The Australian claims that a court has “rip[ped] away veil on jihadi preacher Wissam Haddad’s hateful rhetoric”. In fact, all that’s been exposed is the utter inability of the elite class to have anything remotely approaching an honest conversation when it comes to Islam.
From the police, to the court, to the mainstream media, the whole narrative has been the grimly familiar ritual of ‘Nothing to Do With Islam©’. When, in fact, it’s everything to do with Islam. Haddad’s hateful anti-Semitism is not some kind of aberration in the Islamic world: it’s the mainstream.
Data from the ADL shows that the most anti-Semitic region in the world is the Middle East and North Africa, where 76 per cent of respondents hold anti-Semitic views. Countries with the highest scores – where anti-Semitism is almost universal – include the West Bank and Gaza (97 per cent), Kuwait (97 per cent) and the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia (96 per cent).
To borrow a phrase from The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood (hardly a rabid right-winger), anti-Semitism is very Islamic. And Haddad’s comments were not wildly out of place in the Sydney Islamic community.
In November 2023, Haddad delivered a series of speeches at the centre that were video-recorded and uploaded to various online platforms. The speeches invoked disgraceful stereotypes that for centuries have been used to butcher, persecute and dehumanise the Jewish people.
These speeches came in the wake of the Hamas atrocity crimes in Israel on October 7 that themselves had been fuelled by much the same kind of rhetoric.
And just weeks after Sydney’s Muslim-dominated suburbs erupted in spontaneous celebrations on the night of the attacks. When thousands of Sydney Muslims stormed a vigil at the Sydney Opera House, chanting ‘Gas the Jews’.
No wonder, then, that Haddad felt entirely comfortable spouting vicious Jew-hatred to a clearly receptive audience.
And small wonder, too, that both the federal and state NSW Labor governments, who depend critically on the Muslim voters of Western Sydney, sat on their hands and did nothing. The same NSW police who made only one arrest on the night of the Opera House grotesquerie – a Jewish man, carrying an Israeli flag – steadfastly refused to apply the law to Haddad’s blatant racial vilification. It took a civil action by Jewish Australians to bring this scumbag to account.
Were officials really powerless? Parts of Haddad’s speeches were seen as inciting or threatening violence towards Jews, contrary to federal and state laws. But this was never put to the test. People in the Jewish community were not the only Australians wondering whether our country was going to hell in a handbasket. Rationalisations invented to excuse the anti-Semitism, or to try to redefine anti-Semitism into a negligible fringe phenomenon, only added to the moral and intellectual confusion.
Moral and intellectual confusion like this:
Haddad also contended that he was just articulating Islamic religious doctrine about the Jewish people and any law stopping him from doing so was invalid under section 116 of the Australian Constitution because it was a law for prohibiting the free exercise of religion. The court was having none of that argument either.
All of the expert evidence in the case, including from Haddad’s own expert on Islam, was that Islam did not justify the wholesale vilification of the Jewish people.
Bollocks, in a word. To anyone trying to argue that Haddad’s anti-Semitism is ‘un-Islamic’, I would refer them to, for instance, Koran 5:41, or Koran 5:60, which states that Jews are “the ones whom Allah has cursed, and who incurred His wrath”. Or Sahih al-Bukhari 4:54:524, which states that Jews “were cursed and changed into rats”. Or Sahih al-Bukhari, 4:56:791: “The Jews will fight with you, and you will be given victory over them so that a stone will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me; kill him!'”
In all, the Koran refers to Jews by the pejorative ‘yahud’ repeatedly. Even Muhammad’s dying words were ‘May Allah’s Curse be on the Jews and the Christians’. Indeed, the first sura of the Koran, which is repeated as the Islamic daily prayer, ends with a curse upon Jews.
Tell us again how Haddad’s Jew-hatred, then, is somehow ‘Nothing To Do With Islam©’.
