As Australianists and “critical friends” of those falsely-libelled ‘genocidal, apartheid-loving, settler colonialists’ Down Under, we have decided to continue our Australia Symposium with this piece on The Farhat Pogrom: when the Australian judiciary joined the Jew hunt. We are not against Australia as a State and we love the Australian people, we just vehemently criticise the policies of Albanese anti-Western, Palestinianist government.
The Green Party were wrong to vote that “Australianism equals racism”. Yet in facilitating antisemitic violence from illegal Islamist settlers like Farhat, who were implanted by white Europeans in formerly Australian sovereign territory, the Australian judiciary are allowing impunity to run rampant in Sydney. In the past, Australia used to lock up its convicts, but apparently this policy only applies to 19th Century Englishmen. Sanctions may follow from the British government.
Join the fight against anti-Western Palestinianism today. Sign up as paid to Guerre and Shalom - Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor, Guerre and Shalom)
PREVIOUSLY ON THE AUSTRALIA SYMPOSIUM:
A natural experiment is underway in Australia to discover what is required for something to be considered antisemitic. Apparently, driving into a Jewish neighborhood, setting fire to a vehicle, and scrawling “Fuk Israel” across cars and buildings does not meet the standard.
According to Justice Desmond Fagan of the New South Wales Supreme Court, these gross acts of Jew hatred were not antisemitism and just a “crude political expression of contempt and dismissal of a foreign state.” It was just vigorous civic engagement.
Perhaps Mohommed Farhat—a man with a Hezbollah tattoo etched into his neck who caused over $100,000 in property damage—was simply confused about the venue for the local Model UN debate.
This ugly episode is the latest sign that Australia is culturally and politically in deep trouble. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s shameful record on antisemitism is something to behold. It is worth familiarizing yourself with it because the dynamics are not unique to Australia and may be playing out in your country.
In his ruling in State of New South Wales v Farhat, Fagan rejected an application for an Extended Supervision Order against a dangerous vandal and used the bench to deliver a masterclass in the disease rotting Western institutions: the aggressive, pedantic, and willful determination to define antisemitism out of existence.
If you ever wanted an autopsy of how an allegedly civilized judiciary dismantles its own immune system to accommodate Islamist intimidation, this judgment is your specimen.
Fagan, whose honorific of Justice I have removed from this story due to his unworthiness, is a disgrace among disgraces. His name is now forever tarnished.
Consider the facts. In late 2024, amid the global wave of attacks on Jewish communities after the October 7 pogrom, Mohommed Farhat went on a 41-minute arson and vandalism rampage. He did not spray-paint the French Consulate or torch a car outside the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He went to Woollahra—a heavily Jewish eastern suburb in Sydney—where he torched a car, wrote “Fuk Israel,” and sprayed slogans referencing foreign terror outfits.
To any life form with a functioning central nervous system, the semiotics were unambiguous. You do not travel to a Jewish enclave to deliver a scholarly critique of the Knesset’s coalition agreements. You go there to terrorize Jews.
Yet Fagan declared that the location “does not imbue the curse with an antisemitic character.” Why? Because, Fagan reasoned, the word was “Israel,” not “Jews.”
It is an intellectual trick of breathtaking dishonesty that reveals Fagan to be a man of extraordinarily low character, a blight on the New South Wales judiciary, and a stain upon the Australian Commonwealth. Clearly, this Australian government is unaware of the degree to which its international reputation has been battered.
Context affects what words mean. Sieg Heil translates from German as “Hail Victory.” There is no mention of Jews or anything Jewish. Yet if a gang of jackbooted thugs marches past the Great Synagogue on Elizabeth Street screaming “Hail Victory,” no sane person shrugs and calls it an enthusiastic tribute to German track and field.
Fagan’s kindergarten hermeneutics have handed psychotic jihadists and other lunatics a bulletproof legal defense: simply swap the noun. As long as you scream Zionist or Israel while smashing shop windows, setting things on fire and menacing children, the law will treat you not as a bigot, but as an impassioned, if somewhat unrefined, geopolitical commentator.
Having sanitized the crime, the judge then launched an unlettered sortie into amateur sociology and rabbinics. To justify his absurd conclusion that attacking Israel has nothing to do with Jews, Fagan turned to the Jewish Council of Australia.
Oh dear.
For those unfamiliar with the Australian landscape, the Jewish Council of Australia is an unrepresentative fringe group—an ideological astroturf outfit created post-October 7 whose membership would struggle to fill a minibus. It exists entirely to appear on state television and to provide cover for anti-Israel agitators by murmuring, “Not in our name.”
Fagan cited this tiny sliver of marginal dissent as proof that “many Jewish people criticize Israel.”
Meanwhile, the judge said that the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ)—the peak, democratically elected representative body of the Australian Jewish community that has represented over 85 percent of the country’s synagogues, schools, and communal organizations for generations—was a “transparently pro-Israel lobbying organisation.”
Notice the ancient, poisonous taxonomy at work. The fringe, tokenized Jews who validate the judge’s progressive worldview are elevated as thoughtful, authentic moral authorities. The vast majority of Australian Jews, who maintain historical, religious, and familial connections to their ancestral homeland, are smeared as foreign agents and shills.
