Adam Bandt’s repugnant views exposed

High-profile Jewish figure Menachem Vorchheimer has acted wisely in launching a human rights complaint against Greens leader Adam Bandt and his party.

The complaint centres on the offensive slogan “All Zionists are terrorists”, often chanted at anti-Israel protest rallies in Melbourne in which Mr Bandt and other Greens have played leading roles. Mr Vorchheimer has complained to the human rights division of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

In his well-argued case, reported by John Ferguson, Mr Vorchheimer points out that Zionism (the right of Jews to self-determination in their historical and ancestral homeland of Israel) has been a central religious belief for more than 2000 years.

“The word ‘Zion’ (Israel) appears in the Old Testament 152 times,” he wrote. “Zionism does not preclude a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state living alongside a Jewish state in peace.”

Since October 2023, shortly after Hamas slaughtered 1200 Jews and kidnapped 250 others, Mr Vorchheimer has written to Mr Bandt repeatedly, warning that the Greens leader’s prominent role at protest rallies may have breached Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act. Participants at the rallies have held placards equating Jews to Nazis and chanted “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud” – celebrating the slaughter of Jews in 628 – and “All Zionists are terrorists”.

The Greens deny Mr Vorchheimer’s claims. Mr Bandt recently made the grotesque suggestion that Israel was to blame for Hamas’s sadistic torture and executions of Palestinians who had risen up against its stranglehold of the Gaza Strip. One of at least six Gazans killed by Hamas, Odai al-Rubai, 22, was beaten with clubs and metal rods before being dragged through the streets with a rope around his neck and dumped, dying, on his family’s doorstep.

Despite Hamas’s terrorist record, its brutality to Gazans and its misusing them as human shields in war, Mr Bandt, unlike most observers of the Israeli-Hamas conflict including Foreign Minister Penny Wong, would not rule out a role for the terrorists in governing Gaza in future.

That would be a matter for Palestinians, he said. Australia could play a role, Mr Bandt said, in bringing about the occupation of Palestine to an end: “But what we have seen consistently is war crimes being committed, including by the extremist Netanyahu government, and Australia taking no action.”

Mr Bandt and his colleagues in the far-left Greens party could be influential in a hung parliament after the election. That is why voters leaning towards supporting them, including idealistic young people, need to look closely at the ghastly, warped morality that has often caused them to turn a blind eye to virulent anti-Semitism.