PM and Wong: ferals who pretend to be moderates
At every turn in foreign policy their radical anti-establishment ideology is exposed.
Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong would have done well to follow Mark Twain’s timeless advice; “If you have nothing to say, say nothing.” Instead, this pair’s attempt to say as little as possible on Middle East foreign policy has led to a series of mindless banalities that have sidelined and damaged our nation.
The Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister have shown no care or respect for Israel’s plight; no understanding of the Islamist extremist motivation to destroy Israel; no scepticism about the propaganda coming out of Gaza from Hamas-controlled institutions; no comprehension of the malevolent role of the Islamic Republic of Iran; and, crucially, no instinct for the centrality and mutual obligations inherent in our US alliance relationship. In short, they have no idea.
They have placed themselves and our country on the wrong side of history and one of the most challenging fissures of our time: the clash between liberal, pluralistic democracies and intolerant, Islamist extremist groups and nations. To understand the true depth of their misjudgment we need only to envision how different the Middle East would be now if anybody had listened to their injunctions.
As it stands, Hamas is on its last legs with somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 terrorists killed in Gaza, along with their political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and combat leaders Yahya and Mohammed Sinwar, taken out by Israeli operations in Iran and Gaza respectively. Hezbollah, too, is severely degraded with most of its weapons destroyed, much of its leadership eliminated in the brilliantly targeted pager and walkie-talkie attacks, and its Lebanon leader, Hassan Nasrallah, killed by an Israeli airstrike.
The Houthis in Yemen also have been hit hard. And now Iran, the sponsor and funder of these proxy outfits, has had its nuclear weapons program destroyed or significantly retarded and much of its missile and air defence capabilities wiped out as its Islamist regime desperately clings to power and the entire region dares to think of a more stable future without Tehran’s malevolent influence.
None of this would have happened if Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump had taken their riding instructions from Wong and Albanese. Instead, the Middle East and the world would be much more dangerous.
Remember, way back on the evening of October 7, 2023, while many Hamas terrorists still were in Israel, 250 hostages were being torn away at gunpoint into Gaza and first responders still were finding mutilated victims and picking their way through unimaginable carnage, Wong made her first comments via social media. Apart from condemning the attack and recognising Israel’s right to defend itself, the Foreign Minister posted: “Australia urges the exercise of restraint and protection of civilian lives.”
Yet the following day, long before any Israeli military response, anti-Israeli protesters in Sydney’s Sunni Muslim heartland of Lakemba celebrated the slaughter of 1200 Israelis. “It’s a day of pride, a day of victory, this is the day we’ve been waiting for,” Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun shouted as the crowd chanted “Allahu Akbar”. A day later hundreds chanted intimidating anti-Jewish slogans at the Sydney Opera House forecourt.
Wong and Albanese certainly exercised restraint. Their reaction to these abominable expressions of hatred on our shores was passive and tepid, no arrests were made, and we saw anti-Semitic behaviour only escalate in following months.
But if Israel had taken Wong’s lead and restrained itself from launching its war to eliminate Hamas, the Sinwar brothers still would be running Hamas in Gaza, terrorising their population and Israel, and Haniyeh still would be jetting between Qatar and Tehran collecting funds for more missiles to be fired at Israeli civilians. The people of southern Israel still would be bombarded by missiles and living in fear of the next bloodthirsty Hamas invasion.
Iran funded and primed Hamas for its October 7 “al-Aqsa flood” and had its Hezbollah proxies immediately bombarding northern Israel from Lebanon and Syria while its Yemeni proxies, the Houthis, launched missiles into Israel too. All this unfolded while Israel was burying dead innocents and 250 hostages still were held by Hamas in Gaza.
At this time, and ever since, Wong and Albanese put the weight of their diplomatic pressure on the terror target, Israel, while portraying the people of Gaza as the real victims. By October 24 Albanese was emphasising “the importance of humanitarian support for people in Gaza” and portraying a kind of equivalence, saying “whether it be Israeli or Palestinian, every innocent life is valued”.
