If there was ever a sign that Australian civil liberties and rights have been thrown under a bus, it would be now, writes Dal Ouba.
IN CONTRAST TO the 2019 Christchurch massacre, where Australian Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 people and attempted to murder 40 others across two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the 2025 Bondi tragedy, which resulted in 15 people dead, has had a profound impact on Australians' civil rights and liberties. Yet both acts were carried out by Australians.
Despite Australian educators Houssein Oubani and Dalal Oubani warning that social cohesion was at risk due to the educational curriculum failing to counteract Islamophobia in Australian politics and media in 2014, there was no significant impact on Australian law, public discourse or life.
An Australian terrorist with Far-Right, White supremacist views purposely killed over 50 Muslim worshippers in a mosque only five years later. Nevertheless, Australia still did not question how its own public discourse had created a hotbed for white supremacy, let alone entertain any ideas for new legislation that might circumvent future acts of terror on its own vulnerable and marginalised community groups.
The events that both preceded and then followed the Bondi attacks on a Hanukkah celebration on 14 December 2025 were even more bizarre.
Early in 2025, several sets of rights-eroding laws progressed within weeks following a hoax caravan terror plot in Dural, with the AFP and NSW police admitting during a press conference on 10 March 2025 that all alleged antisemitic firebombing attacks and graffiti reported over the November 2024 to January 2025 period were also fabricated.
The NSW Council for Civil Liberties requested an upper house inquiry regarding whether NSW Labor was aware of the hoax caravan plot prior to rushing through legislation with legal commentators stating that the new laws were exploiting antisemitic fear to control communities that were "never under the grips of an antisemitic crimewave".
Incredibly, the whole Australian Muslim Community was made to pay for the significant intelligence failure, despite many Australian Muslims themselves fleeing Islamic State and being specifically targeted by religious extremists who prioritise targeting Islamic Shia, Sufi and Sunni sects that do not agree with their ideologies.
With hundreds of thousands of Muslims who reject IS ideology murdered across Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Syria, Pakistan and threats to the Iranian and Lebanese borders currently unfolding, such expectations of the local Muslim community are akin to gaslighting victims of domestic violence to prove that they did not provoke their aggressor to attack a second victim.
Publicly, every Islamic institution was expected to denounce the Bondi tragedy, even though many could very easily have been the target themselves, with no political denouncing of Islamophobia, despite increasing by 200 per cent since 14 December 2025, according to the Islamophobia Register Australia.
Interestingly, the new Syrian Government, affiliated with Al-Qaeda extremism and led by Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani), currently has more peaceful relations with Israel than it does with its own Muslim neighbours, with minimal interest in a free Palestine and a major focus on imposing its dogmatic Islamic ideology across the Middle East through relentless bloodshed.
The noble appeal of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for unity that rejects divisive hatred and a rushed hate speech bill while Australians were still recovering from New Year celebrations was soon to be contradicted with a special invitation for Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, to visit Australia.
Ironically, the character of Isaac Herzog is exactly the type of behaviour and incitement that the hate speech bill proposes to target. Herzog has been accused by the International Court of Justice of making genocidal statements, such as punishing all civilians in Gaza and writing messages on bombs prepared to be dropped on the children of Gaza, with Amnesty International in Australia calling for an investigation into his acts of genocide.
These comments reinforce the threats of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who threatened to turn Lebanon into Gaza in October 2024.
Herzog’s planned visit to Australia also contradicts Australia’s commitment to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1949), which binds Australia to international obligations to prevent and punish acts of genocide. Welcoming foreign criminal perpetuators of genocide to inflame existing tensions over the loss of Australian lives will be considerably traumatic for Australians from the Middle East, especially from Palestine and parts of Lebanon, who often have had several family members and friends murdered by Israel in its quest for border expansion.
Concerns were also raised by Sarah Schwartz, the Executive Officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, who said:
'Inviting a foreign head of state who is implicated in an ongoing genocide as a representative of the Jewish community is deeply offensive and risks entrenching the dangerous and antisemitic conflation between Jewish identity and the actions of the Israeli state. This does not make Jews safer. It does the opposite.'
This contradiction between words and actions by our own PM and framing of political discourse seems to make one thing clear: the hate speech laws were never meant to protect all Australians, only some Australians, with all Australians having paid the price by losing their protections from the due process that protects their simple freedoms from being overridden by political adversaries.
Such callous manipulation of the pain and suffering of different community groups in Australia ultimately does not protect any Australian and only leads to an arbitrary exercise of power and a lack of due process.
With punishment based on political instead of legal reasons, the Federal Government's counterproductive 'Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026' threatens to create a future of fear and unpredictability for Australians from all diverse backgrounds.
If one Australian life is truly more precious than another, then we have also formally created different classes of citizenship that beg to be admired.
Dal Ouba is a researcher, educator and published writer with experience in writing about curricular and social justice.
Support independent journalism Subscribe to IA.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
