Australian man arrested for hurling bacon while scrawling antisemitic graffiti
68-year-old allegedly spat on and threw ‘packet’ of cured pork at a passerby who confronted him over the vandalism
Police in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia have arrested a man who they say threw a “packet of bacon” at someone who interrupted his attempts at antisemitic graffiti.
The arrest, announced Tuesday, is the latest in a string as police crack down on antisemitic incidents in Melbourne and Sydney, home to Australia’s two largest Jewish communities.
The incident took place in a park on January 31, the Victoria Police said in a press release. A 68-year-old man was seen allegedly scrawling “prejudice-motivated graffiti” on a fence when “a passerby approached the male offender and was spat on and had a packet of bacon thrown at him,” the statement said.
He was charged with three crimes including “offensive graffiti.”
“There is absolutely no place at all in our society for antisemitic or hate-based symbols and behavior,” the police statement said. “Police will always treat reports of such crime seriously.”
The mayor of the suburb where the incident took place said it was a “cowardly” attack meant to stir fear in local Jews who are already reeling from the arson of a prominent synagogue in December.
A 68-year-old man who allegedly assaulted a passerby with bacon while defacing the home of a Jewish family in Melbourne’s inner suburbs with antisemitic graffiti has been arrested and charged.https://t.co/19Rn0Xk0t5
— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) February 4, 2025
Officials in Sydney say they believe actors paid by foreign governments are behind many of the recent antisemitic incidents there.
Bacon and other pig products, which are not kosher to eat under Jewish law, have been used in antisemitic assaults before and have historically shown up in antisemitic imagery. In January 2020, an upstate New York woman was charged with a hate crime after allegedly throwing pork at a local synagogue in the middle of the night.
Australia has seen a surge in antisemitic actions since the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which sparked the war in the Gaza Strip.
The number of anti-Jewish incidents in Australia quadrupled in the year after the terror assault in southern Israel, according to data from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
These have included several arson attacks on synagogues and community centers in Sydney and Melbourne and the repeated spraying of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel graffiti on properties or vehicles in areas with large Jewish populations. Last month also saw a neo-Nazi rally near the Melbourne parliament.
