{"id":271681,"date":"2026-08-31T15:58:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T15:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/271681\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T15:58:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T15:58:11","slug":"australian-judge-rules-f-israel-not-antisemitic-rejects-ihra-definition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/271681\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian judge rules \u2018F*** Israel\u2019 not antisemitic, rejects IHRA definition"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Australian judge<\/a> rejected the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and ruled that \u201cFuk Israel\u201d graffiti is not antisemitic.<\/p>\n

NSW Supreme Court<\/a> Justice Desmond Fagan made the statements in the recent State of New South Wales v Farhat ruling.<\/p>\n

The case concerns an Australian man \u2013 Mohommed Farhat \u2013 who committed a series of vandalism offenses in November 2024. This included spray-painting slogans such as \u201cPKK\u201d and \u201cPKK coming,\u201d referring to the Turkish Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party (although Fagan concluded that Farhat didn\u2019t know what the abbreviation stood for) and \u201cFuk Israel\u201d on vehicles and buildings in Sydney suburb Woollahra, and setting fire to a vehicle.<\/p>\n

He pleaded guilty and received a 20-month prison sentence.<\/p>\n

The NSW government subsequently sought an extended supervision order (ESO) under the Terrorism (High Risk Offenders) Act 2017. An ESO would have imposed 55 conditions on him after his sentence expired, significantly restricting his liberty.<\/p>\n

\"AustralianAustralian justice. Ilustrative. (credit: SHUTTERSTOCK)<\/p>\n

To obtain the ESO, the state had to establish to a \u201chigh degree of probability\u201d that, if released without supervision, Farhat posed an unacceptable risk of committing a serious terrorism offense.<\/p>\n

The state argued that the graffiti was evidence of an antisemitic ideological motivation and potentially of an ideology associated with Hezbollah, and therefore relevant to assessing whether Farhat might commit terrorism offenses in future.<\/p>\n

Fagan rejected the application.<\/p>\n

‘F*** Israel’ not antisemitism<\/p>\n

He concluded that \u201cFuk Israel\u201d slogans were \u201ccrude expressions of political hostility to the State of Israel, [and were] not antisemitic according to the ordinary understanding of that concept in the Australian<\/a> community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fagan said that the fact that the slogans were graffitied in a locality where a high proportion of residents may be Jewish \u201cdoes not imbue the curse with an antisemitic character.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also said that Farhat \u201cdid not understand the slogan to convey hostility to Jews as Jews and he did not intend to express hatred of Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

His main argument was that \u201cdisparagement of Israel is not antisemitic because the Jewish people are not equivalent to the State of Israel,\u201d and that \u201cmany Jewish people criticize Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

The judge then cites the Jewish Council of Australia as an example of an anti-Israel Jewish organization, despite it being small and fringe, while decrying the Executive Council of Australian Jewry as a \u201ctransparently pro-Israel lobbying organisation.\u201d<\/p>\n

This sparked significant outrage from mainstream Australian Jewish groups.<\/p>\n

IHRA doesn’t reflect established usage of term ‘antisemitic’<\/p>\n

\u201cThe good Jews testify; the bad Jews lobby, and procedural justice, which required giving the ECAJ an opportunity to contest the charge, was blatantly ignored,\u201d said ECAJ.<\/p>\n

Another controversial part of Fagan\u2019s ruling is the part about the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.<\/p>\n

Fagan said that the IHRA<\/a> formulation \u201cdoes not reflect the established usage and understanding of the term \u2018antisemitic\u2019 in Australia\u201d and therefore he did not use it to determine whether the slogans spray-painted by the defendant were antisemitic.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe IHRA core text is so verbose and imprecise that it could not realistically be attributed to the ordinary, reasonably informed member of the Australian public,\u201d Fagan added.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe IHRA formulation propounds a concept different from that which \u2018antisemitism\u2019 has long been understood to describe and appropriates that word to the novel concept.\u201d<\/p>\n

His language remained unusually polemical for a common-law judge.<\/p>\n

He argued that IHRA\u2019s 11 examples are designed to include criticisms of Israel \u201cthat could not be regarded as hostile to Jews as Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe [purpose of IHRA] is to graft onto the community\u2019s abhorrence of antisemitism a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Greens party celebrated the ruling.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe IHRA definition of antisemitism is an imprecise and wide-ranging definition which has no place in prosecutions and the justice system of New South Wales,\u201d said Greens MP and spokesperson Sue Higginson.<\/p>\n

\u201cJustice Fagan has rightly decried the IHRA definition as incomprehensible to the ordinary and reasonable member of the Australian public.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Australian judge rejected the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and ruled that \u201cFuk Israel\u201d graffiti…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[2492,1648,27884,64292,73929,37],"class_list":["post-271681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-antisemitism","tag-australia","tag-hate-monitor","tag-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism","tag-islamic-antisemitism","tag-israel"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117190951414858438","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}