Role of crime in anti-Semitic attacks is a complicating factor, not a cleansing one
Politics are at play in the story of a bomb that wasn’t a bomb and anti-Semitism that apparently wasn’t about Jew-hatred.
What about the list of Jewish targets found with the explosives? That was a diversion designed to build a sense of “chaos, threat and angst” in the community. The police were “distracted from their normal job”, which is what the criminals wanted.
A string of ostensibly anti-Semitic acts in Sydney since October 2024 – arson attacks on a preschool, a Jewish bakery, a kitchen, a synagogue and numerous anti-Jewish graffiti attacks – these were all masterminded by organised crime. It’s claimed there was no ideological motive at play.
Police suspect that an Australian criminal living overseas was seeking to create a bargaining chip to negotiate a sentence reduction with police in return for what is now known to be fake information.
The Australian reported on Friday that Sydney businessman Sayit Erhan Akca was allegedly the plot mastermind. He is said to have left the country while on bail after being charged with importing “a commercial quantity of drugs”.
Both the Australian Federal Police and the NSW Police Force knew the basics of this hoax almost from the moment the caravan was found following a tip-off on January 19. While “wanting to come out as early as we can … to provide comfort to the Jewish community”, it was not until Monday, March 10, that the AFP and NSW police felt their investigation had reached a point where they could make this information public.
Fortunately, the federal government had been “kept up to date” by the AFP, and so it was that Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke quickly hit the airwaves on Tuesday to claim “Peter Dutton kept providing the exact lines and the exact narrative that organised crime was wanting to be out there”. Burke was not going to “discount in any way, shape or form the lived experience of people experiencing anti-Semitism”, but he was relieved “now that we know what it is, then, you know, at least that is not from a deep-seated hatred within the Australian community”.
This is a complicated story in which I see four layers of competing politics, personality and interests at play. These need unpicking to understand what is really going on with the bomb that was not a bomb and the anti-Semitism that was not about Jew-hatred.
First there is federal Labor’s political management of the caravan hoax and anti-Semitism more broadly. As late as January 30, 11 days after the caravan was found, Anthony Albanese described the incident on KIIS FM as “a horrific incident. Quite clearly this is aimed at terror, aimed at causing harm, but also aimed at spreading fear in the community.”
By February 6, Albanese was refusing to say when he was first advised about the caravan being found because doing so would mean “resources should be diverted, that the AFP and intelligence agencies should be engaged in a political process rather than doing their job”.
It seemed that NSW police briefed Premier Chris Minns earlier without advising their Canberra counterparts. The Prime Minister was briefed later than Minns, but by February 19 Albanese was saying “all is not what it seems from the first reporting of (the caravan). But the police have to be allowed to do their job. We know that there are criminal elements have been involved in some of these anti-Semitic attacks.” As of Wednesday, Albanese said: “It was a hoax, and the police have done a thorough and full investigation. They gave full briefings in appropriate forums, and briefings were available to others who chose not to receive them.”
Since early February Albanese was aware the police viewed the caravan as a con job – not a genuine bomb threat. A political decision was taken not to put that information to the opposition and to Minns.
Both Albanese and Burke have blamed the federal Opposition Leader for not seeking to be briefed. Dutton rejects this.
In effect, Labor is playing a political game. Governments will always know more and know it earlier than oppositions. If Labor had specific information, why not, in the interests of public safety, pass that to Dutton?
Albanese said on Wednesday “while it was a hoax and the motivation was about criminal activities and not related to those issues, the fear that it created was very real. And that is absolutely understandable, that people felt that fear.”
The government’s failure to handle this information more responsibly should be condemned. I have never seen a government deliberately withhold such a salient fact from an opposition on a domestic security issue. Between Albanese and Burke’s comments, a picture emerges of Labor using the fears of Australian Jews as way to politically manipulate Dutton’s comments.
The second layer in this story is the obviously frosty relationship between police forces. The media conference on Monday between the two deputy commissioners, Krissy Barrett from the AFP and David Hudson of the NSW Police Force, was an uncomfortable show, almost a clash of two policing cultures.
Barrett is in her early 40s, with a master’s degree, an overseas deployment to Solomon Islands and a string of “first female” roles with the AFP including heading the national security command.
Hudson is in his early 60s. According to a Daily Telegraph profile of him in 2013, he skipped university to join the police at 18. He “cut his teeth in local area policing and spent most of his career there before moving to a senior position in State Crime Command, which manages all the crime squads, such as homicide, sex crimes and gangs, where he later became boss.”
There were obvious tensions. It appears that the AFP had not handed NSW police information relating to the overseas source who allegedly manipulated police into pursuing an inquiry based on anti-Semitism.
Hudson observed on the foreign dimension that “there are some things still unknown to NSW police that we will be further exploring”. At one point he couldn’t avoid rolling his eyes to the heavens in what seems to have been a frustrating experience. On several occasions Hudson commented to the effect that the anti-Semitic hoax was “distracting them from their normal job”.
