Kostakidis defended her tweet about the Hezbollah leader.
“What are you saying, that we shouldn’t hear what the other side has to say?” she told this masthead. “The point of that tweet was to say that Israel is inviting an escalation, it’s inviting retribution because it is conducting a genocide.”
Cassuto’s legal team is led by Arnold Bloch Leibler’s Raphael Leibler and Leon Zwier.
The complaint against Kostakidis is the highest-profile case relating to the war on Gaza to come before the Human Rights Commission and will test the strength of the existing Racial Discrimination Act, which Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has promised to bolster.
Kostakidis spent nearly 20 years reading SBS’s weekday bulletin before a dispute in 2007 with management and her newly appointed co-host, Stan Grant, which culminated in her quitting and suing the broadcaster. She is a former chair of the Sydney Peace Foundation and has served on multiple government advisory boards.
This masthead last week documented the phenomena of October 7 denial, where prominent pro-Palestinian supporters such as Kostakidis have sought to minimise, qualify and otherwise deny what Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups did when they attacked communities in southern Israel.
Mary Kostakidis, photographed in 2019 outside London’s Belmarsh prison, where she went to support Julian Assange.Credit: John Davis
Kostakidis has not resiled from her comments about October 7 or the war in Gaza. In an email response to questions from this masthead last week, she defended each of her claims and maintained her scepticism that women were raped on October 7.
The Human Rights Commission complaint against Kostakidis is under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to publicly offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person or group on the basis of race, colour or national or ethnic origin.
This provision has been used previously by Jewish people and groups against Holocaust deniers.
A freedom of speech provision also contained in the act exempts artistic works, scientific debate and fair comment on matters of public interest. To make use of this defence, a respondent must demonstrate they acted in good faith.
Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler and chief executive Alon Cassuto at the Beth Weizmann Jewish Community Centre in Caulfield.Credit: PENNY STEPHENS
Zionist Federation president Jeremy Leibler said Nasrallah’s speech was not a rallying call for equality or peace between Arab and Jewish people but rather, a call to ethnically cleanse 7 million Jews who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
“He lays bare what these words that are chanted on our streets mean to him, to Hamas and to Iran,” Leibler said. “Mary Kostakidis, for so long the trusted face of multicultural Australia ... misused her platform to share extreme and hateful speech with her 30,000 Twitter followers.”
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Complaints under the Racial Discrimination Act’s Section 18C are civil proceedings that, if they proceed to court, can result in a fine.
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