‘Foreign actors’ involved in antisemitic attacks raise questions about who benefits

After months of social unrest due to unresolved antisemitic attacks in Australia, foreign interference has been blamed for a string of crimes that have transformed the secular and peaceful society.

The string of hateful attacks have disturbed the secular Australian community (Source: Twitter)

There have been startling police developments in regards to a string of antisemitic attacks carried throughout Sydney, with NSW police at Taskforce Pearl believing “foreign actors” paid local criminals to commit the string of crimes that included arson, property damage and racist graffiti. This revelation challenges long established narratives that the perpetrators may be antisemitic, and suggests a greater involvement of foreign agitators seeking to disrupt Australian social harmony and force drastic changes to liberties by rushing through laws that limit public freedoms.

The opaque nature of the AFP and local police investigation, the reticence to reveal the pie chart of foreign influence by threat level, has seen Australians have to largely guess what the nature of the foreign interference in these crimes could be. Long propped up by the press, the hawkish hard talkers in Canberra beat the drum towards Chinese espionage or Islamist extremism, but we find that Indian “nests of spies” and homegrown far right ethno-nationalists, break with the manufactured narratives. And the details surrounding the use of hired criminals through foreign funded sources, combining with the crimes committed, narrows the list of who could benefit from sowing such direct chaos.

Since the Israeli response to the attacks of October 7th, called a genocide by Amnesty International, deemed a criminal action by the ICJ and the ICC, and condemned by the majority of the worlds nations in the UN, there has been a sharp rise in antisemitic attacks in Australia. Adding to the Islamophobic attacks on places of worship and firebombings in business dwellings, the attacks have unsettled the secular Australian diaspora, and are largely uncharacteristic of moderate Australian society, causing alarm in the Jewish community, and wider Australia, including those involved in peaceful anti-war protests.

The spate of antisemitic attacks have been cycled through months of media, and daily press releases by politicians, eventuating in rushed legislation, and drastic changes that have raised concerns about the deprivation of civil freedoms. This is coinciding with a time that Australians from across the political aisle are becoming increasingly concerned about foreign influence in Australian politics. In the last week, it has been revealed that a majority of the crimes have more operational similarity with the criminal-for-hire tobacconist fires that plague our capital cities, than they do with an organised campaign of hate against the Jewish community. And with the discovery that foreign actors used a dark web method using encrypted technology to hire petty criminals to commit the seemingly linked crimes, and not enough information coming out from those who are responsible to protect us from foreign espionage and interference, there are concerns that our top law enforcement agencies, defence experts and intelligence committees may be incompetent at best.

Professor Greg Barton at the ANU says although Russia and Iran have the capability to organise criminal attacks, so too does Israeli intelligence, and any involvement in these attacks is concerning, as is the presence of any foreign interference. Regardless of the source of the foreign interference, Professor Barton said that he is “Worried of the general erosion of free speech”, particularly while the details of the crimes are still being investigated.

ASIO boss, Mike Burgess spoke rather frankly last year in August last year when he admitted there were “at least three of four” countries involved in active espionage within diaspora communities in Australia, that “Some of them would surprise you, and some of them are also our friends”. In an AUKUS climate that sees Australians concerned about Australian sovereign agency under the opaque agreement, after the Indian “nest of spies” fiasco revealed only months earlier, Burgess’ words were unconvincing, because he never got to revealing who some of those “friends” were. At the same time, Penny Wong and her Government were trying to send sheepish messages of “concern” to a friend for the conduct in Gaza, beset by problems emerging from it, with a history of foreign espionage and interference in Australia.

A clip has recently resurfaced of Gough Whitlam at a National Press Club in 1985, in which he starkly spoke the the political pressure and blackmail exercised on his government by “heroes in the Australian Jewish community” who pressed his government to support Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Whitlam resisted and expressed Australia's policy of neutrality in those disputes, a position which he endeavoured to maintain until his removal. He would be sacked less than two years later in one of the most controversial moments in Australian political history.

The annals mostly tell former Prime Minister Rudd's story as this: He was a popular PM that was unpopular in the party room, picked the wrong fight on the mining tax to his detriment, and was removed by Julia Gillard in a popular coup. But in 2010 there was something else happening to pressure Rudd behind the scenes. Leading up to the closest thing to a Shakespearean drama in modern Australian politics, there were fierce discussions occurring in the back channels regarding a diplomatic fiasco with the State of Israel.

In 2010, Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was assassinated by Israel intelligence forces in Dubai. There was a significant diplomatic incident after an investigation revealed that three forged or stolen Australian passports were used in the plot, and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith summoned the Israeli ambassador, Yuval Rotem, to his office in Canberra to express Australia's concerns about the use of Australian passports. This resulted in Smith expelling an Israeli diplomat over the passport fraud in late May 2010. Kevin Rudd was removed in late June 2010, barely three weeks later.

Kevin Rudd wrote in his memoirs about pressure from Zionist powerbrokers in the short time between the decision to send home the diplomat and the climax of the Neo-Shakespearean bogan version of Julia’s Julius Caesar, implying a veiled threat to his leadership in private meetings with a powerful power pro-Israel lobbyist who Rudd says told him, "Julia is looking very good in the public eye these days, Prime Minister… She’s a great friend of Israel". Gillard become the 27th Prime Minister of Australia three weeks later, and no Prime Minister since has challenged the state of Israel, or their powerful Zionist lobbyists in Australia in any significant way since.

Australians have had to endure slights against our national fabric for over a year, facing Zionists with foreign allegiances telling Australians who they are, the media drowning out the discourse with fear campaigning, and politicians and pundits politicians reactively legislating to impinge on personal freedoms. And our society has been anything but cohesive ever since. After all the accusations, and half cocked statements with consequences on public freedoms, to discover it is a foreign actor behind these disruptive attacks, has further convinced millions that outside forces have too much power in this country, and has angered those who are becoming increasingly aware of our captured political class covering for those outside forces, increasing the pool of the population fundamentally concerned about foreign influence over our domestic way of life.

The media platforms the decrees of Israeli officials knee deep in a genocide, and interviews pro-Israel groups breaking the remit of their “charity status” to denigrate the Government for not being supportive enough, while much of the blame for the chaotic “social cohesion” can be placed on the over-saturation of disproportionate representation for a small group of Zionists who support Israel’s abhorrent actions in Gaza and the West Bank and denigrate those against it as ‘antisemitic’, and falsely claim to represent the entirety of Jewish interests in the community, but do not accurately reflect the views of the wider Australian community

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Sky News rave on in proto-Orwellian lexicon about peace protesters being “pro-Hamas”, the pundits at Nine talk about moving on anti-genocide protesters for being
“intimidating” to Melbourne’s Jewish population, while Peter Dutton alludes to mandatory prison sentences for the ever-evolving categorisation of “antisemitic acts”, but all these authoritarian actions fly in the face of the reality of these investigations, and sheepish police, Premiers and politicians now allude to the influence of foreign actors in hiring these attackers, without backtracking on drastic measures that impinge on our freedoms.

For sixteen long months, as the carnage in Gaza has raged, the entire society of our country has been turned on its head for a section of a small community that essentially support a foreign state that is committing genocide on another, bringing heavy pressure to bear on our levers of power, manipulating our national discourse, and causing friction in our society against the public interest. If elements of the government, intelligence and police at all levels have been covering for unreasonable demands from entrenched foreign elites, maybe and including, downplaying a campaign to destabilise Australian society through politically motivated attacks carried out with the backing or influence of a foreign country, then this is one of the most significant events in recent times, and something that urgently needs to be explained to the Australian public in the national interest.