Content warning: this article mentions subjects some readers may find distressing.
Days after the Hamas attack that killed more than 1,100 people on October 7, pro-Palestinian protesters gathered in front of the Sydney Opera House as it was lit up in blue in solidarity with Israel.
Some protesters chanted anti-Semitic slogans. Soon after, videos of the protest went viral, including one that purported to show marchers allegedly inciting violence with a chant that referenced the Holocaust.
Against the backdrop of a documented global rise in anti-Semitism, one group’s videos showing protesters chanting with the caption “gas the Jews” were viewed millions of times online and prompted international outrage and a rapid change to New South Wales’ hate speech legislation.
But new unedited footage unearthed by Crikey, an independent audio report and interviews with forensic audio experts have cast further doubt on whether that specific chant was captured in this footage.
Even if these videos don’t depict that chant, it neither proves the phrase wasn’t chanted, nor does it cast doubt on the other (widely reported) anti-Semitic chanting from protesters.
However, a “gas the Jews” chant is both distinct and significant as that specific language would be likely to reach the criminal standard of threatening or inciting violence against protected groups, according to a briefing reportedly given to the state’s police minister. And the interpretation of the videos will be likely to influence whether NSW Police charge protesters as they have been shown to police.
This new footage also appears to capture what one expert said is a protester shouting “We’re gonna kill them all”, a previously unreported allegation of incitement to violence.
Last week, Crikey reported that police and independent verification experts had been unable to verify the edited videos that had been shared by the Australian Jewish Association (AJA) claiming “Muslim mob of 100s chant ‘gas the Jews'”, and that additional evidence supporting the claims had failed to emerge. One protest organiser confirmed that some attendees had shouted anti-Semitic chants but said they did not hear the Holocaust reference.
The AJA refused repeated requests to provide raw footage or to explain who filmed, captioned and edited the videos.
After publication, Sky News Australia’s Sharri Markson broadcast new footage of a 30-second, continuous clip showing the protest in a wide shot, with captions that included the same chant. Markson confirmed to Crikey that her producers had subtitled the audio for broadcast. The AJA later shared the clip on its Instagram saying it had “exactly the same audio” as Sky News’ clip.
Crikey has obtained and is publishing an independent audio report from Forensic Audio Australia’s principal engineer James Raper that assesses whether the audio from Sky News’ footage includes “gas the Jews”.
After detailing a series of audio enhancements to clarify the chanting, Raper wrote that the audio recording has “no instance” of anyone chanting the slogan. Instead, Raper suggests the audio captures people saying “where’s” and not “gas”: “My professional assessment indicates that the words being vocalised are more accurately interpreted as ‘Where’s the Jews?’,” he wrote. Crikey has also obtained and is publishing audio from Sky News that has been enhanced by Raper.
The report was provided to Crikey by Criminal Lawyers Sydney’s principal lawyer Osman Samin. When asked who commissioned the report, Samin said he commissioned it “on behalf of a client in relation to anticipated legal proceeding” but declined to comment further.
Crikey has also obtained, from an independent protest observer, new footage of the moment captured by both Sky News and the AJA’s footage, with the new footage including a close-up of the group of protesters chanting. The observer told Crikey that he heard protesters chanting “Where’s the Jews?”. Crikey has shared the footage below, which has been blurred due to legal concerns.
The video was captured by James McKellar, who runs the Telegram page Sydney Protests. He posted the footage publicly online the day after the protest. He confirmed to Crikey that he was at the protest that night and captured the footage. The video shows a group of young men from the protest as they begin the chant. They wave flags, pump fists and look around as they yell together. Some have their faces covered, but the footage captures some of their mouths during the chants.
Crikey first confirmed the claim that the audio from the Sky News footage matched audio from the AJA’s shorter video and McKellar’s footage by comparing sound waves and audio cues, suggesting that all the footage captured the same moment of the rally.
These soundwaves also matched portions of the AJA’s longer edited footage, suggesting that the video, which Crikey previously reported featured edited and looped audio, despite the AJA saying it was “UNCUT”, had also drawn from the same moment.
Verification experts from RMIT CrossCheck and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s senior open-source intelligence analyst Elise Thomas said their analysis of the audio provided by Crikey suggested all the footage that was captured was of the same moment.
Thomas also identified one voice from the footage yelling “We’re gonna kill them all”, which she said was “unambiguously a threat”. A NSW Police spokesperson said it is conducting extensive investigations into the entire protest.
