by ROGER CROOK – WHILE no Arab nation will accept Gazan refugees, Australia’s Labor Government has no such reservations, welcoming them into Australia with only hours of vetting.
It now appears that Western democracies, including Australia, have been the main supporters of an organisation whose sole purpose is to foment conflict, and support jihad terrorism against Israel.
- Is it because over the past two decades Albanese has been a trenchant supporter of Palestine.
- Unlike most leaders of democratic governments, the PM has not visited Israel following the massacre.
- And all we do is sit and watch. That’s what we are told to do. This is Australia today.
It’s almost obvious that this is the case, despite cheap words in support of our most important middle-eastern ally.
Last week US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said: “We have an offer on the table now to Hamas that is very serious and should be accepted. Hamas could move forward with this immediately and get a cease fire that would benefit the people throughout Gaza as well as, of course, get the hostages home. I think the fact that it continues to not say yes is a reflection of what it really thinks about the people of Gaza, which is not much at all.
“It’s also extraordinary the extent to which Hamas has been almost erased from this story, as we both said (referring to British Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron) going back to almost day one, none of what we have seen in Gaza would have happened had Hamas given up the hostages right away, put down its weapons, stopped hiding behind civilians and surrendered.
“The ball is in Hamas’s court. The world is watching to see what it does. It remains outstanding to me that the world is almost deafeningly silent when it comes to Hamas.”
BEFORE OCTOBER 7
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it was called the disengagement.
In 2006 Hamas, a group associated with the Muslim Brotherhood were elected to government by the people of Gaza. Hamas then killed off its opposition; some they threw off buildings.
In June 2005, prior to disengagement, there were 3500 factories in Gaza city employing 35,000 people. By December 2007, 195 factories were employing 1700 people.
After disengagement in 2005, Hamas started digging tunnels; out of Gaza into Egypt for illegal trade and to import weapons and to build a fortress under Gaza, to eventually eliminate Israel. Egypt destroyed the tunnels.
Nearly two decades of excavation saw five hundred to six hundred kilometres of tunnels, almost the distance between Melbourne and Canberra.
It is reasonable to assume that on October 7, 2023, the day of the massacre of Jews by Hamas, that every person in Gaza over the age of ten, every man, woman and child would have known of the existence of the tunnels and for what purpose they had been built; they would have known for most of their lives.
The men who dug those tunnels knew what they were doing; digging and plotting and waiting for the day, the day when they would be killing the Jews.
Did the women of Gaza, women with one of the highest birth rates in the world (which has dropped over the past twenty years from over six children per woman to just over three) ever question their men, the fathers of the many children they were bringing into the world; did they ever ask those heroes why they were digging tunnels? Of course they did.
In the hospital wards above the Hamas tunnel fortress, doctors and midwives safely – and with great care – brought innocent baby Gazans into their world.
Those same people went to work every day, in a hospital full of sick people, with the knowledge that they were the first line of defence should Israel ever attack; why did they let that happen?
Did they weep, did they question Hamas? They knew that every little baby boy brought into the world was destined, as soon as he was able, to be a Hamas fighter.
And if that little Hamas fighter died, did those doctors tell him there would be a busload of virgins waiting?
AFTER OCTOBER 7
In the past six months we have seen these same doctors on television, complaining bitterly at the Israeli violence, the depravation, and the deaths caused by Israeli guns and bombs; yet what did they do over the decades to prevent it?
We have seen these same doctors and nurses caring for tiny premature babies in their humidicribs. They told us they are running short of oxygen; awful, awful scenes.
Yet, those same caring people have known for many years, that a war with Israel would be hell on earth for the babies of Gaza, yet over the years they have done nothing.
When Hamas realised their dream and invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, they killed babies, Jewish babies.
They killed them in front of their parents. They put some of them in the oven. They filmed as they raped and then killed pregnant women.
They killed and tortured parents in front of their children. They killed children before they killed the parents; They killed old people and set them on fire.
Brave Hamas warriors sent text messages back to Gaza telling of how many Jews they had killed and how they had killed them.
Hamas paraded dead Jewish women in Gaza and the crowds cheered and defiled the bodies. They did unspeakable things to dead Jewish men and boys and the Gazans cheered.
On October 7, after the massacre in Israel, one hospital in Gaza was shown on Australian TV news to be the destination for some of the Israeli hostages.
They went into the hospital with their Hamas captors and disappeared; are they still there, are they alive?
None of the Arab nation will accept Gazan refugees in this time of their greatest need. The so-called leaders of Hamas live in luxury in Doha, and they are detested by many Arab leaders.
The Australian Labor government has no such reservations, they have welcomed refugees from Gaza into Australia with only hours of vetting to ensure they were not Hamas.
