Court documents claim that racial discrimination proceedings brought by the head of the Zionist Federation of Australia were “part of a deliberate campaign to undermine and discredit” Mary Kostakidis.
The former SBS newsreader has been charged by the ZFA with breaching the Racial Discrimination Act by sharing two ex-posts about a speech by the late Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah in January 2024.
ZFA’s chief executive, Allon Cassuto, complained to the Australian Human Rights Commission, but the matter was not resolved and was taken to the Federal Court.
Cassuto’s claim said the violation occurred after Costakidis shared a video of Nasrallah’s speech on January 4 and said: “The Israeli government is getting some medicine of its own. Israel has started something that it cannot end with this genocide.”
A second post on January 13 sharing the same video also forms part of the claim. The post, which was re-shared from another account, quoted Nasrallah’s speech, saying: “Nasrallah’s message to Israelis: ‘If you want to be safe and secure, you have an American passport, go back to the US. You have a British passport, go back to the UK. You have no future here. From the river to the sea, the land of Palestine belongs only to the Palestinian people.'”
In his defense filed in the Federal Court on Friday, the journalist and commentator claims that “the proceedings have been initiated as part of a deliberate campaign to undermine and discredit the defendant, a prominent Australian, who has questioned and criticized the conduct of the State of Israel in order to negatively impact him and others in relation to him since 7 October 2023”.
In an amended statement of claim filed in October, Cassuto claimed that most Jewish Australians consider themselves Zionists and feel a personal connection to the State of Israel, and that the January 13 post was likely to offend Jewish Australians and/or Israeli Australians.
Cassuto was asked to file an amended claim after Costakidis submitted that the Racial Discrimination Act claim was so vague and vague regarding Jewish people and citizens of Israel that it could include “Arab ethnicity in the case of an Arab person who practices the Jewish faith” or “a Jewish person who is ethnically Swedish”.
In his defense, Costakidis claims that the term “‘Zionist’ is not defined and can have multiple meanings”, and that “Zionism is a political philosophy or ideology, not a race or ethnic group”.
He said that parts of Cassuto’s claims were “embarrassing” because they were not based on material fact.
Cassuto said he was “hurt and insulted” by the January 4 post – a contention that Kostakidis disputed, pointing out that he had not complained about any posts until July 14, 2024, nor had he asked for any posts to be removed. Furthermore, they argued, not only did they not file their complaint with the Commission until six months later, but ZFA held a press conference before filing the complaint.
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“If…the applicant felt hurt and insulted by the post, that reaction was extreme or unusual and should be ignored,” defense documents say.
Costakidis believes the 4 January post was a fair comment on a matter of public interest and an expression of a genuine belief, and he denied that his 13 January post was made because of the race or national or ethnic origin of Jewish Australians.
The parties are scheduled to have a case management hearing before Justice Andrew MacDonald in the federal court in Melbourne on December 18.
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