Little Bird Bookshop, Brisbane

22/12/2025

22/12/2025

I was there.
On Sunday night I, like a lot of non-antisemitic, non-anti-Zionist people had tears running down my cheeks and I thought hard about what I could do to express solidarity with the Jewish community and send a message to others that it's not appalling to be a Zionist - i.e. to think Jews need and are entitled to have a TINY homeland (only 10,000 sq kms of habitable land).
Like many non-Jews I've often wondered why almost half the Jewish population of the world chose to live in Israel rather than somewhere apparently safer like Australia or the US. A dive into history gave me the answer.
A dive into history also gave me an answer as to why persecuted Jews didn't leave the N**i camps once they became DP camps and try to create a state of their own in Europe. With enemies as formidable as recently demobbed N**i soldiers and the Red Army they would of course have failed.
I decided to hang the Israeli flag outside my shop for the first time ever. Most passers by seemed to approve, but your mate Jonty Bush did NOT approve.
Nor did she approve of me putting out a blackboard that attributed some of the blame for Bondi to the overblown rhetoric of the Greens especially (Amy Macmahon and Trina Massey called Gaza a genocide when the death toll was 1,900 and it CLEARLY was nothing of the sort). Jonty didn't approve even though she almost lost her seat to Katinka Winston Allom at the last state election and any criticism of the antisemitic Greens should be music to her ears.
My guess is that she decided to go hard against me, making an Instagram video in which she treats me like a fruitcake for siding with Jews, because I have been on federal MP Madonna Jarrett's case for standing with keffiyeh-wearing protesters who call for Israel's total obliteration and for never uttering one word of support for Jews, until Bondi made it obligatory.
Steven, you CAN'T surely be impressed by the botox and filler-addicted, grifting moron who only ever goes into bookshops to see if she can trade social media plugs for freebies.
The ALP needs a better MP for Cooper.
It's a catastrophically bad look for the ALP to be employing a politician who's petty and vindictive and stupid enough to attack one of the very few Brisbane businesses that's expressed support for the Jews before Bondi.
In other states Jewish businesses such as Avner's have closed down, such are the threats to those of us who stand up against antisemitism. There isn't a night I don't worry about my shop being destroyed. I receive frequent arson threats as well as threats against my person. When I drive down Given Terrace I look at the shop and half expect to see smashed windows, graffiti, overturned pot plants, paint all over the windows, dog s**t on my front door. I park my car and go to the door and it's a relief when it hasn't been Superglued.
Morons like Jonty Bush contribute significantly to the level of threat I feel. That's precisely what she wants to do. Use the internal discipline mechanisms of the ALP to give her a lesson that she never forgets. Otherwise, your expressions of solidarity with the Jewish community will strike this bookseller as entirely hollow.

22/12/2025

The text is from a fabulous Yoni Bashan article in The Australian.

The non-Jews of Little Bird feel desolate that Avner’s, a brave and decent business that spread nothing but joy, has been forced to close.

What do people stand for?

Jonty Bush - Member for Cooper has indicated clearly what she stands for.

If you hang an Israeli flag as a gesture of support for the Jewish community, Jonty will try to destroy your business.

If you draw a very obvious connection between the inflammatory rhetoric and undoubted anti-Zionism of the Greens and a horrendous massacre of Jews at Bondi, Jonty will try to destroy your business.

Stop voting for the ludicrously light-weight botox and filler addict. Little Bird possibly got her across the line in the last state election by campaigning hard against the Greens, even though Katinka actually wasn't that bad.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Here's Jonty on Instagram, doing her bit to reduce the variety of Brisbane independent bookshops because, really, we've got FAR too many: https://www.instagram.com/p/DSbK7fDE9J2/?hl=en

