Australia lost this fight on the steps of the Sydney Opera House
The mob had been primed. The Opera House riot was inevitable. And what happened there was a green light for pro-Palestinian protesters everywhere.
I was once invited to address a group of imams gathered from around the country. The meeting was running behind time and I was told to be brief. I was.
I explained that the most recent census showed that Australia’s Muslim community had grown to 418,749. I pointed out that the same census had our Buddhist community at 528,977 believers. I suggested to the religious leaders assembled before me that they return to their flocks and, if nothing else, encourage them to make as few headlines in the next year as Australia’s Buddhists.
Perhaps they did. But it seems elements of Australia’s Muslim community didn’t listen. They still make a lot of news, often in hostile circumstances.
Perhaps that is understandable given some of Australia’s Muslims react sharply to what they perceive as attacks on their religion.
Along Sydney’s streets they loudly protested against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses being on sale in Australia. Elsewhere around the world, shops were bombed and people were killed in riotous demonstrations.
“In Islamic societies, people take religion more seriously,” Ahmad Shboul, a University of Sydney lecturer in Semitic studies, was quoted as saying at the time.
You will remember when dozens of angry supporters crowded around Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, the Egyptian imam of the Lakemba mosque in Sydney as NSW police booked him for traffic violations. Two people were arrested in the melee that followed.
In 2012, a YouTube video that mocked the prophet Mohammed so angered some of Sydney’s Muslims that a gathering in the city’s Hyde Park turned into a violent rampage.
Proving Shboul right, some of them carried confronting posters. One read: “Our dead are in paradise, your dead are in hell”, without making clear who “your dead” might be. Another read: “Shariah will dominate the world”. Distressingly, a boy of about three or four held up a placard stating “Behead all those who insult the prophet”, while being photographed by his mother. That image went around the world.
Some protesters threw stones and bottles at police, six of whom were injured. Among them, photographed arguing with police, were two men who would soon make even bigger headlines: Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Elomar. Not only would they go to fight for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, Sharrouf also was memorably there with a young boy – said to be his son – who was photographed holding the severed head of a Syrian government soldier.
So on October 9 last year, as protesters made clear they would mass around the Sydney Opera House because it was to be illuminated in the colours of the Israeli flag – following the attacks by Hamas savages in which 1200 people were raped, burned alive, blown up, shot and decapitated – Sydney authorities knew what to expect. Violence was almost guaranteed.
Police must have considered some residents of Australia’s biggest city to be in mortal danger from this mob and urged Jews not to attend. In doing so, the NSW police were conceding they could not guarantee the safety of all taxpayers who funded them.
That is extraordinary, as was the decision to approve the protest – particularly after a rally in Lakemba the night before at which Sydney religious leader Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun, in a celebratory mood, declared: “I’m smiling and I’m happy. I’m elated, it’s a day of courage, it’s a day of pride, it’s a day of victory. This is the day we’ve been waiting for.”
The mob had been primed. The Opera House riot was inevitable. And what happened there – or, rather, what did not – was a green light for pro-Palestinian protesters across the country and has led directly to the firebombing and vandalising of MPs’ offices, attacks on Jews, and the illegal occupation at the University of Melbourne – perhaps the national headquarters of Jew-hating in Australia – and also the University of Sydney.
The Kristallnacht-like scenes along the streets of Woollahra in Sydney’s eastern suburbs last week, in which a car was torched and three buildings and nine other cars were spray-painted with the words “F..k Israel”, was in clear response to the feeble actions of federal and state governments and their police forces in applying the law to curb this anti-Semitic insurrection.
Newly minted NSW Premier Chris Minns was still trying to be everybody’s friend last October and said it was an operational decision by his police force to allow the Opera House rabble free rein. It was reported that Yasmin Catley, his Minister for Police and Counter-Terrorism, considered caving in and reversing the decision to illuminate the Opera House because of the reaction she knew was coming.
The march in solidarity with Hamas started at the Sydney Town Hall and proceeded to the Opera House, where illegal flares were let off, Palestinian flags were flown, illegal fireworks were discharged, Israeli flags were burned and illegal hate-speech chants of “F..k the Jews” and “Gas the Jews” were heard. It was OK to bring an Israeli flag – if you planned to set fire to it. A Jewish man who brought one along was arrested.
After NSW police paid for a lengthy and expensive analysis of the audio and video from the night, conducted by the National Centre of Biometric Science – and one may ask why – its experts declared no one had uttered “Gas the Jews”; rather, they had shouted “Where’s the Jews”. That’s OK, then; put away the canisters of Zyklon-B.
