Racial Discrimination Act put to test in Mary Kostakidis case

Racism against Mary Kostakidis may be a long way with the explicitly emergence of defects in the Anti -Discrimination Law. Kim Wingerei Reports from the federal court.

Mary Kostakidis’ legal team brought justice McDonald to McDonald on Wednesday to reveal the case against him by the Australian Zionist Federation (ZFA). After two and a half hours of complex legal arguments, the judge kept his decision for a future date. He made it clear that his decision would be neither easy nor close.

Earlier this year, the senior journalist and former SBS news reader Kostakidis was sued for racist statements by Alon Cassuto, CEO of ZFA. This first watched his complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission in July 2024, where a tweet shared by Kostakidis here claimed that “our community was deeply disturbing and scary, but the line was illegal to illegal Hate speech”.

Tweet referred to a record by the Hezbollah Secretary General at that time. Hassan Nasrallah (Since it was assassinated), the Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea .. Other tweets from Kostakidis about the Gaza genocide have been brought to the federation’s complaint since then.

Claims, foul fall of these tweets 18C Chapter of the Anti -Discrimination LawIt means “aggressive behavior because of race, color or national or ethnic origin”.

Movement for strike

Mary Kostakidis opposed that her tweets reported an opinion contrary to the official Israeli narrative, not anti -Semitic or racist in any way. In December last year, he said the following mediation at the Australian Rights Commission:

“I condemn all kinds of anti -Semitism and racism.

X account on January 4 and 13 January 2024 I shared by Hassan Nasrallah I did not approve of the contents of the conversation and I did not approve. I acknowledge that some comments can be seen anti -Semitic, but this is not an obstacle to reporting them.

I apologize for the incinage, troubles and pain of Jews and/or Israelis in Australia. “

CEO, AUS V Kostakidis Zionist Federation CEO

Six months ago, a complaint on my tasks against X under 18c of racial discrimination law shared a speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. A series of slander and laborious interpretation…

– 💧 Mary Kostakidis (@marykostakidis) January 2, 2025

At the hearing yesterday, the legal team filed a lawsuit in case of expressing the views on the Gaza conflict in case of a racist or discriminatory against any group within itself. In another case of Justice Stewart (Wertheim v Haddad), they referred to a recent judiciary.

The criticism of Israel’s actions, no matter how severe, is not anti -Semitic.

The authority drew attention to the case -law of South African and stressed that the Australian courts are now struggling with this issue.

Mary Kostakidis’s lawyer expresses this in a different way and said, “Criticizing all blacks does not mean criticism of all New Zealands!”

Justice McDonald made an earlier comment on that “Israel’s criticism could not be interpreted as racism on its own”. “There is a subject of correlation between the two because of the strong connection between Israel and Jewish people,” he added.

Some of the legal arguments between the parties described who the wounded party was. All people of Jewish origin? All Israeli citizens? Only those who have Zionist views?

This and the other parts of the procedure seemed to emphasize this observer, the whims (and inadequacies) of the 18th part of the Racial Discrimination Law.

If the case continues and it is found that Kostakidis broke 18C, CHAPTER 18DThis is “a fair and accurate report of any event or public interest issue, or the expression of a real belief held by the commentary person, a fair interpretation of public interest or public interest”.

In the second, Justice McDonald added rhetoric at some point, “Is Retweeting equal to confirm?” Perhaps it is an indication of which direction it focuses, but we will not find it for a while.

Again antisemitism! | Western Report