Deadly disease of denialism killing Jews – and our values
There’s a doomsday clock in the centre of Tehran that counts down the minutes until the annihilation of the state of Israel and the Jewish people. The digital screen sits in a place called Palestine Square.
It has been there since 2017 when Iran’s Supreme Leader, the maniac Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, predicted that within 25 years the Jewish state and Jews along with it would be gone. Clearly, he’s no student of history but that’s another matter altogether.
This all reads like a line of fiction; instead, it’s yet another window into the crazed, murderous world of Islamic extremism. I learned about the Doomsday clock this week, scant days before Israel, justifiably out of patience, responded to Hamas’s violation of the ceasefire with a targeted attack on northern Gaza. Several senior Hamas leaders were killed. Civilians died, too. Of course they did, it’s war, what does anyone think?
Every civilian death is a tragedy, every single one, and, in this case at least, unnecessary. Let’s not pretend that there’s anyone other than Hamas to blame.
All the terrorists had to do was free what few living hostages remained, and return the bodies of those already dead. But no, these demons prefer to spill the blood of their own, then cry victim. It’s a well-established pattern.
Penny Wong, demonstrably ever the friend of the Palestinian cause and the frenemy of Israel and democracy in the Middle East, urged restraint as Israel moved. She said both sides should honour the ceasefire. Only one side broke it, Minister, and it wasn’t Israel.
Nowhere this week in her comments did she demand Hamas release the hostages and end the war. Not once did she talk about corpses being used as leverage.
This from a Foreign Minister who has rightly said that Hamas can have no role in a future Gaza but appears to believe such an outcome will magically occur by itself. Without cost. Without courage from those in the West.
The Australian government’s response to this conflict will forever be the Foreign Minister’s shame. History shall judge her. The present already is.
This week’s fresh offensive in Gaza took place as the British government’s All-Party Parliamentary Group released a report into the October 7 terrorist attack. This document has been unilaterally described as the most forensic, accurate and chilling account of what was done that day by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the wider terrorist cohort.
It is 315 soul-rending pages. Despite the subject matter, there is a clinical lens at play that had me imagining the writers steeling themselves for the task at hand, understanding how critical it was. I don’t know how they wrote it without losing their minds. Reading it was another step back into hell. That now familiar taste of bile as the detail is laid out so clearly and simply, almost methodically, like the ingredients of a recipe.
There’s no emotion in the words, just facts. And those facts tear at the fabric of what we know of humanity. Shall I share some of the detail with you?
The youngest victim of Hamas on October 7 was 14 hours old. A newborn. Baby Naama Abu Rashed was a Bedouin Israeli. Her mother had gone into early labour, her husband racing them towards the hospital when terrorists attacked their car.
Baby Naama was shot while still in the womb and, despite being delivered alive, she was fatally wounded. Her mother lived.
Nine-month-old Mila Cohen was the second-youngest victim. She was shot while being held in her mother’s arms as they hid from terrorists. Three generations of the Cohen family were wiped out that morning in a matter of minutes.
The oldest victim of this demonic onslaught was 92-year-old Holocaust survivor Moshe Ridler. Hamas terrorists murdered a frail old man with a rocket-propelled grenade fired straight into his safe room. What cowards.
It goes on and on and on still. First-hand witness accounts that, with each word, systemically dismantle and shame every protester, every person who throws around words like resistance and colonisation. Every ignorant fool who says: “But wait, there’s context to this. Let’s talk about the nuance.”
One victim testified to what she saw while hiding in long grass south of the Nova music festival site at Re’im. A woman was being violated and the terrorist (not a man) on top of her stabbed her in the back each time she flinched as he raped her.
There is no context, nuance or mythological construct from history that can cover this evil. Excuse it. Soften it. Instead, it must be crushed.
The authors of this report lament that it should never have needed to be written. They’re right. But who could imagine a world where two baby boys could be choked to death just for being Jewish, their killings fade like words to a forgotten song? Do Western leaders not realise this ideology seeks to destroy more than just Israel? Do they not discern the times?
Don’t talk to me about caution, or restraint. This wasn’t some randomly planned spontaneous uprising, some Palestinian Spring. It was the fruit of a decade’s planning. It was 9/11. It had a name, Operation Al Aqsa Flood. And people in the West, including some in Australia, celebrate it. They responded, and continue to respond, with elation. They called it resistance and bravery, and our federal government repeatedly refuses to address this.
Our government and others say they support Israel’s right to exist. What a bizarre thing to say when you think about it. Who says, yes, well I support France’s right to exist. America’s. New Zealand’s. What about Australia’s right to exist? After all, aren’t we a bunch of dirty colonisers? It’s just another way in which Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is demonised and gaslit.
Where is our national conscience, our moral compass? As Israel does the world’s heavy lifting for it in confronting and attempting to eliminate extremism, we in Australia have a government that can’t find a spine, that can’t admit its wrongs, and obsesses over the cosmetics of identity rather than matters of substance.
Well, let me tell you what I identify as: someone who is sick of this BS. Sick of the weakness, the lack of leadership and the refusal to deal with the large, tusked mammal in the corner.
The British parliamentary report pointed out that Israel was being blamed for October 7 before it had even sent troops into Gaza, which happened on October 27. By then, the cool kids were hanging out on campus in their tents, terrorising Jewish students, and the UN was preparing to be unmasked as an incubator of anti-Semitic bias and moral failure.
This matters. God, how greatly it matters, because while the conflict on the ground is half a world away, the war against Western values, Australian values, Judeo-Christian values, is real and it’s here. To deny this is to deny reality.
One weapon that has been used with impunity since the 1940s is denialism, and with that I want to borrow from the report’s authors as I leave you.
“As a Gentile, I believe that it is vital to prevent the emergence of another, more modern version of Holocaust denial, namely 7 October denial. After the Holocaust, non-Jews like me owe the Jewish people nothing less.”
This goes for all of us.
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