Over the past fifteen years the United Nations Works & Relief Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, was the recipient of many millions maybe be billions of dollars from donating nations across the world.
In January 2024, according to UN Watch, it was revealed that at least 12 UNRWA’s staff in Gaza were members of Hamas and were involved in the October 7 attack on Israel; around 10 per cent of UNRWA’s Gaza employees have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organisations, and 50 per cent have close relatives who belong to those groups.
UNRWA
This resulted in many countries, including Australia, suspending payments to UNRWA in Gaza.
UNRWA’s biggest donors in 2023 were the EU and America, who contributed US$865m out of the total agency budget of US$1.16m.
According to UN Watch, after the initial wave of funding suspensions, Germany, the EU, Sweden, Japan, France, Canada, Finland, Iceland and, yes, Australia decided to reinstate funding.
They did this despite the fact that the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) and the independent review board have not concluded their investigations into UNRWA’s finances.
Funds from America, the UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, New Zealand, Romania, and Estonia, remain frozen, as they should.
Why did Foreign Minister Penny Wong and the Prime Minister do this on behalf of the Australian people? Are they happy that we may have funded Hamas in the past?
What information gave them the confidence to reinstate funding when America and the UK and others said no?
Wasn’t there another agency in Gaza worthy of our funds? I get emails from Medicines sans Frontiers every few days asking for money for Gaza.
I have not heard either our Prime Minister nor Senator Wong repeat the words of Secretary Blinken that the war could be over.
Is it because over the past two decades Anthony Albanese has been a trenchant supporter of Palestine. Always fiery and always a critic of Australian Coalition governments.
One time he compared Israel’s government to that of the evil Sadam Hussein.
In 2017, with Tony Burke – one of Israel’s sharpest critics – the PM helped set up of the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine.
MASSACRE
Albanese, unlike most leaders of democratic governments has not visited Israel following the massacre and mass kidnappings.
He has never explained why to both to the Australian people and most especially to the large Jewish community in Australia. It took him several weeks before he managed to speak to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Wong waited for more than two months, until January 15, 2024, before visiting the region. She did not visit the places where the atrocities had occurred within Israel.
She also visited Jordan and the UAE and spoke with officials in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The pictures of Gaza today remind me of three events in my life.
The first is I can remember the air raids over Liverpool in England during the blitz of the World War II. I remember the bombs and the anti-aircraft guns at the end of the street.
The second is after being evacuated, I remember standing with an aunt on a sandhill looking east from North Wales and being told the glow in the sky was Liverpool burning.
The third was just eleven years later, in 1956 as a British soldier, I was stationed in what was West Berlin; in Spandau, just a kilometre or so from the prison where the last of the Nazis were held.
Rudolf Hess, Walther Funk, Albert Speer, Von Schirach and the famous ex Admiral Karl Doenitz were still in residence.
My regiment did several months guard at Spandau Prison.
It was the Berlin in the days before Checkpoint Charlie and the Wall; the city was divided into four zones: British, American, French and Russian/East German. Each nation did a month’s guard at the prison.
Berlin was a complex posting for me because my maternal grandmother was German, and there was I, as a soldier of occupation in the land of my ancestors, just ten or so years after a war; a war in which no doubt, my British family had fought and maybe killed my German ancestors or, vice versa?
West Berlin had largely been rebuilt and the grandeur of parts were re-emerging, some parts, like in London, were untouched by the war.
Somewhere close to Unter den Linden there was a little bistro, run by a gentleman who had fought in the World War I and been taken prisoner. He made the most wonderful Bratkartofflen, fried potatoes, onions, sausage, goodness knows what else.
British army food was not all that good in those days; so, when I could afford the modest price, the old man charged; a plate of Bratkartofflen, a glass or three of Schultheiss beer and some WWI war stories were wonderful hours for a boy out of his depth.
In 1957, I went to a festival where the 1936 Berlin Olympic games had been held.
Not a hundred metres from where I sat, Hitler had sat and watched the games and maybe contemplated Jesse Owens’ victories? It was a moment in history for me; I was nineteen.
SMELL
On a sight-seeing tour behind the Iron Curtain into East Berlin and behind Stalin Platz, which was the continuation of the road from the west’s side of the Brandenburg Tor, into east Berlin, the smell of war was still in the air.
In 1939 the only way to stop Hitler and Germany was war.
After the war, the records showed that while he was talking peace, Hitler had already started killing people, mainly Jews.
The German people elected Hitler as their leader. There was no mass revolution by the German people when war was declared on them by the British.
The national War Museum states that German military deaths were 5.5m. Total German military and civilian deaths were between 6.6 and 8.8m. That was the human cost to the German people for following Hitler into war.
