Australia has severed diplomatic ties with Iran and expelled the Iranian ambassador and three other diplomats for orchestrating attacks on a synagogue in Melbourne and a kosher restaurant in Sydney.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the plots “extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil.” Australia also withdrew its staff from Tehran and urged its citizens to leave the country immediately.
“They put lives at risk, they terrified the community and they tore at our social fabric. Iran and its proxies literally and figuratively lit the matches and fanned the flames,” said Australia's spy chief, Mike Burgess.
Australia is now ready to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist group. The United States declared the Revolutionary Guards a terror group in 2019.
“The IRGC used a complex web of proxies to hide its involvement. It’s a series of chains. There’s an organized crime element offshore in this, but that’s not to suggest organized crime are doing it. They’re just using cut-outs,” Burgess said.
That's not much comfort to Australia's Jewish community. Australia has seen an explosion of antisemitism since October 7, 2023. There has been a 316% year-over-year increase in antisemitic incidents in the year following the attacks.
Iran chose a nation where antisemitism had already taken root.
The expulsion of the Iranian diplomats comes shortly after the arrests of two individuals in connection with the December 2024 Melbourne synagogue attack, in which a synagogue was firebombed while nearly two dozen people were inside.
The arson at Sydney’s Lewis’ Continental Kitchen, which took place in October 2024, caused $1 million in damage to the kosher restaurant. Court documents released earlier this month indicate that a middleman, Sayed Moosawi, who was directing the Sydney attack, was to receive $12,000 for his work. Prior to the fire at Lewis’ Continental Kitchen, two men directed by Moosawi mistakenly set fire to a brewery with a similar name to the restaurant.
“The Australian people want two things. They want killing in the Middle East to stop, and they don’t want conflict in the Middle East brought here. Iran has sought to do just that. They have sought to harm and terrorise Jewish Australians and sow hatred and division in our community,” Mr. Albanese said.
With a 316% increase in antisemitic incidents, Albanese doesn't appear to be doing much about preventing Australians from "sowing hatred and division" in the community.
The president of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia, Lynda Rae Ben-Menashe, told the New York Sun, “If our government had stamped out the hate speech and incitement to violence against Jewish Australians when it first appeared at the Sydney Opera House on October 9 we might have avoided nearly two years of escalating violence." Ben Menashe added that expelling Iranian diplmats “is hugely significant.”
Just two days after the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, hundreds of pro-Hamas demonstators held a protest at the Sydney Opera House that was still bathed in the colors of the Israeli flag. "Protesters waved Palestinian flags and chanted slogans like 'f... the Jews ', 'free Palestine', and 'shame Israel,'" according to the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC).
The Iranian cut-outs must have slipped up somewhere to have exposed themselves to detection.
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