AARON PATRICK: With friends in Canberra, Wissam Haddad can celebrate the failure of racial vilification laws

One man has a good reason to be pleased at the Government’s failure to criminalise racial vilification: Wissam Haddad.

Jewish leaders hoped the militant Muslim advocate would be caught by the law, which would have treated inciting violence or hatred as an aggravated offence if the speaker was a religious official or spiritual leader. The penalty was to be ten years jail.

Among those gunning for Mr Haddad, who once associated with the man charged over the Bondi massacre, Naveed Akram, was Peter Wertheim, who led negotiations with the Government over this week’s anti-Semitism laws.

Mr Wertheim successfully sued Mr Haddad in 2024 in a case that today seems prophetic. From his centre of hate at the now-closed Al-Medina Dawah Centre in the Western Sydney suburb of Bankstown, Mr Haddad preached that Jews are racist, manipulative, violent and dishonest, among other unpleasant attributes, the Federal Court ruled.

Citing freed-speech concerns, the Coalition refused to support the proposed law, which would have made such language a crime if a court found the speaker intended to incite hatred or violence.

Proving intention is difficult, but Mr Wertheim and other Jewish leaders hoped the law would have been used to arrest and jail influential Islamist figures who might have inspired Akram and his father Sajid to embark on a Jew-hunting spree.

“My personal opinion is the evidence would have been sufficient to do that in his case but one can never be 100 per cent,” Mr Wertheim said Wednesday morning. “I think there is a good chance he would have been convicted.”

Friends in Canberra

Mr Haddad has supporters. Some occupy parliamentary seats.

On Tuesday evening a West Australian senator from an immigrant Afghan family, Fatima Payman, asked the Senate to explicitly enshrine in the remaining anti-Semitism law a clause that cited the judgment against Mr Haddad and would have shielded him from existing hate-speech laws.

“Criticism of the practices, policies, and acts of the State of Israel, the Israeli Defence Force or Zionism is not inherently criticism of Jewish people and is protected political speech, not hate speech,” the amendment said.

Given most Jews are Zionist, which means they support the existence of Israel, and weekly protests have called for the death of IDF soldiers, the clause looked designed to provide legal protection for anti-Jewish hatred the law is designed to stop.

All Greens and Tasmanian independent Tammy Terrell voted with Senator Payman, but the amendment was defeated by the Government and Coalition.

With racial vilification jail terms stripped from the bill, the Senate was left to vote on changes that would allow the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir to be banned.

A few minutes before 11pm, Senate president Sue Lines called for a vote. Nationals Bridget McKenzie, Susan McDonald, Matt Canavan, Ross Cadell and Liberal Alex Antic gathered on the opposition benches with the Greens and left-wing independents.

On the other side of the chamber, most Liberals voted with the Government.

Recriminations

Why National senators opposed a law they had agreed to, and had been significantly watered down at their request and others, was the subject of recriminations on Wednesday.

One Liberal frontbencher said the Nationals appeared to have been spooked by online criticism based on misinformation that the original racial vilification law was going ahead, based in part on a misleading X post by One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson.

“Essentially on a whim they pulled the pin and voted against it,” the Liberal said. “In this case you have only one honourable choice.”

That choice, he said, needed to include at least the offer to resign from the shadow ministry. Without that, he said, there could be a breakdown of Coalition discipline.

On Wednesday morning, Anthony Albanese was asked if he planned to reintroduce the racial vilification law. He said that was a question for the Coalition given the Labor Party does not control the Senate, and is unlikely to.

Which means Mr Haddad is safe from prosecution for criticising Jews under Federal law for the foreseeable future, although could be caught under legal changes made last August in New South Wales.

What he thought of the events in Canberra is unclear. But on Tuesday Mr Haddad went on to Instagram, his preferred medium of communication, to explain that his long-running account, which had amassed more than 10,000 followers, had been shut down.

He was starting from scratch with a new account, which described him as: “Muslim unapologetic.”