‘Get out of our community'

Note: this story has been updated to reflect clarifying statements made by Cairo Takeaway staff on February 17.

-

Talaat Sehia is a chef at Cairo Takeaway, a restaurant on Enmore Road in Sydney’s inner west.

Talaat was working on early Wednesday afternoon when a man came in and ordered a mint tea. The man was wearing a crisp white t-shirt, a blue-and-white baseball cap emblazoned with the Star of David and a Star of David pendant.

“He came in and ordered a tea, which Sam*, the waitress gave him,” Talaat says. “It was a takeaway tea, but once he got it, he just stood there, he didn’t leave. And because the place was empty, he just stood out.”

Given his dress and strange behaviour, Talaat was worried the man had hostile intentions.

“I knew he was a provocateur straight away. The way he was dressed, I thought ‘Oh fuck, here we go’, but I just put my head down and kept cutting an onion,” he says. “I thought maybe he was just a bit of a loony who would get his tea and leave.”

However, the man soon began trying to start a verbal altercation with the waitress who had served him.

“Sam asked him whether he needed anything, to which he replied: ‘Do you have a problem with me because I’m Jewish?’” Talaat says. “She was taken aback by this, because she knows nothing about the situation in Palestine. She asked him if he could leave and not cause any trouble, and he asked again if it was because he was Jewish.

“He asked her to say the word ‘shalom’ — ‘Can you say the word ‘shalom’ for me? Why won’t you say ‘shalom’? Have you got something against Jews?’”

Talaat says the man also claimed he found a mural on the wall “intimidating,” and that he felt “unsafe”. Talaat posted later on X that the mural in question depicts Umm Kulthum, an Egyptian singer and actress who died in 1975.

At some point, Sam stepped outside onto Enmore Road, where she was confronted by a journalist, cameraman and photographer from the Daily Telegraph who had been waiting across the laneway.

“We didn’t know who they were, but the two men had big cameras, so I made the assumption they were some kind of media. I knew that was the situation,” Talaat says. “Every time the conversation got heated, the tall cameraman would get his camera up and start filming. So he was waiting for a moment.”

Sam became upset and began filming the trio — Telegraph journalist Danielle Gusmaroli, photographer Rohan Kelly and video producer Jeremy Span. (I have sent questions to Gusmaroli and Daily Telegraph editor Ben English regarding the incident, but have not heard back.)

The confrontation began to draw attention from passersby and people in nearby shops.

“Other people in the street and from neighbouring shops, just random people, came out and started telling the Daily Telegraph people to leave, saying ‘Get out of our community, you’re causing trouble’. Two Indigenous guys came out and gave them a mouthful,” Talaat laughs.

At this point, Kelly began urging Gusmaroli, Span and the man in the white t-shirt to leave the area.

“The tall cameraman was grabbing the female journalist and saying ‘We need to leave’ because a lot of people were coming now and screaming at them,” he says. They weren’t in control of the situation anymore. That seemed obvious to the tall guy."

The man in the white t-shirt has been identified as Ofir Birenbaum, a consultant for a software company and a prolific Zionist agitator who has been extensively quoted and profiled by News Corp publications. The Australian Jewish Association has also described Birenbaum as a “Friend of AJA” in multiple social media posts.

In December 2024, Birenbaum appeared on Sky News after claiming he was moved on by police after confronting a pro-Palestinian protest outside the Great Synagogue in the Sydney CBD. The protest was directed against the Synagogue’s hosting of an event with Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, an Israeli university that supplies armoured bulldozers to the IDF.

In November 2023, Birenbaum was quoted extensively in The Australian after organising a rally outside the electorate office of Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi, during which he and other Zionists stood in bins.

In January 2025, Birenbaum was quoted extensively in a News.com.au article about antisemitic graffiti in Maroubra.

“Racism in general, and antisemitism, it doesn’t start with violence,” he said at the time. “It starts with words. It starts with good people being silent. It starts with tolerating what we see in our streets.”

