Has Albanese’s authority in his party been shattered by his humiliating referendum defeat?
Anthony Albanese claims he stands with Israel yet some of his senior ministers pander to the party’s strong Muslim vote and encourage radicals who want Israel stopped or even destroyed.
Andrew Bolt
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Anthony Albanese seems distracted and his government divided on the war on Israel and the disgusting Jew-hatred it’s unleashed.
Mobs here scream “gas the Jews” and call for Israel’s destruction, and Jews fear for their safety.
Yet when we need leadership, Albanese’s government speaks with a forked tongue.
Albanese claims he stands with Israel, yet lets some of his most senior ministers pander to the party’s anti-Israel Left and its strong Muslim vote, and encourage radicals who want Israel stopped or even destroyed.
Has his authority in his party been shattered by his humiliating defeat in the referendum on his Voice?
True, Albanese on Wednesday was still saying “Israel has a right to defend itself”, and “Hamas’s terrorist activity horrified the world”.
“Activity”, though, seems a mild way to describe what Hamas, the terrorist group which runs Gaza, did to start this war on October 7, slaughtering 1400 Jews, mutilating parents in front of their children, raping women, beheading captives, burning babies alive and taking 240 hostages.
What’s more, having allowed the bare minimum – Israel’s right to defend itself – Albanese again insisted Israel restrict itself in fighting back: “How it defends itself matters, and we want to see all innocent life protected.”
Of course, no Israeli leader wants to do to Palestinians what Palestinians did to Jews, but Israel cannot defend itself and still protect “all innocent life”.
Albanese’s demand is impossible because Hamas is a death cult.
It doesn’t just want Jews to die, but its own civilians, too, to hurt Israel.
Ismael Haniyah, the Hamas leader, explained that last week: “The blood of the women, children and elderly … we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit.”
That’s why Hamas does not build bomb shelters for its civilians or let them hide in the 500km of tunnels it claims it has dug under Gaza.
Senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk explained that last week, too, saying the tunnels were for Hamas fighters, and the United Nations should protect the civilians.
“Everybody knows that 75 per cent of the people in the Gaza Strip are refugees, and it is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them,” he said.
That’s all just played out with Israel’s strike on Tuesday on a Hamas command centre cynically hidden inside the Jabalia “refugee camp”.
Israel warned civilians repeatedly to move away from this and other areas filled with Hamas military, but Hamas told them to stay.
And so, yes, civilians died when Israel bombed that Hamas base and killed a senior commander and many fighters.
Reports on the bombing said it opened “huge sinkholes, with residents … saying that the ground began to collapse”.
That was Hamas tunnels collapsing.
But Albanese and his ministers fall too easily for this Hamas tactic of fighting from behind crowds of civilians, and lying and exaggerating when Israel fights back.
When Hamas lied that Israel had bombed a Gaza hospital, Albanese was conned into declaring: “We condemn any indiscriminate attacks and targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals.”
In fact, all available evidence shows a misfiring Palestinian rocket caused the explosion, not in the hospital but a car park outside. Albanese never corrected that record.
But if he’s weak on Israel, some of his ministers are plain hostile.
Two, Ed Husic and Anne Aly, accused Israel of a war crime – collective punishment of Palestinians.
Another, Tony Burke, representing a Sydney seat that’s 25 per cent Muslim, backed the Canterbury-Bankstown Council flying the Palestinian flag while this war lasts.
This was just to mourn dead Palestinian civilians, insisted Burke: “It is not a Hamas flag.”
In fact, it’s still a kind of battle flag, adopted initially by another terrorist army – the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
Flying it is less about grieving than fighting.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong is also cutting across Albanese’s professions of support for Israel.
She’s given $25m to help Palestinians in this war their own government started, and without demanding Hamas release the hostages first.
On October 18, she posted a tweet of herself posing with a Palestinian activist who’s called for the destruction of Israel “from the river to the sea”, saying she was sympathising over “the devastating explosion at the Gaza City Hospital”.
Since then, Wong has tweeted not one direct criticism of Hamas or the Hezbollah terrorists firing rockets at Israel from Lebanon, but has criticised Israeli “settler violence against Palestinians”.
Whose side in this war against Israel and western civilisation is this government on? Can anyone tell?
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