Australia’s diplomatic attack on Iran may have further eroded confidence in the country’s spy agency and the Albanese government, Mick Hall reports.
The Iranian embassy to Australia in Canberra. (Nick-D /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Mick Hall
Special to Consortium News
The expulsion of Iran’s ambassador to Australia over accusations his country directed anti-Semitic recent attacks in Sydney and Melbourne may yet backfire on intelligence agencies behind the move.
The expulsion of Ahmad Sadeghi and three other officials followed a briefing from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) on Aug. 26, which Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese concluded had presented credible evidence of Iran’s involvement.
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According to some analysts however, a significant proportion of the public are not convinced and the diplomatic attack on Iran may have further eroded confidence in the spy agency and their government, which uncritically accepted its conclusions.
“These were extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil,” Albanese told media on Tuesday. “They were attempts to undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community.”
Albanese did not explain what Iran would have to gain from such activities.
Mike Burgess in 2023. (YouTube/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess claimed his organisation had unpicked a complex network of criminal proxies used by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to attack a kosher restaurant in Sydney and the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne. No one was injured in those attacks.
He said Iran was “likely” to have been involved in directing other anti-Semitic attacks, although the four diplomats being expelled were not involved.
“They’re just using cut-outs, including people who are criminals and members of organised crime gangs to do their bidding or direct their bidding,” he said.
Mostly tellingly, Burgess confirmed his organisation’s investigation had been carried out with help from foreign partners. A Jerusalem Post report suggested Mossad was one of the likely intelligence partners involved, while analysts said the U.S. had most likely played a role as well.
“It is quite clear that a large proportion of people, of different backgrounds, no longer accept the pronouncements of these ‘intelligence’ organisations without questioning,” Warwick Powell, an adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology, told Consortium News.
“A cursory glance across the independent media and social media spaces tells us as much. The centrality of ambiguous words like ‘likely’ and ‘possible’ as part of the rationalisation of the diplomatic expulsion don’t help, raising scepticism amongst people as to motives and judgement. Put plainly, the credibility of these agencies has been severely damaged over the past couple of decades.”
‘Politically Tainted Report’
Israel’s likely involvement in Australia’s move against Iran, while Israeli diplomats remain in the country amid a genocide being committed in Gaza, is a damning indictment of a politically-tainted report used as a diplomatic move against a country the Zionist state is attempting to destroy.
This week Western publics witnessed the live bombing of the Nasser Hospital in the south of the Gaza Strip, a “double-tap” strike that killed 21 people, including emergency responders and five more journalists. It brings the number of journalists killed in Gaza over the last 22 months to 247, according to U.N. statistics.
“Compounding this scepticism is the fact that many across the community are highly critical of the government’s reactions to the situation in Gaza,” Powell says.
“While the government made the announcements to expel Iran’s ambassador on the back of undisclosed and seemingly tendentious ‘intelligence,’ we were all aware that another hospital in Gaza had been bombed by Israel, with journalists and civilians amongst the casualties. A question of standards is therefore naturally raised. Disgust at the apparent hypocrisy is deserved.
“If Australia wanted to remind the world that its foreign policy priorities are often or largely shaped by those of other countries, then it is hard to think of a better way than this.”
The IRGC will now be designated a terrorist organisation by Australia, following designations by the U.S. and Canada. Other Five Eyes partners, including New Zealand, are expected to do the same.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters condemned Iran following Albanese’s announcement.
“New Zealand is gravely concerned to learn of Australia’s announcement on Iran’s role in antisemitic attacks against the Australian Jewish community,” Peters said.
“New Zealand unequivocally condemns Iran’s actions, including through proxies, in Gaza, the Red Sea and around the Middle East and the world. State-sponsored attacks designed to sow discord are completely unacceptable.”
The language used by Burgess and Albanese plays to the widely-disseminated distortion of Iran directing “proxies” in the Middle East, creating trouble for geopolitical gain, including using Hezbollah, an independent, powerful regional ally of Iran.
This Western projection has been a feature of Five Eyes’ annual ‘threat assessment’ reports in recent years, warning that Tehran and Moscow are using criminal proxies to carry out its violent attacks across Europe.
