Akerman: Grow a backbone Albo and take on protesters not committed to our values
The lack of leadership from the Albanese government has created unprecedented social division and discord, eroding the authority of federal and state law enforcement, writes Piers Akerman.
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The lack of leadership from the Albanese left-Labor government has created unprecedented social division and discord.
The weakness at the top has cascaded down, eroding the authority of federal and state law enforcement.
A foreign citizen, an Iranian, has been permitted to lead anti-Israel rallies at which the flags of proscribed terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah have been brandished over the past year in Sydney.
Not one person who participated in any of the intimidating pro-Palestine rallies in city centres and in Jewish neighbourhoods has been convicted.
AFP deputy commissioner Krissy Barrett told Sky News’s Chris Kenny that carrying the flag of a terrorist organisation was not necessarily a crime, depending upon “the context”.
The hate crime legislation is not that unclear. Waving the flags of organisations whose aim is to eliminate Israel, solely because it is the ancestral home of the Jewish people, is a breach of federal law.
But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong are as weak as jellyfish melting on a hot sandy beach.
They are preferencing the demands of a minority of activist Islamists in a handful of Labor electorates above the rights of other Australians of all denominations to go about their lives peacefully and without intimidation.
The vision of shrieking imams calling for the annihilation of Jews on October 8 – the day after a murderous wave of Gazan terrorists crossed Israel’s border to rape, torture and take hostage civilians – demanded an response from Australian authorities.
There was none.
Some of the same protesters will test the NSW police on the anniversary of that massacre, having been permitted to hold a “vigil” in central Sydney.
In anarchic Melbourne, where there are no longer laws governing protests, the mob will prevail, as it has every week for the past year.
Albanese and Wong’s spinelessness has been on display with every utterance the pair have made since both beseeched Israel, not its attackers, to be proportionate in response to the assault on its people.
Merely stating that Israel has the right to defend itself is a non sequitur. Every nation has such a right.
Every day since the largest loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust, rockets have rained upon Israel fired by terrorists from Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, and last week by the actual supplier of these gangs, Iran.
Hezbollah is estimated to have 150,000 rockets hidden in tunnels and homes, hospitals and schools in Lebanon, just as Hamas hid its munitions among civilians – hoping that their deaths would turn world opinion against Israel.
The original attack was part of Iran’s plan to derail the Abraham Accords, which saw some modern Arab nations recognising Israel and signing trade agreements.
The ageing ayatollahs saw this as a threat to their desire to be the reigning Middle Eastern power.
Palestinian statehood was not the principal consideration.
Albanese and Wong didn’t even have the guts to kick out the Iranian ambassador when he weighed in with his support for terrorism, though we owe Iran nothing and Australia is not central to Western intelligence in the region, as the government claims.
The UN has been as useless. Its so-called peacekeeping force UNIFIL, in Lebanon since 2006, has done nothing to prevent the build-up of Iran’s proxy Hezbollah or halt its rocket and mortar attacks on Israel.
When the flags unfurl and the hate chants ring out on Sunday, Australians will wonder if protesters are committed to the values of this country.
Those with dual citizenship who break their oath to uphold our laws should be stripped of their Australian passports and sent to whichever ratbag theocratic nation they may have come from.
Grow a backbone, Albo.
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Originally published as Akerman: Grow a backbone Albo and take on protesters not committed to our values
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