Andrew Bolt: Israel-hating protesters who hijacked day of mourning make me fear for our country’s future
How can anyone still pretend this is one country, after hundreds of anti-Israel protesters hijacked a day meant to commemorate the slaughter of 1200 Jews two years before. I’ve never been so pessimistic about the future of Australia.
After this week, how can anyone still pretend this is one country? That “we” Australians share even basic values?
I’ve never been so pessimistic about Australia, after hundreds of Israel-haters marched in Sydney and Melbourne on Tuesday, hijacking a day meant to commemorate the slaughter of 1200 Jews two years before, and the kidnapping of 251 more.
No, they said: this was instead the day to remember the “genocide” of Palestinians in this war that Hamas terrorists had actually started.
What can I say to such people? What do I have in common with them?
I once assumed we’d agree it was shameful to deliberately murder so many civilians, even children – to hack off the heads of some men and parade and beat the bodies of violated women.
Did it even need saying that no cause excused such savagery?
But that’s changed. Tuesday’s protesters wanted no pity shown on that day for the Jewish dead, or the hostages still held in Gaza, some deliberately starved into living skeletons.
No, protesters instead made Tuesday an anniversary of Palestinian “resistance”, under the slogan: “Glory to the martyrs!”
You may say a few hundred pitiless protesters mean little in a nation of 27 million. But add also the vandals who painted “Glory to Hamas” and “Oct. 7 do it again” on a billboard and wall in Melbourne. Add the thousands expected to also rally on Sunday.
Most disturbingly, add the media release the Australian National Imams Council issued on Tuesday, saying October 7 actually marked “over 730 days of relentless genocide and war waged against the people of Gaza”.
Never mind that Israel didn’t invade Gaza for another three weeks after October 7.
Not once in the page-long statement did this council, representing our Muslim preachers, mention the Jews who had been killed, raped or kidnapped on that day. This was tribalism: our side, your side.
If that’s the Imams Council, what’s being said in our mosques?
If only it was just Muslim preachers. But Melbourne’s protest also included many non-Muslim young, plus haters of the West, from Marxists to overeducated and underpaid Leftists resentful at not having their brilliance recognised in a “colony” they’ve been educated to despise, along with its Judeo-Christian values.
I generalise, but again: what can the rest of us say to such people?
They are in a different moral universe, seemingly guided by hatred and tribal loyalties, and I fear for our future.
