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This week’s hearings focused on ideologically motivated extremism and radicalisation
Published: 13 August 2026
Last updated: 13 August 2026
Approval by silence emerged as an issue within the organised Muslim community in Australia when the head of the Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) appeared before the Royal Commission (RC) on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in its Hearing Block 8.
The block, which focuses on key drivers of antisemitism in Australia, including ideologically motivated extremism and radicalisation, heard evidence from ANIC’s president Sheikh Shadi Alsulamein, who was grilled about why there was no publicly stated condemnation of remarks by Sydney cleric Imam Ibrahim Dadoun at Lakemba on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attacks on Israel.
In a sermon, Dadoun had infamously stated that day, “I’m smiling and I’m happy. I’m elated … It’s a day of pride. It’s a day of victory. This is the day we’ve been waiting for.” However, ANIC, the clerical roof body, had failed to expressly reject and condemn his comments.
Cross-examined by Nicholas Bender SC for various Jewish bodies, Alsuleiman said ANIC had regarded Dadoun’s comments as crossing a line. But when pressed on why the remarks were not condemned, Alsuleiman did not answer directly, stating instead that “what the Palestinian people were going through does escalate the tension and emotions throughout that week”.
An ANIC statement issued after Dadoun’s sermon instead had alleged that “certain media outlets and politicians took the words of an imam entirely out of context”. Alsuleiman testified that ANIC had privately regarded the speech as inappropriate and had later confidentially counselled Dadoun about it.
But Bender put to him that ANIC’s privately held views, and counselling Dadoun behind closed doors, set no example and demonstrated no model to the Muslim community about where the limits of discourse should lie, and sent a signal that ANIC would be sympathetic to further comments along those lines.
“We don’t have authority over what the imams do or say,” Alsuleiman testified, but added that “we do our best to make sure that imams are responsible in what they say … in a reasonable, respectful way that does not breach the Australian law and at the same time does not undermine social harmony”.
The ANIC president said overseas-trained imams are not as aware of the wider community’s expectations as are their Australian followers. “One of the challenges that we see with imams who come from overseas, who are trying their best to accommodate for the community, is that there is a big gap with understanding … the Australian context and the language.”
The Australian Islamic Institute of Higher Education, which Alsuleiman founded, aims to narrow that gap, he said, but has not yet been registered by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.
Political or religious Ayatollah?
Commissioner Virginia Bell tried to trace the point at which religion and extremist politics intersected when Australian Shia Muslims mourned the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, who was killed in a US airstrike early in the 2026 Iran war.
She questioned witness Dr Ali Alsamail, director of the Sydney-based Shia Muslim Council of Australia (SMCA), who had testified that Australia’s Shias had been mourning for Khamenei as “a religious leader”.
In her questioning, Bell put it to Alsamail that Khamenei, while acknowledged for his “position of significance for the Shia community globally”, was Supreme Leader of a country with which Canberra had cut diplomatic ties after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps directed the arson of an Australian synagogue and of a Jewish business. Bell asked: “Can you explain how we as a society … are to reconcile a display of mourning in those circumstances?”
Alsamail responded, “The intelligence reports indicated that there were certain criminal elements that were involved in those two horrific attacks, which we completely condemn. It’s a horrible thing that that happened to any Jewish business or any other Jewish organisation. There were criminal elements, they’re not community members at all … these are not people who are at our mosques, but professional criminals.
“A religious authority like Ayatollah Khamenei … we don’t know what the line of hierarchy [for the arson attacks] there was, whether there was a rogue element … We would believe that the Ayatollah would never have any direct involvement in anything like that at all. So the mourning was for a religious leader, a leader in jurisprudence and theology, aside from any political or authority positions that he held.”
Asked by Bell, Alsamail confirmed that after the Bondi shootings of December 14, the SMCA had sent two statements to the Jewish community, on the Sunday evening of the attack, and later that week, “condemning the terror attack and sending condolences to the Jewish community”.
