Testimony as a target: how witnesses at the antisemitism royal commission are being abused online
- Written by: Weekend Times
On December 14, 2025, 15 people were killed and dozens wounded in a terror attack during a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. In the wake of the deadliest terror attack on
Australian soil, the Albanese government established the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in January 2026.
This violence against the Jewish community was not an isolated incident. Evidence indicates that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks outside Israel in 30 years.
In Australia, the Bondi terror attack followed two years of rapidly escalating antisemitism, including arson at the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne – designated as a terror attack – and another arson attack at a kosher restaurant in Sydney. Both events have since been attributed by ASIO to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
There have also been threats towards and the targeting of Jewish schools and community leaders. Online abuse has frequently resulted in criticism of Israel being extended to hostility to Jews, irrespective of their political views.
This hostility and hatred has been extended to royal commission witnesses. People who have described their experience of antisemitism to the commission have been subjected to significant online antisemitic abuse in the hours and days after.
I study extremism in all its forms. Since the commission’s hearings began on May 4, I’ve worked with the Dor Foundation – a charity researching antisemitism in Australia – to document and verify more than 1,300 such posts directed at witnesses. We then submitted them to the commission as evidence.
What the monitoring shows
Dor used social media monitoring tools alongside daily manual searching to identify antisemitic posts. A second analyst then viewed the post for confirmation. We applied a conservative threshold to separate legitimate political criticism and debate from abuse and antisemitic material.
The exercise was not exhaustive. Many examples remain uncaptured.
Because of the way we collected the data, our analysis focuses on the nature and severity of the content, not how prevalent it is.
The posts came from 1,137 distinct accounts across social media platforms, which rules out the possibility of a single organiser. Witnesses appearing under a pseudonym were also targeted.
Much of the antisemitic activity sits in comment threads under clips posted by alternative and independent media pages. While Dor’s analysts generally coded the clips themselves as negative or neutral rather than hateful, the comments were more extreme. Five clips from one page drew more than 4,000 comments.
Read more: Let’s stop arguing about antisemitism and focus on researching it
Witnesses were also targeted on their own accounts. One prominent Jewish leader received more than 2,200 comments across four posts about his evidence, including violent language and characterisation as a “baby killer”.
The content crosses ideological lines. Neo-Nazi material is common, including the Happy Merchant caricature, the trope of “109 expulsions” (which falsely suggests Jews have been expelled from 109 countries), and Holocaust denial.
This appears alongside conspiratorial claims about globalist Jewish control, “paid Mossad operatives”, “the Jewish lobby” and imagery associated with Hamas propaganda.
While the ideologies underpinning the abuse differ, they share similar themes about Jewish power, conspiracy and disloyalty to their home countries.
Testimony as a target
The most severe material has called for witnesses and Jewish people to be executed, hanged, shot, firebombed and interned in concentration camps.
Witnesses were compared to rats, cockroaches and vermin, and described as filth requiring eradication.
There was Holocaust denial and mockery, deportation demands and sexually degrading abuse. One witness was depicted in a digitally generated image inside a gas chamber.
Witnesses were called paid actors and crisis actors, accused of giving evidence for shekels (the Israeli currency), and told they were not really Jewish so had no business speaking about antisemitism.
Some were accused of helping to orchestrate the Bondi attack and the Adass Israel arson for financial gain.
Our monitoring also captured a small amount of targeting of Jewish witnesses who criticised mainstream communal responses. They were labelled “Kapo”: a prisoner forced to work as an overseer in Nazi concentration camps.
The commission itself was cast as a taxpayer-funded exercise run by and for Jews.
A woman who gave evidence as the daughter of a man killed at Bondi was abused in terms that named and degraded her father. A rabbi who described his daughter being wounded in the attack received the reply “Only wounded huh”.
Material directed at Liberal MP Julian Leeser included posts targeting his young son, characterising the boy as a liar and a “little Zionist”, speculating in graphic sexual terms about him, and in one instance proposing violence against him.
Posts such as these show anyone weighing an invitation to give evidence is weighing it on behalf of their children as well.
A royal commission depends on people speaking publicly and having their evidence weighed on its merits. But these attacks go well beyond reasonable political debate. They target individuals and the truth-seeking process at once, and amount to a direct repudiation of democratic process and the rule of law.
‘Undiluted level of hatred’
Commissioner Virginia Bell has sought to address this targeting of witnesses directly.
Opening a hearing in May, she reported a dramatic increase in online hate messages after witnesses gave evidence. She said the material displayed an “undiluted level of hatred and bigotry”, confirmed the commission was recording it, and disclosed that one matter had been referred to the Australian Federal Police.
Around the hearing room, the physical protection of attendees is tangible: police presence and strict security protocols exist.
But simultaneously online, more than a thousand documented antisemitic posts have produced little to no action from social media platforms. More than 1,100 have been referred to the Australian Federal Police.
Of 150 live posts reported to one platform after an early hearing block, five were removed, with three more taken down after Dor identified them in public oral evidence, and a further three removed in the following weeks.
A post reading “JEW KISS ASS KILL ALL JEWS” was twice assessed as compliant with that platform’s community standards. It is still there.
Royal commissions in the digital age
Section 6M of the Royal Commissions Act makes it an offence for any person to use, cause or inflict, any violence, punishment, damage, loss, or disadvantage to a person because they have given evidence to a royal commission. The maximum penalty is one year’s imprisonment.
How it applies to conduct dispersed across a thousand primarily anonymous accounts, on platforms that decline to act on reports, has not been worked out. This legislation needs to be adapted to the digital age.
Remarkably, despite strong reservations, no witness appears to have withdrawn. It is unclear how many did not submit for this reason, though there are likely to be many.
On its own terms, the intimidation has failed, and Commissioner Bell’s final report is due in December.
What cannot be counted is who reads all this and quietly declines to come forward. Evidence an inquiry never hears leaves no trace in its transcript. It also will not record who is profiting from this abuse, be it for political or financial gain.
Josh Roose receives funding from The Australian Research Council. He is the Director of Research and Policy at The Dor Foundation – a charitable organisation researching and combating antisemitism.
