No Moral Panic Sparked Over Attack on Islamic Place of Worship

Victoria police apprehended a 43-year-old man wielding a knife and calling out Islamophobic slurs outside the Hume Islamic Youth Centre on Wurundjeri land in the north Melbourne suburb of Coolaroo just before 6 pm on Monday 21 July 2025. Yet the corresponding response of the state and the media has been subdued despite the criminal incident transpiring at a place of worship.

Eyewitnesses say the assailant, a Craigieburn man, had appeared in the carpark initially yelling anti-Muslim slurs. He then left and returned in a white Toyota SUV that police attempted to stop. But the man got out and headed directly towards the Islamic centre, which had 20 congregants inside, and footage shows police repeatedly calling on him to drop the weapon, prior to tasering him.

“There is no place for this hateful behaviour anywhere in our community but most particularly around places of worship,” said Victorian premier Jacinta Allan. Yet the Labor leader hasn’t since launched a taskforce into Islamophobia in a similar manner to the antisemitism inquiry she established in response to an arson attack on an East Melbourne synagogue just a fortnight ago.

Australia has just borne witness to Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal releasing her action plan to deal with antisemitism in the community, and this appears at the same time as there has been a distinct avoidance of any mention of recent rising Islamophobia.

Indeed, state premiers and police ministers have not been raising the fact that in-person Islamophobic incidents increased by 150 percent over January 2023 to November 2024. No new laws have been suggested or drafted in relation to this.

But then again, Islamophobia has neither been weaponised in the public sphere of late, whereas antisemitism has distinctly been swung.

Triggering predicable responses

NSW police minister Yasmine Catley has been raising rising antisemitism incidents of late, in fact, she and the NSW premier Chris Minns passed a package of hate crime and antiprotest laws in February, in response to an “antisemitic” crimewave on Gadigal land in Sydney, which turned out to have been staged by organised criminals in order to create a moral panic around Jewish hate crimes.

Often the reasons for the rises in these forms of religious hatred are overlooked, and recent waves have followed Hamas, a Palestinian Islamic resistance group, having attacked Israel, a nation that provides self-determination solely to Jews, on 7 October 2023, and Israel, a Jewish state build upon historic Palestine, has been committing genocide against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip ever since.

But the reason why the media is focusing on antisemitic incidents in a way which it fails to provide incidents of Islamic hate with is that often the incidents being cast in the public sphere as antisemitic are actually political protests against the Israeli state and the reasons they’re being construed as antisemitic is that it then deflects from what is being criticised and it deters others from criticising it.

Zionism is the 19th century European doctrine advocating for the creation of a Jewish state on historic Palestine. Since the 1970s, Zionists have been conflating criticism of Israel and Zionism itself with antisemitism, or the dehumanisation of and hatred towards Jewish people, which led Nazi Germany to commit the mass murder of 6 million Jewish people during the World War II Holocaust.

So, when crime figures decided to stage a series of anti-Israel and antisemitic arson and graffiti incidents in Greater Sydney between October 2024 through to early February 2025, they chose to target Jewish premises, because they were well aware of the heightened and particular attention these acts would be given, at the same time that the mass slaughter in Gaza was being perpetrated.

Places of worship

The fact that a dead kangaroo was dumped out the front of a mosque on Kaurna land in Adelaide in August last year remains unknown to most Australians, as does the fact that a man with a knife was approaching an Islamic youth centre in Naarm-Melbourne last week, simply because there is no need for politicians and the media to create a stir around such incidents to serve another purpose.

That a 34-year-old NSW man went up to the doors of the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation synagogue on the evening of the 4 July and poured flammable liquid on the front doors of the place of worship and set them alight is known likely to a majority of Australians as such was the furore that Victorian politicians and the media bestowed upon the incident.

Premier Allan visited the East Melbourne synagogue straight after the arson attack against it, as did federal politicians. However, there was no such special attention given to the Islamic youth centre targeted by an unknown assailant this week, and neither did South Australian premier Peter Malinauskas visit the Park Holme mosque in Adelaide, following the dead kangaroo incident.

But in response to a peaceful protest out the front of Sydney’s Great Synagogue on 4 December 2024, which was due to it hosting an event by Technion, which is an Israeli institution engaged in violent settler colonialist expansion, the NSW premier commenced pushing for a ban on protests outside of places of worship, which resulted in the passing of an all-pervasive move-on order.

Indeed, in response to the staged antisemitic crimewave in NSW, the Minns government passed several rights-eroding bills in February, which even included a Jewish-specific law that makes it an offence to display Nazi symbols “near a synagogue, a Jewish school or the Sydney Jewish Museum”, and it carries up to 2 years prison time, even though swastikas were already banned in public.

Silencing slaughter

The appointments of the special envoys on antisemitism and Islamophobia were said to be attempts to address both forms of rising religious prejudice in the community, but really the appointments resulted in nothing of the sort.

The religious and racial bias of the Australian government was on full display during this process, as Albanese announced the appointment of Segal to antisemitism envoy on 9 July 2024, however the PM didn’t announce that Aftab Malik was to be appointed Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia in Australia, until 30 September last year.

And whilst Segal has produced an action plan since then, Malik appears to have gone to sleep.

Segal has only just released her Special Envoy’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism on 10 July, just days after the East Melbourne synagogue incident. The centrepiece of Segal’s plan to combat Jewish prejudice in Australian society is that all the nation’s institutions adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism conflates certain criticism of Israel, like calling for the dissolution of the political entity, as antisemitic. And once in use, this partial inclusion of criticism of Israel in the definition can then serve as an excuse to cast all criticisms of Israel as antisemitic or harbouring the same kind of prejudice that led to the Holocaust.

The issues with the disproportionate manner in which Islamophobia and antisemitic incidents are being raised by politicians and the media is not to suggest that more attention must be given to vandalism incidents at mosques, but it would tend more towards the authorities not acting like the sky has fallen in and the law books must be rewritten if an incident involving a synagogue occurs.

The gravest issue of all involves the fact that our politicians and our media are attempting to erase our awareness and knowledge that the Israeli state is committing a genocide upon the Palestinians of Gaza and that Segal and her ilk want to erase Palestinian identities on this continent too.