Court Finds Islamic Preacher Breached Racism Laws With Anti-Jewish Sermons

A known Islamic preacher has been told to stop making disparaging remarks about Jews after a court rejected his defence that no Jew could be offended because his lectures were delivered in private to a purely Muslim audience.

Wissam Haddad—whose actual name is William, but who also goes by Abu Ousayd—regularly lectured at the Al Madina Dawah Centre in Sydney.

During his sermons, he described Jewish people in the seventh century as “mischievous,” “treacherous,” “cowardly,” and “vile.”

In response, he was sued by two senior members of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), who alleged he had breached section 18C of the federal Racial Discrimination Act during three lectures, a sermon, and an interview, all in 2023.

The section prohibits offensive behaviour based on race or ethnic origin.

Haddad denied breaching the law and claimed he was delivering historical and religious lectures on events from the Koran to contextualise the current war in Gaza.

He said he was speaking about “Jews of faith” rather than ethnicity while trying to explain that “what the Israeli government is doing to the people of Gaza” was not “something new.”

Before his trial commenced, Haddad took to social media to claim he rejected the court’s authority.

He described the case as a battle “between Islam and unbelievers” and told viewers that, “We disbelieve in these courts; these are the houses of the Taghut”—an Islamic concept that describes the worship of anyone or anything other than Allah and which has come to be used to dismiss or insult a non-Muslim power as being anti-Islamic.

“What I am currently facing in the federal court is not an issue of Abu Ousayd or Al Madina Dawah Centre versus the Jewish lobby … rather, it’s a battle between Islam and kuffar (unbelievers),” he said on Instagram, alleging the claimants sought to criminalise Islamic scripture.

Jewish Group Says Comments ‘Dehumanising’

Nonetheless, he duly appeared in the Federal Court on July 1 to hear one of the applicants in this case, ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim, describe his speeches as using “overtly dehumanising” language.

“Making derogatory generalisations, calling Jews a vile and treacherous people, calling them rats and cowards … are things which I think would be experienced by most Jews as dehumanising,” Wertheim told the court.

His barrister, Peter Braham SC, told the court that Haddad’s speeches were designed to “persuade an audience that the Jewish people have certain immutable and eternal characteristics that cause them to … be the objects of contempt and hatred,” and that such rhetoric was “so dangerous.”

Haddad’s barrister, Andrew Boe, argued his sermons were delivered in “good faith,” and constituted religious and historical instruction for a solely Muslim audience. If his sermons breached Section 18C, then the law would be unconstitutional because it restricts freedom of religion, which is guaranteed in Section 116 of the Australian Constitution.

Seminar Publicly Available

Boe claimed that the lectures were intended only for a private Muslim congregation of 40 people and that Haddad was not responsible for their publication online.

However, that quickly collapsed after the court heard that Haddad had installed sound and video recording equipment and was shown Instagram videos of him promoting several of the speeches, which included the words: “The lecture will be recorded and then uploaded on YouTube.”

Questioned by Braham, he admitted he did know the speeches would be uploaded but denied being involved in the process. He refused to name the third party he believed had published them.

“I’m not at liberty to give his name because I don’t think it’s relevant,” he said.

Court Issues a Takedown Order

Previous cases in which freedom of religion has been weighed against anti-discrimination laws have typically found that religious orders can claim exemptions based on their beliefs.

But in this case, Justice Angus Stewart found the speeches were disparaging and likely to offend, insult, harass, or intimidate Jewish people.

He ordered that Haddad and the Al Madina Dawah Centre remove any copies of the offending material under their control, and request that others who have copies do the same.

He found that the Al Madina Dawah Centre also breached Section 18C by publishing the three lectures on the social media site Rumble, as well as one on Facebook.

Haddad is also barred in the future from causing “words, sounds, or images to be communicated otherwise than in private, which attribute characteristics to Jewish people on the basis of their group membership and which convey any of the imputations identified [in] the reasons for judgment.”

Both must also pay the costs of the two applicants.

The content of the material was likely “in all the circumstances to offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate Jewish people in Australia,” Justice Stewart said. “The imputations include age-old tropes against Jewish people that are fundamentally racist and anti-Semitic.”