In the wake of Hamas’s barbarous rampage of 7 October on Israeli civilians few would have noticed the death in Egypt just two days earlier of the former Grand Mufti of Australia. Yet the imam of Australia’s largest mosque, in Lakemba, Sydney, had more than a passing association with the ideas that fuelled the attack that killed 1,200 people. Sheik Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly was one of Australia’s leading proponents of Jew-hatred, equal to anything Hitler believed, and would not have grieved their deaths.

During his 31-year tenure, Sheik Hilaly was known for spreading the same lies that landed Holocaust deniers like Fred Toben (1944-2020) in jail, but no such prosecution awaited Hilaly for his repeated assertion that the Holocaust was ‘a Zionist lie’. In 1988, the year he was appointed Mufti, he delivered a public address (in Arabic) to students at the University of Sydney on ‘the nature of the Jews’, accusing them of enmity toward the whole human race.

According to the late Jeremy Jones, in Confronting Reality: Anti-Semitism in Australia Today, Hilaly said: ‘Judaism controls the world by… secret movements and destructive doctrines and groups, such as communism, libertarianism, Free Masons, Baháʼísm, the Rotary clubs, the nationalistic and racist doctrines. The Jews try to control the world through sex, then sexual perversion, then the promotion of espionage, treason, and economic hoarding.’

Efforts by the then-immigration minister Chris Hurford to deport Hilaly for his anti-Australian views failed because the Islamic community rallied to his defence, and he was given permanent residency in 1989.

Hilaly’s views were nurtured in his native Egypt, home of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, and inspiration to jihadi terrorists the world over. Latterly, Egypt’s government television station showed Horseman Without a Horse, a thirty-episode dramatisation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic booklet that has been called the ‘bible of anti-Semitism’ and a favourite of Hitler. Despite being exposed by Phillip Graves of the Times in 1921 as a forgery concocted by the Russian Secret Police based on a French satire of Napoleon III, it has proven the old adage that a lie is more powerful than the truth. The Protocols purports to be a record of Jews and Freemasons at the First Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, in 1887, who connive a sinister plan to take over the world. Translated into multiple languages, including Arabic, it prompted Egypt’s most famous actor and producer of Horseman, Muhammad Subhi, to exclaim, ‘The Protocols is one of the most important books the world has ever known.’    In this excerpt from the series, the protagonist describes its secret contents:

‘The Zionist racist movement devised a plan long ago, even before Christ: A peaceful Zionist invasion of all the countries of the world, with a malicious serpent as its symbol… the serpent moves, coils and binds the countries of the world, enslaving them by hellish means. These means include an economic invasion, which weakens these countries, and uses all methods of violence and deception… so they can spread among the world’s youth, wantonness, alcohol, abomination, and corruption. The Serpent is the Zionist symbol and its progress is drawn on the map, step by step.’

The TV series which aired several times from 2000 in Egypt, and in Lebanon on Hezbollah television, is also available on IMDb. If that were not enough Egyptian journalist Muhamud Khalil advised, ‘the government channels must make sure to air it every so often, in order to give the new generations an opportunity to know it and to the old generations a chance to refresh their memory [of it]’. But for those who preferred to read the original, which ends with the coda, ‘Judaism is Satanism,’ one could have just visited the Lakemba Mosque bookstore, where discounted copies were sold.

The Protocols conspiratorial view of Jews and Israel which asserts that ‘the desire for a “National Home” in Palestine is only camouflage and an infinitesimally small part of the Jew’s real object’ was also inculcated in the 1930s when Hitler lured the Arabs through shortwave radio broadcasts and millions of pamphlets from the Third Reich’s Arabic language propaganda bureau to become allies in his war against Europe and the Jews.   According to Samuel Todros, an Egyptian Copt and Research Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, this anti-Zionist position was in stark contrast to the initial jubilation expressed in Egyptian newspapers at the announcement of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 when the return of the Jews to their land was seen as foretold in the Koran.  At that time the government sent officials to the celebrations held by the Jewish communities in Alexandria, Cairo, and other cities.

On the contrary, Hilaly’s call to Muslim youth to become martyrs fighting Israel was consistent with his support of Hezbollah and the Iran-linked Islamic Unification Movement and Islamic Action Front. In Lebanon in 2004, Hilaly gave a sermon in which he stated, ‘The media all over the world are controlled by Zionist fingers.’ He also defended the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon as ‘God’s work against the oppressors’. Hilaly assured his audience that Muslims would control the White House and in Australia he attempted to establish a Muslim political party, which did not eventuate, but riding high on a wave of community support he was made Muslim Man of the Year in 2005.

It is not surprising therefore that at a rally in Lakemba, Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun celebrated the Hamas attack saying, ‘I’m elated. It’s a day of courage. It’s a day of happiness. It’s a day of pride. It’s a day of victory. This is the day we’ve been waiting for.’ According to the Australian, Muslim cleric, Wassam Hadad (aka Abu Ousayd) of the Madina Dawah Centre in Blacktown, in western Sydney, preached a sermon admonishing his listeners to ‘kill Jews’, while Brother Ismail, called on Muslims to mount a jihad against Australians for condemning Hamas. The Muslim reaction hit rock bottom when a mob of demonstrators with red-paint-spattered dolls shouted at Israeli survivors of the 7 October massacre who were visiting Melbourne.

These are signs that the hatred of Jews and Israel preached by the late Sheik and epitomised by the Protocols is deeply rooted in the Muslim community. According to the ABC, on the imam’s death, Samier Dandan, his close associate and former president of the Lebanese Muslim Association said, ‘The entire community has been shocked by hearing such news because it’s a man that reflected and embodied the spirit of the community.’

That spirit explains why the Muslim community has remained silent in the face of lurid anti-Semitic demonstrations and refused to condemn the hate-mongers in its mosques and prayer halls.