The good Jews testify; the bad Jews lobby.
It is an outrage that an Australian judge deployed this classic antisemitic trope from the bench—and did so without even giving the ECAJ the elementary procedural courtesy of answering the slur.
The real venom of Fagan’s judgment, however, was reserved for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.
A shadow cabal did not conjure the IHRA definition out of thin air the way Fagan did his legal reasoning, if one can call it that. The IHRA definition was drafted over years by the world’s leading Holocaust scholars, sociologists, and legal experts, and has been formally adopted by more than 40 democratic nations—including Australia—and hundreds of universities, police forces, and municipal councils worldwide.
Far from outlawing criticism of Israel, the definition explicitly states that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
What the IHRA definition does do—and why jihadis and the Far Left hate it with volcanic fury—is call out the obvious: that denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, applying double standards not required of any other democratic nation, and holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of Israel are contemporary manifestations of antisemitism.
Fagan would have none of it.
He dismissed the IHRA core text as “verbose and imprecise,” claimed it was “detached from reality,” and declared that it had no place in an Australian courtroom. Then, shedding any pretense of judicial temperance, he accused the IHRA of seeking to “graft onto the community’s abhorrence of antisemitism a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel.”
Take a moment to savor that word: parasitic.
Of all the adjectives available, he miraculously landed on the foundational slur of 20th-century European fascism and Nazism.
Naturally, the Australian Greens, the local Stalinist party, popped the champagne. Greens MP Sue Higginson raced in front of the cameras to celebrate that Fagan had struck a blow against the IHRA standard. Of course they cheered. When the yardstick of antisemitism is destroyed, Jew haters are free to spew their bile without being held to account.
Make no mistake. This is not a dispute over statutory interpretation but an exercise in complete cultural cowardice. Western elites have decided that they will recognize antisemitism under exactly one condition: when it conforms to a black-and-white photograph from 1944.
If you do not show up in a Nazi SS uniform, sporting a swastika armband, shouting about skull shapes and shouting Juden, our progressive institutions throw up their hands in theatrical perplexity: “Gosh, it’s just so complex! Could it be an architectural grievance? Maybe it’s a zoning protest!”
This is happening in Britain and Australia:
Yet antisemitism has never been a static ideology. It mutates to match the host culture’s dominant moral vocabulary—and everyone, including Fagan, knows this.
In the Middle Ages, when religion was the supreme authority, Jews were hated for their religion—Christ-killers, well-poisoners, desecrators of the Host.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, when science and nationalism ruled, Jews were hated for their race—biological pollutants threatening national purity.
In the 21st century, when human rights and anti-colonialism are the Western elite’s secular sacraments, Jews are hated for their nation-state—settler-colonialists, apartheid-mongers, genocidaires.
The hatred is identical; the pretext modernized.
By insisting that antisemitism can only mean “hostility to Jews as Jews”—divorced from the real-world vessel of modern Jewish identity, which is the State of Israel—judges such as Fagan are demanding that Jews surrender their reality to suit legal pedantry.
They are telling Australian Jews that their fear is illegitimate, their communal structures are suspect, and that their tormentors are simply misunderstood activists exercising their democratic rights with a spray can and an accelerant.
There is an adage from the Talmud (Pirkei Avot 1:18): “By three things is the world sustained: by justice, by truth, and by peace.” When justice becomes semantic gymnastics, and truth is sacrificed to placate political fashion, peace is the first thing that burns. And Fagan has given his judicial blessing to the mob and is letting it burn.
The Farhat ruling is a signal to every radical, every Islamist thug, and and every extremist in Australia that the judiciary has their back. As long as they keep the word “Jew” out of their mouth and substitute “Israel,” they can terrorize Jewish neighborhoods, firebomb vehicles, and intimidate a vulnerable minority with virtual impunity. Fagan claims he was protecting the right to legitimate political protest.
Not a single person believes this.
What Fagan has legitimized is the intimidation of Australia’s Jewish citizens. In doing so he has also destroyed the integrity of the New South Wales bench, and proved that contemporary Australia has not progressed much beyond its notoriously racist past.
If lighting fires in a Jewish street while cursing the Jewish state is not antisemitism, then the word is now meaningless—and that is precisely the point. Removing any meaningful definition of antisemitism licenses and normalizes it.
Australian Jews now know exactly where they stand—and that when it comes to their safety, some members of the judiciary have joined the government in the hunting party.
The cause of Judge Fagan's obvious antisemitism is obvious. It is his name. I imagine he has suffered the slings and arrows of an outrageous childhood being characterized as the archetypical villainous Jew of Dickens' Oliver Twist. He has probably spent the rest of his life trying to prove that he "is not a Fagin".
"The Farhat ruling is a signal to every radical, every Islamist thug, and every extremist in Australia that the judiciary has their back. As long as they keep the word “Jew” out of their mouth and substitute “Israel,” they can terrorize Jewish neighborhoods, firebomb vehicles, and intimidate a vulnerable minority with virtual impunity. Fagan claims he was protecting the right to legitimate political protest. Not a single person believes this."
It is beyond insane how many "Jewish" kapos are delighted to throw Jews under the Islamist bus.