22/12/2025

Dezza McJezza maybe take the blinkers off.
When Jews, between the start of 1933 and the end of 1946, wanted desperately to escape anti-semitic N**i and Red Army-occupied Europe, Australia let in 8,200 of the initial 9.5 million of them in danger. It was the left that opposed their migration.
In 1947, when small ships carrying a few hundred Jews who'd only just got out of former N**i concentration camps started arriving in Australia, it was organisations like the RSL, representing working-class diggers, who protested that Jews should have been left to rot in typhus-infested camps.
In the 1970s, when boatloads of Indochinese refugees started arriving on Australian shores, Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke condemned them as capitalist sell-outs and pressed for them to be refused entry. It was the much-loathed Malcolm Fraser who let them in.
When Tony Abbott gave a very thoughtful speech about the conflicts he had to resolve between his duties as a staunch Catholic and his duties as a health minister managing a system which paid then for about 85,000 taxpayer-funded abortions a year, multiculturalist Julia Gillard laid into him for his misogyny.
When Israel Folau went public on the fact that Rugby Australia and team captain David Pocock were wrong to imply ALL the players supported same-sex marriage, it was the irrational and brutal, pro-multicultural, left that forced him out of work and the LNP people you imagine are appalling bigots who stood up for his freedom of speech.
And now we have the ALP, almost exclusively a party of non-indigenous people, condemning the necessary steps Israel (a TINY country in which 60 per cent of the population is indigenous and wields considerable power) has to take to defend itself. Non-indigenous people took 100 per cent of the Aboriginal world. Israelis (including indigenous Israelis) took 0.16 per cent of the Arab world. But the ALP acts as if Israelis (Jewish Israelis in particular) are the most evil people imaginable.

22/12/2025

Thank you but it's important to recognise that you won't achieve anything effective to combat antisemitism while people delude themselves there's a fundamental difference between antisemitism (intolerable) and anti-Zionism (obligatory). Hi**er despised absolutely everything about diaspora Jews who'd moved to Europe but (as he says clearly in Mein Kampf, 1925) he despised Jews who dreamt of escaping mortal danger and having a commendably liberal Jewish-majority state of their own in the fundamentally pro-N**i Arab world.
There are lots of points we could and should make when arguing with antisemites who think they are merely humane anti-Zionists.
One is that Israel takes up 0.16 per cent of the Arab world (a smaller fraction of the Islamic world) and about 60 per cent of its population is indigenous. So 0.064 per cent of the Arab world is in non-indigenous hands but this is the catastrophe to end all catastrophes?
If anything tells you anti-Zionism is just a disguised form of antisemitism it's this endless obsession with what the desperate survivors of the N**i Holocaust did when they joined with Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, Druze, Christians, Arab Muslims and others to create a state with just 10,000 sq kms of habitable territory - which is more or less identical to the habitable territory of Melbourne.
Imagine living in such a state and being surrounded by hostile regimes, some of them with very deep pockets and with the backing of a worldwide movement of sanctimonious antisemites, many of whom live on stolen land.
Am Yisrael Chai. Australia HAS to change.
Screenshot shows, in the blue circle, what Australia would look like if, instead of taking 100 per cent of the Aboriginal world, we non-indigenous people had taken just 0.16 per cent of it.

22/12/2025

We seem to be turning the corner in the fight between rational and irrational policymakers.

NSW premier Chris Minns:

Bondi is beautiful tonight. And not because of its beaches, its sunset, its people, its fun.

It's beautiful because you in your thousands, in your defiance, in your resistance and resolve, you have returned to these sands just seven days after a shocking crime, and have said to the terrorists, we are going nowhere.

This crime was an attempt to marginalise and scatter, to intimidate and cause fear.

But Jews have stood up to this intimidation for thousands of years, and so tonight, thanks to the Jewish community of Australia, on this last night of Chanukah, you have reclaimed Bondi Beach for us.

Firstly, let me say my heart is heavy for the lives that were taken here, for those who've been injured, and for the families and loved ones whose worlds will never be the same again.

I want to say this clearly and sincerely. We are deeply sorry.

We grieve with you and with humility, I acknowledge that the government's highest duty is to protect its citizens, and we did not do that one week ago.

That reality weighs on me heavily. We must accept that responsibility and use it to do everything and anything we possibly can to stop it from happening again.

Sometimes I think it's trite when Australians say, and we say it about everything, that ‘we're with you.’

We say it from birthdays to work meetings to sporting heroes, that we stand with you, that we're with you, we're by your side.

I think Aussies are better at showing it than saying it, and they've done just that in the closing days of this year.

The thousands who jumped on a surfboard last Friday and paddled past the breakers to show solidarity to this community.

The hundreds of first responders, including the police, the paramedics, Surf Life Savers who ran straight into danger to protect our community.

