Court rules Islamic preacher was ‘fundamentally racist’ in speeches

A series of hate speeches delivered by a Sydney-based Islamic preacher must be removed from social media after the Federal Court today ruled they contained "fundamentally racist and antisemitic" material.

Wissam Haddad was found to have contravened Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act following five speeches he delivered at Bankstown's Al Madina Dawah Centre in November 2023 – recordings of which were subsequently posted online.

In a summary of his decision, Justice Angus Stewart said the accusations made by Haddad were "devastatingly offensive and insulting" to the Jewish community.

"They make perverse generalisations against Jewish people as a group. Jewish people in Australia in November 2023 and thereafter would experience them to be harassing and intimidating," Stewart said.

"That is all the more so because they were made at the time of heightened vulnerability and fragility experienced by Jews in Australia, but they would also have been harassing and intimidating had they been made prior to 7 October 2023. That is because of their profound offensiveness and the long history of persecution of Jews associated with the use of such rhetoric."

The case was brought to the courts by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), after it lodged a complaint with the Australian Human Rights Council (AHRC) in March 2024, which then proceeded to failed conciliation with Haddad and the Al Madina Dawah Centre.

No order for damages or monetary compensation was pursued by ECAJ, who instead successfully sought court orders requiring that Haddad and the Centre’s incorporated association remove the lectures online, not to repeat similar statements in public, and cover legal costs.

“People are free to engage in robust debate about international conflicts, whether their beliefs are true or false, informed or ignorant,” ECAJ said in a statement following the decision.

“But that does not include the freedom to mobilise racism as a polemical tool to promote one’s views – to dehumanise and vilify entire communities or individuals on the basis of their racial, ethnic or ethno-religious identity.”

Of the five speeches, three were found to contain slurs about Jewish people that were “reasonably likely in all the circumstances to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate Jewish people in Australia”, and that Haddad “said the many disparaging things about Jews because of their race or ethnic origin”.

Haddad's lawyers argued the speeches were derived in substance from religious texts, including the Koran; were delivered to a Muslim audience in private; and did not refer to Australian Jewish people.

Among the offensive comments made by Haddad, who is also known as Abu Ousayd, were references to Jews as "wicked", "scheming", "vile", "mischievous" and "descendants of apes and pigs".

A separate interview and a sermon were found not to conflict with racial discrimination laws because they contained comments critical of Israeli defence forces and Zionists, and would not be understood to be referring to Jewish people in general.

It follows a seperate complaint raised by ECAJ with the AHRC against another Sydney-based Muslim cleric, Sheikh Ahmed Zoud, who described Jews as criminals, terrorists and monsters during a sermon at Masjid As-Sunnah Lakemba mosque in December 2023.

Both Zoud and the mosque issued apologies in resolution of the complaint in May this year.