Cui Bono? Australia’s pivot to Iran, and Israel’s influence

ASIO Chief Mike Burgess stood next to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke as they delivered a “disturbing discovery” to the Australian public. The announcement revealed that two of the antisemitic attacks, including the Adass Synagogue arson attack, were the responsibility of foreign actors connected to Iran. After delivering the findings of the ASIO investigation, the group announced a diplomatic freeze with Iran and the expulsion of its ambassador. 

According to ASIO intelligence, and the differing perceptions of some Australians, Australia has been under foreign attack for quite some time. 

A series of uncharacteristic domestic crimes across a period between the beginning of the Israeli genocide in Gaza post October 7, and the war crimes we see today, were designed to strike fear and division into Australian society, fuelling a narrative supported by the media and political classes that Jews were unsafe in Australia. Some of the attacks seemed uncharacteristic to secular Australia – anti-religious graffiti, randomly defaced currency with antisemitic slurs. Nonetheless, the response has been definitively draconian and consequential.

Burgess and the government made the announcement a few days after hundreds of thousands of people Australia wide marched in support of Palestine and against Israel’s aggression against the Palestinian people. Tens of thousands of children have been destroyed and large swathes of infrastructure turned into rubble. The targeting of journalists, healthcare workers, and aid staff killed in Gaza is unmatched across all recent global conflicts. Among all the death, ethical acquiescence, lies and hypocrisy, the government says the culprit for two of the graffiti and arson attacks, in which no one was harmed, was the responsibility of the nefarious Iranian Revolutionary Guard Core.

Penny Wong spoke with an ashen face about the situation with Iran, walking the roundest arc around the elephant in the room to remind bewildered Australian viewers about her government being the “toughest ever” on Tehran. She dared to do this while delicately ignoring that our government has been the weakest ever on Israel, including the previous Rudd government, who sent home an Israeli diplomat for passport forgeries. Wong’s government allows diplomatic, economic and military normalcy with a nation that has been taunting Australia for merely whimpering of an end to Netanyahu’s hostilities while he commits the worst crime against humanity in the 21^st century.

Wong’s repudiation of Iran felt like a cheap double handed trick. As she read through her generic condemnation, she prepped towards a statement that reflected another aspect of this public appearance: she asked Australians to leave Iran immediately. It can’t be ignored that while Wong made her statement, the closure of diplomatic offices in Iran was already underway, and the logistics and supply chains of war were rerouting to feed weapons and manpower towards a horrendous conflict in the Middle East. She clung to her script, and seemed barely able to finish it.

Since US President Donald Trump ordered the unprecedented and unprovoked attack on Iranian nuclear, military and civilian sites in concert with the IDF, the prospect of further war with Iran has evolved from a possibility to an inevitability. And along with it, so too has evolved the language of the political and media class in Canberra. From the moment the Labor government refused to condemn the US strikes on Iran in June, it has shifted its position quite rapidly from one of ambiguity with a few distinct bilateral flavourings between Tehran and Canberra, to one of outright hostility carrying a unilateral message out of Washington.  

Iran, which possesses the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel, has been subjugated to tough sanctions, the restrictive conditions of the JCPOA, cyber attacks, and decades of continuous lobbying from Israeli interests in the west to influence mindsets towards its desired confrontation. Tehran has had to walk a diplomatic tight rope to survive – as it has looked to appeal to the world as a rational actor, whilst pointing to the irrationality of Israel and its benefactor in Washington. Why would Iran, which has over a 100 synagogues, spend all the time and resources organising dark web cookers to spray graffiti on Jewish targets in far away Australia, when it could have picked one of its own?

Israel has made no secret of its desire to topple the Iranian regime over the decades, led primarily by the tireless lobbying of its beleaguered PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel has also gained significant strategic wins throughout Iran’s “axis of resistance” (e.g. marginalisation of Hezbollah, fall of Syria), and seeks to consolidate on its push after tipping the scales further towards conflict in the recent ‘12 day war’ between the US, Israel and Iran. Interesting timing that Australia has all this dirty laundry to air about Tehran, as whispers of a regional war by December become more like tangible battle plans, and diplomatic sabre rattling becomes the language of war.  

So now the Albanese government is taking drastic action against the state of Iran, and if the intelligence turns out to be evidence, so it should. But, it has barely acted against Israel after it killed an Australian aid worker, Zomi Frankcom, along with tens of thousands of innocent children in Gaza for nearly two years straight. 

The announcement comes at a time that Australia is under pressure from Washington and Tel Aviv for choosing to recognise the state of Palestine. All these movements coincide with reports of a scathing letter in which Netanyahu ripped into Albanese demanding he ‘act against antisemitism’, and now only days later, well before the 22 September Rosh Hashanah ultimatum, the PM has conveniently blamed Iran for everything Israel stands to benefit from.

This comes after Anthony Albanese has been the target of Zionist frustrations, who along with the media, have painted the PM as as anti-Israel, even anti-jewish, culminating in Netanyahu taking time out from his genocide to tell Albanese he is a “weak leader”. So what does our Albo do, after copping it for daring to run the country in the national interest from powerful Zionist’s loyal to a foreign government? Well, he says he doesn’t take the comments from Netanyahu personally, and he then proceeds to draw the longest bow with the aid of Israeli intelligence to accuse Iran as the primary foreign entity behind the series of attacks that have altered our national DNA.    

As the Albanese government acts with post-haste to designate Iran as a terror state, it must be asked why a nation with the second largest indigenous Jewish population in the Middle East, a country possessing over 100 synagogues, would coordinate a multinational intelligence operation that, among other things, hired a couple of Zionists to tag a restaurant in Sydney? Something doesn’t add up. Who benefits? There are so many unanswered questions about the “liaison with foreign partners” that Burgess credited, about how this information impacts the two year social damage caused by the sun being blocked out by all things antisemitism and changed the law on secular Australian society, and without any transparency from the ASIO chief or the PM, Australians are left feeling further confused, and further in doubt why people we are supposed to trust are seeming so unconvincing in their delivery of something so monumentally consequential.  

One thing is for certain: the genocidal state of Israel, a global pariah, led by one of the most brutal murders in modern history, who has benefited from the social division and the legislation changes in Australia, has been a foreign entity manipulating Canberra both behind the scenes and on the world stage. 

Watching this unfold, amongst the gall of the recent Antisemitism envoy report, with the evident pivot to Iran as the new public enemy number one, with a rolling genocide continuing unabated, with streams of people marching over landmarks just to get some lipservice – its hard to refute that our bipartisan political class is working for foreign interests at the expense of our own. 

The war with Iran looms ever closer, and Australia’s role will become apparent in the rhetoric and action used on Iran in the weeks and months ahead. And without any clear information from our opaque leaders, we are left to ponder together if the same mob who have stalled and dithered on the human catastrophe in Gaza for nearly two years, could soon be asking Australians to go to war with Iran on behalf of the same mob committing it.