Australian federal police launched an investigation regarding suspicions that the recent antisemitic attacks in the country are funded by “overseas actors.”

According to a report by Australian media outlet 9News, the “overseas actors” may be paying local criminals, sometimes in cryptocurrency, to carry out the attacks.

Following the most recent attack on a daycare in Sydney, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese convened Australia’s national cabinet. A decision was made at the meeting to establish a national database to track “antisemitic crime and other antisemitic incidents and behaviors.”

Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Reece Kershaw said on Tuesday evening: “There is no doubt there is an escalation of antisemitism in Australia. We know this is changing the movements and behavior of a community that is in fear…antisemitism is a disease in our community, and it needs to be aggressively attacked.”

Albanese had previously established Operation Avalite on December 9 to investigate “violence and hatred” towards Jews in Australia. At the national cabinet meeting, Kershaw revealed that the police were investigating 15 out of 166 reports received since the operations was established.

He added that in New South Wales, a similar operation had led to 36 people being charged with antisemitism-related crimes and a Victoria-based taskforce had made 70 arrests.

Kershaw scheduled a meeting with state police commissioners across the country to discuss other tactics or “matters we can consider.”

Opposition leader Peter Dutton placed some of the blame for the antisemitic attacks on Albanese’s anti-Israel policies. “This is a national crisis. We are having rolling terrorist attacks in our community, and the prime minister is being dragged kicking and screaming to hold a meeting of our nation’s leaders,” Dutton said at a rally on Tuesday.

Following the fire deliberately set by mask-wearing perpetrators at a Melbourne shul last month, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu slammed the Australian government, saying that “it’s impossible to separate this reprehensible act from the extreme anti-Israeli position of the Labor government in Australia, including the scandalous decision to support the UN resolution calling on Israel “to bring an end to its ‘unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory’…and preventing a former Israeli minister from entering the country.”

“Anti-Israel sentiment is antisemitism,” Netanyahu concluded.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)