Neo-Nazi sinister security threat

The nine months since Hamas’s brutal terrorist attacks in Israel in which 1200 Jews died and 250 were abducted on October 7 has seen an alarming rise in anti-Semitism. Radical Islamists celebrating in Sydney’s west, the Sydney Opera House protest, vile graffiti plastered on a Jewish school and harassment of Jewish students on university campuses have been appalling.

Another sinister brand of anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head, Alexi Demetriadi wrote in Tuesday’s paper, with emboldened neo-Nazi groups gaining thousands of new followers. The social media following of Joel Davis, whose anti-Semitic vitriol is extreme, has skyrocketed since October 7. His podcast with fellow extremist Blair Cottrell surged from 297 followers before October 7 to about 3300. Followers of Davis’s X account have doubled to more than 25,000.

On April 20, Hitler’s 135th birthday, neo-Nazis gathered in four states. In Victoria they met around framed photographs of Hitler and cut a swastika cake. “We will never let his sacrifice be in vain,” group leader Thomas Sewell, who led a neo-Nazi rally in Sydney on Australia Day, wrote of the event. “Hail, Hitler!”

The trend, fostered on social media, underlines why ASIO has had right-wing extremists, such as neo-Nazis and white supremacists, in its sights for decades. In May, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said neo-Nazis remained a “significant threat in the terrorism landscape” and they were recruiting. As extremism expert Josh Roose said, anti-Semitism had gone full circle between the far left and right. “The conspiratorial elements of the far left can be seen in the same anti-Semitic tropes on the far right,” he said. That is an ongoing, serious challenge for security services.