The Deputy Commissioner of the New South Wales Police Force, David Hudson, told reporters on January 30 that detectives are considering whether a caravan packed with explosives found abandoned on the side of Derriwong Road in the north-western semirural suburb of Dural, which was located by NSW police on January 19, might be an elaborate set-up.
The reason he suggested police are looking at whether the incident could be a hoax is due to the obvious clues left behind. An antisemitic note and a list of targets, including a synagogue, were found in the caravan, along with the sizable amount of Powergel explosives (usually used in mining) which had the potential to create a 40-metre blast wave.
Police announced the discovery of the caravan on January 29, 10 days after the fact, apparently due to the ambiguities involved.
NSW police terrorism expert, Peter Moroney, told Nine’s Today program on January 30 that they are investigating if the explosives were stolen from a mining site, “say 12 months ago”, where were they being stored in the interim?
When the caravan was discovered in Dural, a media storm around a spate of anti-Israel and antisemitic attacks was peaking.
Australian Federal Police (AFP) commissioner Reece Kershaw said the vandalism attacks could be the result of foreign interference, with foreign actors paying local criminal elements to carry out the attacks.
Police have also confirmed that all 10 suspects who have been arrested in relation to “Jewish hate crimes” were not motivated by ideology — making the antisemitic fear campaign, which potentially linked to the pro-Palestinian movement, unfounded.
Potential foreign interference
NSW Premier Chris Minns told reporters at Surry Hills Police Station on January 30 that he wanted to discuss “the very disturbing pattern of escalating criminal behaviour in relation to antisemitic attacks in NSW”.
He spoke about another such attack, over the previous night, which involved someone spray painting a Maroubra school and nearby house.
Minns then turned his attention to the explosives in the caravan, which he referred to as a “very serious and ongoing inquiry into a potential terrorist event in NSW”. He said that the discovery “represents, undeniably, an escalation … in race-filled hatred and potential violence in NSW.”
But if the foreign interference version of events is linked to the explosives in a caravan on the side of the road in Dural, it would appear that foreign actors either harbour this “race-filled hatred” or they want to convey to Australia, and the world, that an epidemic of individuals are suddenly so filled with antisemitic sentiment that they are now carrying out these attacks.
Police raided a Dural property, where the caravan was parked, on January 19. The owner told police that he’d towed the van on to his property, as it had been sitting on the roadside for a number of days and posed a traffic hazard.
Further, he told the ABC that the search warrant included the names Tammie Farrugia and Scott Marshall.
Farrugia was arrested, charged and remanded on January 20, in relation to an antisemitic incident in the inner-city suburb of Woollahra in December. Police noted that she had been using social media to source jerry cans that were evidently used in that attack. It turns out that she had also been attempting to locate a caravan.
Marshall is also on remand in respect of unrelated weapons’ offences.
Kershaw told a national cabinet meeting on January 21, the day after Farrugia’s arrest, that the AFP is looking into the possibility that a foreign organisation is involved in paying locals to carry out the attacks for a financial reward.
However, authorities have not publicly speculated on who these foreign actors may be.
A bias in approach
The antisemitic attacks have been at the front and centre of the news since they began in November: there was an incident in Woollahra, followed by the firebombing of the Addas Israel Synagogue in Naarm/Melbourne in early December.
However, according to Aftab Malik, the special envoy to combat Islamophobia, Australia is experiencing the highest levels of Muslim hate incidents ever recorded. He puts this down to Islamophobia being so normalised it is going unnoticed, whereas antisemitism is an aberration.
The lack of attention, and outrage, directed towards rising Islamophobia might be connected to a dearth of media attention.
The attention directed towards the antisemitic attacks has helped demonise the pro-Palestine movement — before the alternative foreign interference reasoning became apparent.
Also, the spate of incidents that have been classed as “anti-Semitic” did start with anti-Israeli messaging. Given Israel has been killing Palestinian civilians in their tens of thousands in Gaza since October 2023, the counter response to the assertion that the arson and graffiti crimes were antisemitic is that they were reflecting violent political criticism, not religious hate.
After some weeks, the vandals’ messaging has shifted: “Jews” have became the subject of derision, not the apartheid Israeli state.
The Islamophobia Register of Australia noted in December that there had been a 530% rise in reported Islamophobic incidents since October 2023.
If the government, law enforcement agencies and the corporate media had showcased these crimes, in a similar manner to the anti-Israel and antisemitic attacks, there would likely be more public concern about rising Islamophobia.
A dangerous conflation
Jewish Council of Australia’s Sarah Schwartz told Sydney Criminal Lawyers early last year that there has been a dangerous conflation at play since the beginning of the Gaza genocide which serves to deflect criticism of Israel and the settler colonial doctrine of Zionism by construing it as antisemitism, or hatred towards Jews.
US academic Judith Butler raised this conflation during a forum in Paris last March. They outlined that it has been propagated by certain Israelis since the 1970s, because it serves to block criticism of Israel for fear of being labelled antisemitic — a heavy charge and which most do not want to be associated with the prejudice that fuelled the Holocaust.
Given Labor’s unbridled support for Israel, it might be considered that the fear campaign around a spike in antisemitism, while ignoring the rise in Muslim hate crimes, means that authorities are happy to propagate the conflation to help stymie criticism of Israeli crimes.
Indeed, if foreign actors are involved, this might be why the early anti-Israel messaging was swapped for the more precise antisemitic messaging which have been seen in the later incidents.
[Paul Gregoire writes for Sydney Criminal Lawyers, where this article was first published.]