NSW Supreme Court Overturns Antisemitism Labeling in Landmark Graffiti Case
On August 19, 2026, New South Wales Supreme Court Justice Desmond Fagan ruled that police, lower courts, and state agencies wrongly classified Mohommed Farhat's anti-Israel graffiti as antisemitic, producing what Fagan called a "serious miscarriage of justice" (The Guardian, 2026-08-19).
Farhat, then 20, pleaded guilty to 15 property damage offences committed in Sydney's eastern suburbs in late 2024. He and a co-offender spray-painted slogans including "Fuk Israel" and "PKK coming" on cars, defaced buildings, and set a vehicle alight in the suburb of Woollahra, destroying it. Farhat was remanded in custody in November 2024. He pleaded guilty to the property damage charges but maintained throughout that he had been recruited by an unknown individual, instructed what to write, and paid with money and the promise of drugs.
The magistrate who sentenced Farhat determined the offences were antisemitic in character and imposed an aggravated sentence (a harsher penalty than the baseline for property damage) of 20 months' imprisonment with a non-parole period of 10 months. Farhat was due for release on parole in early December 2025, but the parole order was revoked after the commissioner of corrective services and the crown successfully applied to cancel it. The state then sought a one-year extended supervision order (ESO) under the Terrorism Act, which would have imposed 55 conditions on Farhat upon release.
Fagan's judgment, published as State of New South Wales v Farhat [2026] NSWSC 985 and dated 17 August 2026, dismantled the prosecution's central premise. He wrote that "Fuk Israel" was "a curse against a foreign state," not an expression of antisemitism. Fagan ruled that the magistrate had erred in deeming the offences antisemitic and that this mischaracterisation had cascaded through every later stage of the case, from the aggravated sentence to the parole revocation to the terrorism supervision application (NSW Caselaw).
The case reached the Supreme Court when the state tried to frame Farhat as a future terror threat to justify the ESO. Fagan found that this attempt relied on the same "misconception" about his motivation that had infected the earlier proceedings. During a July 2026 hearing, Fagan told the parties the proceeding had been "derailed and gone completely haywire" because of police representations to the magistrate and a district court judge that the graffiti was antisemitic.
The most damaging finding concerned the suppression of exculpatory intelligence — evidence that tends to clear a defendant. The court was shown intelligence indicating that counterterrorism police had accepted, within three weeks of Farhat's arrest, that he had been recruited and was not ideologically motivated. This information was not shared with the prosecution or the sentencing magistrate. Fagan further ruled that key evidence was withheld, including a page of Farhat's bank statements showing money transferred to his account, which Fagan accepted as proof of his recruitment claim.
Fagan also directly criticised the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, calling it "detached from reality" and "inept." The IHRA definition has been adopted or endorsed by numerous governments and institutions worldwide, but it has long faced debate over whether its contemporary examples conflate political criticism of Israel with hatred of Jewish people. Fagan's judgment stands as a supreme-court ruling that explicitly rejects the definition's application in a criminal-law context.
The broader context matters here for several intersecting reasons. Farhat's case was the first in a series of graffiti and arson attacks across Sydney's eastern suburbs during the 2024–25 summer. The Australian Federal Police later determined that these attacks were carried out by paid criminals and orchestrated by organised crime figures, not by genuine ideological actors. That finding aligns with Fagan's assessment of Farhat as a recruited operative rather than a motivated extremist, and it raises the question of whether other individuals prosecuted in connection with the same spate of attacks were similarly miscategorised.
The case also exposes a structural weakness in how NSW law enforcement and lower courts handle offences involving politically charged expression. The miscarriage Fagan identified was not a single error but a sequential failure: counterterrorism police formed the correct assessment early but failed to transmit it; the prosecution proceeded on the antisemitism framing; the magistrate accepted it and aggravated the sentence; the parole authority revoked release based on it; and the state then sought terrorism-level supervision. Each institution appears to have relied on the mischaracterisation generated or sustained by the one before it — like a row of dominoes, each falling because the one behind it had already tilted.
Fagan's ruling quashes the antisemitism designation at its root. The ESO application under the Terrorism Act failed, and the judgment opens the possibility of further challenges to sentences and supervision orders imposed on the same flawed premise. The NSW Caselaw entry for the judgment is flagged as "Amended," indicating post-publication revision, though the substance of the ruling as reported remains consistent across available sources (NSW Caselaw).
For legal practitioners, the judgment establishes a supreme-court precedent that political invective directed at a foreign state does not, without more, constitute antisemitic speech for the purposes of sentencing aggravation or terrorism-supervision applications. It also signals that courts will scrutinise the flow of intelligence between counterterrorism units, prosecuting authorities, and lower courts, and that failures in that chain can invalidate an entire prosecution trajectory.
