Tehran’s record beyond Australia’s borders should have been enough to set off the alarm bells in Canberra.

By: Ben Cohen

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese probably didn’t imagine that one week after his interior ministry abruptly canceled a visa for Simcha Rothman, a member of Israel’s Knesset, his government would be enveloped in a major dispute with Israel’s arch-foe, the regime in Iran.

Unlike Iran, Israel has not carried out any terrorist attacks in Australia. It has not encouraged hate crimes against that country’s growing Muslim population. It is not boycotting goods produced in Australia. Had Rothman been permitted to go ahead with his visit, organized by a local Jewish organization, he would not have advocated for any of these measures. Yet the letter revoking his visa asserted that his presence amounted to “a risk to the good order of the Australian community or a segment of the Australian community, namely the Islamic community.”

Commenting on the visa revocation, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke insinuated that Rothman’s arrival might provoke civil unrest. “If you are coming to Australia to spread a message of hate and division, we don’t want you here,” he declared. “Australia will be a country where everyone can be safe and feel safe.”

Everyone, that is, except the Jewish community. Australian Jews, who represent 0.5 percent of the total population, have endured a miserable two years of arson, violent attacks and constant antisemitic abuse. In the 12 months that followed the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, hate crimes against Jews increased by an almost unfathomable 316% from the previous year. What’s now painfully and frustratingly clear is that while Australia has no shortage of homegrown and immigrant antisemites, the field is also open to a malicious foreign power like Iran.

If any foreign state is spreading hate and division in Australia, it’s Iran. But Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and the rest of Australia’s left-wing cabinet were too incensed with Israel to realize that until the country’s intelligence service, assisted by information provided by the Israelis, produced irrefutable evidence of Iranian involvement in at least two of the antisemitic attacks: arson directed at a kosher delicatessen in Sydney in October 2024 and the firebombing of the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne two months later.

As a result, Albanese had little choice but to expel the Iranian ambassador and announce that the Tehran regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) would be sanctioned, which is a move that should have been undertaken a long time ago.

Tehran’s plans to target Australian Jews were hatched long before the Oct. 7 atrocities. Writing in the Melbourne newspaper The Age, the Australian political scientist Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who was incarcerated in Iran’s notorious Evin prison from 2018 to 2020 on fabricated charges of espionage, recalled an interrogation session during which her inquisitor pulled out a piece of paper listing the names and addresses of synagogues and Jewish organizations in her native Melbourne.

“He wanted to know if I’d visited any of them, and if so, what was inside,” she wrote. “By this time, I had no interest in co-operating with my captors, who had sentenced me to 10 years in prison on ludicrous charges of espionage and were attempting to blackmail me into working for them. I told them where they could shove their list of Australian Jewish intelligence targets.”

The courageous Moore-Gilbert added that after her release in a prisoner swap, she debriefed Australian intelligence about this particular encounter. Yet Iran was still able to carry out its attacks in Australia four years later.

Australia has provided us with a textbook case of what happens when a country fails to wake up to the Iranian threat. Indeed, Iran’s record beyond Australia’s borders should have been enough to set off the alarm bells in Canberra. During the last two years, Iran has either carried out attacks or attempted them in several countries where the Islamist regime maintains an embassy, including Sweden, Germany and the United Kingdom, as well as those, like the United States and Canada, where it doesn’t.

To get a fuller sense of Iran’s terror footprint, we must go back to the early 1980s, when the founder of the Islamic Republic—Ayatollah Khomeini—was still in power. In the closing decades of the last century, Iranian suicide bombers massacred U. S. Marines in Beirut and blew up the Israeli Embassy, and then the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires, among many other outrages, causing several hundred casualties, dead and wounded.

The critical difference with the present is that the Iranian regime has rarely been as weak as it is now. Its regional proxies in Lebanon, Gaza and Syria have been badly, perhaps irreparably, damaged. Its nuclear-weapons program has been set back for several years, thanks to the combined Israeli and U. S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June. Its rulers have been frantically looking over their shoulders as they acknowledge among themselves the extent of Israeli intelligence penetration of key departments and agencies.

Nevertheless, Iran’s determination to rebuild its nuclear program hasn’t wavered, which is why the foreign ministers of the E3—Germany, the United Kingdom and France—decided last week to trigger the sanctions “snapback” mechanism first agreed when the U. S.-led nuclear deal with Iran was announced 10 years ago. What that means is that by the middle of October, the heavy restrictions on Iran in place before that flawed deal—impacting weapons, nuclear development, and economic and trade policy—will have been restored unless the regime manages in the interim to persuade an increasingly skeptical world that it will verifiably cooperate with the dismantling of its nuclear program.

As the U. N. General Assembly prepares for its annual debate in September—with rumors abounding that member states with far-left governments like Colombia are pushing for the suspension of Israel from the global body—the correct countermove is to isolate Iran even further with the goal of making this year’s meeting the last to be attended by the regime.

Western states, which could become the main focus for Iranian terror now that its regional proxies have been emasculated, should follow the Australian move by severing all diplomatic ties with Tehran. For too long, the ayatollahs have been indulged by Western diplomats even as they draw closer to their fellow states in the axis of aggressors, like Russia, China and North Korea. Those days must now come to an end.

          (JNS. org)

Ben Cohen is a senior analyst with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and director of FDD’s rapid response outreach, specializing in global antisemitism, anti-Zionism and Middle East/European Union relations. A London-born journalist with 30 years of experience, he previously worked for BBC World and has contributed to Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, Tablet and Congressional Quarterly. He was a senior correspondent at The Algemeiner for more than a decade and is a weekly columnist for JNS. Cohen has reported from conflict zones worldwide and held leadership roles at the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. His books include Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through 21st Century Antisemitism.