The 40,000 people who've given blood as an act of public service, the flowers at the Pavilion, the red and yellow Surf Life Saving army.

The candles, the tears – all acts large and small, but they show Australia stands with our Jewish brothers and sisters at this time.

And I say our, because while the attack was undoubtedly targeted at Jewish people peacefully celebrating a religious festival, for every other Australian, the shock and the pain we feel is as if a member of our own family has been taken.

The sad truth is that this crime has tragically highlighted a deep vein of antisemitic hate in our community. To excuse it as an aberration or a tragic single event is wrong.

It will not do justice to the killed and wounded and will not allow us to take steps to stop it from happening again.

History shows us that antisemitism builds, starting with a phrase or a chant, then migrating to the air waves, or in modern times, onto the internet. Then graffiti on Jewish buildings, then damage to property, then arson and then murder.

In the Book of Psalms, we read, “Who is the person who desires life, who loves days to see goodness? Guard your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good, seek peace and pursue it.”

The psalm teaches us a profound truth. Thoughts become words, words become actions.

The danger we must confront is the deliberate incubation of hatred. This includes organisations and individuals who promote violence and division, sometimes cloaking it in ideology or even the perversion of religion. This must be confronted.

Of course, that's by government, yes, by police, but also by communities committed to the idea that an injustice committed against any of us is committed against all of us.

As the late Chief Rabbi Sacks once said, “Jews cannot fight antisemitism alone. The victim cannot cure the crime, the hated cannot cure the hate.”

We cannot let the Jewish people carry this burden by themselves. It is Australia's responsibility.

We make special mention to the Chabad community of Sydney, personified by Rabbi Ulman. Rabbi Ulman, no doubt, this week, you've been gripped by your own exceptional pain, having lost a friend, a fellow rabbi, your son in law.

And yet you've been someone who's been able to find wisdom in pain and strength in suffering, and it's been an inspiration to all of us that even in this period of sadness and evil, there is work to do.

Tonight, we light the eighth and final candle of the Chanukah menorah, and it compels us to ask, what will we light tomorrow? How will we carry this light forward when the candles are no longer burning?

Civic and government leadership now has a heavy burden, security for this community, justice for the dead and the injured, and action to confront this hatred.

But the Psalm does not end with solely government responsibility. It says, “seek peace and pursue it”, and that is the task of every citizen.

Peace doesn't happen by accident. It must be actively pursued through compassion, through kindness and moral courage. Government can encourage it and support it, but people must live it.

And that's why tonight, after meeting with the rabbinical leadership of Sydney, who can I just say are incredibly persuasive.

Rabbi Feldman, Rabbi Eli, Rabbi Wolff, Rabbi Benny. They're very persuasive people.

But after consultation with the rabbinical leadership of Sydney and hearing their strong views, in fact, demands for positive action.

Following what happened on Sunday, we're launching tonight a campaign in their honour and in the honour of the people who've been killed and those who are injured and all who are suffering.

The initiative is called One Mitzvah for Bondi.

For those watching at home, in the Jewish tradition, a Mitzvah is a simple but powerful idea. It's a concrete act of goodness.

Something that you do that makes the world just, more just more compassionate, more humane. The One Mitzvah for Bondi campaign is inspired by the spirit of Rabbi Eli Schlanger.

Eli was in the process of launching Project Noah, a reminder that every one of us is a child of Noah, charged with building a good world.

It invites every citizen of our state of any faith or no faith, to increase acts of goodness and kindness.

The rabbis I've spoken to in the last days have been very insistent that this is the best way of healing our country.

If hatred spreads through words and actions, then so does goodness. We can't cure hate with hate. And the lesser lesson of the Chanukah is not that there is no darkness, it's the darkness cannot extinguish the light.

So be the light in the world and may the memories of those who've been lost be a blessing to all of us.

22/12/2025

Yesterday a wonderful person brought us a bottle of South African pinotage. Tragically it had a cork in it and we couldn't find a corkscrew so we couldn't drink it at 9am this morning. But then another wonderful person brought in a cold bottle of riesling and it had a screw top, so all is well with the world.

We are surrounded by kind people and for that we are truly grateful.

22/12/2025

Little Bird loved Noam Chomsky when we were adolescents. But we grew up.

