An award-winning Australian children’s author and illustrator who has won multiple awards and grants for his work justified the Bondi Hanukkah massacre and denied that those killed were innocent.
Matt Chun received the taxpayer-funded $42,452 Creative Australia Grant in May 2023 for his picture book Policing in Australia. He also won a Children’s Literature Fellowship and the Developing Illustrator Award at the Australian Picture Book Illustrator Awards, and has been shortlisted for multiple other awards.
However, on Thursday, Chun – whose real name is Matthew Jones – published an op-ed glorifying the murder of Jews at the Hanukkah Bondi massacre. The op-ed “We don’t mourn fascists” refers to Chabad as a "Zionist Jewish-supremacist organization” that holds “events to advance settler-colonization in Palestine amidst the ongoing extermination of Gaza.”
Chun justified the killing of slain Rabbi Eli Schlanger on account of him visiting the West Bank, fundraising for the IDF, and signing Gaza-bound missiles.
Chun disputed the massacre as being an "antisemitic attack" or an “innocent Hanukkah gathering,” saying that “Chabad is in fact a network of centers and institutions which actively, publicly, and extensively helps to facilitate the ongoing Zionist and Euro-American imperialist holocaust of Palestine.”
He said the reporting of the massacre was “written by Zionist lobbyists, Zionist politicians, Zionist police, and Zionist ‘witnesses,’ then quickly adopted, solidified, and uncritically amplified by the Australian Left.”
He also said that those killed were not innocent, and referred to them as “white, Jewish settlers.”
“Genocidal occupation entities cannot be reformed; they must be destroyed. Every inch of stolen land must be liberated. There was a time before Israel, America, Australia – and there will be a time after,” he concluded.
Chun previously praised Hamas
In a previous op-ed, Chun referred to October 7, 2023, as “a courageous act of revolutionary decolonization.”
Chun was one of the leaders of the large-scale doxing campaign against Jewish creatives in Australia in early 2024.
Many of the victims were members of a support group of 600 Jewish creatives, who suddenly found their details published online. A five-year-old boy was threatened, and several people lost their jobs.
Prior to this, Chun was involved in calling for boycotts on Jewish-owned businesses and online anti-Jewish and anti-Israel campaigning.