Overt Hezbollah backers in Australia are making the task of security agencies much easier

Protesters in Sydney on Sunday. Picture: AFP

Protesters waving Hezbollah flags and pictures of the terror leader Hassan Nasrallah in Australia’s major capitals have unwittingly done security agencies a favour.

If ASIO, the Australian Federal Police and state police agencies didn’t know who to monitor among the Lebanese diaspora, they do now.

Or at least who should be at the front of the queue.

For the best part of the past year, Lebanon has not been a significantly well represented cohort among Arab protesters angry that Israel had, quelle surprise, fought back against the October 7 atrocities.

Instead, the focus has been more heavily on Gaza. Now that dynamic has shifted, at least in part, towards Lebanon after the death of terrorist-in-chief Nasrallah, a Shia.

There are nearly 90,000 people born in Lebanon who live in Australia, according to the 2021 census, and nine out of 10 are naturalised. Nearly 250,000 people claim some ancestry.

Statistically, most Lebanese-born and their descendants live in NSW, followed by Victoria, and most are Muslim (45.1 per cent) and then Catholic (33.8 per cent).

This makes for sharply different world views.

For security agencies, the Lebanese-Australian community is complicated to monitor, in part because of the religious split but also because of the accumulating wealth of its people, which tends to lead to higher education outcomes.

There have been some spectacularly thick failed terrorists in Australia in the past couple of decades.

Photographs of weekend protests in Sydney and Melbourne tend to be somewhat difficult to read because it can hard to determine whether some of the Palestinian protesters have appropriated Nasrallah’s death for their own cause.

Security agencies should be all over who is protesting and why.

At times, some of the people at the protests can look uncannily like police.

Late 20 to 30-something mainly men in jeans, runners and T-shirts walking among people of Middle East appearance lacking the sense of purpose of the protest leaders. Modern-day Graham Greene characters.

Get the drift?

Part of the police strategy has not been to lock up inciters of violence for the simple reason that they can lead to the most dangerous of protesters. At least that’s how it looks.

The nation’s politicians are right to condemn the Hezbollah flag-wavers and Nasrallah photo-bearers but they will know full well that the agencies need to be alive to any terror risk.

When potential threats march in the open, that makes monitoring a whole lot easier.