It has taken 19 months but justice has finally caught up with Wissam Haddad and the Al Madina Dawah Centre in western Sydney.
In November 2023, Haddad delivered a series of speeches at the centre that were video-recorded and uploaded to various online platforms. The speeches invoked disgraceful stereotypes that for centuries have been used to butcher, persecute and dehumanise the Jewish people.
These speeches came in the wake of the Hamas atrocity crimes in Israel on October 7 that themselves had been fuelled by much the same kind of rhetoric. Most shocking, the mass murder, mutilation, rape and kidnapping of people in Israel resulted not in a wave of revulsion and condemnation of the perpetrators but in an unprecedented upsurge in global anti-Semitism including, in Australia, from sectors of society that posture as champions of human rights.
Haddad’s speeches were added into this combustible mix. The potential for an outbreak of violence against Australian Jews should have been obvious. The responsible authorities “investigated”, as they did countless other inflammatory incidents, but pronounced themselves powerless to do anything.
Were officials really powerless? Parts of Haddad’s speeches were seen as inciting or threatening violence towards Jews, contrary to federal and state laws. But this was never put to the test. People in the Jewish community were not the only Australians wondering whether our country was going to hell in a handbasket. Rationalisations invented to excuse the anti-Semitism, or to try to redefine anti-Semitism into a negligible fringe phenomenon, only added to the moral and intellectual confusion.
The judgment handed down by Federal Court judge Angus Stewart has stripped away those rationalisations one by one and prohibited Haddad from repeating his anti-Semitic statements in public. Haddad’s speeches have been found to have contravened the prohibition in the Racial Discrimination Act against offensive behaviour based on racial hatred.
The contention that this prohibition is in conflict with the implied freedom of political communication was given short shrift by the court.
People are free to engage in robust debate about international conflicts, whether their beliefs are true or false, informed or ignorant.
But that does not include the freedom to mobilise racism as a polemic tool to promote one’s views; to dehumanise and vilify entire communities or individuals on the basis of their racial, ethnic or ethno-religious identity. If we were free to vilify one another in the way Haddad vilified the Jewish people, the door would be wide open to chronic racial and sectarian strife of the kind that has devastated other countries, and the peace and harmony we generally have enjoyed here would be ruined for everyone.
Haddad also contended that he was just articulating Islamic religious doctrine about the Jewish people and any law stopping him from doing so was invalid under section 116 of the Australian Constitution because it was a law for prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The court was having none of that argument either.
All of the expert evidence in the case, including from Haddad’s own expert on Islam, was that Islam did not justify the wholesale vilification of the Jewish people. Even if that were not the case, there are 100 different faith communities in Australia today and on rare occasions some of their practices might come into conflict with Australian law.
For example, entering into polygamous marriages in Australia is a criminal offence, even though this practice is sanctioned by some religions. When a religious practice conflicts with Australian law the latter must prevail.
One of the reasons the rule of law still stands strong in Australia, and even stronger after Tuesday’s judgment, is that the same rules apply to everybody. We are all free to campaign to have the law changed if we wish, but we are not free to break the law.
Neither are we free to violate court orders. We expect Haddad to comply strictly with the orders that have now been made in this case.
Peter Wertheim is co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
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