The Germans killed six million Jewish men, women and children. The Holocaust Museum claims they killed about 3.3m Soviet prisoners of war and another 1.8m Poles, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of other people they took a dislike to.
Those deaths are now part of the history of Germany.
I apologise for those horrible statistics, but it is a reminder of what has happened in this world in my lifetime.
Millions of people died because of the political ideology of one man and his political Party.
Did the German people know before World War II was declared that their fellow Germans, every week, were systematically killing Jews and other people?
How could at least some of them not know? Their fathers, sons and maybe daughters were enlisted in the Wehrmacht. Soldiers went home on leave and as they have done since time immemorial, talked to their friends, relations and lovers.
There was no recorded widespread resistance in Germany from the German people against the Nazi regime.
They went to war when they were told to.
Over three hundred Germans have been recognised for their bravery in helping the Jews during WWII, but the rest of the German population just got on with building, with enthusiasm, the biggest killing machine Europe had ever seen.
CHILDREN
In the end, the only way to defeat Hitler and Germany was a massive effort to bomb her cities all day and all night, and in so doing cripple her industry and accept the collateral damage of the deaths of civilian men, women and children.
Because Israel is doing what the Allies did to Germany to end WWII, its friends are starting to lose their courage; is that because there are elections in the air all around the world?
Here in Australia, as opinion polls move slowly against Labor, there is increasing speculation of a hung parliament after the next general election.
There are several marginal seats held by Labor, which have a large number of people of the Muslim faith on their electoral rolls.
These are the people who wave banners, “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free”. Which is a demand for the elimination of Israel. They want genocide.
These people live in Australia and many of them are Australian citizens, we are a multi-cultural society after all, aren’t we?
We celebrate multiculturalism, don’t we? Well do we, or don’t we?
Some of these people and some of their religious leaders, on October 9, 2023, celebrated the massacre, rape and torture of 1160 Israeli men, women, children and babies by Hamas.
All we could do was sit and watch. That is what we are told. This is Australia today.
They had the gall to conduct their celebration on the steps of the non-sectarian holy place of all the Australian people, the Sydney Opera House; and in so doing, they defiled it.
Was this our Kristallnacht?
Were those people from far off places showing the rest of Australia that they can do as they wish in this country?
The same people who demonstrated in support of Hamas and the slaughter of so many innocent Jews, may decide who forms the next government of Australia; what on earth has happened?
The Hon Penny Wong knows that; she likes her job and wants to keep it.
Albanese also knows who he has to win over to keep his job, and that means listening to those in his Party who put him there, and who can just as easily, as history has shown, take that job away. Albo likes the Lodge.
The question for all of Australia is whether the over-riding desire to win the next general election in Australia together with the need to keep the factions of the Labor Party united is driving Australia’s foreign policy with regard to Israel?
If it is, are all the people of Australia prepared to accept Labor’s political ideology over absolute support for the Jewish people in Israel, in Australia and around the world? PC
So what’s your alternative to religion Carole Hubbard…….atheism, communism…….or perhaps climate change?
It’s all very well attacking Christianity but what do you have to offer to replace it, Carole?
Religion needs to make sense To me religion based on faith is just wishful thinking based on heresay. Things such as being “born again”, talking in tongues, who you worship in this life is man made religion, designed to engineer society and pit people against each other, a distraction to keep us down while society is being engineered towards globalist control and slavery.
People need to have the courage to think for themselves and not depend on the words of “experts” and “reliable sources”. If it doesn’t make sense it should be put aside, I don’t think any real god would expect anything else.
My thinking is that real religion is based on spiritual laws but which we don’t know much about, eg the law of attraction (whatever you think about you will attract into your life – good or bad). We’re put on this planet to evolve spiritually. Bias is drummed into us from childhood. We need to avoid bias and find our own truth. “Rule out the impossible and whatever remains no matter how improbable is possible.” — Arthur Conan Doyle, writer of Sherlock Holmes series
First they came for the Saturday people and next they will come for the Sunday people.
Israel is the frontline now.
Religion is a funny thing. People demand logic and commonsense for all sorts of things but when it comes to religion its all just “faith-based” where people accept on faith, that they are doing “god’s will” in fighting for a religion. Christians accept that their religion is the only true religion and all the others are deluded. Islam accept they will get all sorts of rewards in the afterlife for fighting the the principles of islam. I went to church when I was a kid and got brainwashed into the “born again religion” ie anybody must be born again or they will go to hell. There are christian religions in Australia who think you have to talk in tongues to be “saved”. Same with islam, they have to go along with their religion or go to hell in the afterlife. Its all religion’s fault.