Iran has a history of stoking anti-Semitism in foreign countries
Australia on Tuesday expelled Iran’s ambassador, closed its embassy in Tehran, and announced plans to list the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, accusing the Islamic Republic of orchestrating at least two major anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish sites in Sydney and Melbourne.
Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said in a press release that his country’s domestic spy agency had “credible intelligence” that Iran was behind the Oct. 20, 2024, attack on a kosher deli in Sydney and the Dec. 6, 2024, attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne. The two arson attacks caused significant property damage and made international headlines at the time.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the United States has designated as a foreign terrorist organization since 2019, orchestrated the attacks through “a complex web of proxies to hide its involvement,” according to Australian Security Intelligence Organisation chief Mike Burgess, who said the corps was likely involved in other attacks.
Anti-Semitic attacks have surged in Australia since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel. A 2024 report by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry found that anti-Semitic acts in the country have increased by 316 percent between October 2023 to September 2024, with more than 2,000 incidents recorded.
The Iranian government has long drawn scrutiny for backing anti-Semitism abroad, including in the United States. Last July, then-director of national intelligence Avril Haines assessed that the Islamic Republic was organizing and paying anti-Israel protesters in the United States to sow division ahead of the 2024 election. Months earlier, Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei openly praised the anti-Israel student protesters as “a branch of the Resistance Front.”
Albanese on Tuesday condemned the arson attacks as “extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil.”
“The Australian people want the killing and hatred to stop, and they don’t want the conflict in the Middle East brought here,” the prime minister went on. “Iran has sought to do just that. They have sought to harm and terrify Jewish Australians, and to sow hatred and division in our community.”
The Israeli embassy in Australia celebrated the terrorist group’s designation for the IRGC as a “strong and important move,” writing, “Iran’s regime is not only a threat to Jews or Israel, it endangers the entire free world, including Australia.”
— Israel in Australia (@IsraelinOZ) August 26, 2025
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