Wet lettuce leaf ‘rebuke’ to Iran

If the Iranian embassy’s version of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade response to ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi’s controversial “Zionist plague” remarks is true, it reflects extremely poorly on the Albanese government’s claims to be trenchant in opposing anti-Semitism. In responding to The Australian, an embassy spokesman insists the dressing down Mr Sadeghi was expected to get after he posted online that the “Zionist plague” should be “wiped out of the holy lands of Palestine” by 2027 did not happen.

There was nothing approximating what is known in the world of diplomacy as a demarche, when offending diplomats are called in by a minister or a senior official of a host government to be rebuked or even told to leave the country.

Mr Sadeghi’s remarks could not have been more offensive. He referred to Israel as a “genocidal regime” and described Hamas’s slaughter of Jews on October 7 last year as an act of resistance “in fighting the criminal Zionist enemy”. According to the ambassador’s spokesman, he was called in by DFAT and the conversation was “in the vein of a range of bilateral, regional and international subject matters; including conversations we had on how to manage the current conditions and how both sides (are) doing their best to de-escalate the situation in order to have a sustained ceasefire in Gaza”. Really? Iran is the mastermind pulling the strings behind Hamas and Tehran’s Hezbollah and Houthi terrorist proxies, hellbent on achieving Mr Sadeghi’s dream of seeing Israel wiped out. But when he is called in by DFAT on behalf of the Albanese government, there’s no dressing down, no threat of expulsion, just a polite chat about regional and international matters? Either the embassy is not telling the truth or the Albanese government is even weaker than many believe when it comes to dealing with gross anti-Semitism. Its reported response has shades of the proverbial wet lettuce leaf about it.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham is right to question if the government asked for the offensive online content to be deleted. That the offensive remarks remain on the ambassador’s social media platform demonstrates his contempt for the legitimate concerns of many Australians. The embassy claim that the encounter was more like a polite chat than a condemnation makes it more critical the government explains how it is holding the ambassador to account.