If the Jewish community was worried that opportunists would take advantage of the “fake terror” label attached to the anti-Semitic plot revealed by police this week, they didn’t have long to wait.
To no-one’s surprise, the NSW Greens charged out of the block on Wednesday, with chief attack dog Sue Higginson in full fury at budget estimates, declaring the Minns government had misrepresented the “hoax” to justify the “rushed” laws it had introduced to protect the Jewish community.
By the end of the day Higginson had declared the case was “not motivated by anti-Semitism” and that the community had been taken for a ride.
But the opportunity was handed to Ms Higginson and her ilk on a plate by NSW and Federal police, who have proffered a series of ever-more convoluted messages since the discovery of an explosives-laden caravan on the outskirts of Sydney in January.
Monday’s press conference, at which NSW and Federal police revealed the so-called “fabricated terror plot” and the arrest of 14 suspects, took the cake.
The plot, police claimed, had been designed to give an as-yet unnamed criminal kingpin “leverage” to use as a bartering tool to reduce their sentence or drop charges in return for information about the caravan. It sounds plausible on its own. A caravan loaded with Powergel and bearing the locations of Jewish targets was a gift just waiting to be unwrapped.
Except that no one has been charged over the caravan plot. The 14 people whose arrests were announced on Monday were all implicated in the string of arson and graffiti attacks that have terrified the Jewish community since November. No one can explain what leverage was supposed to have been gained by the mysterious Mr Big from paying a bunch of lowlifes to torch cars and paint Swastikas on walls.
Asked specifically what the motive could have been for the arson and graffiti attacks, as opposed to the caravan plot, NSW Deputy Police Commissioner David Hudson replied: “Exactly the same”. Except it wasn’t. Hudson had a completely different take on it.
“It was about causing chaos in the community … diverting people away from their day jobs to have them focus on matters that would allow them to engage in other criminal activity”, he said. Which isn’t at all about having valuable information to trade. And what of the still-at-large puppetmaster?
Ruling out the motivations of a suspect you haven’t yet questioned, much less caught, seems an unusual approach for investigators. It has given free rein to anyone with a want to downplay the level of anti-Semitism experienced by the Jewish community.
What about the attempt to set fire to the Newtown Synagogue in January, Ms Higginson asked Hudson. “Is it your understanding that there was any anti-Semitic intention behind those actual offences?”
Perhaps it was the absurdity of being asked to agree that there was no anti-Semitism in an arson attack on a Synagogue spray-painted with Nazi swastikas.
Or perhaps it finally dawned on Hudson that here was a moment to separate the clear motivation of the hired help from that of the unknown paymaster.
“The actual ideology behind the person that tasked them is still under investigation,” Hudson replied.
If only he’d stated the bleeding obvious two days earlier.
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