How Clementine Ford went from must-read feminist to inciting hatred against Israel
Clementine Ford was once a must-read for young feminists. Now the firebrand writer is inciting hatred against an entire nation.
For most of the 19 months since October 7, 2023, I considered it a matter of personal pride to screen out Clementine Ford’s scorched-earth ranting against Israel – a nation, in her telling, of “irredeemable, psychopathic, violent monsters”, and a signifier of every evil under the sun. Amid the eruption of Jew and Israel hate following the October 7 massacre and Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza, Ford has with mounting intensity accused the world’s only Jewish state of colonialism, imperialism and white supremacy – and even (the ultimate slander against a state created from the ashes of the Holocaust) Nazism, in which, she says, Israel has been engaged “for 76 years”.
But no, until recently I enforced a relative quiet from the social media noise generated by Ford and her fellows. Occasionally I’d hear about her propaganda channel on Instagram (I’m not on that platform, X being my sewer of choice). I’d hear about how the four-time author who made her name furiously denouncing “rape culture”, exhorting us to “believe women”, dismissed the systematic sexual violence against Israeli women on that fateful day, the gist of which Hamas proudly filmed and uploaded, as “wildly unverified accounts”.
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Confronted with footage of jeering, gun-toting men spitting on October 7 victim Shani Louk’s lifeless body, of hostage Naama Levy dragged away by the hair, her hands bound, ankles cut and the back of her pants soaked with blood, Ford, after a conspicuous silence, decided she would give not the female victims but the misogynist perpetrators the benefit of the doubt. The benefit of her humanity.
To the Jewish women who queried her departure from feminist principle – women she branded “Zios”, a new part of her lexicon meant as a derogatory term for Zionists (ie: the people supportive of the Jews’ right to a national homeland) – she retorted: “This one goes out to all the Zionist women who are FURIOUS that their bloodlust isn’t being supported. I DON’T CARE BABES. I don’t care that you felt betrayed or let down, and I especially don’t care that you want to have a big crybaby rant ... You’re pathetic, you disgust me, and I pity you for being so basic and gross that you think others should cheer on the murder of thousands just to make you feel better.”
Still: one can’t worry about every jihad apologist with a megaphone, right? And anyway, I figured, she’ll get herself cancelled soon enough. Back in February 2024, she helped disseminate leaked personal details of Australian “Zios” in a WhatsApp group, bringing death threats to families and the vandalising of a business. Surely no top-shelf publisher or taxpayer-funded institution would endorse someone who could generously be described as teetering on the edge of the abyss of Jew-hatred?
Then I watched her response to the Bankstown nurses scandal, in which she seemed to defend them. “Trust me, that’s nothing!” says Zara Cooper, creator of the Instagram parody page titled “Clammy Fraud”, where she also archives hundreds of Ford’s videos. I endured 19 reels (social media videos) where Ford expounds on Israel’s “genocide” based on a selection of cherrypicked reports from Israel’s left-leaning and vehemently anti-government Haaretz newspaper. The fact that this “terrorist ethnostate” and modern-day “Nazi” regime accommodates a free press clearly doesn’t strike her as odd.
“One last thing,” she says as the invective finally wraps up: “F..k Israel.”
This was the first time I heard her say, “F..k Israel.”
It happened in the same week in February this year that Israelis were turning out in their tens of thousands for the funeral procession of murdered kibbutz mother Shiri Bibas and her tiny red-headed children, Ariel, four, and Kfir, nine months. A defining image from October 7 was of the terrified Shiri gathering a blanket around her boys as Hamas terrorists herded them from their kibbutz in Israel’s south. Their coffins were returned after a lurid, triumphant ceremony in Gaza to which ordinary people had been encouraged to attend, with their children. According to the Israeli military, the Bibas brothers had been slaughtered with “bare hands”.
F..k Israel.
No, actually: that’s not “one last thing”. It’s everything.