We have an aerogramme Chomsky sent us, obviously typed by him on an old mechanical typewriter, single-spaced, covering every available bit of space, disagreeing with us on the matter of Robert Faurisson and Holocaust denial.

Bizarrely, Chomsky claimed not to see any connection between Holocaust denialism and antisemitism.

One day we'll dig the letter out of whatever box it's in in the garage and put it on display in the shop.

We don't like Chomsky but we stock more of his books than any other Brisbane bookshop.

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The news cycle of late has offered little cause for pleasure, and much cause for screaming dismay. But very occasionally, something comes along that, if not uplifting, at least captures a sense of schadenfreude so perfect that you cannot but let rip a guffaw. Even if it’s 2am and you’re in bed, tucked up with a cup of tea.

That, at least, was how I was when I saw the picture of Noam Chomsky, now 97, sitting next to Jeffrey Epstein on a private jet, in one of 68 pictures released this week by Democrats on the House oversight committee.

The late Epstein, of course, is by now a known monster, the scale and scope of whose crimes are still being detailed. Chomsky, an MIT linguist and a key architect of the modern post-colonial Palestine movement, is a different type of monster whose legacy will feed dark cultural currents for many years to come. Indeed, it would be hard to find a more evil list of ideologies than the ones to which Chomsky has devoted his life.

Chomsky, an America and Israel-hating anti-capitalist, is a long-professed “anarcho-syndicalist” and/or “socialist libertarian”. Anarcho-syndicalism, for those that haven’t yet troubled themselves to learn about it, is a form of anarchism that “centres trade unions as a vehicle for conflict”.

It is, in other words, a piece of Leftist theatre designed to showcase support – through direct action and sabotage – for the (inevitably violent) reign of the proletariat. Socialist libertarianism is also all about anti-capitalism. More specifically, Chomsky has devoted himself to condemning the “elite corporatocracy” and explains himself as duty-bound to use his “privilege” to support efforts to disrupt it, such as the Occupy movement.

All of which makes Chomsky’s smugly comfortable presence in the pale leather embrace of arch capitalist Epstein’s private jet – a category of luxury good only made possible by the “elite corporatocracy” – hilarious. But only, of course, in a way that is familiar to observers of more than a century of clever Marxist bullyboys.

And so, aside from the literal criminality of Epstein, there is one key difference between Epstein and Chomsky. Epstein, as far as I know, didn’t pretend to be a saint, or, more precisely, a feminist theorist, sex-work campaigner or woman’s right activist.

But Chomsky has thrown his every waking breath into proclaiming his own sainthood. For a man who has devoted his intellectual life to the destruction of the very possibility of a private jet at all, to look so darn at home riding on such a jet with such a man is just too good.

I hope this picture tarnishes Chomsky’s last days and, above all, his legacy. The damage he has done over his long life is immeasurable and inexcusable. It is not just through his writings, which include a litany of Israel and West-hating books such as On Palestine, The Myth of American Idealism, Occupy and Gaza in Crisis – but through every hipster and crank inspired by them.

Of course, it’s become rather hard to find a member of the great and good, from David E Brooks, the iconic New York Times columnist to Woody Allen, who hasn’t been pictured in Epstein’s embrace at one point or other. Some were simply lured, as Allen claims to have been, by the presence of “college professors, scientists, Nobel laureates”. But you feel that Chomsky, a man of intimate familiarity with such elite types, would not be so easily seduced. The conclusion has to be this: Chomsky liked Epstein. And he liked flying private even more.

22/12/2025

We've just heard from a friend who works for the Greens that Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Greens, Ryan) takes every Wednesday off to look after her grandchildren and that she and the rest of the office take every Friday off as a "mental health day" (which doesn't seem to be helping).

We're pretty certain that last time she browsed the architecture section at Little Bird (she doesn't seem to be a reader) it was for about an hour on a Thursday.

Maggie Forrest told us to take note of every time EWB spoke in parliament and asked a question on behalf of her constituents. From memory, Maggie said EWB might represent her constituents once or twice a year.

This could all be wrong, but if you know anything more use the comments space.

P.S. We LOATHE the thuggish Michael Berkman. Allegedly he managed to get an educational program on antisemitism stopped at Indooroopilly High School. More information needed.

21/12/2025

"The values that carried us through":