Is Cryptocurrency Fueling an Inferno of Antisemitic Hate in Australia?
Please don't buy Bitcoin.
There’s something very strange happening in Australia right now.
On Monday, I wrote a story for The Algemeiner titled “Arrest Made as Spree of Antisemitic Crimes Continues Across Australia:”
The recent wave of hate crimes targeting Jews in Australia has shown no sign of abating, with more incidents over the weekend as political leaders and law enforcement stepped up efforts to counter an alarming surge in anti-Jewish incidents.
The New South Wales (NSW) Police announced on Monday they had charged an unnamed 21-year-old man with stalking and intimidation intended to cause fear or physical harm after a woman reported an incident of alleged antisemitic abuse in Bondi on Saturday. Law enforcement also charged the unnamed man with an unrelated Jan. 15 incident of destroying or damaging property and breach of bail.
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On Saturday, the NSW police announced plans to double the officers assigned to Strike Force Pearl, a division created to counter the wave of antisemitic crimes. NSW Police Force Commissioner Karen Webb said that the “extra investigators under Strike Force Pearl means those who commit antisemitic acts will be caught and brought before the courts. I want to reassure the Jewish community that we will do everything we can to find the perpetrators of these hateful crimes.”
On Sunday, the NSW Jewish Board said that in three weeks they had seen 10 publicly reported antisemitic incidents which included vandalism and arson. The group said that number “doesn’t include the graffiti appearing in our streets on a daily basis or the abuse and harassment that goes unreported.”
The story then proceeded to note recent antisemitic hate crimes in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, and Kingsford. Police have made arrests for many of these crimes, with 12 people charged so far, including for fires at two businesses in Bondi in October 2024, damage of 10 vehicles and buildings in Woollahra in November 2024, and property damage in Woollahra in December 2024.
Yesterday, Algemeiner published an article by new foreign correspondent Ailin Vilches Arguello: “Australia Cracks Down on Antisemitism Amid Unrelenting Surge in Hate Crimes Targeting Jewish Community”:
Last month, Australian police said they foiled a potential mass-casualty antisemitic terrorist attack after discovering a caravan in a suburb of Sydney filled with explosives and material containing details about Jewish targets.
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In Melbourne, a 68-year-old man has been charged with criminal damage, unlawful assault, and offensive graffiti after allegedly vandalizing a family home in a Jewish community and throwing bacon at a passerby who tried to intervene.
In Sydney, a woman was found guilty of sending a threatening message to a Jewish school just 11 days after Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. However, she has escaped conviction.
In the letter, the 21-year-old wrote: “You are the children of Satan … get cancer and die a slow, painful death.”
“Praise Hitler. If only he was here to continue the mass destruction of your bloodline,” the message continued.
What’s going on here?
For a potential answer, let’s jump back to a piece I wrote on January 22, “Australian Police Suspect Foreigners Paying Criminals to Perpetrate Antisemitic Attacks:”
Law enforcement in Australia has started an investigation into the origins behind a spree of recent antisemitic crimes, announcing they suspect individuals outside the country have coordinated the campaign of hate.
On Wednesday, Australia Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Reece Kershaw said his department believes that “criminals-for-hire may be behind some incidents” and that they have begun investigating “who is paying those criminals, where those people are, whether they are in Australia or offshore, and what their motivation is.”
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A December report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) said that the country’s Jews experienced more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024, compared to 495 in the prior 12 months. The number of antisemitic assaults rose from 11 in 2023 to 65 in 2024. In the seven weeks following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitic acts in Australia rose by 591 percent according to the ECAJ.
In a statement, Kershaw said on Tuesday that police sought to determine “whether overseas actors or individuals have paid local criminals in Australia to carry out some of these crimes in our suburbs.” He added, “We are looking at if — or how — they have been paid, for example in cryptocurrency, which can take longer to identify.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also described the government’s suspicions about the nature of the attacks. He said that it looked as though “some of these are being perpetrated by people who don’t have a particular issue, aren’t motivated by an ideology, but are paid actors.”
I’ll put it straight and blunt:
Fuck cryptocurrency and fuck the amoral speculators chasing easy money with it. If that’s anyone subscribed, then my apologies if this offends you, but you can fuck off, too.
Back on December 4, 2022, as the sixth installment in my recently-launched “Antisemitism and Culture” series, I published “Why Morally Decent People Can’t Buy Bitcoin.”
I offered three arguments in opposition to the this shit, with the last one being the real core of it:
Economically, this whole space is really just another fuckin’ pyramid scheme.
Environmentally, the amount of electricity wasted on Bitcoin “mining” and exchanges is just horrifying.
Most importantly, as a Zionist, I cannot support a platform and a technology which empowers the Islamist theocracy of Iran to fund its genocidal terrorism against the Jewish state.
What is the actual practical utility of Bitcoin as a form of currency? What real-world purpose does it offer that one cannot get from using an established, government-regulated currency?
Simple: the ability to more easily commit crimes!
It is becoming more and more common for international criminal gangs to target people in free societies like America and Australia, to threaten them in one way or another, and to then demand payment in crypto. I even have a good friend who was victimized this way.
Now, I’ve heard the apologetics from the CryptoBros about this, and their arguments are fucking embarrassing:
“Yeah, well, criminals use regular money to commit crimes all the time, but you wouldn’t say we should stop using cash, would you?”
Dumbass, there are laws and security systems in place to prevent people from engaging in crimes. With normal money, the transactions can be tracked and traced. The criminals specifically use crypto in order to avoid that! Are you really that fucking stupid, or is someone just paying you in Bitcoin to pretend to be such a brain-dead bastard?
As much as I advocate for learning about and embracing the cutting edge of technological developments, in many ways I remain old-fashioned when it comes to education. When I want to better understand a topic, I’m not just going to ask ChatGPT or peruse the podcasts. I’ll go to the library and check out as many books as I can on the subject. I’ve done that over the last few months with books about AI—and will be revealing some of the interesting things that I’ve learned—and now, to a lesser degree, I’ll do the same with cryptocurrency.
The two subjects are actually interrelated. Why did the so-called “Paypal Mafia” of Silicon Valley tech bros shift so hard to Trump this last cycle? Because he’s not going to get in their way when it comes to making money off of both AI and cryptocurrencies. One hand washes the other here. AI can provide more enhanced guidance on crypto earnings, and then those earnings can flow back into paying for ever-more advanced and powerful AI.
These are serious threats to free societies. It is necessary for responsible citizens to learn about them. So please, put aside your entirely justified feelings of annoyance at these subjects and take the time to learn what they are, how they work, where they cause harm, and who stands to benefit most from their continued path into the mainstream.
And I’ll let you know as more news emerges out of Australia. We really need to understand who has inflamed all the hate down there and how they did it.
Because here’s the question to ponder: Could what’s going on Down Under right now be merely the trial run before comparable terrorism is unleashed in America and other Western states?
Dave, while I agree that *most* of the crypto out there is junk, I do believe that two classes of crypto are potentially useful:
1. Crypto that has some sort of utility built in, like ethereum or any number of tokens that are basically "airline miles" or "coupons" for some sort of decentralized project or community (assuming the utility itself has value, and crypto is the best way to realize that value); and
2. Bitcoin specifically, exactly because it is so "wasteful." I was converted on this point a few months ago after reading The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous, which I recommend. (Some of his more florid claims can be discounted, such as that a sound currency will bring about a moral revolution across the world.)
Also, it is easier to track crypto payments nowadays than I think many people realize, and unless the Aussies are incompetent, they probably know more than they are letting on.
But back to the immediate point: let's find the paymasters and drone-strike them, shall we?