Akerman: As the civilised world stands with Israel we must fight opportunists who gladhand terrorism

While the civilised world stands with Israel, pockets within Australia have shown they stand with terrorists, writes Piers Akerman.

It is impossible to understand the truly unfathomable evil ideology of the Islamist terrorist group Hamas without making some comparison to the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, our education system today has little time for real history. The verified reports of headless, charred bodies of babies and children found blackened and disembowelled in the shattered ruins of homes in Israel reminded me of the stories filed from Buchenwald, one of Hitler’s numerous concentration camps, liberated in April 1945.

Veteran war correspondent Osmar White, one of the first newspapermen to enter the camp, filed a lengthy account of his harrowing experience for the Brisbane Courier-Mail, where it appeared in the April 18 editions.

He wrote: “A Belgian girl from Auschwitz told me it was the practice there to throw newborn infants alive into the crematorium furnaces; that her own child, conceived in rape by a German officer, had been taken from her and disposed of that way. I believed her.”

White, who had been a foreign correspondent in New Guinea before being sent to Europe to cover the end of the Nazi regime, had seen horror before, but nothing prepared him for the scenes he was to witness there.

The furnaces of Buchenwald death camp in Germany, circa May 1945, taken by Osmar White. Picture: Supplied

His reporting still features in history books covering the end of the Allies’ European campaign and he later wrote a book, Conqueror’s Road, published posthumously, which was hailed for its extraordinary balance.

So even-handed was he, the book could not initially be published in the US because White reported on the war crimes committed by all combatants, Allied and Axis alike.

Abandoned and torched vehicles at the site of the October 7 attack on the Supernova desert music festival by Palestinian militants. Picture: Jack Guez/AFP

The world now knows that not only Gaza has housed and been controlled since 2007 by Hamas – who have used it as a base from which to fire rockets indiscriminately into Israel, killing civilians – but that we in Australia have provided a safe haven for Hamas supporters.

We saw them rioting in the forecourt of the Opera House as it displayed the colours of the Israeli flag last Monday.

As NSW police stood by, the mob desecrated our most iconic secular building.

Scenes of homegrown Hamas followers chanting “Gas the Jews”, among other revolting slogans, and vision of an Australian-born imam dancing with joy as he told his addled flock that he was celebrating the terror, were viewed globally.

Supporters of the Yes campaign in this weekend’s referendum tried to shame the nation by repeatedly claiming that we would become international pariahs if we didn’t agree with the Labor-Green view.

Their display, and the flaccid response of the state and federal MPs from whose electorates they came, have smashed the boast that we are a successful multicultural nation.

And we must not to overlook the contribution made by former Labor PM Paul Keating, who defied security warnings and enabled the late hatemongering Egyptian imam Sheik Taj El-Din Hilaly’s residency.

Labor relies on these electorates to govern, and the transgressions of the Islamists who live in them have for too long been overlooked.

Twenty-one years ago this past Thursday, Islamist terrorists from Jemaah Islamiyah and al-Qaeda killed 202 people, including 88 Australians who died while holidaying in Bali.

Among the more than 1300 murdered Israelis this week were some 260 young people at a techno-music party celebrating peace.

While the civilised world stands with Israel, pockets within Australia have shown they stand with terrorists.

We are better than this. We have fought wars in distant places to show we stand for freedom and justice. We must take a stand again now.