Royal Commissioner Virgina Bell has had to interrupt a lawyer for a Palestinian group after her line of questioning strayed into broader Middle Eastern history and detailed military action rather than focusing on the Royal Commission\u2019s terms of reference around anti-Semitism and social cohesion.<\/p>\n
Counsel for the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) Ragni Mathur had disputed SW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip\u2019s claim that a protest at Sydney Opera House had been a celebratory affair, insisting Israel at that point hadn\u2019t launched widespread retaliatory action to the Hamas October 7 terror attack.<\/p>\n
Commissioner Bell had to step in during Ms Mathur\u2019s cross examination to remind the hearing that the high profile probe wasn\u2019t focused on exploring the hostilities of the Middle East \u201cin greater detail\u201d but rather focus on anti-Semitism in Australia.<\/p>\n
\u201cMs Mathur, I don\u2019t think you\u2019re going to get very far with this line,\u201d Ms Bell interrupted her.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe witness has acknowledged that it is a very contested history.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat there have been innocent Palestinian lives lost, just as innocent Israeli lives lost.<\/p>\n
\u201cI understand the matters that you wish to canvas, but the witness isn\u2019t in a position to do more than possibly agree that that is a fair reading of a portion of the United Nations Commission report, that can be referred to in submissions.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do think that we\u2019ve gone as far as we can with this line of questioning.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Royal Commissioner Virgina Bell has had to interrupt a lawyer for a Palestinian group after her line of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[22,23,21,5820,149,105],"class_list":["post-64913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-austrlia","tag-middle-east","tag-politics","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}