Trump fires a warning shot, Albanese plunges the knife

Imagine if the world had held the line against those who want to obliterate the state of Israel.

Israeli hostage Naama Levy, left, and being abducted, bloody and bound, by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

With friends like Australia, who needs enemies?

After the week just gone, when the Australian government abandoned Israel in a blinding display of political desperation, ignorance of Middle East history and present-day reality, this is a fair question to ask. Certainly I found myself asking it.

Is it any wonder?

The Albanese government insists Hamas cannot have a presence in any potential Palestinian state yet continues to embolden, reward and encourage the terror group with every action: from the government’s shameful policy shift away from our long-term ally Israel, to the failure to confront anti-Semitism on Australian streets. From Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic telling his electorate to hang in there, we’re working on delivering statehood, to Education Minister Jason Clare feebly protesting that you can’t bomb your way to peace and going missing in action as Jew hatred raged on the nation’s university campuses.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong, when visiting the Middle East earlier in this conflict, refused to go to the site of the Nova massacre or the kibbutzes where Israelis were slaughtered like wild animals in their own homes.

What a message to send about where your loyalties lie.

It has been a dog’s breakfast of weak obfuscation from a government that twists and turns to try to shore up its electoral prospects, trading values for votes all the while.

I never thought I’d see such political debasement in action on a simple matter that asks for one thing: leadership based on moral clarity. At least the government finally, collectively, said the quiet part out loud.

With friends like Australia … Meanwhile, there are still just shy of 100 hostages being held in Gaza. Remember them? I can’t forget them. Of the 251 innocents who were dragged, bloody, beaten and degraded, into the terrorist hellhole of Gaza while people in the streets watched on and cheered, 97 are presumed still there. As of December 2, only 62 are believed to be alive.

Is baby Kfir Bibas one of them? Naama Levy? I’ll ask again: What if it were your child, mother, daughter, partner?

The world has abandoned the hostages, content to let them rot in dark tunnels while it plays politics with terrorists who should never have a seat at the table. All this while the hopelessly corrupt, captured and morally bankrupt UN advocates for terrorist agendas and breaking bread with the Iranian regime, the architect of this chaos and bloodshed.

Enter US president-elect Donald Trump. Before I go any further I would like to declare that, broadly speaking, I’m a Trump agnostic. By the time the US election came around I was firmly for anyone but the vacuous Kamala Harris. My posture now is one of open-mindedness about what a Trump administration may deliver. And before anyone gets all judgy about his history with women and all manner of other things, best we don’t use past moral failings as the category on which a person is excluded from politics, otherwise our own halls of parliament would be two-thirds empty, and every single politician knows it.

This week Trump fired a warning shot to Hamas, the region and the world, saying there would be hell to pay if the hostages weren’t freed by the time he took office in January. Imagine if the international community had taken this position on October 8, 2023, and held the line. Imagine the lives saved in Gaza, Israel and Lebanon, and the message that would have sent to Iran and its proxies.

But no, in the most stunning and disgusting example of victim blaming, the international community for the most part turned on Israel. The Australian government joined along, like the needy kid at school who didn’t want to be left out. Collectively, they treated Israel like an abused woman with a black eye: you asked for it, Israel was told. It was your fault for making us mad.

Time and again our government has shown itself incapable of moral clarity and leadership. Allow me to help with a simple suggestion: Stop telling Israel to back off. Start telling Hamas to surrender and hand back the hostages, alive. Oh, and stop talking about Palestinian statehood. You’re allowing us to become pawns in an agenda rooted in the eradication of the state of Israel.

Any student of history knows Iran and its proxies will never settle for a two-state solution. Most Israelis I know believe in it, hope for it. But they have lived the truth through decades of successive intifadas that you can’t coexist with people who vow to wipe you from the map as long as there is breath in their lungs, no matter how many generations it takes.

In the past month the Israeli government has offered a reward of $US5m ($7.7m) plus safe passage out of Gaza to anyone and their family for freeing a hostage. That’s $US5m a hostage.

“The choice is yours,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “But the result will be the same. We will bring them all back.” Just a few weeks before, former SodaStream chief executive Daniel Birnbaum offered $US100,000 in cash or bitcoin to anyone who “delivers from Gaza a living Israeli prisoner”.

Guess how many lives have been spared? What a window into the mindset of evil. What a demonstration of how deep the hatred for Israel, for Jews, runs.

As I recount the events of the past 14 months, I see time and again the gaslighting of Israel as it does the world’s dirty work, does our heavy lifting in confronting the terrorist networks that would seek to bring that chaos also to Australian streets.

Don’t agree with me? Don’t be so bloody naive.

The world said: Don’t go into Rafah. Hostages were rescued from Rafah. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the coward, met his pathetic and deserved end in Rafah.

The world said: Don’t tackle the north. Hezbollah, now substantially degraded, has waved its white flag and negotiated a ceasefire.

In and among all of this, the truth has emerged of just how deep Islamist terrorist networks have been allowed to embed in the UN via the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and UN Interim Force in Lebanon.

It would seem it’s broader than just the UN, too, from journalists working for Al Jazeera and other news outlets being members of Hamas to revelations emerging about other non-government organisations. This past week, US-based charity World Global Kitchen suspended operations in Gaza after an Israel Defence Forces strike killed one of its workers who was suspected of taking part in the October 7 massacres. World Global Kitchen says it is urgently seeking more details and has pleaded ignorance, saying it had no knowledge of the terror links.

It’s the same way UNRWA pleads ignorance about terrorists masquerading as teachers on its payroll. The same UNRWA that this government, with the support of teal MPs such as Wentworth’s Allegra Spender, pushed to re-fund with Australian tax dollars despite the truth emerging.

Where does it end? I had thought we would be on the other side of this by now. Hostages home. War over.

I’m the naive one, perhaps, in the sense that I assumed that confronting terrorism was a given. That no government on earth, let alone our own, would choose to sleep with the enemy.

This is a good time for us all to remember that you become the company you keep.