On the eve of New York’s Thanksgiving Parade, the city’s police warned “malicious actors” any attempt to disrupt the procession would be dealt with firmly. They were backed by Mayor Eric Adams who, despite strong woke tendencies, understands the theory of zero-tolerance policing. “We are going to be on top of those who attempt to interrupt the parade in any way possible,” he said.
Nevertheless, a dozen or so pro-Palestinian demonstrators chanced their luck, plonking themselves in front of the Ronald McDonald float. The NYPD was true to its word, dragging them away without hesitation.
“Anti-Israel bozos block clown at Macy’s Parade,” ran the headline in the New York Post.
“It’s exactly the type of language we were missing,” Ruby Chen, father of Hamas captive Itay Chen, told Fox News.
If NSW police had acted as decisively on October 9 last year it would have sent a message that anti-Semitism will not be tolerated. Instead, they stood by impassively as our own Palestinian bozos lobbed flares over their heads.
With Donald Trump’s inauguration barely six weeks away, a similar kind of backbone is about to be restored to US foreign policy. President-elect Trump fired an opening salvo at Iran and its proxy, Hamas, last week, saying there would be “hell to pay” if the hostages were not released by inauguration day.
It’s exactly the type of language that has been missing for the past four years.
The Trump administration promises a return to clear-eyed foreign policy with Marco Rubio nominated for secretary of state. China’s People’s Daily labelled him a troublemaker who spews garbage from his mouth. Clearly, he’s off to a good start. Rubio will be supported by Mike Waltz, Trump’s designated national security adviser and the first Green Beret to be elected to the US congress.
To its credit, the Biden administration has continued to support Israel. Yet it has shown a disturbing ambivalence toward Iran, the font of so much evil in the Middle East Democrats since president Barack Obama have tried to appease.
The fall of the shah in 1979, followed by Ayatollah Khomeini’s consolidation of power, marked the arrival of a malicious force in the region steeped in revolutionary ideology and harbouring regional hegemonic ambitions.
Iran’s primary export is barbarism. It drove the implosion of Iraq, and the 16-year civil war in Syria. It perpetuates instability in Lebanon through its proxy, Hezbollah. It disrupts shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden through its proxy, Ansar Allah, aka the Houthis.
The slogan on their flag, “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam”, spells out their intent.
Beyond the region, Iran aligns itself with the enemies of freedom everywhere: China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela.
At the heart of Iranian ambitions lies the elimination of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. It opposes a two-state solution because it opposes the existence of Israel in any form. It poisoned the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the peace process at the Camp David Summit in 2000, funding Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to attack Israel.
Conscious of the superior strength of Israel, it has been careful to wage its war by funding proxy militias, notwithstanding limited ballistic missile attacks on Israel in April and October this year to save face after Israel’s devastating assassinations of senior Iranians and leaders of its proxy militia.
Iran’s propaganda war has been more successful persuading useful idiots in the West that the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East is Zionist imperialism. Trump’s Abraham Accords demonstrated that this was false, bypassing Iran and the Palestinians to normalise relations between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain.
Iran’s surge in oil exports under Joe Biden unlocked more than $30bn, which funded Hamas’ October 7, 2023, atrocities in Israel. Iran’s culpability was ignored by Western media, which instead framed rape, murder, kidnap and infanticide as legitimate if regrettable “resistance”. The Hamas-Israel war scuppered the entry of Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, a victory for Iran.
Iran scored another victory when the Albanese government abandoned Israel to join the herd at the United Nations supporting an “irreversible pathway” to Palestinian statehood. Anthony Albanese voiced support for a two-state solution that cannot happen while Iran is in the driving seat.
The arson attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne is the icing on the cake for Iran’s Khamenei and his theocratic henchmen, crowning the anti-Semitic hatred unleashed in Australia by October 7.
Trump returns to office determined to revive the Abraham Accords and isolate Iran. He is surrounded by a team who have no difficulty identifying our enemies in the new Cold War: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and their acolytes.
Meanwhile, Albanese stumbles around in a fog. His undergraduate worldview cannot see beyond the sideshow of Palestine. He has put Australia at odds with its most important ally, refusing America’s request to send a ship to the Gulf to join an axis of the willing to counter the Houthi threat. He was conspicuously absent from the NATO summit in Washington in July, to the delight of China.
Critically, he is unable to recognise the gravity of the escalating anti-Semitic attacks in Australia, seemingly scouring the thesaurus for the weakest words of condemnation. The foul graffiti and vandalism of Jewish property in Sydney’s eastern suburbs last month was merely “deeply troubling”.
On Friday, after the arson attack on the Adass synagogue, Albanese went ahead with a press conference in Western Australia spruiking his Future Made in Australia plan, rattling on for more than 10 minutes about what he called “a cracker of the announcement”, an additional $475m of corporate welfare to promote rare earth mining.
Finally, a journalist asked him to comment on the synagogue attack. It was “a shocking incident”, the PM said. “Anti-Semitism is something that has been around for a long period of time.”
No, Prime Minister, it hasn’t. Not in a country that was a haven for Jewish people from the 1930s fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe. Not in a country where Jewish migrants and their descendants have been the most loyal, civilised and community-minded cohorts that ever came here. Their example and contribution have made it easy for the vast majority of Australians to know on which side they stand in Israel’s fight for survival as the only liberal democracy in the region.
Albanese’s belated recognition on Sunday that firebombing the Adass synagogue was an act of terrorism only highlights the woeful weakness of his first comment, revealing him as a Prime Minister with feeble moral judgment and an impoverished grasp of history, prepared to sacrifice principle to hang on to Muslim votes in a miserable handful of seats.
Nick Cater is a senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre
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