In his evidence, Alsamail outlined a remedial intervention program run by the SMCA to counsel Australian-based clerics who professed hate speech, but claimed the program has rarely needed to be implemented in his community. Richard Lancaster SC, counsel assisting, asked Alsamail if he saw any merit in extending the program as a preventative rather than just a remedial measure. Alsamail said that “it definitely could be tweaked a bit to be used that way”.
Nuance, respect have yielded to polarised views
Polarised political debate, from which “nuance” and “respectfulness” had gone missing, has emerged as a driver of violent extremism, according to Dr Kelly Mischel, Victoria’s inaugural Commissioner for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism.
In her testimony on Friday last week, Mischel detailed Victoria’s Voluntary Case Management Scheme (VCMS), which began four years ago and is Australia’s only legislated early intervention scheme for individuals exhibiting tendencies towards violent extremism, some as young as 10. The program offers bespoke support for individuals and enables family members to participate so they can support the individual. But she said for confidentiality reasons, community representatives do not have access to cases.
Referrals come exclusively from police, and a dedicated pathway links Victoria’s Department of Education and Victoria Police for concerns raised by teachers. Mischel said referrals to the VCMS have risen significantly since the outbreak of more intense conflict in the Middle East, and particularly since the Bondi shootings, she said, describing “vicarious trauma”, “grievances” and “heightened emotions”.
Mischel noted that extremist ideology is becoming hybrid, with distinct ideologies such as white supremacism, various conspiracy theories, support for ISIS and for neo-Nazism appearing in the beliefs of some individuals assessed within the program. Online material is a major source of enforcing these views, she said.
Prisons as laboratories of terrorism
Prisons are a common breeding ground of violent extremism, a former deputy commissioner of sentence management at Corrections Victoria (CV) testified on Friday. Jenny Hosking said prison experience tends to amplify and affirm the pre-disposed tendencies of extremist inmates towards terrorist acts.
With that in mind, it has been CV’s policy to release prisoners where it is safe to do so, while they continue to receive support from psychologists, social workers and occupational therapists, as exposure to the wider community introduces them to views contrary to their own.
Hosking said that “it's important that we make that link from custody to community. Some of the people convicted of terrorism offences are serving very long sentences, so there is a significant need for support as a person transitions back to the community. Some people who have served shorter sentences because they've been identified as posing a risk will need support to ensure that the services and the systems and the locations that they're returning to are well managed and are able to manage the risk that they may pose.”
However, she stated that offenders convicted of terrorism offences were often found to be unsuitable for rehabilitation and reintegration permits.
Hosking spoke about annual “problem solving” reviews she had conducted with individual convicted offenders under that individual’s sentence plan.
Cautioning that she was limited in what she could describe in an open session, Hosking gave basic details of two intervention schemes – the Community Integration Support Program, which focuses on Islamic extremism and is delivered by the Board of Imams Victoria under contract to Victoria Police, and the Network for Intervention and Tailored Engagement, which targets right-wing extremism.
Counter-terrorism strategies
In his testimony, Brendan Dowling, coordinator of counter-terrorism at the Department of Home Affairs, detailed the National Support and Intervention Program (NSIP), which is “nationally coordinated and locally delivered,” resourcing agencies in all states and territories in countering violent extremism (CVE).
NSIP deals with aspects of CVE such as case management and awareness training for frontline staff working with at-risk individuals. Additionally, Step Together, which has been incorporated into NSIP, is a support program for at-risk individuals experiencing grievance, isolation and disconnectedness.
Dowling emphasised that intervention by law enforcement is “the pointy end” and that early intervention to disengage at-risk individuals is important to prevent “mobilisation to violence”.
It was an issue later addressed by Dr Steve Barracosa, senior manager of the Youth Justice unit of the NSW Department of Communities and Justice. He distinguished between “diversionary” strategies that are preventative and “disengagement strategies” that try to counter individuals who are already more immersed in violent extremist spaces.
