Jewish Australian says police told him Jew-hatred case was ‘wasted effort’

A Jewish Australian man told a public inquiry on Tuesday that police in New South Wales discouraged him from pursuing a complaint against a man who allegedly threatened him and used antisemitic slurs, saying it would be “a lot of wasted effort.”

Nir Golan testified before the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that the incident occurred in October 2023, when a man approached him on the street and “started calling me all sorts of racial slurs, among them ‘dirty Jew.’” Golan said he was wearing a kippah at the time.

According to Golan, the man performed a Nazi salute and pointed “a gun finger at my forehead, imitating like he wanted to kill me.” When Golan began recording the encounter on his phone, the assailant “started getting physical,” Golan said.

“No one intervened, unfortunately, except for an American tourist who jumped in. That tourist ended up getting bashed pretty badly,” he said. “I broke down and started shaking uncontrollably and crying again. No one came to my aid. No one came to help. No one came to do anything.”

Golan said he filed a police report and provided video and photos of the incident, but was told a Nazi salute was not illegal and that the case was unlikely to proceed.

“I was eventually told by the police that there’s not much that they could do and the case would ultimately get thrown out, and it would be a lot of wasted effort for nothing and encouraged to drop it,” he told the commission.

The commission began its first hearing block in Sydney on Monday, focusing on defining antisemitism, the “lived experiences” of Jew-hatred and its impact on Jewish Australians and “metrics for assessing the prevalence of antisemitism in institutions and society, including through incident reporting and survey data.”