In 2008, Carlos Almonte went to an Israel Day Parade in New York carrying a placard on which he’d written ‘Death to all Juice!’ Nobody was sure whether he was a man with a blind hatred of fruit and vegetable-derived beverages, an illiterate antisemite, or a Sacha Baron Cohen-style Israeli plant trying to make the protesters look bad.

Almonte was indeed a Jew-hater who couldn’t spell but despite a hilarious typo – a photo of his placard went viral – he was a genuine terrorist who was eventually arrested boarding a plane at JFK airport to join Al-Shabab, an African offshoot of Al-Qaeda, and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence. In his defence, his mother claimed, ‘He’s not a terrorist; he’s a stupid kid’, but the two categories are not mutually exclusive. In his case, he was both.

Were there stupid kids or terrorists in the mob that descended on the Sydney Opera House on Monday 9 October? Maybe. Three years ago Ali Bazzi, a 30-year-old Lebanese Australian moved from Sydney to Lebanon and joined Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed group, designated a terrorist organisation by the Australian government that has repeatedly launched rockets at Israel during the current war. In late December he was killed in a retaliatory Israeli strike.

In the Opera House forecourt, there were certainly terrorist sympathisers. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who perpetrated the massacre in Israel two nights earlier, have both been designated terrorist organisations by the Australian government. At least one protester was waving the yellow flag of Hezbollah and several others waved the black Shahada flag adopted by Islamic State.

The men waving the Shahada flags called out Takbir to which the crowd responded Allahu Akbar (God is Greater). Takbir expresses surprise and joy. In battle, it is a cry of victory, in Iran it is the official motto.

The victory the mob was celebrating was that of Hamas, Iran’s proxy, in violently assaulting 5,000 civilians in Israel, murdering 1,200, and taking more than 240 hostages. As Sheikh Ibrahim Dadoun said in Lakemba 24 hours earlier, ‘I’m smiling and I’m happy, I’m elated. It’s a day of courage, it’s a day of pride, it’s a day of victory.’

But the cries of Takbir and Allahu Akbar were interspersed with antisemitic chants that shocked protest organiser Fahad Ali who said on X that he intervened to shut down the ‘group of idiots’ but got no help from the police who told him they would not assist him. Why not? Indeed, why was the rally allowed to go ahead at all? Why was no one charged for letting off flares or for using racist hate speech to incite violence? Why was the only person arrested for breaching the peace a man carrying a rolled-up Israeli flag, not the unauthorised protesters who were a threat to him and to anyone else they identified as Jews?

Last December, Asio director-general Mike Burgess told Labor MP Michelle Ananda-Rajah that there is a ‘real risk of a domestic terror -attack’ in Australia. Yet bizarrely, Burgess thinks that pro-Palestine rallies serve as an important ‘pressure release’ and Ananda-Rajah said she would put up with protests to prevent a terrorist attack. This is crazy. Why should the targets of terrorists be forced to endure racist threats in public places? Why aren’t the police upholding the law to send the strongest possible message that terrorism isn’t tolerated in Australia?

In the aftermath of the rally, a video emerged of young thugs chanting ‘F–k the Jews’ and ‘Gas the Jews’ which shocked the world. Nobody disputed the words in the video, they claimed that the tape had been doctored and hadn’t been ‘sufficiently’ vetted so ‘nobody can verify that it’s real’.

Now, almost four months later, the NSW police have announced that an ‘eminent’ biometrics expert, hiding behind a veil of anonymity, has told them ‘with overwhelming certainty’ that he has found no evidence that the tape was doctored but also no evidence that the phrase ‘Gas the Jews’ was chanted. Instead, he claims the mob chanted ‘Where’s the Jews?’ He provided no evidence to back this up – no slowed-down recording to show how the word ‘gas’ could be mistaken for the words ‘where’s’.

The assertion contradicts not just the video evidence but multiple eyewitness accounts and was a source of jubilation amongst those who claimed the tape was a fake. Ignoring the police statement that the tape hadn’t been altered, the president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, Nasser Mashni, said confirmation that the video ‘was faked’ must compel every politician and media outlet who relied on it to issue a public apology.

The Australian National Imams Council called on the NSW Premier to identify the perpetrators of the ‘slanderous subtitles’ on the video and prosecute anyone who ‘fomented false allegations’. The government must also ‘address the harm caused’ and ‘manifest, in a demonstrative manner, support and empathy for the distress and grief being experienced by the Muslim and Arab communities’.

Seemingly, it’s okay to chant, ‘God is Great! Where’s the Jews? F–k the Jews!’ Would Mashni and the imams be okay if a mob chanted the same words but substituted Muslims for Jews? Would the police be okay if it were gays or indigenous Australians who were targeted? What if neo-Nazis in black balaclavas were doing the chanting?

Tellingly, those who claim that the tape was doctored think that saying ‘Gas the Jews’ is legally distinct from saying ‘Where’s the Jews?’ and ‘F–k the Jews’ because only it would reach the criminal standard for incitement to violence. How can this be correct? The threat of racist violence was so real that the police told law-abiding Australians not to gather at the Opera House if they were Jewish and a Jewish Australian was arrested ‘for his safety’, according to NSW Police Assistant Commissioner Tony Cooke, simply because he was in the vicinity of the unauthorised gathering carrying a rolled-up Israeli flag.

Regardless of legal thresholds, the chants threatened Jews wherever they lived and sent a clear message that Australia was not safe; not just because an Islamist mob was baying for their blood but because Australian police stood by and let it happen, charged no one, and now claim that video evidence and eye witness testimony of antisemitic incitement to violence can be dismissed on the say-so of an anonymous ‘expert’. This is gaslighting on a grand scale, a form of manipulation usually intended to undermine an individual’s perception of reality, only on this occasion NSW Police are gaslighting the global Jewish community and those who expect the law to prosecute rather than protect those who incite anti-semitic violence.

On X, people imagined what else forensic analysis by NSW police had discovered people at the rally were saying with overwhelming certainty: Watch the news? Go on a cruise? Look at the views. Where’s the loos? Wax the roos. That’s what it’s come to. The NSW police are a joke. Unfortunately, it’s the antisemites that are laughing all the way to the forecourt of the Opera House.