by Geoff Vasil

Last week the Australian Government under Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese barred Israel’s former justice minister Ayelet Shaked.who was scheduled to speak at a conference hosted by the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, claiming she would incite unrest in the island country.

Asked a day later to comment on the ICC’s announcement of an international arrest warrant for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Galant, ALbaense’s foreign minister Penny Wong said Australia would honor the arrest warrant. Penny Wong has been publicly flirting with the idea of Australian recognition of a Palestinian state for over a year now.

Meanwhile Australian authorities made their first arrest, if you exclude Jewish detainees harassed by police for being Jewish or carrying Israeli flags in public, since October 7, 2023, of anyone involved in the brewing conflict between Hamas supporters and Australian Jews yesterday, handcuffing Mohommad Farhat, 20, as he waited to board a flight to Bali. Farhat is accused of a spree of vandalism in a Jewish area of Sydney during which he set at least one automobile on fire and spraypainted businesses and cars with the phrase “Fuk Israel” as well as “The PKK is coming,” a kind of mixed message. PKK is best known as the acronym for a Kurdish Communist party recognized as a terrorist organization in the EU and elsewhere.

Jewish leaders have decried the rise in anti-Semitism and street violence since Albanese’s Government failed to suppress pro-Hamas demonstrations starting on October 9 Eastern Australian time, before Israel invaded Gaza, when a group took over the steps of the Sydney Opera House and chanted “Gas the Jews.” Since then state police in Victoria and Sydney have harassed and detained Jews and Israel supporters rather than the boosters of terrorism who have taken over city streets.

Many of the pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah protests have been staged in front of synagogues in Sydney and Melbourne. Not for the first time, Australian Jews pushed back Monday at the Caulfield Shule synagogue in Melbourne targeted by protestors. Police separated a larger group of local Jews from the pro-Hamas people as the latter began to gather but never really materialized in greater force. The Israeli side pushed towards the pro-Hamas group waving Israeli flags and singing the Israeli national anthem, HaTikva. They chanted “Go home!” and local police appeared to detain briefly one male pro-Hamas Australian wearing a Palestinian scarf.

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