Pro-Palestine burger chain owner charged by police
A former organiser of Melbourne’s weekly pro-Palestine protests, Burgertory owner Hashem Tayeh, has been charged with four counts of using insulting words in public at a 2024 rally.
Burgertory boss Hashem Tayeh has been charged with using insulting words in public at a pro-Palestine rally in Melbourne CBD, marking possibly the first time comments considered political speech are the subject of a criminal charge under certain state laws.
Victoria Police on Friday confirmed Mr Tayeh had been charged under Section 17(1) of the state’s Summary Offences Act – which prohibits profane, indecent or obscene language – for saying “all Zionists are terrorists” at a rally in May last year.
The crime is punishable with two months’ prison for the first offence, three months for the second, and six months for three or more. Australian Lawyers Alliance spokesman Greg Barns SC said the offence was typically used “in circumstances where people insult each other using profane language”.
“I’ve never seen it used in a political context,” he said.
Mr Barns, who would not directly comment on the matter as it was before the courts, said, for example, people had been charged under the offence for swearing at police.
“It’s normally the person complaining is an individual, and not an entire group,” he said.
Mr Tayeh, who was once arrested but never charged for allegedly inciting hatred against Jews, was a leader of weekly pro-Palestine protests in Melbourne after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. He split from other organisers in January to shift his focus to “advocacy, rebuilding, and accountability” efforts, both locally and internationally.
Mr Tayeh has previously made clear his discontent with Victorian police, taking to social media to claim officers “refused to recognise the campaign of terror that’s been waged against my business, Burgertory, as the hate-fuelled violence that it is”. His comments followed the firebombing of one of his restaurants.
He claimed police also dismissed as “littering” the “sickening act of hatred” of a pig’s heart being left outside his home.
On Friday, he told Nine newspapers he would “fight these charges with everything I have”.
“I have never supported the harming or killing of men, women, and children – no matter their faith or background,” he said. “Standing against the loss of innocent lives is not just a political stance; it is a moral obligation.”
Following the charges, Mr Tayeh shared multiple messages of support on Instagram. “I stand with @hash.tayeh against the weaponisation of anti-Semitism to silence the legitimate criticism of Zionism, an ideology based on racism, terrorism and ethnic cleansing,” one user wrote.
“Smear campaign after smear campaign! Aggressively targeting our community and its leaders to label them as something they are not has to END,” another wrote.
Executive Council of the Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin said Zionism “is the Jewish civil rights movement that called for the creation of a Jewish state to put Jews on an equal footing to other nations”.
“It is supported on a basic level by all Jews, religious and secular, progressive and conservative, with the exception of a few ultra-orthodox sects that oppose a secular Jewish state and by the small number of Jews who have adopted the far-left’s hatred of Israel,” he said.
“To declare that all Zionists are terrorists is not only an attack on the notion of Jewish equality, it is an attack on virtually every Jew that supports it.”
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