Dowling said NSIP intervention straddles a range of ideologies and targets behaviours rather than ideologies themselves. He described antisemitism as “probably the most prominent commonality, which goes from jihadi extremism to right-wing or white supremacists or anti-government extremism”.
Barracosa saw a similar pattern. “I think we’ve observed that antisemitic narratives, ideas and in some cases ideologies, have crossed different pockets of the extremism landscape, particularly religious and right-wing extremism.”
Dowling said the impact of social media platforms on encouraging violent behaviour is significant and described a “backsliding” by platforms in the levels of trust and safety measures they use, particularly X, but others as well, including the Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram. Social media’s role is “a major concern for us, and I believe for police around the country”.
He raised concern about foreign interference by governments to amplify divisiveness, for example, Russian bot campaigns and similar activity from groups linked to the Iranian regime. He said a French government program has been analysing the inroads made online by foreign actors in intensifying violent extremism.
Dr Danielle Matsuo, assistant commissioner of Corrective Services NSW, detailed her department’s CVE services, which seek to improve the coping strategies of ideologically “fixated” individuals and the role of religious support officers in prisons. She said combating “disguised compliance” tries to discern whether an individual has genuinely changed or is merely talking about change to give an impression of reform. Services such as removal of extremist tattoos, including swastikas, are offered to facilitate an individual’s return to society.
Distinguishing violent tendencies from detestable views
A contest of ideas emerged during the hearing block about how closely “extremist ideology” and the tendency to act on it violently are aligned. Some witnesses from government departments argued that the focus should be on preventing violence, rather than trying to modify points of view.
For example, Home Affairs’ Brendan Dowling said “disengagement” from ideologies is the NSIP program’s aim, rather than “deradicalisation”.
Heather Jackson, director of the NSW Department of Communities and Justice, outlined her department’s implementation of Step Together, but noted it is a voluntary program and narrowly based. She stressed that the program’s purpose is not to combat anti-social views but to disengage individuals from ideas of violent conduct. She said many of Step Together’s recipients have held long-term antisemitic views. (Rebecca Barson, director of re-integration and community services at the SA Department of Corrective Services, also noted that antisemitism is “the predominant extremist belief system” of individuals in that state’s remedial program).
But Jackson said Step Together is very specifically geared to disengaging individuals from violent extremism. She offered an example of a former Step Together recipient who at the end of his enrolment still held his views. “In his own words, ‘I still believe that white people are the master race. However, I don’t want to hurt anyone’,” Jackson said. Under questioning by Nicholas Bender SC for various Jewish bodies, she said individuals enter the program by personal consent and exit once its parameters have been achieved. But after exit, there is no formal process of case review.
Jackson argued that broadening Step Together’s scope would dilute it, and would also risk introducing a wide range of recipients to ideas they may not have initially embraced. Bender put to Jackson the example of Britain’s Channel program, which practises early intervention through referrals, and asked her if an applicant’s suitability for Step Together could be established at the referral stage, which would meet both the suitability requirement while maintaining a wider net of vigilance in the community, and she agreed that this was an idea worth examining.
But the distinction between extremist ideologies and the risk of violence was challenged in testimony from Professor Michele Grossman, research chair in Diversity and Community Resilience at the Alfred Deakin Institute. “If you really are going to get people to disengage from violent behaviour, some level of transformation in how they think and also how they feel is going to be necessary,” stated the academic, who has conducted 36 government-funded research projects in countering violent extremism.
The debate is a weighty one because, as testimonies showed, it directly addresses the question of how at-risk individuals should be responded to, indeed, who in fact is an at-risk individual. And critically, it raises the question of how many potentially violent individuals slip through the cracks.
Safeguards against hate-speech funding
The RC this week grappled with the issue of how Australian regulations are equipped to stop or prevent religious charities from becoming resources for hate speech. What emerged was a picture of a Byzantine regulatory framework that has enabled some religious charities to fund the activities of extremist preachers.