Maybe, I started to wonder, Ford herself was a signifier. Of – what, exactly? The unravelling of third-wave feminism into psychosis? “I DON’T CARE BABES” – her response to pleas from Jewish feminists over the Hamas rapes – may as well have been the official stance of the UN’s agency for women: it took 53 days and intense campaigning from Jewish groups before UN Women condemned the October 7 atrocities. Or did she signify the moral decay of the intelligentsia? The political economy of social media?
Over the seven years she was a columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Ford was a must-read for me. Her chiselled, take-no-hostages critiques of men and the patriarchy delivered wickedly cathartic pleasure. But I reckon her truly memorable pieces were ones that veered off-message. A striking reflection on the dividing line between bad sex and coerced sex. A funny piece, written with genuine curiosity, on why women feel obliged to have sex with “nice” men to spare their feelings. An achingly beautiful meditation on the vulnerability of new motherhood.
She thundered off from Fairfax in 2019, revealing she had been disciplined over a tweet calling Prime Minister Scott Morrison a “f..king disgrace”. (She’s big on the expletive “f..king”.) I lost track of her after that, but others did not – her social media audience now at nearly a quarter of a million. That’s impressive because it’s tough out there, the market crowded and the premium on political purity high. An incendiary quip, later deleted, about the domestic burden on women during the pandemic in the nature of, “honestly, the corona virus isn’t killing men fast enough” cost her a modest writing grant, easily offset, one imagines, by the increased notoriety. But the “kill all men” schtick was bound to get stale over time.
So Ford subscribed to intersectionality, the only type of feminism that these days has official sanction. It’s best summed up as a rejection of “white feminism”. She shared platforms with feminists in hijab. She rallied for “trans women” (biological men) and evicted from her online orbit women deemed “TERFs” (a slur that stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist); asked last month by TV host Piers Morgan to define “a woman”, she landed on, “Someone who has at least at one point in her life felt scared of a man.”
In 2023, four weeks after October 7, she published her fourth book, I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage, with the tagline “A new story about an old lie”.
And thereafter Ford crafted new stories from old lies – about the Jewish people.
No serious person was demanding she “cheer on the murder of thousands” in Gaza, as she put it. No one serious would be on her case if she was simply expressing vehement opposition to a horrific war. The problem is the dust storm of falsehoods and distortions. That Israel is an embodiment of “white supremacy”: when more than half of Israeli Jews trace their heritage to the Middle East and North Africa, places now ethnically cleansed of Jews. That the state itself is an “illegal” product of European colonialism: a narrative that both ignores the fact that Jewish immigrants were refugees from European anti-Semitism and disavows the Jews’ ancestral ties to the land.
Otherwise, I hope this isn’t unfair, Ford lives on the un-ceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation and chooses not to go back from whence she came.
As is the case with many Israel-loathers, Ford’s lies grew darker as she descended deeper into conspiracy. She shared an infographic accusing Israel of training dogs to rape Palestinians. When in September the bodies of six Israeli hostages were found in tunnels in Gaza, having been shot at close range, she said: “I don’t for a second believe that Hamas executed those hostages.” This was a lie, Ford insisted, to “manufacture consent” for the IDF’s “genocide”.
The claim was at least sensational enough to make news. It would not be the first time, as her attacks on Jews escalated. Well, she doesn’t refer to us as “Jews”; after all, some-of-her best-friends and so on; coincidentally, the Jews she deems kosher also believe the world would be better off without Israel. (A topic for another day, but heretical Jews, even in the political sense, are an archetype of Jewish history.)
Those of us who support the continuing existence of Israel, we “Zionists”, are a species she’d like to eradicate, rhetorically speaking. “Zionist c..t” she flames detractors on social media, “grotesque little worm”. Monsters. Sadists. Ghouls. “Repugnant, brainwashed racists” who “flatter themselves that they’re the most moral people on Earth.” There are “not enough babies in the world who could be bombed” to satisfy Zionists’ ideological fervour.