Well yes, of course. But we need solutions in war and only one side had deliberately taken innocent lives, used other innocent lives as human shields and was holding still more innocent lives hostage.
Yet from Wong and Albanese, nothing but false moral equivalence. Wong told the Senate on November 9: “When Israel’s friends, including Australia, urge Israel to exercise restraint and protect civilian lives, it is critical that Israel listens. This is because innocent civilians in Gaza do deserve protection. Women and children – innocent civilians – should not pay for the crimes and provocations of Hamas.”
By this tortured logic Israel is responsible for the casualties caused by its enemies. Nobody has placed the people of Gaza in peril except their chosen leaders of Hamas; yet, like so many around the world, rather than placing maximum pressure on Hamas, Albanese and Wong repeatedly called on Israel to ease up its attacks on Hamas.
From the start of this horror story the unspoken but logical extension of the demands on Israel from the likes of Albanese and Wong has been that it forget about its people who were held hostage, stop pursuing terrorists intent on its destruction, supply those enemies and their supporters with food, water and medical care, and accept that it must wait for the next horrific attack. It is as morally absurd as it is practically unreasonable and it could only prolong war, not end it.
In 2024 Albanese and Wong lined up with others to say an Israeli Defence Forces ground attack in Rafah would be “unjustifiable”. Yet in the Rafah offensive the Israelis killed hundreds of Hamas terrorists, senior leaders involved in the October 7 atrocities and their military commander, Yahya Sinwar. Likewise, Albanese and Wong were calling for a ceasefire against Hezbollah in Lebanon before Nasrallah was killed and before Israel cleared out massive caches of weapons and rockets in fortifications close to its border where, under Security Council resolution 1701, the UN was supposed to be excluding Hezbollah and its arsenal.
And even this month, Albanese and Wong again were making calls for “de-escalation” between Israel and Iran, before the US intervened to bomb Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons installations. It is becoming something of a pattern; soon after Albanese and Wong call for the forces of freedom to put down their weapons, those forces score historic victories that make the world safer. It makes you wonder whether the Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister would ever support the use of military might. After Pearl Harbor? After the invasion of Poland? The bombing of Darwin?
If Albanese and Wong hold any kind of world view it would resemble most closely the misinformed, valueless, great power resentment of the feral street protesters who support Hamas one moment and the Iranian regime the next, backing whoever spits in the face of the US, Israel and the capitalist West.
This jejune movement is where Albanese and Wong learned their politics, developed their Socialist Left factional affiliations and made their long-term political bargains.
Albanese was a student activist for all the usual causes, including pro-Palestinian, before working for the ALP and Tom Uren, one of the most left-wing ministers in the Whitlam government; Albanese has referred to Uren as his “father figure”. Wong was also a student activist and worked as a lawyer for the hard-left, hard-core CFMEU.
Central to their success in rising to the lofty positions of Prime Minister and Foreign Minister has been styling themselves as political moderates. But that is exposed as mere pretence because at every turn in foreign policy their radical anti-establishment ideology is exposed. (Remember in late 2023 Albanese rejected a US request to contribute a navy vessel to help protect shipping in the Middle East.) Their loyalty is to UN-led multilateralism, not the values and alliance-driven foreign policy of American and Western leadership. This makes them useful dupes for despotic regimes such as those in China, Russia and Iran who resent US hegemony.
Albanese and Wong are entirely unsuitable for the weighty positions they hold. In ominous times, Australian foreign policy is drifting into worrisome waters.
By rejecting American overtures on defence spending and failing to give the US practical and diplomatic support in the strategic hotspot of the Middle East, they have weakened the alliance relationship at a perilous time. Love Trump or hate him, there is no denying that this week he has made the Middle East safer and NATO stronger, delivering on aims long held by Democrat and Republican presidents.
This can only help curb Chinese belligerence in our region. But Albanese and Wong have been nay-sayers all along, made Australia less than useful and contributed nothing to historic strategic gains except snide criticism from the cheap seats.
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