Loading

It was “objectively unlikely that any Jewish person in Australia would have come across the speeches without them being picked up and publicised separately by other media”, Boe said.

Boe said Haddad’s speeches did not amount to a breach of the act because “some people in a group have gone out of their way to expose themselves to speech which they might reasonably expect to be critical of Israel, and then become offended by it”, comparing the viewing of the speeches to a “person with a prudish sensitivity seeking out pornography and then complaining about being offended by it”.

But Braham said Haddad’s speeches were intended to be broadcast publicly, and were recorded in front of a physical backdrop displaying the centre’s social media accounts.

“It was directed to people outside the room,” Braham said.

The speeches, Braham said, were uploaded to social media and “picked up by the popular press”.

Giving evidence on Tuesday, Wertheim said Haddad’s speeches were “dehumanising” and that members of the Jewish community in Australia had felt less safe since the October 7 attacks in southern Israel, partly because of the use of “overly dehumanising language” towards Jews that was “quite alien, quite foreign to us”.

“Making derogatory generalisation calling Jews a vile and treacherous people, calling them rats, cowards, those sort of things, in my view, are dehumanising, and I think would have been experienced by most Jews as dehumanising,” Wertheim said.

Boe said in Haddad’s case, a preacher was required to “finely calibrate sermons delivered to their own religious community, in a highly emotional political environment”.

The “boundaries of legitimate debate cannot be set so narrowly as to exclude that which is not polite, bland, muted or balanced in its manner or content”, he said.

“It is of the essence of legitimate discussion in a free democratic society that there is room for the confronting, the challenging, even the shocking, and that space remains for those views even in an environment such as the one that existed in November 2023,” Boe said.

“This is especially so in this case where those views were expressed by someone to members of their own religious and ethnic community, and not directed at the group from which some members now claim to be offended, insulted, humiliated, or intimidated by some of the content of these speeches.”

In his evidence, Goot said he felt “much less safe, less accepted and less welcome” since October 7.

Other witnesses, whose identities were suppressed by the court, echoed his concerns.

“I walk around today with a general sense of unease and anxiety that I didn’t have beforehand,” one witness said.

The four-day hearing before Justice Angus Stewart will continue on Wednesday, when Haddad is expected to give evidence.

Get alerts on significant breaking news as happens. Sign up for our Breaking News Alert.