This week, Australia finally expelled Iran’s odious ambassador, Ahmad Sadeghi and three other Iranian ‘diplomats’ (in scare quotes because Iranian envoys and the activities they conduct are anything but diplomatic).

Australia will also belatedly list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation and has taken the precaution of suspending all operations at its embassy in Tehran, as Iran can now be expected to retaliate, possibly in its signature mode of kidnapping Australian diplomats or citizens.

The Australian government has, apparently, known for months that Iran may have been involved in multiple antisemitic attacks on Australian soil, but only acted because ‘enough credible intelligence’ had been gathered by intelligence agencies to satisfy even the doubting Thomases (or the doubting Tony in the case of Minister Burke) in Australia’s kitchen cabinet – a triumvirate that includes the PM and the Foreign Minister – that Iran was behind at least two of the antisemitic attacks that have swept Australia in the wake of the invasion of Israel by Iran’s terror proxies, Hamas and friends.

Iran sought to disguise its involvement by employing local criminals, but the tell-tale signs were hard to hide as the Australian crooks it hired were almost as incompetent as the Iranian terrorists it has previously engaged.

Take the attack on the Curly Lewis Brewery in Sydney. Allegedly, it was mistakenly targeted by amateur arsonists who misunderstood the instructions they had received from their handler – ‘James Bond’ – which were to burn down the nearby kosher cafe, Lewis’ Continental Kitchen.

When Australian academic, Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, was finally released after being held for 804 days in some of Iran’s worst prisons, on bogus espionage charges, it was in exchange for three Iranian ‘businessmen’, who also bungled their plot in Bangkok to blow up the Israeli ambassador and blew off their own legs instead.

Ambassador Sadeghi has made a name for himself on social media. When the Wall Street Journal accused Iran of being behind the 7 October massacre, Sadeghi said it a ‘spontaneous’ act of ‘resistance’. Hardly. The attacks began with a barrage of more than 4,300 rockets, launched into Israel by 1,000 fighters, allowing 6,000 Gazans (3,800 elite ‘Nukhba forces’ and 2,200 militants and their cheer squads) to invade in vehicles, powered paragliders and on foot, murdering almost 1,200 people, injuring over 5,400, and taking 251 hostages, which Hamas gloated would be enough to secure the release of all the terrorists in Israeli prisons.

Sadeghi has not kept a low profile since. After the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of proscribed terrorist organisation Hezbollah, Sadeghi praised him as a ‘great personality, an outstanding standard-bearer and an exceptional leader’ and said his ‘path in the fight against the oppression and occupation of criminal Zionism will be continued’.

Then opposition leader, Peter Dutton, rightly said that the ambassador’s comments were ‘utterly at odds with what is in our country’s best interests’ and called for the ambassador to be expelled. Yet all the Prime Minister managed to do was feebly claim that Australia’s relationship with Iran continued, ‘not because we agree with the regime but because it’s in Australia’s national interest,’ without explaining in what inconceivable way Australia benefited.

In August 2024, after Sadeghi referred to Israel as a ‘Zionist plague’, and called for its removal from ‘the holy lands of Palestine’ by 2027, the vice president of the Australian Iranian Community Alliance, Suren Edgar, said Sadeghi’s comments were ‘definitely antisemitic’, and called for his removal saying, ‘The ambassador’s egregious comments are not only unacceptable but also a direct threat to the safety and harmony of our multicultural society’ and, ‘allowing such an individual to remain in Australia would be a grave mistake and disservice to the values of peace and respect that we uphold.’

But that was too much for the PM. All he managed to muster the courage to do was ask the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to call in Sadeghi to be metaphorically slapped on the wrist with a wet lettuce leaf.

For years, the Iranian community in Australia and victims of the IRGC, such as Moore-Gilbert, have been, as she put it, ‘literally screaming at rallies, to our local MPs, in parliamentary consultations, and in reports to the national security hotline that Iranian agents are operating brazenly and with few consequences here on Australian soil.’

Iran frequently uses organised crime to orchestrate attacks on journalists, dissidents and targets within the Jewish community, and many, including Moore-Gilbert, have said Iran laies behind some of the anti-semitic attacks that have proliferated in Australia since October 7, and called for its ambassador to be expelled for his antisemitic rhetoric and the embassy’s ‘sinister role in sponsoring the surveillance of dissidents here in Australia’.

Moore-Gilbert pointed to a February 2023 Senate inquiry, which recommended the IRGC be proscribed as a terrorist organisation and said she had personally petitioned two foreign ministers to sanction the IRGC officials ‘directly complicit’ in her wrongful detention and that of at least four other Australian citizens, with no response.

On 5 December 2020, the week after Moore-Gilbert was freed, this column surveyed Iran’s deadly diplomacy. A Belgian court had just sentenced an Iranian diplomat to 20 years in jail after he flew into Vienna airport with half a kilo of explosives. The attack carried out by the ‘business buffoons’ traded for Moore-Gilbert was orchestrated by then Quds Force chief Major General Qasem Soleimani thankfully killed in a drone strike on 3 January 2020 ordered by President Trump.

Looking at this grim picture, this column wrote that, ‘normally, a diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip’ whereas ‘an Iranian diplomat plots hell in his embassy and personally organises its delivery,’ asking how long the Australian government would ‘tolerate the risk such an embassy poses in Canberra?’ and adding that, ‘One thing is certain, Israel will not sit on its hands, ‘Biden’ it’s time, and let Iran go nuclear.’

You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to know that sooner rather than later, Israel would destroy or degrade Iran’s nuclear program. Yet despite this week’s expulsions, Iran’s embassy has not been closed. As long as it remains open, it provides a base to plot further acts to harm Australia. We have all been warned.