Wissam Haddad, the Bankstown preacher whose lectures on Jews the Federal Court found carried tropes that are fundamentally racist and antisemitic, has dropped out of sight while the Jewish community leaders who defeated him chase a legal bill in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, The Saturday Telegraph reports, and bankruptcy is one of the options open to them if he doesn't pay.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry won't say much beyond confirming that enforcement options are under consideration. The mechanics from there are blunt: a bankruptcy notice, 21 days to pay, and if he can't or won't, a court can declare him bankrupt and hand his assets and a slice of his income to a trustee, normally for three years.
Carpet layer Wissam Haddad turned a Bankstown prayer hall into a pulpit against Jews
Haddad, whose legal given name is William and who preaches as Abu Ousayd, laid carpet before he found his platform at the Al Madina Dawah Centre in Bankstown, in Sydney's south west. The centre's lectures were recorded and posted across its social channels, where anyone could watch them.
From late 2023, after the October 7 attacks on Israel, his lectures turned squarely onto Jews. In speeches that ended up before the court, he called Jewish people "vile" and "treacherous", described them as "descendants of apes and pigs", and cast them as "troublemakers and schemers" who wanted money and power for "nefarious means".
Justice Angus Stewart found racist tropes that even Haddad's own expert wouldn't defend
Peter Wertheim and Robert Goot, two of the most senior figures at the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, sued Haddad and his centre under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act over five recorded speeches, chief among them a three part lecture series titled The Jews of Al Madina, delivered to congregants in November 2023 and uploaded for the world.
On 1 July 2025, Justice Angus Stewart found the lectures conveyed "age-old tropes against Jewish people that are fundamentally racist and antisemitic", and were reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate Jews in Australia, delivered at a moment of heightened vulnerability for the community after October 7.
Haddad's defence, that he was simply teaching scripture, collapsed on the expert evidence. Experts on both sides agreed that neither the Qur'an nor the Hadith teach that Jews carry inherent negative qualities as a people. His own witness, Sheikh Ibrahim, told the court that "Islam does not encourage hatred towards Jews".
The court did clear part of his output. Passages attacking Israel and Zionists, however inflammatory, were criticism of a state and an ideology rather than of Jews as a people, and didn't breach the Act. The lectures were different. Wertheim told the court the speeches were "dehumanising".
Haddad fought hardest against the order to tell his own followers what the court found
The orders that followed were straightforward: take the lectures down, never repeat the imputations in public, and pay the applicants' costs.
Then came the part Haddad resisted most. On 17 July 2025 the court ordered corrective notices describing its findings to be pinned to the centre's website and its Facebook, Instagram, Rumble and SoundCloud pages for 30 days, with 21 days to comply. Haddad objected that pinning the notices went beyond what courts ordinarily order, and was tantamount to promoting the findings against him.
Justice Stewart was unmoved, writing that pinning would stop the notices from being "deliberately buried by way of successive further posts".
"The respondents promoted the unlawful lectures and it is not disproportionate to require them to promote the corrective notice ... as an appropriate form of redress," the judge wrote.
Whether the notices ever went up isn't on the public record. The deadline fell in early August 2025 and the 30 day pin expired a month later, so even full compliance would leave no trace today. What the record does show is what hasn't happened: the court's public file on the case hasn't moved since the July orders, and no contempt proceedings have been reported. That's less surprising than it sounds. No court polices its own civil orders.
Haddad has paid nothing, and the ECAJ is weighing bankruptcy
More than a year on, the Telegraph reports, Haddad has paid none of it.
Collecting won't be simple. The paper reports he owns no property, works for himself and rents, and that the addresses on record for him are either outdated or belong to family members. Even serving him is the first hurdle, though the courts have an answer for that too: where personal service fails after all reasonable attempts, a bankruptcy notice can be served by email, by text message or through a third person such as a family member.
Rod Roberts, the former policeman who is now deputy president of the NSW Legislative Council and has spoken out against Haddad for years, told the Telegraph the preacher's silence was telling.
"Haddad deliberately courted notoriety and prominence, yet the second it gets too hot for him he seems to have disappeared, I've noticed his recent silence and it appears as if he's gone to ground," Mr Roberts said.
A vacant centre, accused Bondi gunman Naveed Akram, and Haddad's denial
The Al Madina Dawah Centre now sits vacant, and the scrutiny that preceded its closure began with the preacher's own words. In May 2025 the Telegraph put a speech from inside the hall on its front page, in which Haddad spoke of a "Jewish lobby" wishing to "destroy" Islam.
"Although there is a physical conflict taking place (overseas) ... know that there is a religious conflict taking place here in Sydney," he said in the speech.
In December 2025, City of Canterbury Bankstown council said it had begun surveillance on the hall. After the Bondi attack, the council issued a cease and desist for operating without the correct permit, added a $3000 fine when that was ignored, and Haddad announced the centre had closed for good.
The Telegraph reports that accused Bondi gunman Naveed Akram was allegedly a follower of Haddad and his centre, and part of a street preaching group frequented by the preacher's closest associates. None of that has been tested anywhere. Haddad has never been charged with a terror or hate speech offence, has denied any knowledge of the Bondi attack, and says no evidence exists showing him and Akram together.
No prosecutor ever charged Haddad, but Wertheim and Goot did act
Through every uploaded sermon and every front page, no police force and no prosecutor ever charged Haddad over anything he preached. NSW has had a criminal offence of publicly threatening or inciting violence on religious grounds since 2018. It has never been used on him. That offence turns on threatening or inciting violence, a far higher bar than the civil finding against him, and no prosecutor has ever alleged his preaching crossed it. Parliaments kept legislating anyway. NSW added a standalone offence of publicly inciting racial hatred in 2025, and the Commonwealth passed new federal hate crime laws in February the same year. The tools keep arriving. The ones already on the shelf never came off it for Haddad.
The only consequence he has ever faced for what he preached was built by private citizens. Wertheim and Goot brought the case themselves, carried the risk themselves, and are now left to chase the bill themselves.
Holocaust survivor Nina Bassat, 87, told the Telegraph she was "bewildered by the lack of humanity and understanding" in the lectures.
"How can he think, let alone say, these things?" Ms Bassat said.
There is a comparison worth making here. The same section of the same Act reached One Nation leader Pauline Hanson over a single post, a finding the Full Court upheld on appeal last week at a cost she puts near $900,000, and which she now wants to take to the High Court. Getting it to bite on years of recorded sermons took two Jewish community leaders, their own lawyers, eight months of litigation and a bill the loser now won't pay.
The corrective notices were ordered to stay pinned for 30 days. The debt has no expiry date. And the preacher whose lectures the court found cast Jews as "troublemakers and schemers" is now, per the Telegraph, a man with no property, no current address on the public record and nothing to say.
