The shocking bloodshed in Bondi was the easily foreseeable end result of two years of failing to push back against escalating anti-Semitism. Jewish-Australians are right to boo Labor politicians who turn up for photo-ops at Bondi memorials. Especially Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke. It was supposed to be his job, after all, to respond to prospective terror threats.
Yet, in the face of a clear terrorist incitement to anti-Semitic violence, Burke did nothing. For years, the Al Madina Dawah Centre in Sydney has been exposed as a nest of particularly poisonous anti-Semitic hate preachers. Yet, incredibly, authorities declared, ‘nothing to see here’.
Except that, as we see now, there was very much something dark and dangerous to see.
Bondi terror suspect Naveed Akram had links to Islamic State through connections he made as a follower of radical jihadist preacher Wissam Haddad, notorious for indoctrinating young people through his Bankstown prayer space, the Al Madina Dawah Centre.
The then-17-year-old Akram, who was known to ASIO but apparently not closely monitored, can be seen in videos in 2019 proselytising and handing out pamphlets for the Street Dawah Movement associated with Haddad and other extremists.
Pulling the strings of the murderer of 16 Jewish Australians was notorious hate-preacher Wissam Hassad.
Wissam Haddad was earlier this year found to have knowingly breached racial hatred laws in a series of lectures and sermons that asserted Jews were “vile” and “treacherous” people. He has previously boasted of his friendship with Australian terrorists Mohamed Elomar and Khaled Sharrouf, both reportedly killed fighting for Islamic State.
Convicted terrorist Abdul Nacer Benbrika, who spent 18 years in jail for terrorism offences, met Haddad just days after his post-sentence supervision restrictions were lifted.
It was left to Jewish Australians, though, to take civil action against Haddad. When NSW police and the Australian Federal Police investigated his anti-Jewish sermons, they rhetorically hid behind their police cars and declined to lay charges. It was civil action by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry which led to the above finding.
Late on Monday, the Al Madina Dawah issued a statement “clarifying” that Haddad, also known as Ustadh Abu Ousayd, no longer had any role in the Al Madina Group other than “occasional invitations as a guest speaker, including delivering lectures and, at times, Friday sermons”.
So, he still has a role there, after all.
Funny, though, how all those Islamic State associations just kept cropping up at this place.
Just weeks after Akram appeared in the Street Dawah videos in mid-2019, police arrested several associates of the group, including his friend Isaac El Matari, an Islamic State operative and a self-declared Australian commander of the group.
Despite Akram’s known relationship with El Matari, authorities appear to have concluded he was not an active or high risk member of the group.
El Matari is serving a seven-year prison sentence after plotting an insurgency, attempting to recruit followers, seeking to acquire firearms and rehearsing speeches in preparation for possible travel to Afghanistan.
He had returned to Australia from Lebanon in 2018 after serving nine months in prison overseas for attempting to join Islamic State.
Why was he even allowed back here? Just cancel his passport and lock him out. Him and every other jihadi who flocked to their ‘caliphate’.
Instead, Tony Burke conspired in secret to smuggle them back in.
Now he has the cheek to turn up to vigils for the victims of his appalling failure to tackle this anti-Semitic hate.
