Public Hearing Block 8

Across multiple witness testimonies, the Commission heard that antisemitism is not “just another prejudice” but sits at the heart of contemporary extremist thinking. Dr Rodger Shanahan described Salafi Jihadist groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda as “strongly antisemitic” movements whose hostility to Jews is embedded in their reading of Islam and in narratives that cast Jews (and Christians) as part of a global conspiracy to subjugate Muslims. These groups reach back to early conflicts with Jewish tribes to argue Jews are inherently untrustworthy, and even claim Shia Islam was founded by a Jew to fracture Muslim unity.

Dr Joshua Roose, Associate Professor of Politics at Deakin University and currently seconded as Director of Research and Policy at The Dor Foundation, told the Commission antisemitism has become a uniquely powerful “mobilising force” because it offers an all-purpose scapegoat. He noted sayings like “everything that’s going wrong with my life... it’s the Jews” have been gaining popularity over the past 15 years, with the antisemitic mindset now functioning as a “perfect enemy” across far-right, far-left, Islamist and sovereign-citizen movements.

Professor Julian Droogan, a Macquarie University terrorism and security academic, told the Commission antisemitism is not “just another prejudice” for the far right but one of its central organising principles – a “macro conspiracy theory” blaming “Jewish elites or cabals or shadowy groups” for immigration, economic change and cultural liberalisation, which he linked directly to the Christchurch shooter’s “great replacement” manifesto and copycat lone-actor attacks.

Former neo-Nazi Witness ‘ADC’, a patched member of an Australian group who has since disengaged and now works in prisons and community organisations, added lived-experience testimony, explaining how conspiracies about a Jewish-controlled “ZOG” world government circulated inside the movement, even though his own radicalisation came more from anger, grievance and the search for belonging than from a coherent ideology about Jews.

Evidence from the second week reinforced this picture from a different angle. Lee Brennan, Chief Executive of ReRoute Australia, said antisemitism is often absent from a young person's original grievance and is adopted later as the price of belonging once they join a movement. Mubinoddin Shaikh, an interventionist with the US-based counter-extremism organisation Parents for Peace, told the Commission antisemitism is the "connective tissue across extremist ideologies", with around 70% of the organisation's caseload showing some form of antisemitic influence. In South Australia, Rebecca Barson of the Department for Correctional Services went further, saying that antisemitism is not just present but the predominant extremist belief system among prisoners referred to the state's New Pathways program.

Block 8 evidence underscored how antisemitic extremism is spread and sustained through online ecosystems, preacher networks and opportunistic “grifters”. Dr Joshua Roose, Associate Professor of Politics at Deakin University, described intersecting “push” factors - housing affordability, social and economic disadvantage, isolation among men - and “pull” factors - extremist narratives propagated by organised groups, hate preachers and online influencers who profit from anti‑Jewish content, including misogynistic figures who have “branched into antisemitism”. He warned that effective online regulation remains “almost impossible” with current resourcing and called for far greater transparency from platforms about the algorithms steering users towards antisemitic and extremist material - themes that were also uncovered in Hearing Block 3. He also praised the eSafety Commissioner’s work but said the office is far too small for the scale of the task.

Julian Droogan told the Commission that formal far‑right organisations are no longer the main engine of radicalisation in Australia. Instead, decentralised online movements and lone actors have become more important, with social media spaces and encrypted platforms serving as the “main locus” for extremist social movements. He pointed to networks such as the Active Club - gyms promoting neo‑Nazi ideology under the guise of fitness and fraternity - and the Terrorgram Collective, a designated terrorist entity that continues to operate as a fluid network of sites despite its listing. 

Dr Rodger Shanahan added detail on Islamist radicalisation, telling the Commission that high‑impact online propaganda and charismatic preachers play a central role in drawing people towards Salafi jihadism. He identified the late Anwar al‑Awlaki as the single most influential Salafi jihadist voice among people convicted of terrorism offences in Australia and elsewhere. He also warned that closing public venues to radical preachers can push them into private homes and closed spaces where they are harder to monitor, placing a premium on community networks that know who is preaching what and where.

Throughout the Commission’s hearings, several witnesses have pointed to antisemitism as a blind spot in systems designed to tackle racism and protect minorities. This week, Dr Josh Roose told the Commission there is a “significant blind spot” in Australia’s multicultural and anti‑racism frameworks because they are built around visible disadvantage, while Jewish Australians are often highly educated and comparatively well‑off, making antisemitism directed at them less visible inside those models. He linked this to “tall poppy syndrome” and to coded language in which “Zionism” becomes a proxy for hostility towards Jews, arguing that criticising Israel’s government is one thing but “when you criticise the right of a people to their homeland… that speaks to antisemitism”.

