Fashion designer Bianca Spender cancelled a live, in-person discussion at one of her stores in Sydney on Thursday after it emerged an artist she was hosting in conversation had posted a slew of bizarre anti-Israel content to Instagram in recent months.
Monica Rani Rudhar was scheduled to appear with Spender at the sold-out talk in Double Bay, but Spender called it off a few hours before the 6.30pm start time once images from Rudhar’s social media accounts came to her attention.
The worst of the posts were mostly crank theories that Rudhar reposted from other people’s accounts, including one that pushed a debunked claim that Israel was harvesting organs from dead Palestinians.
The claim was first published in a 2009 Guardian newspaper headline that the paper retracted the following day, and which Rudhar seemingly didn’t pressure-test with a Google search. “This shit is REAL!!” she wrote.
In a separate post, Rudhar re-upped the content of a Kuwaiti journalist that depicted an Israeli hostage kissing the forehead of his armed Hamas captor, a gesture carried out under duress and instruction from a Hamas cameraman on the day of the hostage’s release from Gaza.
“A single kiss shattered decades of propaganda,” read the accompanying caption, Rudhar – quite tragically – failing to grasp that the content itself was a screaming piece of Hamas propaganda.
The rest of the caption said: “They tell us these people had been plucked from the depths of hell … yet, here the hostages are kissing the very people we are taught to fear.”
A spokeswoman for Spender confirmed that Rudhar’s artworks had been removed from display in Spender’s store, which makes sense because Spender is apparently a supporter of the Jewish state, but she’s also the sister of teal MP Allegra Spender, whose seat of Wentworth has the highest concentration of Jewish voters in the country, and who really doesn’t need kertwangs of this kind ahead of an election.
And maybe it’s because an election is about to be called, but just last week Allegra abruptly decided to opt publicly for a defunding of Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, a full eight months after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and others had called for the same – that’s after they learned that its staff participated in the October 7 massacres and, in the case of at least one employee, held an Israeli hostage in their home.
“This event has nothing to do with Allegra Spender. We understand it is not even happening,” a spokesman for the political Spender told us.
Well, it certainly was happening until we – and others – asked questions about Rudhar’s involvement.
And it was scheduled to take place in the heart of Allegra’s seat, which is a heartland for support of Israel. And it was being hosted by her sister.
Crown’s new glory
David Tsai, the newly appointed chief executive of Crown Resorts, seems to like giving the impression that Crown no longer wants to make its money from gambling. Because that would obviously be stupid for a casino.
Crown’s vision, according to Tsai, is to make bales of money through “fantastic restaurants” and “shows and open bars and lounges”, which we presume, and hope, doesn’t involve celebrity steakhouses and Wayne Newton.
Tsai’s lament, however, in an interview with the Fin Review this week, was that his casinos are all tied up Shibaru-style in bundles of regulation that discourage injections of loot from his paymasters at Blackstone.
This red tape, he said, “stifles our ability to do what we really want to do, which is not really gaming – it’s to build fantastic restaurants and bring in shows and open bars and …”
Yes, you read that correctly – a casino that doesn’t want to make its money from gaming, a line as outrageous and believable as the acting on PornHub.
In his rush to bemoan these restrictive regulations, Tsai dubiously ignores the fact that they only exist because Crown — prior to its buyout by Blackstone — repeatedly attempted to embody the country’s worst corporate citizen, its behaviour competitive with the callousness of James Hardie and Wilson Parking.
Just last year the Federal Court slapped Crown with $450m in fines for noncompliance with anti-money-laundering and terrorism financing laws.
A year earlier it faced penalties of more than $100m for breaches of Victoria’s responsible gambling laws, and that was after former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein called Crown’s conduct “disgraceful”, “illegal”, “callous”, “dishonest”, “unethical”, “exploitative”, “appalling” and “alarming”, in findings delivered at the conclusion of his royal commission into the casino, where even the wayside issues that fell short of the hardcore illegality were still stunning for their impropriety.
To wit, Crown had bullied its regulator, fed it false, misleading information, frustrated its investigations, and generally helped to ruin the lives of problem gamblers while holding itself out as a paragon of a best-practice in solving the addiction problem.
Tsai can shrug and feign indifference to gaming as the lifeblood of his business, even though it accounted for nearly 70 per cent of Crown’s revenue in fiscal 2021, before it was sold to Blackstone.
But instead, he’s spinning a line that gambling is some sort of distraction from the gaudy resort-style Vegas buffets of entertainment that he really wants to do.
If he’s crazy enough to be telling the truth, he’ll need a lot more Elvis impersonators to make up the difference.
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