Top NSW Ministers Stoked the Antisemitism Moral Panic with Fudged NSW Police Statistics

Dozens of the 367 reported antisemitism incidents that New South Wales premier Chris Minns and police minister Yasmin Catley both fell back on at key points in the 2024/25 summer debate around a suggested crisis in escalating antisemitic behaviour have now been shown to have had nothing to do with antisemitism, and indeed, at times, these incidents actually targeted Palestinians and Muslims.

The revelation has come in response to a question put to the NSW Police Force during a 4 July NSW parliamentary hearing of the Antisemitism in NSW inquiry, which asked for a brief description of each of the 367 suggested antisemitic incidents. This was taken on notice, and after an initial response implied that it was too much trouble, a much more insightful answer was issued on 3 October 2025.

NSW police advised the MLCs running the antisemitism inquiry that the spreadsheet detailing the nature of the 367 antisemitism incidents suffered from a “consistency and veracity of incident recording”, which “varied over time” due to the high turnover of officers within antisemitism taskforce Operation Shelter, and a “significant number of incidents” do not meet the criteria.

The so-called antisemitic crimewave of last summer involved arson and graffiti attacks on Jewish-owned property in Greater Sydney, which included the discovery of a caravan filled with explosives on Dharug land in Dural. The 367 incidents were additional to these crimes and had been raised to justify the antisemitism panic that swept the nation prior to the more serious crimes taking place.

The NSW inquiry into antisemitism was convened due to a suggested rise in such incidents, and it was soon followed by the Dural Caravan inquiry, which is probing into how the caravan incident and the antisemitic crimewave in general contributed to the passing of three law-and-order bills, when NSW police had likely revealed its doubts in regard to the legitimacy of the antisemitic crimewave.

False incidents upon false incidents

“The NSW Police Force has reviewed all incidents, and a preliminary review suggests that a significant number of incidents do not meet the criteria for antisemitism,” the 3 October response to the 4 July question on notice reads, which is “defined as prejudice or hatred directed at individuals based on their Jewish faith or cultural identity.”

“In some cases, incidents were incorrectly categorised as ‘antisemitic’ solely on the basis that the person reporting or the victim was Jewish,” the police force continued, adding that the table it has provided to the Antisemitism in NSW inquiry includes multiple mis-categorisations, along with the duplication of reported incidents a total of 38 times.

The miscategorised reported antisemitism incidents included a Jewish man spitting on pro-Palestinian people in Circular Quay, another man shouting “Free Palestine” in a shopping mall, while a business receiving calls that involved disrespectful remarks about the Koran was included as antisemitic and a man removing an Israeli flag from a pole was too recorded.

This confession from the NSW police, however, is not the first time that NSW authorities have been shown to be overstating the number of antisemitic incidents that Operation Shelter has been made privy to since October 2023, as both Minns and the police minister had been referring to “more than 700 antisemitic” incidents having been reported in NSW since October 2023.

The staged antisemitic crime scenario became all the more confused after ASIO announced in August this year, that one of the initial antisemitic arson attacks in Sydney and the December 2024 torching of the Addas Israel Synagogue of Melbourne were both staged incidents, as instead of local criminals being charged as the culprits, the spying agency has deemed the government of Iran responsible.

Queries regarding a list of 815 reported antisemitic incidents recorded by Operation Shelter from 10 October 2023 to 26 March 2025, have been raised with Catley on a number occasions, in respect of their accuracy. The minister then advised during a September estimates hearing that 38 of them were actually Islamophobic incidents, while 410 were “other”, and the rest did involve antisemitism.

Inflating the facts

Minns and Catley had alluded to more than 700 antisemitic incidents over last summer, with the premier quoting his source as NSW police deputy commissioner Dave Hudson, prior to it being downgraded to 367 incidents, after the police minister was called out on her figure of 815 instances. However, many of the remaining 360-odd suggested Jewish hate crimes are now in doubt too.

The major antisemitic incidents in NSW took place over October 2024 to February 2025. These serious criminal offences involved property damage and graffiti targeting Jewish-owned property. But the initial graffiti messaging comprised of anti-Israel sentiment, as they were political criticisms of that state’s commission of genocide in Gaza. Although the messaging then shifted to target Jews.

Following news breaking around the discovery of a caravan with explosives, along with a note listing Jewish addresses, deputy commissioner Hudson revealed on 29 January 2025, that he considered the caravan on a Dural property might be a staged crime, and he added that all the suspects in custody in regard to recent antisemitic attacks weren’t ideologically motivated.

The Australian federal police and the NSW police then announced on 10 March that inquiries into the October 2024 to February 2025 Sydney antisemitic crimewave had found that it had been staged by local crime figures then overseas, who were seeking to provide information to police about these antisemitic crimes in order to gain leniency in respect of their own nonrelated criminal matters.

The Minns government, however, had passed three pieces of legislation, specifically said to crackdown on these crimes over 20 and 21 February. These laws comprised of racial and religious hated crimes, inciting racial hatred measures and powers that allow NSW police officers to broadly shut down protests near places of worship, which could have implications for the entire Sydney CBD.

An upper house inquiry was launched into the Relationship between the Dural Caravan Incident and the Passage of Relevant Bills through the Legislative Council, with the suggestion being that Minns and the police minister had progressed the trifecta of laws in February, with the moral panic around the list of reported antisemitic crimes being used to justify the need and reasoning behind them.

However, premier Minns was still raising the 367 antisemitic incidents Operation Shelter had listed in March, in order to justify the package of three pieces of civil liberties-eroding legislation that cracked down on what appears to be the now dwindling numbers of hate crimes and a rising civil society protests, and when the NSW top minister did so, he characterised the dubious incidents as “attacks”.

That dangerous conflation

NSW Labor MLC Stephen Lawrence provided Jillian Segal, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, with a series of questions on notice following her 4 July appearance at a NSW antisemitism inquiry hearing. This included a query around whether she was aware that many complaints involving antisemitism to police actually involved criticism of Israel.

The Labor member asked the envoy whether she considered there might be a “role for education within the Jewish community about the history of the Palestinian people, so as to reduce the perception that certain speech actions are antisemitism, when in fact they are legitimate speech based on legitimate interpretations and understandings of historical events and present realities”.

Segal retorted on notice that when people report antisemitism they do so because they often feel targeted with good reason. The envoy, who is an expert on all things, told the parliamentarian that while education is good, the necessity at present is to protect Australians from hate, not to ask “vulnerable communities to adjust their sensitives to it”.

The Albanese government is currently deliberating upon Segal’s July 2025 released Plan to Combat Antisemitism, which seeks to insert the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) working definition on antisemitism into all Australian institutional structures. This definition serves to conflate criticism of Israel with hatred towards Jews, in order to block criticism of that nation.

The technique of blocking political criticism of Israel, especially when it comes to dispossessing Palestinians from their land, as well as imposing a system of apartheid upon them, has been employed by proponents of Zionism, or the doctrine espousing the establishment of a Jewish state in historic Palestine known as Israel, since the 1970s, according to US Professor Judith Butler.

Operation Shelter’s mischaracterisation of numerous incidents that fail to actually comprise antisemitism were being recorded during the societywide moral panic around antisemitic hate crimes. Whether consciously done or not, the outcome of this was to deflect focus upon Israel’s illegal commission of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza.

So, the downlow on the 2024/25 antisemitic crimewave appears to be that it was entirely staged, and that the initial accompanying list of 815 antisemitic incidents used to stoke the flames of the feigned crisis, which had already been cutback to 367 incidents, has now been reduced further as officers were obviously operating under the grips of the antisemitic moral panic while compiling it.