It has taken 19 months, but justice has finally caught up with William Haddad and the Al Madina Dawah Centre in western Sydney.
In November 2023, Mr Haddad delivered a series of speeches at the centre which were video-recorded and uploaded to various online platforms. The speeches invoked disgraceful stereotypes which 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, 2023, which themselves had been fuelled by much the same kind of rhetoric.
Most shockingly, the mass murder, mutilation, rape and kidnapping of people in Israel resulted not in a wave of revulsion and condemnation of the perpetrators, but in an unprecedented upsurge in global antisemitism including, in Australia, from sectors of society that posture as champions of human rights.
Mr Haddad鈥檚 speeches were added into this combustible mix. The potential for an outbreak of violence against Australian Jews should have been obvious. The responsible authorities 鈥渋nvestigated鈥, as they did with countless other inflammatory incidents, but pronounced themselves powerless to do anything.