Peta Credlin: Welcome back Albo, now stem the anti-Semitism wave sweeping the country
Until it actually happened, a large Australian crowd chanting ‘gas the Jews’ would have been unimaginable, writes Peta Credlin. It’s time the PM stepped in to stop the wave of anti-Semitism washing over our nation.
Peta Credlin
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Extensive overseas travel is unavoidable for a prime minister, but to Anthony Albanese it seems it’s become a substitute for actually running the country.
Since the defeat of his signature project, the Voice, he’s hardly been in Australia.
First, he was in the United States, an important trip to be sure, given the need for intimate co-operation over nuclear submarines, but also a convenient distraction for a shell-shocked leader.
Then he was in China, an incongruous destination given the contrast between his emollient words about our greatest strategic challenger with his earlier talks in Washington.
The main reason seemed more nostalgia for the historic Whitlam visit 50 years earlier than any coherent conception of our national interest.
And then there was his Pacific stopover, that seemed less about rallying our neighbours against Beijing’s influence-peddling than courting the numbers for another vanity project — Australia hosting the 2026 COP climate jamboree.
To the extent that there was any prime ministerial counsel for our Pacific neighbours against getting too close to communist China, it was contradicted by his own Beijing visit scarcely hours earlier.
Meanwhile, here at home, cost of living continues to skyrocket, with another interest rate rise compounding the near-doubling of most home buyers’ mortgage costs and the government’s climate preoccupations worsening the energy price spiral.
Plus, the government has no coherent response to the rampant anti-Semitism that’s starting to disfigure our major cities.
Foreign trips can be a heady mixture of ceremony and flattery from more powerful leaders.
Their main point has to be to ensure Australia is taken seriously, especially to further important national objectives such as expanded markets and more secure alliances, not ego-tripping for leaders with a floundering domestic agenda.
It’s likely that the Washington visit helped the passage through Congress of the legislation needed to make AUKUS happen.
The best that can be said of the China visit, though, is that it may have expedited the dropping of some trade bans that never should have been imposed in the first place.
But some short-term trade gain is a high price for confusing our main allies about whose side we’re on and misleading businesses about the long-term security of the China market, given President Xi remains hellbent on world domination.
And as for hosting the next UN climate change Conference of the Parties, that would just guarantee even higher costs and poorer policy as the price for all the junket-loving climate-istas to fly to Australia.
There would be higher emissions reduction targets with associated cost-of-living pain and more hobbles on the resource and agricultural exports that pay our way in the world, to appease emissions obsessives who will never be satisfied short of the deindustrialisation of the West.
The $350m in climate aid the PM re-announced in a bid to get Pacific nations’ votes to host COP is the latest waste of taxpayer money.
And for what? We’re barely responsible for 1 per cent of global emissions and, despite the talk, the biggest emitters, China and India, are increasing emissions not cutting them.
There is one vital issue, though, where even a government that’s more performative than performing, and better at striking a pose than making a difference, could bring about an immediate improvement. And that’s by denouncing the wave of anti-Semitism now sweeping the country.
Since the October 7 Hamas massacres in Israel, egged on by radical Islamist preachers and justified by neo-Marxist academics, tens of thousands of Australians have been marching in favour of what would amount to a new Holocaust, the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of millions of Jews “from the river to the sea”.
Until it actually happened, a large Australian crowd chanting “gas the Jews” would have been regarded as unimaginable, but such is the extent of anti-Semitism despite our laws against racism.
If this was “gas the Aboriginals” or “gas trans women”, you can be sure protesters would have been arrested. So why the official apathy for Australian Jews?
The brazenness of these extremist preachers has been extraordinary, with one even daring the government to deport him.
But lest anyone think these are just unrepresentative extremists, the Grand Mufti of Australia, the Islamic equivalent of the Anglican primate or the president of the Catholic bishops conference — so Australia’s foremost Muslim leader — in a post just three days after the Hamas atrocity, blamed Israel for what had happened.
“The central issue at stake”, said Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, “in this bloody iteration of violence is not about Hamas, but rather about the innocent Palestinian people who have been oppressed for more than 70 years.”
He added “the brilliance that every measure of resistance takes on with their boldness and their innovations” means that “the blood of the martyrs will smell of musk”.
To be clear, this is Australia’s leading Muslim cleric praising the actions of the Hamas terrorists.
It’s little wonder that 102 Australian Holocaust survivors this week issued a statement “never did we think that we would witness a re-enactment of the senseless and virulent hatred of Jews that we faced in Europe. The actions of Hamas are so familiar, so barbaric, yet instead of condemning this, the response across the globe is a shameful spike in anti-Semitism”.
Just one of many examples is the placing of stickers saying “Zionist propaganda” over posters of Israelis taken hostage displayed around Melbourne University.
It’s fair enough to demand that the Israeli government do its best to minimise civilian casualties, among those Hamas is now using as human shields, and to seek a humanitarian pause in military operations to allow food and water into Gaza. But in no reasonable moral universe is there any equivalence whatsoever between the Hamas death cult and the Israeli armed forces trying to deal with it.
Yet clearly conflicted Labor MPs either draw a false equivalence between a next-to-non-existent Islamophobia and rampant ant-Semitism, or say next to nothing from fear of alienating their Muslim constituents and branch activists.
It’s just not good enough for the federal government to take next to no action against these hate preachers.
The mosques and other Islamic centres hosting these Islamic clerics must lose any grants they’re getting. If the hate-preachers are Australian citizens — Australians of convenience not conviction — they should be prosecuted. And if the hate-preachers are on visas, they should be deported on character grounds.
Likewise these now-routine protests calling for the destruction of Israel. Don’t let them march. And don’t let them chant their hate-filled slogans.
If the police could break up freedom marches during the pandemic, they should be more than capable of breaking up “kill the Jews” marches now.
Now the PM is finally back in the country, he must sort this out. Now.
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Originally published as Peta Credlin: Welcome back Albo, now stem the anti-Semitism wave sweeping the country
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