By Christine Chen
SYDNEY, May 25 (Reuters) – Antisemitism in Australia was left unchecked after the October 2023 outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war, fuelling violence against Jewish people, the country’s spy chief told an inquiry into the Bondi Beach mass shooting on Monday.
The comments came during public hearings in the wide-ranging inquiry known as a Royal Commission that focus on the events leading up to last December’s Bondi attack, which killed 15 attending a Jewish Hanukkah celebration.
The spike in antisemitic incidents contributed to the agency’s decision to raise the national terrorism threat level to “probable” in August 2024, said Mike Burgess of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
“There is no doubt that the war in the Middle East invoked a range of emotions in Australia,” added Burgess, the agency’s director-general of security.
“Some of those violent aspects … and those behaviours, including antisemitism that, in our view, were left unchecked, were therefore normalised and gave more permission for violence … and Jewish Australians were on the receiving end.”
From late 2024, Burgess said, antisemitism also escalated in severity from “threatening, intimidating behaviour to direct targeting of people, businesses and places of worship”.
Such incidents included vandalism and arson attacks on homes, schools, synagogues and vehicles in the months before the Bondi attack.
Burgess said the agency concluded that Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind two antisemitic attacks on a kosher restaurant in Sydney and Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue.
That finding led to the expulsion of Iran’s ambassador in August.
Iran was probably involved in more attacks, but ASIO “just can’t quite get there” in its assessments to pinpoint responsibility, he added.
“They use their network of proxies and agents to do their bidding, and that is to bring harm to Jewish people wherever they are in the world.”
The commission’s first block of hearings this month focused on the nature and prevalence of antisemitism, taking testimony from members of the Jewish community.
(Reporting by Christine Chen in Sydney; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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