Rendering of the “Five Eyes” intelligence network that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., the U.S. (@GDJ, Openclipart)
In October 2024, MI5 chief Ken McCallum claimed Russia was on a mission to generate “sustained mayhem on British and European streets” and that the agency had also responded to 20 plots backed by Iran since 2022.
The New Zealand Security and Intelligence Service (NZSIS) earlier this month warned of heightened threats posed by Iran, Russia and particularly China, repeating themes of its Tasman neighbour and other Five Eyes partners.
The report provoked a stern rebuke from China, evidently becoming less patient with the country’s increasing alignment with the U.S. and its hegemonic narratives and machinations in the Asia Pacific region.
The latest move by Australia may also see public patience wearing thin.
In the wake of the expulsion announcement, Albanese told media his government would give whatever powers it needed to carry out its work.
“I think Australians can take confidence from our security agencies, know they have a government that backs our agencies and says ‘whatever power you need, we will give you’.”
Although, instances of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have increased since Oct. 7, 2023, according to some surveys, there have been a number of high-profile fake anti-Semitic attacks in Australia too.
In March, police found a caravan with explosives, no detonator and an address of a Sydney synagogue and eventually concluded it was part of a fabricated plan by an organised crime network in order to divert police resources.
Albanese’s colleague, New South Wales state Premier Chris Minns, is currently the subject of a Parliamentary inquiry for his role in using such anti-Semitic hoaxes as pretext for draconian anti-protest laws aimed at pro-Palestine rallies that have attracted unprecedented numbers in the past month.
Although the Iran probe may serve to attempt to condition the public to accept more powers being given to the state agencies, it may also be useful in positioning Australia on the Israeli side in a renewed war with Iran.
Albanese at an event in Victoria in February. (Samuel Phelps / Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade / CC BY 4.0)
There has been heightened expectancy that Israel’s act of aggression against Iran in June, which resulted in a 12-day war, will be followed up with more provocations and attacks on the Islamic Republic.
Tim Anderson, director of the Sydney-based Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies, said Australia’s spy agency was almost certainly assisted in its probe by Mossad and America’s National Security Agency (NSA).
“It is very clear to me, as a researcher and author of several books on the mid east wars, that the Israelis played a determining role in Canberra’s expulsion of the Iranian ambassador from Australia,” he told Consortium News.
“This demonstrates the ongoing reality of foreign interference [U.S.-Israeli] in Australian politics.
“These are the same agencies that fed us a steady stream of fake war propaganda including the supposed WMDs in Iraq, claims of Hamas bases under Gaza hospitals and fake stories about Iran being on the verge of producing nuclear weapons.”
Anderson believes the diplomatic move against Iran not only puts Australia on good terms with Israel and the U.S. again, after a spat over its purely symbolic recognition of Palestine on Aug. 12, it may also be aimed at making its public more amenable to any military support given to Israel.
“Canberra’s diplomatic attack on Iran comes as the Israelis prepare for a second round of aggression against Iran and while the Australian public, through huge rallies, has been expressing its outrage at the Albanese government’s collaboration with the Gaza genocide and demanding punishment of the Israelis,” he says.
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s building in the Parliamentary Triangle, Canberra. (Nick-D, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
After presenting ASIO with a catalogue of claims about a supposed IRGC role in “anti-Semitic attacks,” he says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has now forced Albanese’s hand, denouncing Iran so as to maintain support of his big brother in Washington. This may also help align Canberra with Israel’s upcoming second round attack on Iran.”
“Netanyahu seems to be further embedding Canberra in his war against Iran as part of his U.S.-backed plot to destroy Palestine and control the entire Middle East.”
Australia Citizens Party spokesperson Robert Barwick compares the intelligence report on Iran to the erroneous “weapons of mass destruction” dossier used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, which arguably left public trust in intelligence agencies in the U.S. and U.K. at at an all-time low.
“Some people, especially politicians, seem to think intelligence assessments by the ASIO are like weather bureau information – objective, accurate reports from an impartial government agency. Nothing could be further from the truth. Intelligence is highly politicised,” he told Mick Hall in Context.
“Initially, Australia’s top intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA), assessed that Iraq might have been reviving its WMD program,” Barwick told Consortium News.
