Akerman: By supporting UNRWA, Wong may as well have handed the money to Hamas directly

With defenders of the offenders claiming Ukraine incited Russia and Israel provoked Hamas, the West is wimping out on winning the wars, writes Piers Akerman.

The West is wimping out on winning in the Ukraine-Russia and Israeli-Hamas wars. In both cases, liberal democratic nations were savagely invaded by forces which broke every international law, murdering civilians, raping young and old women and, in some cases, men, and kidnapping hostages.

Yet, there are defenders of the offenders who claim that Ukraine incited Russia and Israel provoked Hamas. The propagandists, particularly the anti-Israel lobby, get a great run on their ABC, which may account for the broadcaster’s continuing loss of audience.

On Friday, woke Radio National hostess Patricia Karvelas sympathised with an Amnesty International spokeswoman who claimed Israel collectively punished Gazan citizens. Unsurprisingly, Karvelas and her guest praised the US Left-wing Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer who said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has lost his way” and who called for new elections. They did not mention that Schumer was shredded by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell who said it was “grotesque and hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of a democratically elected leader of Israel.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer leaves the Senate Chambers in the US. Picture: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images/AFP

The Albanese government has fallen for the same anti-democratic garbage and has now renewed funding to UNRWA, the critically compromised UN body which Hamas successfully infiltrated to the point that it installed a command base under an UNRWA office while UNRWA staff participated in the October 7 carnage.

It may as well have handed the money to Hamas directly as the UN has still not designated Hamas a terrorist organisation. Foreign minister Penny Wong, who refused to visit the sites of Hamas’ attacks, remains as blind to their horrific rapacity as Schumer and other anti-Israel advocates who ignore the anti-Semitic attacks on Israel and serial invasions since it became a state 76 years ago.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has unpaused funds to aid victims in Gaza. Picture: NCA NewsWire/RoyVphotography

The Arab nations’ successive unsuccessful wars have all begun during UN-sanctioned ceasefires. Should there be another ceasefire, as even Pope Francis has called for, Hamas would only use it to rearm and relaunch its attack on Israel.

The Pope, a unrepentant appeaser, has also suggested Ukraine surrender to Putin’s murderous forces. No mention in Rome of the Iran-backed Lebanon-based terrorist organisation, Hezbollah, firing more than 100 rockets into Israel in the past few weeks.

Israel is not enforcing “collective punishment” on Gazans (who overwhelmingly support the terrorists, according to Arab pollsters). Hamas, in using Gazans as human shields and building their tunnel network under schools, hospitals and refugee camps, is ensuring that civilians will bear the brunt of defensive attacks by Israel forces. The humanitarian crisis that the ABC commentators wring their hands over has been created by Hamas alone.

Writing about World War II in 1948, Winston Churchill said: “Every bond between man and woman was to perish. Crimes were committed by the Germans under the Hitlerite domination to which they … allowed themselves to be subjected … find no equal in scale and wickedness with any that have darkened the human record.”

In its acts and ambitions, Hamas has matched the Hitlerites in barbarity. Even US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the sexual violence against women on October 7 as “beyond anything that I’ve seen”.

Yet Hamas was simply implementing the explicit articles of its 1988 Hamas Covenant and Hamas Principles and Policies of May 2017, which express no interest in any negotiated settlement or two-state solution, but only total victory over Israel or death. They are not interested in any peace negotiation.

Much has been made of the civilian death toll in Gaza and, though the numbers cannot be independently verified, some 31,000 are claimed. Little has been made of the (low) estimates of the total number of deaths in the Syrian civil war which range from 580,000 as of May, 2021, to 613,407 to March, 2023.

Clearly, Muslims killed by Muslims don’t matter as much as terrorists and their sympathisers killed in a just war against aggressors, if those doing the killing are not Israelis.

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently said it was imperative to resist “moral derangement” and to “get the big questions right”. There is no moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas or Ukraine and Russia.

We must, as Churchill (and eventually assorted allies) did, fight evil without giving any quarter.