In 1979, he was convicted and imprisoned for an alleged Ananda Marga conspiracy to murder a National Front leader Robert Cameron,[3] but was pardoned in 1985 after an inquiry and awarded compensation.
[4] In a linked case, in 1990 he was convicted of ordering the 1978 Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing and sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment, but was acquitted on appeal in 1991.
In 1990, Anderson was convicted for three counts of murder for planning the Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing, for which Evan Pederick had been jailed the previous year.
[10] In directing an acquittal NSW Chief Justice Murray Gleeson said:[11][12][13]The trial of the appellant miscarried principally because of an error which resulted in large part from the failure of the prosecuting authorities adequately to check aspects of the Jayewardene theory.
[a] This was compounded by what I regard as an inappropriate and unfair attempt by the Crown to persuade the jury to draw inferences of fact, and accept argumentative suggestions, that were not properly open on the evidence.
[22] After The Australian Jewish News published an article on the issue, Anderson wrote to the newspaper saying that he did not support the expressions that appeared on the jacket including "Death to Israel".
[24] Anderson was suspended from his University of Sydney Senior Lecturer role in December 2018 for showing students material including an image of a Nazi swastika superimposed over the Israeli flag.
[49][51][52] In September 2017, he travelled with controversial Canadian activist Eva Bartlett to Pyongyang and pledged solidarity with the North Korean people against alleged aggression from the West.
[53] He also attracted controversy in April 2017 for using a series of Anzac Day social media posts to allege the Australian air force was committing murder in Syria.
[48] In a 2008 entry published in e-journal The National Forum, Anderson said that Wikipedia has a "US-centric bias" on what sources the encyclopedia considers reliable and on what edits its administrators make.
[54] In academic writing, Anderson stresses the principle of self-determination of peoples, in international law and the twin covenants of human rights.
[56][non-primary source needed] The Spectator Australia described the Centre for Research on Globalization as "a book club gathering for academic crackpots and conspiracy theorists".