So-called left-wing protesters need to sit down and listen to the adults | David Penberthy

If you think you’re progressive holding up a Hezbollah flag, you need to go back to left-winger school and brush up on the tenets of socialism, writes David Penberthy.

As sick and as tasteless as it might be, the attempted scheduling of anti-Israel protests in Australia on the loaded date of October 7 has done our community a favour.

It provides final and indisputable clarity as to the fact that many of the people protesting are motivated by a genuine and racist hatred of Jews.

What other reason would there be to pick this date?

A recap for the profoundly forgetful.

What happened on October 7 last year was not some act of resistance against colonisers or some romantic Che Guevara-style attack on a fascist regime.

No-one was setting out to kill soldiers. They weren’t trying to target military bases or infrastructure.

This was a sickeningly successful plot to kill as many civilians as possible, simply because they were Jewish.

The entire focus of the operation was to kill kids at dance festivals and elderly people working on their farms.

Little kids were included in the death toll. Many young women who survived were so defiled they probably wish they had perished.

So on what date are we going to hold our local day of solidarity with the people of Palestine?

Umm, I dunno, how’s October 7 sound?

Demonstrators burn an Israeli flag in front of the parliament building, following the assassination of Lebanon's Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, in Rabat on September 28. Picture: AFP

There are a lot of bandwagon jumping halfwits in Australia who consider themselves left-wing and progressive but need an adult to sit them down and tease out their ideological inconsistencies.

The first goes to their assertion that Israel has brought all this on itself by refusing to progress a two-state solution.

Setting aside the long, byzantine history of Israel’s several offers of two-state solutions, a more fundamental contradiction is at play.

The people at the protests might want a two-state solution but the two key organisations at war with Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah, do not want a two-state solution. They want a no-state solution. A final solution.

They want Israel and by definition and default its inhabitants wiped off the map.

For inhabitants, read the Jews.

Then there’s the small issue of who is behind Hamas and Hezbollah – Iran.

How can any so-called progressive person in Australia either downplay or rationalise the work of either of these organisations, backed as they are by a demented theocracy that thinks women should keep their mouths shut, their faces covered, and that gay people should be put to death?

There has been much discussion this week about the availability and acceptance of Hezbollah flags at protests on Australian streets this past few days.

Our federal police were slow off the mark to twig to this as an issue, weirdly sitting it out (probably on squeamish PC grounds) until its outrageousness was rightly pointed out by our politicians.

Again, as with the election of October 7 as the protest date, the waving of flags in Melbourne has truly belled the cat as to the agenda of some of those protesting.

Since its inception in the 1980s Hezbollah has pioneered the murder of civilians and the use of suicide bombings as its primary tactical vehicle.

Its charter explicitly states that Israel should not exist and its leaders and clerical supporters have made all sorts of vile and demented claims about the Jews, every trope under the sun, from claims about international banking conspiracies to the creation of the AIDS virus.

If you think you’re progressive holding up a Hezbollah flag, you need to go back to left-winger school and brush up on the tenets of socialism.

We aren’t talking here about some freedom-fighting organisation but a bunch of fanatical and violent lunatics who have rightly been listed internationally by every liberal nation as a terrorist organisation.

As for the flags, rather than asking how people obtained them in Australia, we might have missed a trick here by not getting ASIO and the AFP to hand them out.

The deal could be that in return for sharing your name, address and citizenship status, you could be given a Hezbollah flag on the spot, with a couple of jets sitting, idling at Tullamarine ready to take you back to your ancestral home.

I wrote a few months ago about the tormenting of Labor MP Josh Burns, the only federal Labor MP who has had his office vandalised and graffitied so frequently that he ordered his staff to stay away indefinitely for their own safety.

Burns is the only Labor MP to have attracted this degree of attention.

He has done so despite being a very minor player in the federal government. He’s not in charge of Labor’s foreign policy.

Labor MP Josh Burns has been hounded from his office along with his staff by allegedly peaceful “protesters”. Picture:AAP Image/Mick Tsikas

He’s not in cabinet. He’s just a backbencher who dutifully serves his electorate.

The reason Burns has been unable to serve his electorate is because his electoral office was turned into a no-go zone by a bunch of “progressives” angered over the treatment of Palestinians.

The reason Burns was selected for such special treatment?

He’s a Jew.

Burns got picked in the same way that October 7 gets picked as the date for a day of action or a Hezbollah flag gets picked up on the streets of Melbourne in some act of anti-colonial solidarity.

We should stop tiptoeing around the true nature of many of these protesters.

You can understand people being motivated to attend these rallies out of a sense of compassion at civilian deaths.

They need to ask themselves what sort of company they are really keeping.

And as for Australia, we have every right to say that anyone who picks up a Hezbollah flag and waves it on the street in this tolerant, liberal country, is probably living in the wrong place and should piss off accordingly.

Originally published as So-called left-wing protesters need to sit down and listen to the adults | David Penberthy