When the first arrests were made over the wave of threats and attacks against Jewish businesses, schools and homes, it was the godsend the legacy media and the anti-Israel movement had been hoping desperately for. Here was their ‘in’ to furiously deny the obvious – that the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement is not just inherently anti-Semitic, but driven by Islamic anti-Semitism in particular. ‘See!’ they screeched in triumphant relief. ‘It’s all just a criminal hoax.’
The fallacy in their argument is self-evident: there’s no reason it couldn’t be a criminal hoax and an anti-Semitic, Islam-driven terror attack at the same time. It’s the same when the legacy media protest that an Islamic terrorist ‘wasn’t motivated by Islam’, but mental illness. Again, there’s no reason why the two can’t go together.
And, as we now know, many of the anti-Semitic terror attacks on Jewish Australians were indeed driven by both criminality and anti-Semitism. The most notorious case, the Dural caravan plot, for instance, which was masterminded by a Muslim criminal trying to leverage a plea deal, but who also posted years of violently anti-Semitic material to social media.
We also now know that other attacks were directed by perhaps the global epicentre of Islamic anti-Semitism: Iran.
Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad has named the Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander behind the attacks on Jewish sites in Australia and other countries.
Sardar Ammar, a commander of the elite IRGC-Quds Force, leads a network of operatives called Unit 11,000 that has attacked Jewish and Israeli businesses and institutions around the world since October 7 2023.
Operating under Esmail Qaani, the commander of the Quds Force, Ammar’s network was behind the 2024 arson attacks on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne and Lewis’s Continental Kitchen, a kosher restaurant in Sydney. The attacks were carried out by criminals and members of organised crime gangs to keep Iran’s fingerprints off them, Mossad confirmed.
The evidence is so incontrovertible that even the Albanese government was wedged into expelling the Iranian ambassador, the first time an Australian government has done so since WWII. The government also designated the IRGC as a terrorist entity.
Australia is just the tip of Iran’s global export of anti-Semitic terrorism.
According to a statement by Mossad, Ammar commands around 11,000 operatives who carry out covert operations around the world, with the aim “to intimidate communities and create conditions that could lead to more serious attacks.”
The agency also linked Ammar to attacks in Greece against an Israeli-owned hotel and a synagogue in central Athens in July 2024, while in July 2025, German prosecutors said Danish police arrested a man suspected of gathering information on Jewish properties in Berlin “presumably in preparation for further intelligence activities in Germany, possibly including terrorist attacks on Jewish targets.”
Mossad said the network recruited non-Iranians and criminal organisations in order to hide Tehran’s involvement, its methods as “terror without Iranian fingerprints.”
Thankfully, in a way, Iran’s criminal catspaws are a decidedly thick lot, even for criminals.
The Times of Israel reports that the attacks were seen as amateurish, with the Sydney restaurant attackers twice targeting the wrong businesses before their arson attack on Lewis’s Continental Kitchen in Bondi.
Two men have been charged over the Adass Israel Synagogue attack. CCTV footage released this year showed masked men smashing their way into the property – estimated to be valued at about $20m – with one carrying a red jerry can. Flames then engulfed the building.
Other attacks on Australian soil are also suspected to have been orchestrated by Iran.
In August, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said the spy agency was investigating suspected Iranian involvement in “a number of other attacks”.
But so long as there’s the merest shred of deniability, however implausible, the legacy media and the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement will seize on its wriggle-room.
Anti-Semitic tyrants can always count on their useful idiots in the usual places, after all.
