On a recent visit to Israel, Australian broadcaster Erin Molan saw two Israeli soldiers stop outside a mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City. One put his hand on the other’s shoulder, took his boots off and walked inside to pray. The Jewish soldier, who wore a kippah, held his colleague’s boots until the other came out, again leaned on the Jewish soldier’s shoulder and put his boots back on. They appeared to resume their conversation as they walked away.
“There is your ‘apartheid state,’” Molan told JNS. “What an incredible image of these two soldiers. That is just mind-blowing.”
Near Israel’s northern border, Molan saw another mosque beside a store selling women’s lingerie. “I thought, that’s quite ironic, isn’t it?” she said. “There you go, only in Israel.”
An even bigger surprise for Molan, 42, who was born in Canberra—Australia’s capital—was hearing a group of 20 or so tourists speaking Indonesian at the Western Wall. Having been raised in Jakarta, where her father was an army attaché at the Australian embassy, she recognized some of the words they were saying.
“There are people speaking Indonesian at the Western Wall, during the conflict?” she told JNS. “It was crazy.” (Of some 280 million people in Indonesia, about 87% identify as Muslim.)
As the tourists took photos of one another, Molan asked if they were scared. “No, no, not at all,” they told her. “This place is beautiful.”
Molan, whose monologues often reveal hypocrisies of the political far left, is torn when people thank her, as a non-Jew, for being an Israeli ally.
“I’m deeply ashamed that I should be thanked for just telling the truth and seeing it for what it is,” she told JNS. “But no, I appreciate it very much.”
Responding to a social media post from Elon Musk, the White House adviser who wrote in February, “Anyone want to create a hard-hitting show on X called 69 Minutes? I will actually fund it,” Molan launched a show by the same name. The former Sky News Australia presenter wrote that the first episode of her new show attracted more than 10 million views on X.
Molan will deliver keynote addresses next week in Toronto (March 16), Montreal (March 17) and Vancouver (March 19) at events hosted by Tafsik, a Jewish civil rights group that counters Jew-hatred in Canada and worldwide.
Seeing the raw footage of videos that Hamas filmed amid atrocities done in Jewish communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, during her trip to the Jewish state made Molan grasp “how depraved they were and how evil they were.”
“I had no idea how bad it was,” she said. “I think that will never leave my mind in terms of really painting a picture of the scope of evil that we’re dealing with there.”
The Israeli mentality broadly, and the lack of desire for retribution against Palestinians in particular, impressed her. She noted that Jews chanted “bring them home” at rallies, while pro-Hamas demonstrations centered on “death to Israel” chants.
“If that doesn’t tell you so much about the two groups of people then I don’t know what does,” she told JNS. She added that the deaths of Palestinian children are “a genuine tragedy and a heartbreak,” every single one of which “lays at the feet of Hamas.”
“You’ll never convince me that Israel does not have a right to defend their people, and to eliminate a threat that promises very publicly to annihilate them over and over and over again,” she said.
‘Chief anchor’
The journalistic seeds were planted at age 8 for Molan, who told JNS that she “forced” her three siblings to create news reports to send to their grandparents.
“I would always be chief anchor,” she recounted. “I always loved communicating, loved writing, loved talking. I think that was an early indication of where I would go.”
At 21, she answered a newspaper advertisement seeking a presenter. She felt “pretty hopeless” at the audition and didn’t get a callback, but she emailed them frequently asking for a big break. Six months later, the station told her that if she’d stop haranguing the producers, they’d give her a two-minute segment on a food show.
“That was my first taste of perseverance paying off, and once I got that job, I then became the hardest-working, most committed, dedicated worker,” she told JNS.
Molan worked as a reporter and presenter for WIN Television and later for Nine News Sydney reporting on sports.
“When I started in sport, there were a lot of people who would say that I was making an incredible difference for women because I was showing that women could host these shows,” she said. “I took that very seriously, and it was such a privilege to feel like I was helping to break glass ceilings.”
But over time, she told JNS, it became tiresome to “talk about some bloke’s groin that he just pulled in a tackle.” She found herself talking to her father—the late Liberal Australian senator Jim Molan—for hours on the phone during the evening about politics and current affairs.
She decided that was a sign that reporting on sports wasn’t so fulfilling. She joined Sky News Australia in December 2021 as a primetime contributor, when she “never felt more professionally fulfilled,” she told JNS. “I’ve never loved anything more.”
After Oct. 7, she regularly displayed her staunch support for Israel on Sky News and addressed rising Jew-hatred globally and calls for jihad.
She credits her father—her role model—with giving her the moral courage necessary to stand up for her beliefs.
“He was the most courageous person in the world,” she said. “He always lived his life without any form of compromise on his integrity.”
Maj. General Andrew James “Jim” Molan fought in Iraq for a year with the coalition forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004, before entering politics.
She asked him once how the Allies could fight an enemy that didn’t follow the rules of war. “If we’re not fighting for the rules of law and the rules of war, then what are we fighting for?” he told her. “We can’t lower ourselves to their level.” (The late senator also said, during a 2015 tour of Israel, that the Israeli military takes “impressive” measures to avoid civilian casualties.)
Molan told JNS that she is also inspired by her mother Anne, who met her father when they were 17 and who cared for the latter “so bravely” when he lost his life to cancer in January 2023.
“I’ve got two parents who have just shown me by example what it is to be brave and courageous,” she told JNS.
“I genuinely feel that I am making a difference, and it’s not from an egotistical perspective,” she said. “What I am trying to do is not convince people to think like I do but to try to show them what is happening from my perspective, and open their eyes a little bit to what I believe is a lot of propaganda and a lot of agenda-driven pieces out there.”