A senior academic at Sydney’s most admired university is being investigated for defending a former colleague who wore a badge calling for ‘the curse on the Jews’ and for the deaths of both Israel and the United States.

Economics and politics lecturer, Tim Anderson, has defended former human rights tutor and current PhD student at the university, Jay Tharappel who was seen online wearing a badge with the slogan that Dr Anderson described as a "Yemeni (Ansarallah) badge". It bore the words: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam.”

On Twitter and Facebook, Dr Anderson called Mr Tharappel a “great friend of Syria”, a “Syrian solidarity activist […] under attack from Zionists” and “friends of Israel.”

The academic has caused controversy in the past. In 1990, he was convicted over the 1978 Hilton hotel bombing in Sydney but was acquitted the following year.

Last year, he voiced support for the Assad regime and described Syria’s chemical weapon attacks on its own people as “false flag” operations.

He has also made provocative comments about North Korea, expressing his “solidarity” with Kim Jong-Un’s US sanctions.

Similarly, Tharappel has made controversial statements in the past, such as that the flag of Hezbollah “will be raised over the Knesset”. Last April, he was under investigation by the university for describing an Armenian journalist as a “traitorous scum who desperately wants a second Armenian genocide.”  

CEO of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, Vic Alhadeff, told Australia’s Seven News that “curse the Jews is an openly bigoted, racist statement. The others are equally problematic.”

Last week, Dr Anderson published The Future of Palestine, describing Israel as an apartheid state and a “crime against humanity” that “must be dismantled”.