Iran’s direct involvement in terror overseas has been well known for decades. Nonetheless, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese seemed genuinely blindsided by its arrival Down Under.
At a press conference in Canberra this week, Albanese told reporters that the evidence left no room for doubt. The firebombing of a synagogue and a kosher deli in Australia last year had been planned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Australian intelligence had reached the ‘deeply disturbing conclusion’, he said, that Iran ‘sought to disguise its involvement’ in these ‘extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression’.
For a notoriously equivocating politician (his being ‘weak’ is one of the few things Israel and Iran seem to agree on), Albanese’s response was, for once, somewhat firm. He has given the Iranian ambassador seven days to leave Australia and designated the IRGC a terrorist organisation.
His words might even have been welcomed by Jewish Australians, a community he has otherwise shown little interest in, despite the wave of anti-Semitic incidents they have faced over the past nightmarish two years. ‘We have witnessed a number of appalling anti-Semitic attacks against Australia’s Jewish communities’, Albanese said. ‘I have made it clear that these sorts of incidents have no place in Australia, and I want the [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation] and the [Australian Federal Police] to investigate them as a priority.’
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