Jihadi preacher Wissam Haddad breached racial discrimination law

A court has ruled the western Sydney Islamist cleric breached the Racial Discrimination Act in a series of lectures and sermons that called Jews a ‘vile’ and ‘treacherous’ people.

Wissam Haddad leaves court on Tuesday. Picture: Nikki Short / NewsWire

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Muslim preacher Wissam Haddad is defiant in the face of a Federal Court ruling he knowingly breached racial hatred laws, upholding a complaint by the nation’s peak Jewish body that he broadcast anti-Semitic rhetoric to his congregation and online.

Judge Angus Stewart on Tuesday ruled that Mr Haddad had breached section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in a series of lectures and sermons asserting that Jews were “vile” and “treacherous” people made in the month after the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks.

Mr Haddad, who legally changed his first name to William more than 20 years ago but who is also known as Abu Ousayd, was not in court as Justice Stewart presented a summary of his judgment at 12.30pm. He arrived seven minutes after the verdict against him had been announced.

“I have found that the series of lectures titled ‘The Jews of Al Madina’ conveys disparaging imputations about Jewish people, and that in all the circumstances were reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate Jews in Australia,” Justice Stewart said.

“They make perverse generalisations against Jewish people as a group.

“Mr Haddad sought to justify the imputations on the basis that he was teaching tafsir, but the expert witnesses on Islamic theology from both sides agree that neither the Koran nor the Hadith teach that Jews have an inherent negative quality as a people.”

Mr Haddad or speakers at the Al Madina Dawah Centre in southwest Sydney have called Jewish people “descendants of pigs and monkeys”, recited parables about their killing, and said people should “spit” on Israel so its citizens “would drown”.

“Mr Haddad will maintain that his sermons – delivered in the context of religious instruction and based on scriptural references – were never intended to insult any group in Australia on the basis of their ethnic identity,” the cleric’s lawyer Elias Tabchouri said outside court on Tuesday.

“He maintains that he has the right to quote religious scripture, as all parties do, the court has found he has that right. Further to that, the court has found that simply criticising what the Israeli nation has done in Gaza is not anti-Semitic, and that position has been affirmed by the court. We’ll make no further comment.”

Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief Peter Wertheim said he would call Mr Haddad back to court for potential contempt should he breach the court orders against him, saying the outcome “vindicated” months of community action against anti-Semitism.

“When it became evident that the responsible authorities in Australia could not, or would not, act to protect vulnerable members of our community from hate-mongering, threats and violence, we decided that we had no alternative but to take action ourselves so as to defend the safety and honour of our community,” Mr Wertheim said outside court.

“That decision has been vindicated by the judgment that has just been handed down. It confirms that the days when Jewish communities and the Jewish people can be vilified and targeted, with impunity, are a thing of the past.

“This case was not about freedom of expression or religious freedom. It was about anti-Semitism and the abuse of those freedoms in order to promote anti-Semitism.

“If the 300 ancestry groups and 100 faith communities living in Australia today were all free to vilify one another in the way that Mr Haddad vilified the Jewish people, the door would be wide open to chronic racial and sectarian strife of the kind that has devastated other countries, and the peace and harmony we have generally enjoyed in Australia would be ruined for everyone.

“Common decency should dictate that free speech and freedom of religion do not include the right to racially vilify other people. Common decency should tell us that that is where to draw the line.”

He argued the verdict indicated current federal criminal anti-vilification laws were insufficient.

“The original proposals for prosecution were never tested. Those prosecutions were never brought,” he said. “So we don’t know whether stronger laws are needed, but if the authorities believe that those laws were not sufficient to prosecute in a case like this, or in the case of the Opera House steps and the chanting of ‘F the Jews’ and much worse, then clearly the laws are in need of reform.”

Justice Stewart upheld the argument of ECAJ lawyers that Mr Haddad’s speeches were the “racist project” of a self-proclaimed “masjid (mosque) shock jock” indiscriminately targeting those of Jewish faith and ethnicity. He ordered the speeches be removed from social media and Mr Haddad pay for the cost of proceedings.

Most notably he granted the ECAJ’s application for a muzzle order on Mr Haddad that would find him in contempt of court should he racially discriminate against Jewish Australians in future.

He ordered Mr Haddad not facilitate “words, sounds or images (being) communicated otherwise than in private, which attribute characteristics to Jewish people on the basis of their group membership and which convey any of the disparaging imputations identified as being conveyed by the lectures”.

Justice Stewart found criticism of Israel and Zionism was not inherently anti-Semitic.

“Impugned passages in the interview and the sermon say critical and disparaging things about the actions of Israel and in particular the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza and about Zionists, but … the ordinary, reasonable listener would not understand those things to be about Jewish people in general,” he said.

“That person would understand that not all Jews are Zionists, and that disparagement of Zionism constitutes disparagement of a philosophy or ideology and not a race or ethnic group. Also, political criticism of Israel, however inflammatory or adversarial, is not by its nature criticism of Jews in general.

“The conclusion that it is not anti-Semitic to criticise Israel is the corollary of the conclusion that to blame Jews for the actions of Israel is anti-Semitic; the one flows from the other.”

When The Australian revealed Mr Haddad’s allegedly anti-Semitic sermons in November 2023, NSW police and the Australian Federal Police quickly investigated. Their decision not to lay charges paved the way for civil action by the ECAJ.

Mr Haddad’s own barrister, Andrew Boe, conceded last month Mr Haddad may have been a “bad preacher” whose sermons were clumsily constructed.