Australia probes suspected foreign funding of anti-Semitic attacks

Police believe ‘foreign actors’ paying local criminals to commit crimes amid a surge in anti-Semitic incidents.

Australia is investigating suspicions that funding from outside the country is behind a surge in anti-Semitic crime.

Detectives investigating the anti-Semitic attacks across the country have concluded that foreign actors have been paying local criminals to commit them, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Wednesday. However, he declined to comment on the source of the suspected funding.

“It is important that people understand where some of these attacks are coming from and it would appear … that some … are being perpetrated by people who don’t have a particular issue, aren’t motivated by an ideology, but are paid actors,” Albanese told reporters.

Australia Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw said police “believe criminals-for-hire may be behind some incidents”.

Inquiries are ongoing to identify “who is paying those criminals, where those people are, whether they are in Australia or offshore, and what their motivation is”, he added.

Arson

The comments followed a meeting of state police chiefs to discuss an increase in anti-Semitic crime in Australia since the war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7, 2023, which has surged in recent months.

Masked arsonists firebombed a synagogue in the city of Melbourne in December. Vandals torched a Sydney childcare centre, set cars ablaze in largely Jewish neighbourhoods, and splashed inner-city synagogues with red paint and graffiti.

Sydney and Melbourne are home to 85 percent of the country’s Jewish population.

After the childcare centre fire in Sydney, the New South Wales Police said the number of detectives working for Strike Force Pearl, formed to investigate anti-Semitic crime, had doubled from 20 to 40.

Detectives arrested 33-year-old Adam Edward Moule on Tuesday night and charged him with attempting to burn down a synagogue in the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown on January 11. Police have said his alleged accomplice was also expected to be arrested soon.

Kershaw told federal and state government leaders in a briefing on Tuesday that police were investigating the involvement of young people in recent incidents, and if they had been radicalised online and encouraged to commit anti-Semitic acts.