‘This cute French restaurant will deliver you dinner on a bike,’ says the headline on a TimeOut review of Bistro St Jacques, a restaurant that prides itself on its old-fashioned ‘warm hospitality’. Unfortunately, last week the trendy tattooed owner was also serving up old-fashioned antisemitism along with traditional French fare.

The plat du jour for the anniversary of the 7 October Hamas massacre was a picture of a pig, dripping with blood, dressed in the uniform of the Israeli Defense Forces next to a Star of David. The caption to this choice image read, ‘In memory of today October 7 the day we all re learned about Jews moving to Isreal (sic) and the absolute death cult they have shown us all they are,’ finishing up with, ‘Glory to the resistance’.

Ah, the resistance. It sounds so romantic, so French, as if Hamas fighters wear red berets and carry baguettes on their bicycles as they fight the Nazis. In reality, the ideological father of Hamas is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who spent the second world war in Berlin discussing the Final Solution with the Führer, disseminating virulent antisemitic bile throughout the Middle East and wherever there were Muslim populations he could reach by radio, and recruiting Bosnian Muslims to the SS. As the Grand Mufti put it, Arabs were ‘the natural friends of Germany because both are engaged in the struggle against three common enemies: the English, the Jews and Bolshevism’.

The bankruptcy of the notion that the 7 October massacre was fuelled by Israeli injustices and genocide is exposed when you consider that the Grand Mufti was inciting pogroms to slaughter Jews in Mandate Palestine more than two decades before the state of Israel was created, as Yardena Schwartz recounts in her new book, Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

Although the Grand Mufti fomented anti-Jewish hatred throughout the 1920s, the author focuses on the Hebron massacre of 1929, which is eerily similar, although on a smaller scale, to the 7 October massacre, with 3,000 armed Palestinian Muslims going from house to house in the Jewish quarter of Hebron raping, castrating, stabbing, torturing, and burning alive unarmed men, women, and children, killing 67 members of the 800-strong community and terrorising the rest who fled in fear for their lives. Delighted with his success, the Grand Mufti used the prestige of his position to promote Jew-hatred and a revolt against the British, eventually taking up residence in Nazi Berlin.

After the war, he escaped trial as a war criminal, basing himself in Egypt and joining forces with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is an offshoot. As al-Banna put it, ‘Germany and Hitler are gone, but al-Husseini will continue the struggle,’ which he did, first in a jihad against the Jews of Palestine and then against Israel, stirring up Arab wars and training Yasser Arafat.

It was the Grand Mufti who initiated the practice of calling Zionists ‘Nazis’ which takes chutzpah when you recall that it was he who was on the Nazi payroll. When Hamas fighters paint inverted red triangles on the places they plan to attack, they are copying the Nazis who forced all inmates of concentration camps to wear inverted triangles, pink for gays, black for gypsies and the mentally ill, green for criminals, and red for the resistance. When Hamas sympathisers daubed inverted triangles on a bakery run by a Jewish chef in Sydney on the weekend, it’s a hologram of the Holocaust.

All of this an amuse-bouche to the main course. Al Yazbek, founder of the supposedly swanky Nomad restaurant group, has now apologised for carrying a flag with a swastika superimposed over an Israeli flag at a Hamas protest. As it turns out, Mr Yazbek has a penchant for this sort of pastime having carted water balloons to a Sydney synagogue in 2014 with the intention of hurling them at Jews.

Yazbek claims, ‘Friends and acquaintances who know me – both Jewish and gentile – know I am not an antisemite.’ Sure. Maybe his friends also like hanging out at Hamas rallies waving Israeli flags emblazoned with swastikas. With mass cancellations, and partners questioning whether they want to be associated with his business, he announced that he would take time to reflect at an ashram in India. It’s a bit disappointing. Why not go to Gaza or Iran where he can see the resistance up close, watch some gays being hanged or women being beaten for not covering their hair?

It’s not just chefs who are feeling the heat. Labor politicians in Victoria are being targeted. It’s bitter schadenfreude to watch the backlash Labor is suffering from the Muslim community, having tried to score political points by granting temporary visas to almost 3,000 Gazans despite the inability to vet them for security threats.

The Prime Minister’s limp support for Israel while allowing the terror team to take over the streets has created a powerfully polarised atmosphere. Red triangles and slogans that read, ‘Glory to the martyrs’ and ‘Land back’ were painted on the office of Labor MP Peter Khalil and an unidentified substance with a hideous smell ‘like an abattoir’ was pumped into his office. Mr Khalil was also one of a handful of Labor MPs who had fake dead bodies dumped outside their offices alongside Palestinian ‘resistance’ messages. Labor MP Josh Burns’s St Kilda office was treated to similar vandalism with smashed windows evoking Kristallnacht. Ironically, in July Mr Khalil was appointed by the Prime Minister to be his special envoy for social cohesion. Good luck with that.

Why is all this happening now? While the Grand Mufti and Hassan al-Banna laid the groundwork, Iran, Qatar and, shamefully, Western donors fund antisemitism through United Nations agencies such as the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (Unrwa), which uses its health and education programs to indoctrinate Palestinians. Effectively, Australian taxpayers are funding the salaries of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders such as top Hamas commander in Lebanon Fateh Sharif Abu El-Amin, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike this month and had been working in an Unrwa school until he was suspended in March after concerns emerged that he was a member of Hamas. Despite the overwhelming evidence that nine Unrwa employees participated in the 7 October pogrom the Australian government resumed funding for Unrwa in March after suspending it in January. Similarly, the agency charged with preventing Hezbollah from having a presence on Israel’s border with Lebanon, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil), has turned a blind eye to Hezbollah military tunnels built only metres from Israel’s border. If the government wanted to ensure that no one it funds has links to Hamas and Hezbollah it need only get a list of UN employees and work with Israeli intelligence agencies to vet them. It should do the same with Gazans seeking Australian visas. Perhaps the PM should have a word with Messrs Khalil and Burns. They might be able to persuade him.