Did you hear the one about Australian children’s author Matt Chun, who f*cked around?
A major Australian bookstore chain has dumped taxpayer-funded anti-Israel children’s author Matt Chun from its books after an astonishing tirade in which he attacked the “innocence” of the victims of the Bondi terror attack.
Dymocks CEO David Allen confirmed to Sky News that Chun’s books had been removed from the bookstores and the chain’s website following customer concerns over a newsletter article the artist had published on New Year’s Day headlined “We don’t mourn fascists”.
Mr Allen said the works had been removed as a result of Chun’s response to the attack.
“The Bondi tragedy is heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking, and something that should never have happened, and as we communicated, ‘we are constantly reviewing our offering to ensure our Brand is representing the expectations of our customers,’” Mr Allen told Sky News.
“We are doing our best to stay alert to the connections that any literature has had to this terrible tragedy and to respond accordingly, and the steps we have taken with Matt Chun or any other sensitive literature is as a result of this.”
A complaint raised with Dymocks, obtained by Sky News, shows a member of the public raising the January 1 article by Chun as having “the potential to cause significant reputational harm to your organisation”.
“This piece is quite frankly disgustingly antisemitic, dehumanises the victims, inflammatory, and cruel to the victims of the tragedy where Mr Chunn (sic) essentially villainises the victims of the shooting (including the 10-year-old child and Holocaust survivor) as deserving of death for celebrating their religious beliefs,” the complainant writes.
“Mr Chunn (sic) continuously frames the victims as responsible for their own passing, asserting that they are undeserving of public empathy or mourning because they attended an event organised by Chabad, an organisation which has political and religious views that differ from his own.
“For myself and many others, the fact that [he] continues to be commercially supported through the sale of children’s books in mainstream retail spaces is deeply disturbing. Children’s authors, in particular, occupy positions of public trust. Their work is often associated with education, empathy, and moral development. The contrast between that role and the rhetoric displayed in this article is stark and concerning.”
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In his January 1 piece, Chun described the Chanukah celebration targeted in the December 14 attack as “an event hosted by the Zionist Jewish-supremacist organisation” the Chabad of Bondi.
He smears the first victim identified in the massacre, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, as a “Zionist zealot” and denigrates those who “impulsively mourned the loss of ‘innocent lives’”.
“Whiteness, Jewishness, and the backdrop of Bondi Beach were enough to bestow every person killed with default innocence and virtue,” Chun writes.
“This played directly into the hands of Zionists and their calculated media. As a result, few people would have known that the targeted event was the broad-daylight celebration of a violent supremacist organisation deeply complicit in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.”
Sky News revealed earlier this month that NSW Police were investigating Chun, whose real name is Matthew Jones, over the publications.
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Chun received a $42,452 federal grant in May 2023 to publish a children’s book on Australian policing, along with a collaborator, and an $8500 grant in 2017 to support participation in an international residency at a Taiwan studio.
Creative Australia denounced Chun’s comments as “offensive” and “creat(ing) further division”, a spokeswoman saying at the time the federal agency was seeking legal counsel about what steps it can take including rescinding the more recent grant, although it would depend on action taken by law enforcement agencies.
While I am happy the Dymocks CEO withdrew Chun’s books and Creative Australia is looking into rescinding his grant, I am still left wondering “What took them so long?”
so it’s not like the idea of him expressing his comfort with the idea of dead Jews is a revelation.
Which brings us to the only real mystery left here. Not why Matt Chun said what he said – he’s been telling us who he is for a while now – but why institutions that pride themselves on “values” needed a pile of Jewish corpses and public outrage before deciding this was a bridge too far.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
