Sydney cleric used ‘dehumanising' generalisations designed to intimidate Jewish people, federal court hears
A Sydney Muslim cleric being sued for alleged racial discrimination gave a series of speeches calculated to 'dehumanise' and 'denigrate all Jewish people', the federal court has heard.
But ahead of the Tuesday hearing, Wissam Haddad, also known as Abu Ousayd, took to social media to say he rejected the court's authority.
Posting a video of Sydney's federal court online, he told followers: 'We disbelieve in these courts, these are the houses of the Taghut,' Haddad said, using an Islamic concept that describes the worship of anyone or anything other than Allah. In modern contexts, the term is used to dismiss, diminish or insult a non-Muslim power as anti-Islamic.
Haddad is being sued by two senior members of Australia's peak Jewish body, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), over a series of lectures he gave in Bankstown in November 2023 and subsequently broadcast online, in which he is alleged to have maligned Jewish people as 'vile', 'treacherous' and cowardly. The claim alleges Haddad breached section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which prohibits offensive behaviour based on race or ethnic origin.
Peter Wertheim, one of the applicants in this case and ECAJ co-chief executive, told the federal court on Tuesday that Haddad's speeches used 'overtly dehumanising' language.
'Making derogatory generalisations, calling Jews a vile and treacherous people, calling them rats and cowards … are things which I think would be experienced by most Jews as dehumanising,' Wertheim said.
His barrister, Peter Braham SC, told the court Haddad's speeches repeated a range of offensive tropes and were designed to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate Jewish people.
The court heard Haddad had sound recording and camera equipment installed to record his speeches, for the purpose of disseminating his message far beyond his congregants.
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Braham told the court the intent of the five speeches was to 'persuade an audience that the Jewish people have certain immutable and eternal characteristics that cause them to … be the objects of contempt and hatred'.
Braham argued Haddad's inflammatory rhetoric was an 'exercise that's so dangerous'.
'It's threatening, it's humiliating and it's offensive. It's calculated to denigrate all Jewish people, including the Australian Jews for whom we appear.
'It involved repeating a large range of offensive tropes about Jews: they're mischievous, they're a vile people, that they're treacherous, and that they control the media and banks et cetera.'
But Haddad's barrister, Andrew Boe, argued the cleric's speeches were addressed to, and intended only for, a private Muslim congregation of 40 people and that Haddad was not responsible for them being published online.
Boe said it was unlikely a Jewish person would have discovered the speeches, to then be offended by them, if the recordings had not been covered and thus amplified by mainstream media.
'It would be analogous to a person of a prudish sensitivity seeking out pornography on the web and then complaining about being offended by it,' Boe told the court.
Boe argued there must be room, in a democratic society, for 'the confronting, the challenging, even the shocking'.
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He said the court should take a 'rigorous and detached approach' in applying the Racial Discrimination Act, and remain careful to uphold the 'intended balance between … proscribing racially motivated behaviour that may be harmful in the Australian community, and … preserving the freedoms of speech and religion that are so essential to the continued existence of a free democracy'.
Haddad's defence case argues that his sermons were delivered in 'good faith' as religious and historical instruction. If his sermons are found to breach 18C, then, his defence submission argues, the law is unconstitutional because it restricts the free exercise of religion.
The long-running dispute, which failed to find resolution at conciliation, came before the federal court Tuesday, with the case set to test the limits of religious expression and hate speech under Australian law.
A directions hearing last week heard expert witnesses would be called to assess whether Haddad's sermons were accurate representations of Islamic scripture, with the court likely to be asked to adjudicate whether Haddad's sermons, in which he quotes the Qur'an and offers interpretation of it, amount to incitement or are protected religious expression.
The applicants are seeking an injunction that Haddad's five offending sermons be removed from the internet, and an order that he refrain from publishing similar speeches in future.
Wertheim and his co-applicant, Robert Goot, are also seeking publication of a 'corrective notice' on Haddad's prayer centre's social media pages, and to be awarded the legal costs of bringing their action. They have not sought damages or compensation.
In his social media posts ahead of the court hearing on Tuesday morning, Haddad said he rejected the court's authority, telling online followers that 'the Jewish lobby' was 'dragging us into [a] court', whose jurisdiction he did not recognise.
'But we're not going to come unarmed, we are going to fight them with everything we have.
'Isn't it about time that somebody stands up to these bullies.'
The hearing, before Justice Angus Stewart, is expected to run until the end of the week.
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