The second week of Hearing Block 8 surfaced a parallel blind spot in charity regulation. ACNC Commissioner Susan Woodward told the Commission that around 8500 “basic religious charities” – roughly 8% of all registered charities – are exempt from the governance standards that would otherwise let the regulator act against hate preaching, meaning the framework built to catch such conduct structurally excludes the category of institution most likely to platform it. 

This theme has previously been brought to the Commission’s attention by a range of witnesses from different sectors in Hearing Block 6 including:

• Former Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) Secretary, Natalie James, who told the Commission that the Australian Public Service Commission’s (APS) culturally and linguistically diverse strategy - built around first language spoken at home - effectively renders Jewish identity invisible because “unless you were born in Israel, your first language is probably not one that is an indicator of your Jewish identity”. 

• Acting APS Commissioner, Joanne Talbot, who admitted antisemitism content added to the APS foundational diversity module in May was “not detailed and insufficient on its own”. She also noted that only one staff member in the Department of Education had completed it by July, and that the APS could not say how many of its 195,000 employees had done the training.

• University of Sydney health services researcher Dr Zhaoli Dai, who told the Commission antisemitism against Jewish patients and healthcare professionals is “under‑measured and under‑recognised”, describing it as a “structural blind spot” because it is not routinely captured in patient experience or quality‑of‑care frameworks.  This testimony in particular also mirrors similar experiences described by Jewish staff and students at Australian universities uncovered in Hearing Block 4. 

• Jewish doctors Dr Jack Green and Dr Adam Gordon, representing the Australasian Jewish Medical Federation, who described Jewish clinicians hiding Magen David necklaces or avoiding mention of being Jewish - experiences also noted in Hearing Block 1, Block 3, Block 4 and Block 6 - patients refusing care from a “Zionist pig”, and national boards dismissing antisemitism complaints without being required to apply the IHRA definition adopted by the regulator. 

Evidence across the block highlighted both the possibility of disengagement from extremism and the burden now carried by Jewish communities trying to protect themselves. Witness ‘ADC’s’ (under pseudonym) story as a former patched neo‑Nazi now working with community organisations and teaching in prisons gave the Commission a rare inside view of how a decade in the movement, driven by anger and a search for belonging, ended with the realisation that the promised “brotherhood” was “a load of lies” and that genuine support came from people outside the far right. He told the inquiry there was no Australian exit organisation when he left in 2013 and that he relied on overseas YouTube testimonies, underscoring the importance of structured disengagement programs for those who choose to walk away.

Former Canadian jihadist Mubinoddin Shaikh added another first-hand account of disengagement, describing how a “cognitive opening” at 18 years old sent him toward a Taliban stronghold in Pakistan and years inside an extreme Salafist group, before marriage and, later, the September 11 attacks began to crack his worldview. Similar to Witness ‘ADC’, Shaikh now works as an interventionist, telling the Commission that changing an individual’s private beliefs is “foundational” to preventing violence, not merely a bonus outcome of behavioural programs. 

For Jewish communities, the burden of living under threat while sustaining ordinary life was put forward to the Commission. David Ossip, President of NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, spoke of a community that was already “deeply shocked, traumatised, [struggling] to sleep, [and struggling] to eat” in the days after October 7. He described how advice to avoid the CBD compounded fear and a sense of exclusion from their own city. Evidence heard in Hearing Block 5 showcased Community Security Group (CSG) volunteers describing safeguarding Jewish life as a “second life” that keeps them up at night and draws them away from synagogue, family occasions and ordinary communal events, and warning that without CSG’s presence many people would not feel safe attending shul or gatherings at all.

Dr Roose closed his own evidence with a risk assessment drawn from two decades researching Muslim communities, telling the Commission that “the Jewish community threat is significantly greater in Australia than it is facing in the Muslim community at the moment”, citing the Bondi terror attack and the documented surge in antisemitism. 

Taken together, the evidence heard throughout this block showed that while disengagement is possible, the work of protecting Jewish communities in the meantime falls largely on the community itself.

Multiple witnesses pointed out gaps in their respective organisation’s rules and regulations that inhibit them from actually enforcing the regulations. ACNC Commissioner Susan Woodward told the Commission she has no power to remove a person who runs a religious charity even if they repeatedly deliver hateful or antisemitic speeches, and that revocation – effectively her only real sanction against most charities – is “a blunt tool” because it ends all ACNC oversight of the entity. She said that only around 6% of charities report overseas activities, meaning the Commonwealth’s external affairs power can rarely be relied on to regulate the rest. During her hearing, Woodward  backed a range of reforms, including a bright-line disqualification threshold extending beyond criminal convictions to civil findings, extending the current 12-month cap on disqualification, and a statutory mechanism to revoke registration on national security grounds.