On October 3 2024, Birenbaum was photographed outside the NSW Supreme Court seemingly posing as a pro-Palestinian activist — complete with a ‘FCK ISRL’ sticker on a backpack — as a crowd of supporters waited to hear the outcome of the NSW Police application to prevent the Palestine Action Group from staging rallies in the Sydney CBD on October 6 and 7.

As more people began cursing out the Daily Telegraph crew, they began walking up Enmore Road. Still filming, Sam and Talaat followed.

“Sam confronted the female journalist, saying ‘How dare you come into a restaurant intimidating workers’,” Talaat says. “And then the journalist said ‘How dare you get appalled by a Jewish man coming into your restaurant’, which is complete nonsense. No one was appalled, we served him — Sam doesn’t even know what a Zionist is.

“I was giving it to the cameraman, telling him: ‘You’re a grown man, this is what you do for a living? Do you tell your kids you come into people’s workplaces and upset people? You should be ashamed of yourself.’ And he looked a bit ashamed, actually,” Talaat says. “He looked like ‘Aw fuck, I wish we weren’t here’.”

“They left in the same car. All four of them. The two cameramen, the journalist and the Zionist guy,” Talaat says.

“It was comical, like Looney Tunes-level comical. The way they were waiting there. Him dressed the way he was, sucking on the straw, saying ‘Say shalom, say shalom’. When he was in the store ordering the tea, they were across the lane waiting, outside Domino’s. They were three metres away! You could see them! At one point the journalist literally had her face pressed up against the window, looking from the outside in, just lurking. It was like a performance piece.

“My thoughts on News Corp are pretty … you know. It’s poison. I have no tolerance for these people. I know they’re trash. But I was a little shocked at how obvious it was. Like, coming in the same car and waiting across the road. I know they do this kind of thing, but it was the level of amateur theatre to it. Afterwards, we had a laugh about it.”

The police arrived later that day. Initially, they seemed disinterested.

“I said to the police, ‘This seems to be intentional provocation’. And the cop said ‘It is, but it’s not criminal’,” Talaat says.

“I said to him, ‘What if it had been an Arab guy going into a Jewish-owned place?’ He didn’t really respond, he just kind of looked down and took some notes.”

However, with growing interest in the case on social media — Cairo Takeaway owner Hashem El Masry has recounted the incident in detail on Cairo Takeaway’s Instagram — police interest in the case has picked up. On Tuesday evening, other police officers arrived and spoke to Sam. Two detectives followed up with Cairo Takeaway staff on Wednesday morning and requested the restaurant’s CCTV footage.

Despite being angry at the restaurant being targeted, Talaat hopes some good will come out of it.

“This impunity has given them the courage to do things like this, because no one really does anything about it,” he says. “So it’s good that people are speaking up. Maybe they’ll get the message that you can’t just do this kind of thing.

“If you know Sam, she doesn’t follow the news at all, she stays right out of that. She actually asked me later that afternoon — we sat down and had a quiet cup of tea, just to calm her down — she asked me, ‘What exactly is a Zionist?’

“I told her, ‘Now you know’.”

Fundraiser for Noor and Hoor Hammad

If you’ve got anything to spare, please consider giving some money to this fundraiser I’m running for Noor Hammad, a young mum in Gaza, and her baby daughter Hoor. Any money raised will be sent to Noor's brother Abdallah Abdalrahim, who lives in Sweden and can send her money directly.

Callout: Help needed with volunteer fundraising

I'm trying to raise money for more than 60 fundraisers for people in Gaza at the moment, which is a lot of work! If you have some experience or knowhow in fundraising, organising or logistics, and can volunteer some time and energy, I'd love some help getting these fundraisers the money and attention they deserve. DM me on Instagram or email me if you're keen.

Become a paid subscriber

If you’d like to further support this newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I don’t paywall anything, but paid subscriptions help pay the bills and let me keep doing this work.

What I’m looking at

• Mondoweiss — ‘Humiliating and painful’: testimonies of mass displacement in the northern West Bank

• Crikey — In the quest to appease Israel, the media undermine our basic rights

• The New Arab — The bombs may have stopped but Gaza's health emergency continues