Iran’s Global Anti-Jewish Jihad Continues
The Meaning and Lessons of Recent Events in Australia.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced on 26 August that his government was designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the praetorians of the Islamic Revolution that rules Iran and the instrument by which the Revolution is exported, as a terrorist organisation. Albanese also suspended the activities of the Australian Embassy in Tehran, and declared Iran’s ambassador to Australia Ahmad Sadeghi and three other Iranian officials persona non grata, ordering them to leave within a week.
This is a notable development, not simply because it is the first time since the Second World War that Australia has expelled a foreign ambassador.1 In February 2023, about nine months into Albanese’s premiership, a Senate inquiry into the behaviour of the Iranian regime recommended that Australia designate the IRGC. Albanese’s Labor government kept silent for more than six months, before rejecting most of the Senate’s recommendations, specifically the call to list the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, under a strange legal theory that looked even stranger after the IRGC’s Palestinian units raped, slaughtered, and abducted 1,450 Israelis on 7 October 2023, and the Albanese government designated those units individually.
Many Australians—in Parliament, in the press, and among the IRGC’s victims, including Kylie Moore-Gilbert—were critical of Labor’s decision against listing the IRGC in 2023 and the issue became a serious point of contention in Australian politics, with more and more voices demanding that Albanese reverse course. He refused, until last week.
The reason for Albanese’s turnaround was visible at the press conference, where Albanese was flanked by Mike Burgess, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Shortly before Albanese spoke, ASIO made public the evidence that the IRGC was behind two antisemitic terrorist attacks in Australia: the October 2024 attempt to burn down Sydney’s Lewis’ Continental Kitchen and the December 2024 firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue. Even the lawyers could not find Albanese a way around this. These were “extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression”, Albanese acknowledged. “They put lives at risk, they terrified the community and they tore at our social fabric.”
The details of these two attacks are worth dwelling on.
Australia is one of the countries where the post-October 7 diminution of the societal disapproval of antisemitism in the West has had the most practical impact: the two attacks Albanese mentioned came amid a wave of attacks on Jews that extended into early 2025. The wave began to subside in March 2025 after Australian police charged fourteen organised crime figures with being responsible for many of the attacks. One of those detained was Sayed Moosawi, a former head of the Nomads bikie gang, and the evidence was damning that he had orchestrated the arson at Lewis’ Continental Kitchen. (We have many fewer details about the attack on the Melbourne synagogue, partly because it took until this summer to apprehend the three suspects.)
The captured communications show Moosawi had been paid $12,000 to organise attacks on Jewish businesses in Sydney. On 30 September 2014, Moosawi set up a Signal group, using the username “James Bond”, and texted his associates: “I got something good lined up”. Moosawi recruited teenagers, local hoodlums, and drug addicts for the job. There were a few false starts: issues with finding whether businesses were owned by Jews, inability to find their locations, setting fire to the door of the wrong business only for sprinklers to douse the blaze minutes later; that kind of thing. Finally, on 20 October 2024, one of Moosawi’s hirelings managed to break into Lewis’ Continental Kitchen, a kosher deli on the corner of Curlewis Street in Bondi, where he “set the kitchen on fire, causing an estimated $1 million in damage before fleeing the scene in a stolen car”.
Amid the Four Lions-level carry-on, the key detail was that Moosawi was being paid by a foreigner based outside Australia to orchestrate this violence and his text messages bear witness to his frustration as his agents made him “look stupid” in front of his benefactor. As we now know, Moosawi’s boss was the IRGC, though whether he was speaking directly to an IRGC officer—or knew who was ultimately controlling him—is unclear. ASIO’s Burgess explained: “It’s a layer cake of cut-outs between IRGC and … the alleged perpetrators conducting crimes. In between them, they tap into a number of people, agents of IRGC, and people that they know in the criminal world, and work through there.”
This operational set-up is not novel: it allows the Iranian regime a measure of “deniability”. The clerical despotism has, of course, denied everything, and the whole purpose of the IRGC structure is to make subversion, whether in Yemen or Australia, look like a “local” matter to avoid bringing retribution on the central node of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In Australia, the IRGC has some advantages. Working in the sympathetic environments of particularly Lebanese immigrants and the deeply-rooted mafia gangs with long-standing Hizballah/IRGC connections in Sydney and Melbourne, the IRGC does not have to do much to encourage anti-Jewish attacks and can hide its hand quite easily, making antisemitic eruptions look like the usual “community issues”. The IRGC’s partiality for organised crime partners is an old story, too. As far back as 2011, for example, the IRGC thought it had found a way to murder the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., by working through Mexican cartels.
Thus, an enterprise as reckless as what the IRGC did in Australia is not surprising. If there is anything new about this, it might be the element of desperation. The IRGC—aware that for many years its foreign terrorism apparatus has been infiltrated and paralysed by Israel, and with the lesson recently reinforced in Lebanon and within Iran—seems to have consciously looked in Australia for less prominent and connected collaborators, for more individual “small-time” criminals, who are less likely to be on the radar of Israel and other States. This did allow Iran to achieve a “success”: the Down Under happened, unlike so many other IRGC operations targeting Jews over the last decade and more. The trade-off, obviously, is that such actors are much less competent.
Overall, then, the conclusion from events in Australia is that we are where we were—and basically have been since the Islamic Revolution captured Iran in 1979. Foundational to the Islamic Revolution are the twin pillars of confronting the West and a global war against Jews; the destruction of the Jewish State is a goal within these paradigms. The IRGC, as the vanguard of the Revolution, has carried on this war at all times and in all places where they can.2 The IRGC’s ability to wage its anti-Jewish jihad and strike at the West has been curtailed in recent years by Israel’s skilful countermeasures, but the intent remains and any opportunities will be exploited. As such, while Australia took an important first step in expelling the Iranian ambassador, the most effective action would be to shutter the Iranian Embassy entirely—a policy many other States would benefit from.
Whether ASIO’s preliminary assessment that the Iranian Embassy was uninvolved in the two terrorist attacks last year is correct or not is irrelevant. The Islamic Revolution, like Soviet Communism, is a transnational movement that happens to hold a State, and is thus entitled by the conventions of the Western-designed international system to have diplomatic facilities in our countries, which it systematically abuses to further its ideological program. In practical terms, this means not only terrorism,3 but missionary-recruitment activity and subversion more broadly, such as turning mosques in Germany into propaganda-recruitment centres and Iranian agents guiding the “pro-Palestine” demonstrations in Britain. These things are all much more difficult to do if the IRGC does not have a base in Western States where its officers can act under the legal protections of diplomatic immunity.
NOTES
Even after the famous Petrov Affair in 1954, it was the Soviets who severed diplomatic relations, expelling the Australian ambassador from Moscow and withdrawing their own Embassy Down Under.
Just a few examples: Iran has been bombing synagogues in Europe since the 1980s, blew up the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish community centre in Argentina in the early 1990s, has brought down plane-loads of Jewish civilians, murdered Jewish holidaymakers in Bulgaria in 2012, and tried to assassinate the Israeli Prime Minister in 2024.
An infamous case where the IRGC used Iranian diplomatic facilities is the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which was run out of Iran’s Embassy in Syria.