Treasury Deputy Secretary Diane Brown outlined proposed amendments to ACNC governance standards that would prohibit racial vilification offences and disqualify responsible persons with related convictions, but confirmed constitutional limits mean the Commonwealth cannot give the ACNC a direct power to remove individuals – the obligation instead falls on charities themselves to take “reasonable steps”. A referral of powers from the states remains the main path to closing that gap, a process Brown said had previously taken “a matter of years”. 

Snap Inc’s Head of Public Policy for Australia and New Zealand, Benjamin Au, confirmed the company has no automated system for detecting hateful or antisemitic content in Snapchat’s private messaging, even though hash-matching technology is used there to catch terrorism material and child exploitation imagery. He conceded that a video of a Hitler salute shared privately by a student “would go undetected”, and he did not dispute that content generating high view counts is “a financially rewarding outcome for Snap”. Au could not say how many Australians currently use Snapchat and, on the government’s proposed digital duty of care, said it had been “a little while” since he had refreshed his memory on Snap’s own position.

Although state-run programs vary widely in design and reach, evidence from multiple expert witnesses have surfaced the same pitfalls in resourcing. Dr Danielle Matsuo, Assistant Commissioner of Corrective Services NSW told the Commission that New South Wales’ prison programs target behaviour rather than belief, even where an inmate holds neo-Nazi views. Rebecca Barson told the Commission that South Australia's New Pathways program rests on a single specialist clinician role spanning identification, assessment, case management and training. Its companion Inclusion Support Program now takes referrals from age 10, increasingly direct from schools before any offence occurs, and has launched a further pilot, COVE, for young people coerced into violent behaviour online with no identifiable ideology at all. Barson said that information-sharing between agencies at the point of a prisoner's release is the area most in need of improvement.

At the Commonwealth level, Counter-terrorism Coordinator Brendan Dowling flagged a possible move to five-year funding cycles for the National Support and Intervention Program and a loosening of the narrow high-risk offender regime, so intervention funding can reach a broader range of at-risk people. The Diversions Australia pilot, which serves pop-up warnings to TikTok users searching for violent extremist material, connected with 6500 users between January and early May, of whom 12 went on to speak with practitioners. The Step Together helpline has drawn $1.7 million in awareness spend, with a further $5.2 million allocated in the 2026-27 budget.

Comparisons with the UK’s Prevent program cut both ways. Professor Paul Thomas told the Commission Prevent referrals for Islamist extremism have fallen to just 8%, down from a program once “explicitly only about British Muslims”, though attrition rates as high as 85-90% proved “exactly comparable” with broader safeguarding referrals. Professor Michele Grossman cautioned against importing a mandatory reporting duty for Australian teachers, citing the UK’s “cooker bomb” case in which a mistaken report traumatised a family, and instead proposed a broader safeguarding framework built around her BRAVE model of protective factors.

Lee Brennan, Chief Executive of ReRoute Australia which works with young people before police involvement becomes necessary, told the Commission that ReRoute Australia is largely funded by its own executives’ contributions and has struggled to reach senior decision-makers within Victoria Police. By contrast, Dr Malcolm Haddon, Acting Director of Community & Policy at Multicultural NSW, told the Commission that NSW’s Compact program has $14.5 million committed to 2028, reached an estimated 23,000 young people between 2021 and 2024, and has expanded its interfaith schools initiative to include Jewish schools since the Bondi attack.

As radicalisation moves earlier and faster, this week's evidence pointed increasingly to the internet, not ideology, as the starting point. Dr Steven Barracosa, Senior Manager of Youth Justice NSW, told the Commission that extremist content is increasingly built around imagery and video games “developed for young people to digest”. He said that it now “feels almost inevitable” that young people will cross paths with harmful material online, and that antisemitism is present across the unit’s youth extremism caseload but is “seldom... the core or defining feature” of a young offender’s profile.

According to Thomas Stewart, General Manager of Inclusion Support at the South Australian Department of Human Services, South Australia’s community program now takes referrals from age 10, often direct from schools before any criminal offence has occurred. Its new COVE pilot works with 10 to 25-year-olds drawn into violent behaviour through coercive online relationships rather than any ideology – a cohort the mainstream program was not built to catch.

Members of the Youth Advisory Council for a Safer Australia (YACSA) told the Commission a new social media account can be fed content that crosses into what is “academically... extreme” within as little as 15 minutes. Citing “Brandolini’s law”, panel member Lou said far less energy is needed to produce and spread bigoted content than to refute or moderate it. Fellow panellists Salim and Hayden pointed to stigma, confusion over data privacy and distrust of law enforcement as barriers stopping young people, particularly young men, from seeking help.

Psychologist Daniel Gregg told the Commission radicalisation pathways that took 12 to 18 months before the pandemic can now take as little as two to four weeks, with self-radicalisation now more common than recruitment through extremist networks and social media forming part of nearly 90% of cases. He identified shooting clubs as a potential early-intervention point, though a regulatory framework under which any report can trigger an automatic firearms licence suspension currently discourages members from raising concerns.