter Dutton. By attempting to delegitimize Dutton’s anti-racist solidarity with the Jewish community, the JCOA have invalidated more than a century of anti-racist solidarity by progressives and other decent human beings with Jewish victims of oppression.

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References

Albrechtsen, Janet (2025) Uni bosses should answer for campus hate speech surge. The Australian, 5 February.

Bornstein, Josh (2025) Our society needs a diversity of views. The Age, 8 February.

Boulter, J. (2025) First class comrades: The Stasi in the Cold War 1945-61. Oldcastle books.  https://www.ipgbook.com/first-class-comrades-products-9780857305213.php.

Couacaud, Tayla; Innes, Rose & Fellows, Taylah (2025) Outrage at uni’s Jewish hate fest. Herald Sun, 25 January.

Freeman, Ben M. (2025) The Jews: An Indigenous People. No Pasaran Media.

Jewish Council of Australia (2025) Offensive smear campaign by the Murdoch Press against the Jewish Council’s anti-racism work and Sarah Schwartz. 26 January, https://www.jewishcouncil.com.au/media/smear-campaign-by-the-murdoch-press-against-jewish-council.

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Mendes, Philip (2003) “German, Communist and Philosemite: The remarkable case of Paul Merker”, Midstream, May-June, pp.16-18.

Mendes, Philip (2014) Jews and the Left: The rise and fall of a political alliance. Palgrave MacMillan. London: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137008305.

Mendes. Philip (2024a) “Prejudice in the academy, an analysis of the parliamentary inquiry into AntiSemitism at Australian universities”, Fathom Magazine, December,

https://fathomjournal.org/prejudice-in-the-academy-an-analysis-of-the-parliamentary-inquiry-into-antisemitism-at-australian-universities/

Mendes, Philip (2024b) “Why have many Australian progressives abandoned Israel and the Jews?”, Jewish Independent, 15 April, https://thejewishindependent.com.au/why-have-many-australian-progressives-abandoned-israel-and-the-jews.

Mendes, Philip (2025a) “Reversing the victims and perpetrators of racism: the use of blaming the victim strategies to minimise and deny the antisemitism crisis in Australian universities”, Fathom, 22 April 2025.

Mendes, Philip (2025b) How did Australians (and particularly progressive groups) respond to the earlier 1960 outbreak of AntiSemitism? The Jewish Independent, https://thejewishindependent.com.au/australias-last-antisemitism-crisis-was-different.

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