Blow for academics sued over alleged anti-Semitic posts

Two lawsuits against staff at one of Australia's most prestigious universities are set to ramp up after a judge let their accusers expand their discrimination claims.

University of Sydney politics professor John Keane and senior linguistics lecturer Nick Riemer are being sued over a series of posts about the conflict in Gaza on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Jewish academics and students at the university allege the posts between late 2023 and mid-2024 are racially discriminatory.

They include a tweet from Dr Riemer allegedly endorsing an event calling for a "global intifada", another reading "no progressive should feel the need to publicly condemn any choices by the Palestinian resistance".

The second post went live the day after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas which left 1200 people dead.

The same day, Prof Keane posted a picture of five green Hamas flags on X, which his accusers say implied support for Hamas and suggested people should celebrate the killing of Jewish and Israeli people.

Prof Keane and Dr Riemer are accused of encouraging violent anti-Semitic uprisings in Australia and portraying Jewish people as apologists for atrocities in their online posts.

The pair maintain the posts are not anti-Semitic because they were criticising Israel and Zionism rather than Jewish people. They have not yet filed a defence.

On Tuesday, Federal Court Justice Geoffrey Kennett allowed the Jewish complainants to expand their statement of claim.

In doing so, he dismissed arguments from Dr Riemer and Prof Keane's barrister Jessie Taylor that it was too late in the proceedings for changes to the claims against her clients.

In particular she argued a statement about the Jewish experience in Australia was unnecessary and it was difficult to prove a group of people collectively hold the same view.

But Justice Kennett said establishing Jewish Australians' perspective on Israel was important to determining whether anti-Israel and anti-Zionist rhetoric is also anti-Semitic.

"This argument may or may not work; however, the proposition that Jewish people feel a connection with Israel is far from marginal to it," he wrote in his decision.

However, statements about Palestinian intifadas and Hamas ideology were rejected because of imprecise identification of the group of people who are said to be offended by the posts.

"It is necessary for this allegation to be directed to, and identify, a sufficiently significant proportion of Jewish and Israeli people ... to inform an assessment of whether ordinary or reasonable people in that group were likely to be offended," Justice Kennett said.

He also rejected amendments that suggested Dr Riemer and Prof Keane have continued to offend by not taking down the social media posts.

But the number of times the posts were viewed, which for some reached into the hundreds of thousands, remains relevant, the judge said.

The case will return to court at a later date.