Dozens should have been arrested and faced court on charges of religious or racial vilification. In NSW you can be fined $100,000 on conviction. In other states you can be jailed. Nobody was. It also might have been opportune to check the criminal rioters’ visa status.
It was Sydney’s night of shame. Others would follow.
Minns, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong all said the protesters’ behaviour was abhorrent and that there was no place for anti-Semitism in Australia. But that is not true: Jew-hating has found quite a home here and is well supported in some quarters. And that night we officially allowed it to flourish.
We don’t demand of premiers that they have a deep geopolitical understanding of such conflicts, but the incompetent naivety of the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister, with their early comments about urging the parties to show restraint and calling for a ceasefire, did not help. Hamas and Hezbollah had been raining rockets down on Israel for years without anyone demanding restraint or a ceasefire.
Wong, who is uniquely unsuited to her role, said she had spoken to her counterpart in Israel; she’d have been better off ringing Hamas boss Yahya Sinwar and asking him to free the hostages, stop the terror and call off his quirky strategy of ensuring as many Gaza civilians as possible were killed each day. Wong and Albanese were so out of touch they called, like ingenuous university students, for a two-state solution for the region.
But Palestinians don’t want that and their leaders, perversely, have rejected it for decades.
Australia’s internal enemies spotted our weakness immediately. A bewildered Albanese still cannot see that we are being subjected to a co-ordinated attack on the democracy we value and for which more than 100,000 Australians sacrificed their lives in the 20th century.
At one point, the Prime Minister said attacks on the offices of MPs do “nothing to advance” the course of democracy. That’s one way of seeing it. Others would view the attacks on MPs’ offices – Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns’s St Kilda office was firebombed – as more serious than that.
Also under fire were the electorate offices of Chris Bowen, Peter Khalil, Bill Shorten, the Jewish Mark Dreyfus, Lisa Chesters, Ged Kearney, Andrew Giles and Daniel Mulino. The Prime Minister’s Marrickville office was blockaded for months, but the activists gave it away soon after Australia agreed to reward Hamas by voting in favour of a UN resolution enabling more Palestinian participation there.
The attacks on the offices of those who maintain our democracy should have been seen for what they were – a national terror campaign to sway our nation’s thinking. A joint ASIO-Australian Federal Police squad should have been formed to pursue the criminals behind them.
Mark Le Grand, a Brisbane barrister and former federal deputy director of public prosecutions who was a member of the former National Crime Authority, agrees that the rot started at the Opera House when what should have been a moment of sacred reflection for the slain and kidnapped was turned into a jeering, hate-filled protest by barbarians shamefully shepherded to the venue by police.
“In the 13 months since, we have witnessed virtual carte blanche being given to the protesters to blockade our university campuses, our city streets (escorted by police), to attack Jewish businesses, to abuse Jewish citizens and to deface our public spaces including our war memorials,” he says.
He says nothing has been done to enforce our laws against hate and violence.
“Muslim preachers in western Sydney repeatedly call for the killing of the Jews on video recorded addresses and nothing is done. Our so-called racial vilification bodies sit idly by, refusing to discharge their statutory functions, monuments to hypocrisy and cowardice (if not blatant bigotry).”
Le Grand says the failure to enforce our laws “fosters contempt for them, emboldens their breach and risks a tragedy”. He, too, sees the threat to our democracy: “Functioning electorate offices are central to our democracy, they are a vital organ of the Australian parliament – the contact point between the citizen and his/her representative – yet these attacks continue with no co-ordinated federal response from the Albanese government.”
He says Australia’s National Counter-Terrorism Plan outlines the arrangements, governance and operational responsibilities of the Australian government and state and territory governments and agencies engaged in counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism. Under Australian law, a terrorist crime is an act, or threat to act, that meets the following criteria:
• It is done with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.
• It is done with the intention to intimidate the public, or coerce, or influence by intimidation, any government, and it causes one or more of the following.
• It causes death, serious harm or endangers the life of a person.
• There is serious damage to property.
• There is a serious risk to the health or safety of the public.
The guilty can face life imprisonment.
As Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin says, a society doesn’t just become violent and anti-Semitic. “It happens because there are people intent on making it so and the rest are too apathetic, too blind or too confused to stop it,” he tells Inquirer.
“This is what has been happening in our country for more than a year and, imperceptibly, for much longer. Eventually it will reach a tipping point when our country will be fundamentally changed and that will affect every Australian, not just Jewish Australians.”
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