“Then, after Sept. 13 2002, the ONA hardened its intelligence to align with the C.I.A. and MI6 fabrications, claiming that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction — a clearly politicised move to falsify evidence to suit the government.”
For Barwick, the move against Iran should highlight the dangers of a U.S.-aligned intelligence community strongly influencing national government policy.
“We should be demanding evidence, not ‘intelligence’,” he says.
Mick Hall is an independent journalist based in New Zealand. He is a former digital journalist at Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and former Australian Associated Press (AAP) staffer, having also written investigative stories for various newspapers, including the New Zealand Herald.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Seems that conclusion that Iran “directed anti-Semitic recent attacks in Sydney and Melbourne” has no supporting evidence identifying individuals who communicated with persons in Australia, persons that could be interrogated, arrested and tried on the basis of collected evidence. Instead, it is vague in extreme. Or witnesses testifying about some pertinent events in Australia.
Instead, it looks like extremely remote “hearsay”. So Australian officials accept it as truth, and New Zealand officials consider accepting it because Australian did. In short, shamelessly baseless.
The sole purpose of foreign and domestic policy of the Five Eyes and NATO is to benefit the Zionist entity, nothing more, nothing less.
Every single thing these so called western democracies do abroad is not for the benefit of their populations. The reality is that these countries act & serve as hosts to a rampaging parasite that has complete capture & control of state and media apparatus – how else is a live holocaust being ignored and supported?
I would go as far as to say that all current conflicts where western powers are involved are in fact ‘chess moves’ by the Zionist billionaire donor class who are seeking full spectrum dominance of mankind.
Iran is our only hope.
The head of ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) Mike Burgess’s wife, Angelita Nobles Oehler , is an Israeli citizen. Just saying.
Before being made head of ASIO he previously joined ASD (Australian Signals Directorate then called the Defence Signals Directorate) in 1995, and worked there for 18 years, most notably as Deputy Director for Cyber and Information Security.
Hmmm…. I wonder if he had any influence in ASD’s implementation of the Palantir Technologies Inc. data mining software?
Gee, hard to know what to think….
Desperately needed are more effective “attempts to undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community”. A good first step at undermining “social cohesion” would be full trade union and organised working class black banning of any military goods going to the genocidal Israeli regime — backed up by mass picketing that is not simply ‘symbolic’. Of course to achieve this, significant “discord in our community” would need to be sown in defying the current union misleaders, and ALP hacks, whose role has always been to keep unruly workers in line with “Australian values” and all the other tripe trotted out by the likes of Albanese et al. in the name of “social cohesion”.
It’s not enough that people have little faith in secret police agencies like ASIO and so on. Anyone half awake knows these agencies are there to provide not only the ‘lies’ and ‘narratives’ for repression and war, but to facilitate the false flag operations so necessary to ‘confirm’ those lies. The populace cannot be scared into compliance so easily without the fear generated by such false flag operations.
Iran will give Israel a proper hiding in Round 2, and it will be up to the Iranians to decide how far to go. If they go all out and destroy the Zionist entity completely, then the US will very likely nuke it. And Albanese and his gang will be right up there cheering the US along. Much more “discord in our community” thus needs to be sown and much more undermining of “social cohesion” needed to put a stop to these crazed warmongers who have swallowed whole the eschatological delusions of the Zionist regime and its lunatic US Christian Zionist backers.
A lot of people, including most Australians, are sick and tired of whinging, moaning Israelis playing victim while they slaughter helpless men, women and children and just want them all to shut up and go away.
The Australian-Zionist smears against the Iranian govt are clearly an effort to drum up the notion in the minds of the public that Iran is a state sponsor of terror. This massively misleading propaganda makes it easier to get the Zionized Western public on board for round two of the Israeli/Washington war against sovereign Iran. Round two is going to be much heavier and bloodier than round one.
As any independent thinker knows full well, the paranoid creepy hegemonic Jewish supremacists have wanted to topple this administration in Tehran for many years.
What incentive would the Iranian govt have in attacking civilian targets in Australia when they have the capacity to launch myriad high caliber missiles into Tel Aviv and can shut down lucrative commercial shipping lanes?
To consider Netanyahu and Israeli “intelligence ” as providing truth shows the lack of any decency or understanding on the part of Australia ??. Observe reality as the Australian people obviously do