NSW judge calls property damage case 'miscarriage of justice' after anti-Israel graffiti mislabeled antisemitic

Mohommed Farhat has spent nearly two years in a New South Wales prison for crimes that a state supreme court judge this week declared were prosecuted as a serious miscarriage of justice. In late 2024, when he was 20 years old, Farhat spray-painted slogans on cars in Sydney's eastern suburbs and helped torch a vehicle in Woollahra. He pleaded guilty to 15 property damage offences. A magistrate sentenced him to 20 months in jail with a non-parole period of 10 months, treating the offences as hate crimes motivated by antisemitism.

But Justice Desmond Fagan's ruling, released this week, dismantles that characterization entirely. Police, lower courts, and state agencies all misclassified Farhat's actions as antisemitic, Fagan found, which meant he was punished more severely than the facts warranted. The judge called the IHRA definition of antisemitism—the standard adopted by the Australian government—"detached from reality" and "inept." He noted that spray-painting "Fuk Israel" was political speech against a foreign state, not an attack on Jewish people. "How can it be antisemitic to disparage Israel when doing so accords with the words and beliefs of many Jews?" Fagan wrote.

The case unravels a chain of institutional failures. Within three weeks of Farhat's arrest in November 2024, counterterrorism police had determined he was not ideologically motivated—that he had been recruited by unknown persons and paid to commit the graffiti. That intelligence was never shared with the prosecution or the magistrate who sentenced him. Crucial evidence also went untended: bank statements showing money transferred to Farhat's account, proof of his recruitment. The graffiti spree that summer, it later emerged, was orchestrated by organised crime figures using paid criminals. Farhat was one of them, not an ideologue.

When Farhat's parole was due in early December 2025, the state revoked it. The crown then applied for an extended supervision order under the Terrorism Act, which would have subjected him to 55 conditions upon release. During the July hearing on that application, Fagan was finally shown the intelligence police had withheld—the evidence that Farhat had been recruited, not radicalized. The judge rejected the terrorism order application. He found that the crown solicitor had continued to "conflate political comment with antisemitism" in their submissions, and that a representative from the director of public prosecution had made "extravagant and untenable" submissions during Farhat's unsuccessful appeal in January 2026.

Fagan's judgment dedicates substantial space to distinguishing anti-Israel speech from antisemitism. He cited a June 2026 Pew Research poll showing 79 percent of Australians view Israel unfavorably. "It would be preposterous to suggest that 79% of Australians are antisemitic because they disapprove of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians," he wrote. Farhat, whose family has strong ties to the Shia Muslim community of Lebanon, had gotten a Hezbollah tattoo months before his arrest and attended a protest against Israel's attacks on Lebanon. The judge found this understandable given his heritage and the military conflict that began in late September 2024. It was not evidence of terrorism.

While imprisoned, Farhat met with a Jewish religion teacher named Ellie Nagel, who provided letters of support to the court. In a letter submitted a year ago, Farhat wrote that their conversations about Judaism, the Holocaust, and other religions "really opened my eyes and allowed me to look at matters from other people's perspectives." Fagan noted this engagement in his judgment.

Farhat's solicitor, Abdul Reslan, said his team was considering options regarding the miscarriage of justice. "The failure to disclose and investigate information known to the authorities at a very early stage, and proceed to prosecute the matter in a one-dimensional format, has caused unnecessary harm," Reslan said. Labor MP Stephen Lawrence, a former barrister, called Fagan's ruling "searing truth on a contentious social policy issue," noting that "the politicised narratives lost out, and so they should have."

On Wednesday, the day after Fagan's ruling was published, a supreme court hearing was held to determine when Farhat might be released. Fagan indicated he would write to the chairman of the state parole authority, asking if the state planned to "correct the evident injustice." The crown prosecutor questioned whether Fagan had authority to compel the parole authority to act. For now, at 22 years old, Farhat remains behind bars, waiting for the state to acknowledge what the court has already found: that he was wrongly imprisoned.