Ask the Druze where they’d rather live. Hint: it’s not that shining beacon, Syria

The terror group blew up a dozen kids on a soccer field this week and we all got to see selective outrage and anti-Semitism in full flight.

Druze mourners surround the coffins of 10 of the 12 people killed in a rocket strike on Majdal Shams last weekend. Picture: AFP

There is something quite vile about selective outrage. Vile and revealing. On the surface, it’s almost easy enough to brush it off as just bias by another name, but scratch the surface and the truth is always there.

This week, 12 children were blown to smithereens when a Hezbollah rocket was fired at a soccer field in the predominantly Druze community of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. The Lebanese terror group has fired close to 7000 rockets and launched 180 attack drones and 700 anti-tank missiles into Israel since October 7 last year.

Process that for a moment. This week, Hezbollah blew up a dozen kids on a soccer field and we all got to see selective outrage and anti-Semitism in full flight.

The coverage of this massacre was almost reluctant. As of mid-week, Amnesty International hadn’t said a word about it. Segments of the media referred to the location as the “occupied Golan Heights”.

They may as well cheer for Syria, that shining beacon of human rights in the Middle East. Ask the Druze where they’d rather live. It’s dreary, isn’t it? And depressing how disparate the response has been to children who had the temerity to be murdered on the “wrong” side of the border.

Hezbollah is a listed terror organisation in Australia, the US and many other countries around the world. An Iranian proxy, it is as committed to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Tehran. Oh, and they’re not big fans of Christianity either, just keep that in mind while you’re at it.

Please, don’t protest, they don’t even try to hide it. Go read the Hamas charter. Go do some basic, perfunctory research. It will take you 15 minutes at most. Maybe longer if you like to take your time.

Protesting against the truth of what I’ve just said makes you look a bit dim, which leads me to a sad conclusion I reached this past week following these events and the welcome elimination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah chief Fuad Shukr.

There is a dearth of intellectual rigour when it comes to looking at this conflict. There is an unwillingness or an inability to critically analyse truth and facts and form a position accordingly. So many are trapped in an ideological prison that prevents them from rationally and intelligently assessing new facts, from balancing ideas in tension and understanding that freedom is never free.

Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh and Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, who are both now dead, in March. Picture: AFP

Is it any wonder? Reuters this week, in reporting the killing of Haniyeh, wrote that “he was seen by many diplomats as a moderate compared to the more hardline members of the Iran-backed group inside Gaza”. Moderate? This evil person celebrated the slaughter of October 7 and boasted that the blood of Palestinian civilians, namely women, children and the elderly, was the fuel for resistance. It’s a sickness.

Haniyeh was a billionaire coward hiding out in Qatar while Gazans suffered under the weight of Hamas tyranny and the brutality of sharia law. If he’s moderate then I’m shy and retiring.

In the space I have here I’d like to bring some (more) facts into play for those of you who like throwing the word genocide around. As if it doesn’t mean anything. As if six million didn’t die at the hands of actual Nazis. As if up to a million people weren’t slaughtered in Rwanda in the course of 100 days in 1994.

There is no genocide in the disputed territories. A mere comparison of population numbers confirms that. To all the twits parroting that line, saying it doesn’t make it true. But let me bring these pesky facts to the table.

Between 1922 and 2017 the Palestinian Christian population plummeted from 70,000 to 40,000, according to the Palestinian Authority’s own published data. The Christian population of Bethlehem is now just 12 per cent, fewer than 11,000 people. The reason? Persecution. No Christians allowed, just like there are no Jews allowed.

Let’s look at Syria. Before 2011 there were about 1.5 million Christians; now there are just 300,000, less than 2 per cent of the population. In September 2016, the last Jews of Aleppo were rescued, ending the presence of the Jewish people for good in that region. As of 2022 the BBC reported only four Jews remained in Syria. These are published facts from verified third-party sources. Do your homework, for God’s sake.

Israel is so committed to genocide it saved the life of October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar by removing a brain tumour while he was in jail for terror offences. A poor choice if you ask me, but instructive in this context.

Let’s briefly address the farcical “apartheid in Israel” nonsense. Israel is a pluralistic society. We can take the Druze as an example. Persecuted by everyone from the Shia caliphate and beyond, the assaults on their people have ranged from pogroms to the destruction of their prayer houses and forced conversion to Islam. There are 150,000 Druze living safely, cohesively and happily in Israel. They have special standing as a minority group and regularly attain high level positions in politics and public life.

Jews can’t go to Gaza or most parts of the disputed West Bank. By comparison, let’s look at the makeup of the Israeli parliament, at a glance. Druze, Arab and Muslim members of the Knesset, women and openly gay parliamentarians. Nowhere else in the region is this the case. Nowhere.

For those who toss around words like apartheid and genocide, shame on you. You not only reveal your lack of intellect, you diminish the impact of those words and the people who have endured true apartheid, whose lives have been destroyed by actual genocide.

This past week, having a conversation with someone about the war, I asked them gently: what would you have expected Israel to do? Now, this was an amicable, honest conversation with someone who holds different views to my own. It wasn’t a shouting match and it wasn’t a war of words. It was a teasing out of horrible truths. I asked the question gently, genuinely. This person had no answer.

Because the only real answer is that Israel is once again fighting a war it didn’t start, doesn’t want and that as a sovereign nation has the right to defend herself.

Hamas (Muslim Brotherhood) has been kicked out of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Moderate Muslim countries want nothing to do with it, yet elements of Australia’s political class, namely the Greens, want to bring that mess here. They are architects of chaos with not a shred of intellect to back themselves with.

If you stand with those who rejoiced in the slaughter of October 7, you are broken. If your rhetoric and campus protests are praised by one of the world’s greatest abusers of human rights, you have no place in the Australia I believe we all want, one of unbreakable social cohesion.

The truth is also this. Most Australians of this current generation (myself included) have never known war or conflict. As a nation, we’ve lost our toughness. We’ve forgotten that freedom comes at a price and that sometimes one must wage war to enforce peace. Nobody wants that, no sane person, anyway. But the best way to avoid these sorts of circumstances is by not starting a war in the first place. Don’t drag civilians from their homes, rape and mutilate hundreds of men, women and children from another country and expect them to let it go unanswered.

When asked what they would do, if it was their child murdered, their sister or son being held in the tunnels of Gaza, most Australians would answer the same way. Whatever it takes to save them to stop it from happening again.