OPINION
“If we allow the bell to be tolled for Israel, it will have tolled for us all”
Bob Hawke
The Albanese Labor government continues to play with fire, with its MPs, ministers, even the PM, parroting Hamas propaganda, and tacitly attacking the Jewish state even as it pretends to be on its side. The reasons for the government’s craven, disgusting flirtation with resurgent anti-Semitism is as plain as it is unforgivable: Labor’s socialist left factions are ferally anti-Jewish, and Labor desperately needs the votes of Western Sydney’s Muslims.
It’s that simple, and that disgraceful.
One senior government minister whose seat is square in Sydney’s Muslim enclaves is Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke.
When asked by Radio National host Patricia Karvelas if he would consider the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza a genocide, he said that he would “prefer to describe the facts” and leave it to the listeners to “find their own words”.
He could have just told the truth, and said “No”. Instead, he equivocates, and stops just short of accusing the Jewish state of the most heinous crime imaginable.
“The people who are going to be most affected by [Israel’s attacks], the people who will die first as a result of that, are not Hamas. They are families who live in Gaza.”
If Burke wasn’t being plain enough, then there was this:
Mr Burke also voiced his decision to support the Canterbury Bankstown council’s decision to raise the Palestinian flag until a ceasefire is declared.
“It’s a flag that gives people the chance to know that there is recognition and not selective grief,” he said.
The Australian
Except that Burke is being very selective with his grief, as is the rest of the Labor party.
Where was Burke, where was the Labor party, when the Sydney Opera House was lit up with the Israeli flag — and Tony Burke’s constituents descended, chanting, “Gas the Jews”?
Instead, Burke is nudging and winking at those on the feral, anti-Semitic left who are parroting the modern version of the ancient Blood Libel: “collective punishment”.
Where Mediaeval Europeans told febrile conspiracy theories about Jews drinking the blood Christian children, the modern left shriek conspiracy theories about Jews slaughtering “Palestinian” children.
The claim, which echoes even in our federal parliament, is that the Jewish state, engaging in an orgy of collective punishment, slaughters innocent civilians.
To call the proponents of those accusations hypocrites would be grossly unfair. After all, hypocrisy requires a capacity to distinguish right from wrong. Falling far short of that level of moral development, Hamas’s apologists shut their eyes to the obvious: that the only collective punishment is that which Hamas has inflicted on Israelis and Palestinians alike.
And let’s not forget — as the left so often conveniently do — that Hamas is still committed to nothing less than total genocide of Israel.
And with Hamas’s stated goal – as well as that of its Iranian masters – being nothing less than genocide, Israel is fully entitled, including under the United Nations’ Genocide Convention, to take whatever steps it believes are reasonably necessary to prevent its people’s destruction.
Contrary to what so many people who should know better, but who, in international law expert Natasha Hausdorff’s words, are “desperately ignorant, yet highly opinionated”, Israel does more than nearly any other country to protect civilian lives.
Richard Goldstone, a former justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa who chaired the 2009 UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, was ultimately forced, by the sheer weight of accumulated evidence, to resile from the mission’s most widely publicised finding, which was that Israel had carried out “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise” the people of Gaza.
And little wonder too that Goldstone, in acknowledging in April 2011 that “civilians were not intentionally targeted by Israel”, also had to concede that while Hamas “had not conducted any investigations” into its own actions, “Israel dedicated significant resources to investigating allegations of operational misconduct”.
And of course, the UN, which is endemically anti-Israel, completely ignored Goldstone’s findings.
The facts, no matter how well established, will never stop Hamas’s apologists from distorting international humanitarian law in their campaign to shield the terrorists from the consequences of their abominations.
The other great stupidity of Hamas’ apologists is to piously witter about “Palestinians, not Hamas”. Which is as asinine as arguing, in 1942, “Germans, not Nazis”. There is, in this current conflict, just as there was in WWII, almost no functional difference.
Not when tens of thousands of Gazan “civilians” working in Israel acted as Hamas’ intelligence wing. Not when Gazan “civilians” join in the orgy of bloodthirsty glee as Jewish corpses are paraded through the streets. Not when Gazan “civilians” elect Hamas to power.
Christian Wolff, who introduced the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in his 1749 treatise on the Law of Nations, emphasised that the distinction could only be sustained if the combatants on each side clearly demarcated themselves from their civilian counterparts; if they didn’t, they were no better than pirates, who deserved to be erased from the face of the Earth.
Equally, Emer de Vattel, whose Law of Nations (1758) is widely regarded as the basis of modern international law, left little doubt about the status of those who are “guilty of enormous breaches of the law of nations”, such as that of hiding behind captive civilians: “Enemies of the human race, who injure all nations by trampling underfoot the foundations of humanity’s common safety, they must be refused any quarter” […]
That is what Bob Hawke, who was consistently mindful of the Palestinians’ plight, so lucidly grasped in 1974, when he vehemently rejected the Whitlam government’s “morally repugnant policy of ‘even-handedness’?”.
Stressing that the Middle East conflict was part of the global attack on the democracies, he stared down the strong pro-Arab forces in the ALP and unreservedly picked sides. “If we allow the bell to be tolled for Israel,” Hawke declared, “it will have tolled for us all.”
The Australian
Would that Labor today, let alone the rest of the putridly anti-Semitic left, had Hawke’s moral clarity.