The University of Melbourne has decided to adopt the IHRA's biased "definition" of antisemitism as part of academic rules intended to prohibit antisemitism. This tends to be used to prohibit criticism of Israel's treatment of Arabs.

The IHRA criterion was designed for statistical studies — to look at a large corpus of statements and come up with figures such as the frequency of antisemitism is in that corpus. For that purpose, infrequent misclassification of edge cases is tolerable — it won't make the figures useless as long as those edge cases are rare in comparison to to real antisemitism. However, in a rule to be imposed on individuals and organizations, each misclassification is an injustice.

If the University or Melbourne goes ahead to develop criteria for recognizing prejudice against Muslims , I hope it will not refer to this prejudice as a "phobia". That is a fundamental conceptual error.