Penny Wong is backstabber of our Israeli allies in this fight to defend western civilisation

I was wondering when it would get to this – when Foreign Minister Penny Wong would be exposed at last as a liar or dissembling panderer to Muslim voters.

The exploding pagers in Lebanon last week blew up more than Hezbollah terrorists. They also blew up Penny Wong’s claim that she backs Israel’s right to defend itself.

Yes, our Foreign Minister is a phony.

I was wondering when it would get to this – Israel launching an attack so perfectly targeting its jihadist enemies that Wong would be exposed at last as a liar or dissembling panderer to Muslim voters.

A backstabber of our Israeli allies in this fight to defend western civilisation.

How could she fail to support such a brilliant operation, in which some 3000 pagers issued only to operatives of the Hezbollah terrorist army were secretly rigged with explosives by Israel, and just enough to maim or kill only the bearer?

How could Penny Wong fail to support such a brilliant operation? Picture: Martin Ollman

It’s clearly an act of Israeli self-defence.

Hezbollah has already fired 8000 rockets into Israel since October 7, forcing 63,000 people to evacuate homes in northern Israel. One Hezbollah rocket two months ago killed 12 Israeli children, all Muslim Druze at a soccer practice.

Is Israel meant to keep enduring these rocket attacks, day after day?

Don’t think Hezbollah can be reasoned with instead.

It’s also attacked American bases and assets, assassinated Christian Lebanese leaders and demanded Israel’s destruction.

Yet Wong last week still tut-tutted that Israel had hurt these poor Islamist terrorists, who seem to have made up most of the dead and injured in the pager plot: “I would say all violence is something we don’t wish to see … This reflects the concern we’ve had for some time about the potential for regional escalation.”

I always suspected Wong was insincere.

Just weeks after Hamas terrorists started this war on October 7 by slaughtering 1200 Jews, raping women, beheading men and taking 251 hostages, Wong hit on the formula she’s used ever since to suggest she supports Israel defending itself, without ever actually doing so.

“Israel has a right to defend itself,” she said, but “Israel’s friends, including Australia, have emphasised that the way Israel does that matters”.

Wong has since honed that down after repeated use: “We recognise Israel’s right to defend itself and we stress that the way it does so matters.”

Which suits Wong, because she’s never since publicly identified a right way for Israel to defend itself.

Indeed, what seems to matter to her is not how Israel fights back, but that it fights at all. You’d even get the impression from Wong that Israel is and always will be a war criminal.

Wong suggests she supports Israel defending itself, without ever actually doing so. Picture: Martin Ollman

For instance, Wong warned Israel had broken “international law” when it bombed a room in one of the many hospitals in Gaza which Hamas used as a military base, even though Israel used surveillance and precision weapons to avoid killing civilians.

Wong also insisted Israel “must not proceed” with military operations in Rafah, in southern Gaza, even though some of the remaining Israel hostages have since been found there.

She gave Israel no credit for making civilians in Rafah first evacuate, or for warning locals ahead of strikes to move.

Wong might quibble in each case that Israel was still putting too many civilians at risk, but how could she say that about Israel’s pager-bomb attack on Hezbollah, or the booby-trapped Hezbollah walkie-talkies it set off the day after?

There is almost no chance that innocent Lebanese civilians were walking around with pagers and walkie-talkies which Hezbollah admitted had been issued “to employees of various Hezbollah units and institutions”.

This had to be the cleanest kill ever seen of terrorists who hide behind civilians. So why can’t Wong support even that?

But so much that Wong and the rest of the Albanese Government does makes no sense, unless you figure – aha – this is about winning Muslim votes, or pleasing anti-Israel bigots of the hard Left who’d otherwise vote for the Greens.

Why has this government said almost nothing about the Jew-hater clerics of Sydney? Why almost nothing about the abusive and violent pro-Palestine protests?

And why did Wong in her visit to Israel refuse to visit places where Hamas massacred Jews on October 7?

I visited kibbutz Be’eri and saw unmistakably clearly how Hamas had planned the systematic murder of Jewish civilians, house by burned house.

Had Wong seen that she’d have had to know there cannot be any compromise with the genocidal men who ordered that horror.

I now understand why she didn’t want to learn that.

No, Israel must never be right. No shot it fires to save itself can ever be praised.

Originally published as Penny Wong is backstabber of our Israeli allies in this fight to defend western civilisation