In November 2024 Mohommed Farhat spray-painted cars and buildings in Woollahra with “PKK”, “PKK coming” and “Fuk Israel”, and set a vehicle alight. The suburb sits near a synagogue and has a high concentration of Jewish residents. That night he searched his phone for local streets and a Jewish hospital. He pleaded guilty and received one year and eight months.
The State then sought an extended supervision order under the Terrorism (High Risk Offenders) Act 2017. The test was whether the Court was satisfied to a high degree of probability that, unsupervised, Farhat posed an unacceptable risk of a serious terrorism offence: conduct intended both to advance a political, religious or ideological cause and to intimidate a section of the public.
Justice Fagan dismissed the application. He found “no significant risk” of such an offence. The reasons treat Farhat as a paid vandal who did not understand his slogans, did not mean them antisemitically, and would not, if returned to the same associates, pose a terrorism risk. That is astonishingly credulous.
The ignorance package
Judge Fagan accepted that Farhat “did not understand the meaning or significance of the acronym ‘PKK’”; that “[n]one of the spray-painted slogans reflected any ideology held by the defendant”; that he “did not understand the slogan ‘Fuk Israel’ to convey hostility to Jews as Jews”; and that there was “no evidence that the defendant was aware of any concentration of Jewish residents in Woollahra.” The Hezbollah tattoos were “superficial.” Farhat was “impressionable, suggestible and a shallow thinker.”
That is exactly the story an accused and his minders would build to defeat an order. A young defendant has every reason to play dumb about symbols, slogans and geography. Cognitive tests can be underperformed. Fagan treated the package as almost self-proving.
A man can have a shallow grasp of Middle Eastern politics and still know he is sending a hostile message to Jews. “Fuk Israel” is not obscure. “PKK is coming”, painted at night near a synagogue after searches for a Jewish hospital, is not a private joke. Limited intellect, if genuine, cuts the other way: it makes him more usable, not less.
The two letters to the Local Court should have been treated the same way. They expressed remorse, denied hatred of Jews, and attributed the job to money and drugs. They say what a sentencing court wants to hear. Their fluency sits poorly with the portrait of extreme limitation. They look written for him, to cut the sentence — not as proof of inner change. Against a claimed wish to remove the tattoos stand hundreds of prison calls to the old network.
Money was not the selector
Fagan wrote: “I accept, unreservedly, the defendant’s case that he was recruited” for “$4,000 and an unspecified quantity of drugs” to paint slogans “stipulated by the recruiter.” From that, ideology drops out.
It does not follow. A mercenary indifferent to the target would have been willing to paint the mirror image — “Fuk Iran”, “IDF coming” — outside a Shia mosque for the same fee. Given Farhat’s associations and tattoos, that is not believable. If he would not have done the other job, money was not the selector. Group loyalty was. Second-hand loyalty to an anti-Israel milieu is still ideology. The law does not require original thought.
Judge Fagan accepted that Farhat remains susceptible to money, drugs and the same people. If a few thousand dollars produced this assignment, what happens when the next “job” is larger? What would he do for $40,000 or $400,000? Bear in mind, there was no comment about Farhat having been desperate for the money.
Location converts meaning
Judge Fagan held that “Fuk Israel” was a “curse against a foreign state,” “not antisemitic according to the ordinary understanding of that concept in the Australian community,” and “not antisemitic, either self-evidently or by any degree of analysis or construction.” The State said context — Jewish neighbourhood, criminal damage — changed the meaning. He replied: “I do not accept that.” Graffiti in a locality with a high Jewish population “does not imbue the curse with an antisemitic character.” The words “were not transformed, by the circumstances in which they were written, from a political curse into religious hostility.”
I beg to differ. Society can tell a statement aimed at a government from one aimed at people who live here and identify with that country’s people. “Fuk Israel” on a protest banner can be political. The same words, at night, on private cars, next to “PKK is coming,” near a synagogue and a Jewish hospital, after a search for that hospital, are a message to the residents. Similarly, “Fuck Russia” at a rally is politics. On cars outside a Russian church in an Australian suburb it is aimed at people, not the Kremlin. Criticism of a state is not redeemed by delivery on a minority’s doorstep.
The same path, unsupervised
Judge Fagan accepted the premise that matters and then refused its consequence. Farhat is suggestible and, without supervision, likely to return to drugs, crime and the same associates — the milieu that produced this night of work. The Court called further offending “criminal conduct of a general nature, rather than serious terrorist offending,” because Farhat “was [n]ever politically radicalised.”
I don’t agree. The 2024 job was not generic vandalism that happened to use political words. It was directed, located and branded. If the same influencers resume, what will Farhat’s next assignment be – something similar or a lot more serious? That is not a risk society should be exposed to. Judge Fagan’s failure to mitigate that risk by imposing the supervision order shows a reckless disregard of government’s core duty to protect its citizens.
Err on the side of the public
An ESO restricts liberty, so it should not rest on suspicion. But the test is not proof of a massacre. It is unacceptable risk.
On one side: a year of conditions and a chance to test whether Farhat has left the old world. On the other: a young man who already accepted a paid brief to mark a Jewish neighbourhood with terrorist-group language. Governments exist first to protect people. The cost of a terrorist attack is of a different order from curtailing one person’s liberty. Where the downside is innocent deaths, courts should err on the side of caution. Declining to do so is not refined rights-protection. It is a reckless disregard for the people the State is meant to serve.
Farhat may be immature and poorly schooled. Those facts enlarge the risk. A person who will paint “PKK is coming” beside “Fuk Israel” for cash and drugs is not safe unsupervised among the same friends. Fagan’s finding of an “insignificant” terrorism risk required a confidence in ignorance and reform, that the conduct, the letters and the prison calls do not support.
In conclusion:
This judgment should alarm society. Firstly, the credulity it shows on Judge Fagan’s part raises the question of whether the decision had been predetermined—and, if so, by whom. Secondly, by rejecting a temporary and entirely justifiable supervision order that could have reduced the risk to the public, the judgment displayed a reckless disregard for society’s safety. Thirdly, Judge Fagan’s failure to recognize the ordinary meaning of words is so far removed from common understanding that it also raises the question of whether another agenda was at play.
It is imperative that we have an honest and impartial judiciary that considers and weighs the evidence and is fair – that it gets the balance right. This judgement shows the contrary.