Mary Kostakidis, a leading anchor of Australia's SBS nightly broadcast
Canberra, August 31 (RHC)-- A senior Australian journalist has been charged with “antisemitism” for two retweeting two posts about Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza that has been ongoing since October last year.
Mary Kostakidis, a leading anchor of Australia's SBS nightly broadcast, was accused by a Zionist group of supporting ethnic cleansing of Jews for retweeting two posts on X critical of Israel, Consortium News reported this week.
Kostakidis is facing charges of allegedly violating the country’s Racial Discrimination Act. Alon Cassuto, the CEO of the Zionist Federation of Australia, filed the complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission about two Kostakidis’s retweets from January this year, which contain a video of a speech by Secretary General of Lebanon's Hezbollah resistance movement Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in which he blasted the Israeli regime.
One of the posts she retweeted was from independent British journalist Richie Medhurst, who is one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s genocidal war against the people of Gaza. The other tweet is from a user called Censored Men, who is also critical of the regime.
The Zionist group is seeking Kostakidis's apology, removal of the posts from her X account, promise not to post such material again, and payment of the legal costs. The group said Kostakidis should have written in her retweet of the video that she did not agree with or endorse it.
The Zionist group claimed that Nasrallah was calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel -- yet the Hezbollah chief only predicted the end of the regime due to its genocidal crimes against the Palestinians.
In that video, Nasrallah also reminded the Zionist entity that “the land of Palestine is for the Palestinian people and the Palestinian people only.”
Kostakidis has rejected the charges, tweeting: “This because I have been sharing the reports of extremely highly regarded independent journalists who have written about the absence of credible evidence of the claims of ‘systemic, widespread rape’ by Hamas on Oct 7.”
Regarding the retweet of Nasrallah’s video, Kostakidis told The Sydney Morning Herald: “What are you saying, that we shouldn’t hear what the other side has to say? The point of that tweet was to say that Israel is inviting an escalation, it’s inviting retribution because it is conducting a genocide.”
Kostakidis’s lawyers tweeted she would not be intimidated, she would not be gagged, and she would not stop covering international events.
The defiant Kostakidis wrote that the Australian Zionist Federation “is weaponising Australian law in an attempt to curb criticism of Israel for its acts of genocide.” “I won’t be intimidated by them in the face of the slaughter of tens of thousands of children, hundreds of doctors, nurses, journalists and other civilians,” she added.