It’s futile pointing out to the likes of Ford that their words bear echoes of the medieval calumny wherein arrogant, deceitful Jews drink the blood of Christian babies. It’s especially futile when blood libel against Israel is the preferred currency of the racket that is the international human rights order. Hence, the astonishing claim last month from the UN’s humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher that 14,000 babies would die in the next 48 hours unless aid reached Gaza. The UN walked back Fletcher’s statement following an outcry but the damage was done. Not 48 hours later, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot in Washington D.C.; the accused killer on his arrest shouting, “Free Palestine.”
Hardly surprising then that in Australia in 2025, daring to suggest biological sex is real will guarantee excommunication from polite society, whereas accusing Jews of being “enthusiastic supporters of a murderous regime that has been killing children for over 70 years” is not an instantaneous deal-breaker. Despite Ford’s doxxing of 600 Jewish creatives, her publisher stood by her, she would be part of the line-up at an International Women’s Day event at the Sydney Opera House (where queues to hear her speak snaked around the forecourt), Screen NSW awarded her more than $30,000 for a TV series, and the ABC still ran her columns. (She did lose a commercial radio gig.)
Meanwhile, her comrade-in-arms, academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, who insists Zionists “have no claim or right to cultural safety”, has at the time of writing had her $870,269 Commonwealth research grant frozen but only after a year of intense scrutiny in The Australian and after she bragged at a closed-door conference about bending research rules. Influencer Abbie Chatfield vowed she would never “platform a Zionist” on her podcast; rather than make her a pariah, in the lead-up to the federal election the Prime Minister granted her a 90-minute interview.
And so for Ford it was almost a matter of reaching for the same playbook when, after the killing of the two embassy staffers outside the Jewish Museum in D.C., she amplified social media posts minimising the significance of the crime compared to the “genocide” in Gaza and denying the act of terror was anti-Semitic. Asked to comment, she first unloaded on The Australian then said: “F..k Israel and f..k Zionism, for both would make the Nazis proud.”
Say you’ll never platform a Jew, say “f..k Jews”, in the manner of graffiti splashed around Jewish suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne, and the law may eventually come knocking. Say “f..k Israel”, on the other hand, and it’s mostly all good. “F..k Israel” is almost a meme. A week after Ford’s “f..k Israel”, Cold Chisel’s publicist Rina Ferris echoed the hashtag sentiment on her Instagram. In April, Irish band Kneecap projected the message above the stage during its performance at the Coachella music festival in California. And yet as a gesture of protest it’s highly unusual to, say, “f..k” a country. Do high-profile defenders of Ukraine sign off with “f..k Russia”? “F..k Putin,” perhaps.
“F..k Netanyahu”? Few would flinch; Israelis themselves voice the sentiment every day. “F..k Zionism”? Well technically it’s an ideology, so maybe.
F..k Israel.
To return to the Bibas family: Ford, who can so powerfully articulate the vulnerability of motherhood, expressed passing regret that the family had been taken hostage and then – perhaps you can guess the next bit – she endorsed the Hamas terrorists’ claim that they were killed not by them but in an Israeli air strike. Israel, she wrote, “has been using this family to generate hunger for revenge, and conceal their own role in their deaths”.
What else to expect from a nation of baby killers? So insatiable is Israel’s bloodlust that the deaths of its people’s own babies are seen as a convenient pretext to kill more Palestinian babies. As for Hamas’s heinous use of Palestinian babies as human shields, as propaganda fodder for its holy “resistance”, that is invisible to Ford because it has to be. Because, f..k Israel.
The words cast an entire nation as beneath contempt. They render half the world’s Jews subhuman. And what of the roughly one quarter of Israel’s population who aren’t Jewish?
For what is “Israel” other than the sum of its people? The young peaceniks raped and mutilated at the Nova festival, trade union leaders fostering Jewish-Palestinian solidarity, women living in households with violent men, the disabled and the mentally ill, the last of the Holocaust survivors whose ghastly memories resurfaced on October 7 in the image of a terrified Shiri Bibas clutching her babies as the Hamas killers herded them all away. Little Ariel and Kfir Bibas in their coffins: they too are “Israel”.
We know what Clementine Ford would say to them.