Remember that the NSW Police Force was the entity that used extraordinary “forensic analysis” to “prove” that chants at the Sydney Opera House in October 2023 said “where’s the Jews” rather than “Gas the Jews”.
Information management seems to have been at the core of police co-ordination problems.
At no stage has there been public clarity around precisely the type of co-ordination taking place between police services, ASIO and other agencies. I took the media conference to imply that the NSW Police Force had won a tussle of sorts to take command of all agencies doing investigative work about the caravan and related crimes.
It may not matter if there is no public clarity about these processes, but it is essential that governments know what is going on. Albanese has stressed since January that his approach has been to “back our security agencies, back the Australian Federal Police and allow them to do their job”.
In practice, that’s not enough. The Prime Minister and ministers sitting in the national security committee of cabinet drive the ship. They shouldn’t interfere in police processes but they can push priorities, set timelines, demand that information is shared, assure that public concerns are addressed.
The absence of engaged political steering is a concern. Burke said on Tuesday: “We allow the (police) operations to be able to determine what goes public at different points.”
That amounts to a failure of political leadership to drive better outcomes from officials. And in giving the police this latitude, note how politically convenient that became for Albanese and Burke. Did the police really think that through?
There are, additionally, many gaps in the police story yet to be properly filled. If these anti-Semitic incidents in Sydney were part of an organised crime plot to allow an individual to bargain for a lesser jail sentence, how is it that this person is overseas and apparently at liberty?
Moreover, how can the police be certain that anti-Semitism wasn’t a factor? Why are they so confident that organised criminal kingpins aren’t anti-Jewish? There appears to be a strong Middle East criminal element in Australia’s criminal motorcycle gangs.
And why has it taken so long to bring this analysis into the public eye? It is close to two months since the caravan was tipped off to police, who apparently knew from the get-go it was a hoax. Was there no faster way to bring this information to the Jewish community?
And how reassuring is it really to know that your business, school, synagogue or car was attacked not by an anti-Semite but by a thug hired by an international organised crime cartel, intent on attacking Jews to confuse and distract the police?
The third layer in this story is that of organised crime, which somehow is presented as being a more appropriate focus of police resources than Jewish people’s security. Here is a worrying observation from the AFP’s Barrett: “What is becoming increasingly concerning is that crime as a service has existed for a very long time, but we are starting to see it very much intersecting with national security.”
“Crime as a service” is when big thugs pay smaller thugs to do their dirty work.
The AFP estimates that serious and organised crime costs Australia $60bn annually, that 70 per cent of this crime has overseas links and is “often associated with other crimes such as terrorism”.
The AFP acknowledges a connection between terrorism and anti-Semitism on its website – just not, it would seem, in relation to the Dural caravan. In any event, if there is a growing overlap between organised crime and national security, why isn’t this being addressed by the federal government with a sharper policy focus?
My concern here is that we have seen a breakdown in the functioning of the Department of Home Affairs with key operational agencies, ASIO and the AFP. The national security committee of cabinet is the policy shop that draws these agencies together into a coherent whole.
If the AFP thinks there is a dangerous new trend linking organised crime and national security, that means some serious government attention is needed.
The Council of Australian Governments last agreed to a National Strategy to Fight Transnational, Serious and Organised Crime on December 12, 2018. This strategy clearly needs to be updated.
Finally, the fourth layer in this story is the position of Australian Jews. The way the Dural caravan “hoax” has been handled risks people drawing the wrong conclusion that anti-Semitism isn’t as big a problem as many have claimed.
Albanese said last Wednesday “the fact that it was a hoax does not mean that it didn’t create fear for the Jewish community”.
Note, though, the undertone that a created fear is not a fear based in reality, and Burke’s assessment on ABC Radio National on Tuesday that the hoax “will take a bit of processing, but it doesn’t undo the fear and the concern that people have”.
It seems the government’s position is subtly shifting from a concern about anti-Semitism to a concern about a Jewish fear of anti-Semitism.
But wait, Deputy Commissioner Hudson also pointed to “an escalation of anti-Semitism in the community” and to anti-Semitic attacks “of a lower nature” not linked to the caravan and more recent arrests. Anti-Semitism in Victoria remains a significant problem and has not (not yet anyway) been attributed to bias-free organised crime cartels.
It is astonishing how quickly some people have concluded that crime supersedes or excuses anti-Semitism. The reality is that crime and anti-Semitism have always worked together. Using anti-Semitism to enable crime – surely what has allegedly happened here – amplifies rather than excuses the problem.
Is the Albanese government trying to define away an uncomfortable political problem? At the level of politics, police co-operation and national security co-ordination the Dural caravan hoax has been handled in an appallingly amateurish way.
The incident points to serious failures of strategic policy thinking and management. The rot starts with Albanese’s lazy management of the national security committee of cabinet.
Based on what we publicly know it’s too soon to conclude that many incidents in Sydney that looked anti-Semitic were not in reality and effect, anti-Semitic. Organised crime is a complicating factor, not a cleansing one.
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