Hamas terrorism finds support on the Left and Right

NSW Greens MP Jenny Leong responded to Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles’s tweet denouncing Hamas for the unprovoked attacks on Israel.

What took place on October 7, 2023 was an act of terrorism that poses the greatest existential threat to Israel since its creation in 1948.

As reports continue to come through of the assault on Israel by Hamas, it stands as the worst act of barbarity perpetrated on Jewish people, since the Holocaust.

These are not hollow superlatives.

There are now confirmed reports of a Hamas attack at a kibbutz in Kfar Aza in the shadows of Gaza. Children, infants were beheaded. At least 40 children were killed.

“It’s not a war,” General Itai Veruv, head of the IDF’s Depth Command, told reporters. “It’s not a battlefield. You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms, and how the terrorists kill them. It’s not a war … it’s a massacre.”

There are no grey areas. There is no room for moral equivocation.

Tell that to NSW Greens MP Jenny Leong who responded to Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles’s tweet denouncing Hamas for the unprovoked attacks on Israel.

“Unprovoked?! This is a disgraceful statement from Defence Minister Richard Marles. It is also appalling that tonight the Opera House will be lit up in support of Israel – what about all of the Palestinian lives lost since occupation?”

Unprovoked?! This is a disgraceful statement from Defence Minister Richard Marles. It is also appalling that tonight the Opera House will be lit up in support of Israel - what about all of the Palestinian lives lost since occupation? 🧵 pic.twitter.com/RmivkyaNCc

— Jenny Leong MP 梁珍妮 (@jennyleong) October 9, 2023

Leong’s thread veered into empty whataboutery. It invoked apartheid, a lazy and false equivalence that trivialises the five decade-long segregation of the black majority population in South Africa under an all white government.

There are 17 Arab members of 120-seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Arabs make up six per cent of the Israeli public service. Arab-Israelis have sat in judgment in Israel’s Supreme Court, and have been represented in the defence and police forces, often at high rank.

Finally, Leong drew a curious but entirely predictable parallel between Israel as a colonial force (created in 1948) with white settlement in Australia from 1778.

“But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised – because after all they too rule over a land still marked with the bloodstains of invasion and colonisation without any end to the injustice for First Nations people.”

The Hamas attack on innocents has confounded the Left. While Marles and the Foreign Minister, Penny Wong have been strong in their statements, others like Tony Burke and Chris Bowen in their western Sydney electorates have failed to criticise community leaders for their violent and hateful remarks.

On Wednesday, the ACT Chief Minister, Andrew Barr, a Labor man in coalition with the Greens, babbled that “No one should be bombing anybody.” It was a dismal five-bob each-way remark unbecoming of any political leader.

In the US, an anonymous collective of Harvard students issued a statement that reads in part:

“We, the undersigned student organisations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

The statement goes on but I’ll spare readers the miserable rationalisations. Worst of all, the signatories of the statement from what we might call some of America’s best and brightest, were concealed “for student safety.”

Anti-Semitism is the cornerstone of the extremes on the left and right. Peel away the political rhetoric and it is laid bare, often in euphemisms associated with insane conspiracy theories of a world run by Jewish cabals. It never goes away and now around the world it has bubbled to the surface again.

I won’t quote the disgusting remarks found on the social media cesspit, Telegram, a free speech absolutist platform. The Telegram account of pro-Putin Simeon Boikov, hiding away in the Russian consulate to avoid a jail term for the assault on a then 76-year-old man occasioning actual bodily harm, was filled with comments from Boikov’s supporters of the vilest type.

X, formally known as Twitter, has its own problems with its owner, Elon Musk urging his millions of followers to follow accounts that had spread disinformation, including an AI-generated bomb blast on the Pentagon that didn’t happen. One of the accounts Musk identified as “good” for “following the war in real-time” had replied to a Tweet from an observer with an awful slur, “Mind your own business, Jew.”

Musk has since deleted his recommendation but he remained in contact with one, wagging a finger at the account after it had referred to a retaliatory air strike from Israel into Gaza having created “20 martyrs murdered by Israel.”

I’m not suggesting that Musk is an anti-Semite but his site with its pay for blue ticks validation now allows for the greater spread of disinformation and hate speech. In the past few days images have been circulated of armed conflicts that came from video games. Researchers have discovered that anti-Semitic posts have doubled since Musk took over Twitter last year.

If Twitter had a utility as a site for breaking news around major events, it has ceased to be so. Disinformation runs so thick on the platform that it has become an unreliable source of news and first hand accounts.

The axiom that the first casualty of war is truth stands. But what took place on October 7, 2023 was not war. It was not an armed conflict fought between two sides. It was the murder of hundreds of civilians, the abduction of others, seized and taken to Gaza where Hamas has threatened to broadcast their execution.

The date will now be forever etched into the litany of sorrow experienced by Jewish people in history. It sits alongside the distilled hatred seen in the pogroms in Europe over centuries and the Nazi’s final solution.

Those who think that the massacre of women and children is somehow fair play have been exposed. This was not an act of war. It was an act of terrorism.