Australian Jewish News, 30 June 2026
Dor Foundation reports on antisemitism targeting witnesses
Dor Foundation CEO Tali Blicblau told the Royal Commission her foundation has been monitoring the response online to witnesses giving evidence during Hearing Block One of the commission’s work and prepared a report as evidence.
“To summarise, we found that witnesses who came to the Royal Commission during Hearing Block One to give evidence about their experience in antisemitism were subjected to more of it. They were targeted and abused online at volume and across social media platforms, and that was true both for witnesses who held positions within the Jewish community, and also witnesses who chose to give evidence under a pseudonym,” Blicblau said.
The report to the Royal Commission included 275 examples of antisemitic and/or abusive posts directed towards witnesses, and in one case, a person who was not a witness, but who was engaging with the commission in relation to making a submission.
“Those posts sit across seven different social media platforms to summarise the general nature of the post. I should say that… 275 examples comes from a much larger body of examples of many hundreds more, but we chose those that were illustrative of key themes and trends,” she said.
“Those themes and trends included the following: first of all, explicit calls for violence against witnesses and Jewish people generally, including calls to kill Jews and bring back the gas chambers. It includes dehumanising language comparing witnesses to cockroaches, vermin, and parasites. It includes misogynistic, homophobic, and sexually degrading abuse, often paired with typically antisemitic abuse. It includes Holocaust glorification, distortion, and mockery, including expressions of admiration for Hitler, and it includes antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories, and accusations that witnesses were crisis actors or were falsifying their evidence.”
Blicblau noted that a small number of the posts had been removed, but the vast majority of antisemitic posts documented were still there. “I will say that that was less than 10 [removed] out of a batch of over 1000,” she said.
Asked about the foundation’s approach for collating the posts, she said: “It’s been a process of multiple layers of assessment and review. The ones that we’ve chosen to include, we consider to be either overtly antisemitic or abusive or contextually antisemitic, that is, by virtue of the fact that they were posted in relation to witness in relation to evidence given by a witness about their experiences of antisemitism, and indeed giving evidence at this commission on antisemitism, I would submit that they are arguably contextually antisemitic.”
Blicblau said across social media monitoring a common theme was that a significant subset of posts included either Holocaust glorification or Holocaust denial – she pointed an antisemitic trope “that asserts that only 271,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust”.
She noted that witnesses were targeted generally with sexually degrading abuse, often incorporating antisemitic slurs including accusations of paedophilia.
Another theme was calls for the expulsion or deportation of Jewish Australians. “There were many of them less coded and quite direct, calling for Jews to leave Australia or be forcibly expelled, deported, or removed. Some of them are as blatant and clear as ‘Expel all Jews’,” Blicblau said.
She discussed the antisemitic trope ‘109’ calling for the expulsion of Jews – “The trope is expressed in different ways, but most commonly appears as the number 109, suggesting that that Jewish people have been expelled from 109 different countries across history, and it often comes with calls for countries to be the 110th to expel their Jewish populations,” she said.
Blicblau spoke to the theme of false flags and false victimhood on the part of Jewish people: “This theme can probably be divided into two sub-themes: antisemitic commentary regarding false flag or staged victimhood. There’s a whole body of examples in the annexure that relates specifically to the Bondi terrorist attack being fake, staged, or self-inflicted, and… separate further examples of false victimhood generally,” she said.
Discussing examples of coded language for Jews online, Blicblau pointed to examples including the juice box emoji and deliberate misspellings such as ‘JOS’.
“Our team went through an exercise of reporting every single post that is in that annexure, so part of the reason that the annexure contains only 275 examples and not the much larger data set is that, as you can imagine, it is a painstaking exercise to report all of those to the platforms, but we’ve done that, and in some cases we’ve reported them more than once, the data set has also separately been shared with the eSafety Commissioner, the AFP, and the community security groups who are point of contact with state-based police forces. In general terms, very few comments, including many of the ones that we’ve just, we’ve just reviewed, have been removed by the platforms,” she said.
Asked for her general observations Blicblau noted that people and institutions seeking to respond effectively to antisemitism are themselves targeted and attacked with antisemitic abuse, and that posts and comments to the platforms “demonstrates a grossly inadequate response.”
She added, “It’s clear that the platform response is entirely out of step with normal communal expectations of how people should treat one another, and I think it’s fair to say that either the legislation or policies are not effective or are not being effectively enforced.”