In her evidence, Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC) Commissioner Susan Woodward identified “basic religious charities” as a category which is exempt from standards of governance that apply to other registered charities.
The upshot is that the ACNC has no power to revoke Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status from religious charities funding hate speech. But she said the ACNC would support changes to the law that would make basic religious charities subject to the regulations governing other charities.
Taken to a case in which an individual promoting hate speech in Australia was also found to have had a central role in a registered charity, Woodward emphasised that the ACNC is not empowered to remove individuals within charitable organisations.
Woodward said the regulations distinguish between an organisation’s “activities” and “purpose”, so that random incidents of hate speech funded by a charity might not meet the test of a “disqualifying purpose” which would lead to revoking tax concessions.
But she agreed that a hypothetical example offered by counsel assisting, Tamara Phillips, of a charity in which a responsible figure was publicly expressing hate speech weekly would be “getting much closer to where we could still consider taking action”.
Woodward stressed that the ACNC is “not a criminal investigation agency … if we contact the enforcement agencies and they say ‘we’ve looked at it and it’s not sufficient’, then it would be, I think, a brave commissioner that would second-guess that, even though the behaviour might be regarded in the media as quite serious.”
Moreover, she said, revoking tax concessions is “a blunt tool” that simply cuts off the organisation from further federal tax deductibility, which enables that organisation to continue its activities with reduced oversight. She said there have been situations in which the ACNC has been asked by law enforcement agencies not to revoke the charity status of an organisation as it would impede investigations.
Asked to expand on a reference in the ACNC’s written evidence to a potential “one-front-door” mechanism, Woodward emphasised that the ACNC, founded in 2012, is “relatively new – there are many, many people in the public that don’t know we exist and I think to believe that every person who works in one of those intelligence agencies knows that we exist is also perhaps stretching things.”
She said that in considering “a single point of contact”, it must be kept in mind that the ACNC “are not the day-to-day business for the AFP; we are not the day-to-day business for ASIO. The vast majority of charities on our register are doing the right thing.”
Deputy Secretary of the Australian Business & Law Group at the Department of Treasury, Diane Brown, testified that Treasury’s proposed amendments to governance standards would apply to most charities, but would stop short of equipping the ACNC Commissioner with the power to disqualify individuals from leadership roles in charities – and that self-regulation is the only possible option.
Acknowledging that flaws in the ACNC regulations have been highlighted in a 2018 review and by the Special Envoy on Antisemitism Jillian Segal, Brown said Treasury has been seeking remedies and has adopted in principle a recommendation by Segal that DGR status be removed from charities promoting antisemitism. However, Brown said there are issues around which government agency should be implementing it, and that ACNC, rather than the ATO, might be the optimal choice, as “the behaviour of charities probably more appropriately sits with the ACNC”.
Treasury is also considering a proposed change to governance that would bar people with criminal convictions for racial vilification, or convictions relating to terrorism, money laundering, fraud, drug offences and child sex abuse offences, from being the responsible person of a charity, as recommended by the 2018 review.
Peter Kohn is an Australian journalist who began his career at the Herald & Weekly Times. For 43 years, he was associated with The Australian Jewish News. For the past decade, he held the title of Senior Journalist at the newspaper. He is the author of two novels. Rachel’s Chance is the story of his family’s experiences as Jewish refugees in Shanghai during World War II, and View From A Sandcastle is based on his own story, growing up in Melbourne suburbia during the 1960s and 1970s.
It’s hard to come to terms with use of a term like “at-risk individuals” (5 times in the text) when talking about people who are threatening to commit violent racist crimes. They aren’t “at-risk”. We are. As long as the authorities view them as people in need of help, rather than enemies who must be stopped at any cost.
Comments1
Henry Kaye14 August at 01:14 pm
It’s hard to come to terms with use of a term like “at-risk individuals” (5 times in the text) when talking about people who are threatening to commit violent racist crimes. They aren’t “at-risk”. We are. As long as the authorities view them as people in need of help, rather than enemies who must be stopped at any cost.