It has tak­en 19 months but jus­tice has final­ly caught up with Wis­sam Had­dad and the Al Mad­i­na Dawah Cen­tre in west­ern Syd­ney.

In Novem­ber 2023, Had­dad deliv­ered a series of speech­es at the cen­tre that were video-record­ed and uploaded to var­i­ous online plat­forms. The speech­es invoked dis­grace­ful stereo­types that for cen­turies have been used to butch­er, per­se­cute and dehu­man­ise the Jew­ish peo­ple.

These speech­es came in the wake of the Hamas atroc­i­ty crimes in Israel on Octo­ber 7 that them­selves had been fuelled by much the same kind of rhetoric. Most shock­ing, the mass mur­der, muti­la­tion, rape and kid­nap­ping of peo­ple in Israel result­ed not in a wave of revul­sion and con­dem­na­tion of the per­pe­tra­tors but in an unprece­dent­ed upsurge in glob­al anti-Semi­tism includ­ing, in Aus­tralia, from sec­tors of soci­ety that pos­ture as cham­pi­ons of human rights.

Haddad’s speech­es were added into this com­bustible mix. The poten­tial for an out­break of vio­lence against Aus­tralian Jews should have been obvi­ous. The respon­si­ble author­i­ties “inves­ti­gat­ed”, as they did count­less oth­er inflam­ma­to­ry inci­dents, but pro­nounced them­selves pow­er­less to do any­thing.

Were offi­cials real­ly pow­er­less? Parts of Haddad’s speech­es were seen as incit­ing or threat­en­ing vio­lence towards Jews, con­trary to fed­er­al and state laws. But this was nev­er put to the test. Peo­ple in the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty were not the only Aus­tralians won­der­ing whether our coun­try was going to hell in a hand­bas­ket. Ratio­nal­i­sa­tions invent­ed to excuse the anti-Semi­tism, or to try to rede­fine anti-Semi­tism into a neg­li­gi­ble fringe phe­nom­e­non, only added to the moral and intel­lec­tu­al con­fu­sion.

The judg­ment hand­ed down by Fed­er­al Court judge Angus Stew­art has stripped away those ratio­nal­i­sa­tions one by one and pro­hib­it­ed Had­dad from repeat­ing his anti-Semit­ic state­ments in pub­lic. Haddad’s speech­es have been found to have con­tra­vened the pro­hi­bi­tion in the Racial Dis­crim­i­na­tion Act against offen­sive behav­iour based on racial hatred.

The con­tention that this pro­hi­bi­tion is in con­flict with the implied free­dom of polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion was giv­en short shrift by the court.

Peo­ple are free to engage in robust debate about inter­na­tion­al con­flicts, whether their beliefs are true or false, informed or igno­rant.

But that does not include the free­dom to mobilise racism as a polemic 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. If we were free to vil­i­fy one anoth­er in the way Had­dad vil­i­fied the Jew­ish peo­ple, the door would be wide open to chron­ic racial and sec­tar­i­an strife of the kind that has dev­as­tat­ed oth­er coun­tries, and the peace and har­mo­ny we gen­er­al­ly have enjoyed here would be ruined for every­one.

Had­dad also con­tend­ed that he was just artic­u­lat­ing Islam­ic reli­gious doc­trine about the Jew­ish peo­ple and any law stop­ping him from doing so was invalid under sec­tion 116 of the Aus­tralian Con­sti­tu­tion because it was a law for pro­hibit­ing the free exer­cise of reli­gion. The court was hav­ing none of that argu­ment either.

All of the expert evi­dence in the case, includ­ing from Haddad’s own expert on Islam, was that Islam did not jus­ti­fy the whole­sale vil­i­fi­ca­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple. Even if that were not the case, there are 100 dif­fer­ent faith com­mu­ni­ties in Aus­tralia today and on rare occa­sions some of their prac­tices might come into con­flict with Aus­tralian law.

For exam­ple, enter­ing into polyg­a­mous mar­riages in Aus­tralia is a crim­i­nal offence, even though this prac­tice is sanc­tioned by some reli­gions. When a reli­gious prac­tice con­flicts with Aus­tralian law the lat­ter must pre­vail.

One of the rea­sons the rule of law still stands strong in Aus­tralia, and even stronger after Tuesday’s judg­ment, is that the same rules apply to every­body. We are all free to cam­paign to have the law changed if we wish, but we are not free to break the law.

Nei­ther are we free to vio­late court orders. We expect Had­dad to com­ply strict­ly with the orders that have now been made in this case.