A fundamental badge of a free society is that the law must be applied without discrimination.

It is a national disgrace that today in Australia, Jews are being denied the equal protection of the law.

The fact that governments have not corrected this leads to the inevitable conclusion that they have condoned or even directed this for advantage in certain electorates.

The first example of this trend seems to have been when, contrary to the wishes of Prime Minister Gillard, Australia’s longstanding UN vote on Palestinian recognition was changed because the relevant minister claimed he would be unable to defend it on ‘the steps of the Lakemba Mosque’.

This trend was significantly escalated when on 9 October, the Opera House sails were illuminated with an Israeli flag as a sign of solidarity and comfort to Jews over the most appalling antisemitic outrage since the Holocaust.

But that evening the NSW Police surprisingly shepherded a threatening band of pro-Hamas demonstrators to the Opera House, warned Jews to stay away and made only one arrest, that of a courageous young Jew unfurling an Israeli flag.

That all this was done without any call to order to the police by the responsible politicians indicates a disgraceful political malaise, public policy being determined by an ancient, imported race-hatred.

The existence of this malaise was confirmed when it was learned that visas were being issued to Gazans without proper verification and when it was revealed that the Albanese government had, against serious warnings, potentially funded supporters of terrorism .

It must be stressed that at the notorious Opera House incident, there was not one  arrest despite incitements to violence and other offences being openly committed in front of the police.

This has ensured that identification now  is difficult, if not impossible. Was this just bad practice, or was it intended?

We can be sure of one thing. The rank-and-file police would not have refrained from acting and would not have taken other questionable decisions unless they were under instructions.

This failure to act was followed by weeks of authorised pro-Hamas demonstrations across the city and even into residential areas where Jews were known to live, all with police protection at enormous cost to the taxpayer.

This is yet another example of government engaging in discrimination. Take, for example, the charges invoiced to CPAC in 2022 concerning security at an indoor conference in Sydney.

Following the failure to act at the Opera House, the police leadership conducted a  lethargic, four-month investigation during which independent witnesses indicated what was said there, including the notorious ‘F–k the Jews’ and ‘Gas the Jews’, words heard on television and radio broadcasts the world over, with enormous reputational damage to Australia.

Meanwhile, a tawdry alibi for inaction,  the myth that the law relating to incitement was unenforceable, was pushed into the media with some politicians curiously eager to repeat it .

This is even though the legislation, Section 93Z of the Crimes Act, was drafted to be effective and had significant bipartisan support.

The question is, why won’t the police use it?

This law makes publicly threatening or inciting violence, on grounds including race or religion, a serious criminal offence punishable by up to three years imprisonment and/or a fine of up to $11,000.

As the prominent media legal expert Chris Merritt confirmed in an interview on ADH TV, rather than being toothless, the provision was designed to make prosecutions more likely to be successful.

It was introduced specifically with a lower threshold than applies to most offences.

This particularly relates to how a court can be satisfied that incitement has occurred.

The burden on the prosecution of showing intent, the mental element in the crime,  was reduced to mere recklessness.

And while the section states that a prosecution cannot be commenced without the approval of the Director of Public Prosecutions, this does not mean, as some have wrongly suggested, that the DPP has some sort of veto on police power.

This in no way stops the police from acting, as they should have, at the Opera House and did recently against a group of self-proclaimed Nazis.

There is no reason to blame the DPP for the timidity of the police in respect of pro-Hamas demonstrators breaking the law.

Eventually, rather than admit they could not now identify the culprits and that they had actually encouraged this situation, the police leadership delivered what they no doubt thought was the coup de grâce.

Claiming wrongly that the only incitement to violence was in the chant ‘Gas the Jews’, and behaving like some desperate defence lawyer trying to provide some soupçon of evidence countering what millions had heard, and what independent witnesses were willing to swear to, the mob was actually chanting the ungrammatical unidiomatic ‘Where’s the Jews’.

Since the opening word chanted was ‘Gas’, the faux chant could not be the grammatical and natural ‘Where are’ with the accent on ‘Where’ and the ‘are’ almost suppressed .

The problem is the world can hear an ‘s’ at the end of the first word.

If you doubt this, just listen to any of the reports, noting that the police exclude any suggestion the first posting by the Australian Jewish Association was doctored .

Instead of the police trying to play judge, jury, prosecutor and defence, had they arrested the culprits, these matters could have been determined by a court.

The coup de grâce was not to the claim that criminal acts occurred, it was to their failure to act.

While it was only after the outrage of 7 October that we saw the authorities willing to sacrifice the right of Jews to equal treatment before the law, the problem began years before.

This was with the careless or improper exercise of the immigration power and the citizenship power in favour of groups who burn with ancient hatreds, together with the willingness of some politicians to allow public policy to be determined by those very hatreds.

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