On the day after the protest — long before there were doubts raised about the “gas the Jews” claims — McKellar was filmed talking about his experiences covering the protest. When live-streamer Chriscoveries brought up the chant during their conversation (at 7 minutes and 53 seconds into the video), McKellar offered an alternative suggestion: “I would debate that ‘gas the Jews’ was never said, from my footage. When you listen to it, it’s ‘Where’s the Jews?’.”
McKellar told Crikey that he stood by his October statements about the chants and shared evidence of emails repeatedly sent over the past two months contacting federal MPs to tell them to correct Hansard because he disputed their quoting of the chants.
Crikey spoke to two academics who are experts in forensic transcription and linguistics about the chants, providing footage from both Sky News and McKellar. Both said they didn’t have time for a full, thorough analysis (which could take days) but were able to provide some initial comments about the audio and the process of trying to confirm what was said.
Professor Helen Fraser is director of the University of Melbourne’s Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence, and is chair of the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association’s (ASSTA) forensic speech science committee whose expertise is forensic transcription. Before Crikey’s inquiry, she was aware of the chants and acknowledged that it would shape her understanding of the footage.
Fraser said it could be possible to figure out what was chanted with some confidence but stressed that coming to a rigorous conclusion would need detailed analysis of extended original footage and not “comparing short clips of video and audio with unknown history and unverified captions”.
After reviewing the clips provided by Crikey, Fraser cast doubt on the certainty with which the AJA and Sky News captioned the videos. She told Crikey over the phone: “I would like to say that there should be a lot of suspicion around the ‘gas the Jews’ version.”
Fraser emphasised the power of captions to influence what viewers hear. It is well established in academia and in the legal system (where adjudicating contested claims of footage is common and critical) that listeners can be “primed” to hear different things when exposed to transcripts or captions along with audio.
“Even when you think you’re not being influenced you are being influenced. You can easily demonstrate that people who have seen captions like that [will] hear differently from those who haven’t even if they reject the captions, it’s so effective,” she told Crikey.
Fraser warned that listeners can’t then “unhear” what they’ve “heard”, meaning they’ll continue to be influenced even after being exposed to the same audio in different circumstances — such as uncaptioned videos or different footage.
Phil Rose is a speech scientist and professional consultant and former chair of the ASSTA’s forensic speech science committee. Crikey provided the footage to him blind with removed subtitles at his request, but as it turned out Rose was already aware of it due to recent news coverage.
He also spoke of the significance of subtitles over the videos: “If you put up a subtitle, you will predispose them to hear what you have written. You hear what you expect to hear.”
He cautioned that his initial reaction to listening to the audio was “not of any value whatsoever until an analysis is done”, including gathering a detailed understanding of factors including acoustics, the videos’ quality and various hypotheses for what had been said by protesters.
After an initial listen to the videos, he said speech acoustics sounded like “adolescent, or not very old males” chanting together. He said that “a quick look at the vowel acoustics of the clearer portions showed a pattern typical of what you would expect if the chant had been ‘Where’s …’, so there were clearly other things being said than ‘gas the Jews’.”
When Crikey asked again if there was any update to the investigation into the protest, NSW Police said nothing had changed from its update last week: that the agency had received a report on the audio examination of videos from the protest and now new evidence had been given to an independent expert for analysis. Police didn’t answer questions about whether police officers who were present had given statements about hearing the chants.
On Monday, The Daily Telegraph reported on the existence of four statutory declarations from people at the protest who claim they had heard “gas the Jews”, which have been given to police.
Deakin University senior lecturer Dr Matteo Vergani, who researches hate and extremism and runs the initiative Tackling Hate, said it was crucial to attempt to find verified accounts to combat the misinformation that’s exploded in response to the Israel-Hamas conflict.
“This is a good opportunity to talk about something broader, which is the amount of misinformation polluting news everywhere, and the fact that people use it to justify their polarised views,” he told Crikey on the phone.
Vergani said it was unreasonable to expect people to go to lengths to verify content that they’re shown in social media and the news: “We wish everyone had perfect digital literacy and time on their hands to do all the research. But they don’t have time to, you know, contact forensic experts.”
Dr Andre Oboler is CEO of the Online Hate Prevention Institute, which has observed a dramatic increase in the frequency and severity of anti-Semitism since the October 7 Hamas attack, including a 3,000% increase in the dehumanisation of Jewish people on social media. Oboler is also a member of the federal government’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
After footage was provided by Crikey, Oboler reiterated his call for a full investigation into the entire protest in an email: “An investigation into the anti-Semitic nature of the incident overall, and how such incidents of racist intimidation should be quickly stopped in the future, is far more important than securing a conviction of incitement to violence.”
“We must draw the line at incitement to hate. If we allow the promotion of hate, and draw the line only at incitement to violence, we have already lost.”
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