Coalition accuses Labor of ‘siding with terrorists’ in support vote for Palestine
Penny Wong’s vote backing Palestine UN membership wilfully blind to evil
Andrew Bolt Herald Sun May 13, 2024 Nothing Penny Wong does in the rest of her political life will wipe out the disgrace of voting in the United Nations last week to reward Hamas mass-murderers and rapists.
Australians should weep in shame.
No decision by any Australian foreign minister in my life has been so disgusting, dishonest, incoherent and wilfully blind to evil. Wong has betrayed not just Israel but Australia’s values. Yes, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should share this guilt, but, alas, he’s just Wong’s doormat. On Saturday, our time, Wong had Australia vote with other nations to ask the UN’s Security Council to accept Palestine as a full member of the UN, just seven months after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and massacred 1200 people, raped women, beheaded men, shot children and took 253 hostages, half of whom are still captive, dead or alive.
UNRWA staff stealing and selling humanitarian aid, Gazans report
The posts expose a deep frustration by employees that senior UNRWA employees are engaged in the abuses, and that the agency is doing nothing about it. This comes amid a recent call by UNRWA Commissioner-General Phillipe Lazzarini for countries to increase direct cash assistance to Gazans because, although “there is more food available… it still does not mean that the food is accessible.”
Australia rewards Hamas for anti-Semitic terror by voting to admit Palestine as a UN member state – The Australian
The timing alone tells you – and terrorists – everything. Hamas can pack-rape Jewish women, and sexually mutilate and shoot them – kill their whole families – and Wong will then help their cause. Former prime ministers are stunned. Scott Morrison calls this vote “the most hostile policy act of an Australian government to the state of Israel”. Tony Abbott says it “looks like rewarding the October 7 atrocity”. But hear Wong now, pathetically trying to hide exactly what she’s done. No, no, our foreign minister protested on Saturday, her vote to recognise Palestine was “the opposite of what Hamas wants’’. She says it’s a move towards a two-state solution Hamas opposes – for Israel and Palestine to exist side-by-side. What a liar, or a fool.
In fact, Hamas had already contradicted Wong. It welcomed the vote, calling it “an acknowledgment on the necessity for our Palestinian people to obtain their legitimate rights and an affirmation of the international rally around our people.” Yes, the Hamas rapists and baby-murderers think our vote is proof that we “rally” to their cause. The shame! Wong is right on one thing, but it just shows how wrong she is. Hamas indeed doesn’t want Israel to exist. It wants it destroyed, and has called for a genocide of the Jews.
So who exactly does Wong think will run her “Palestine” and represent it in the UN in her “pathway to a peace” and a “two-state solution”? There are just two options. One is the Palestinian Liberation Organisation that right now controls the Palestinian Authority which runs the West Bank, giving it observer status at the UN. The other is Hamas, which runs Gaza, the other Palestinian territory. But – plot twist! – both actually want democratic Israel wiped out.
The PLO is the terrorist organisation long run by Yasser Arafat and now by Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected the Palestinian Authority’s president in 2005 and has banned any election since for fear Hamas would beat him after already taking over Gaza at gunpoint. True, the PLO has said in English it will recognise Israel, but Wong seems to overlook that it never made good its promise to remove from its official covenant, in Arabic, its demands that Israel be destroyed. The PLO’s covenant still insists Israel is “entirely illegal”, and “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine”.
Indeed, the Palestinian Authority today pays more than $400m a year to terrorists and their families under its “pay for slay” policy. Hamas, easily beating the PLO in Palestinian opinion polls, is even more hard line. It demands the “death” of Israel. In 2021, its leader Yahyah Al-Sinwar called for “the full liberation of Palestine from the sea to the river”. In support of its Jew-hatred, it’s quoted a verse from Islam’s sacred Hadith: “Then the rocks and tree would call: oh Muslim, oh servant of God! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” So which one does Wong think will represent the Palestine state she wants created and accepted into the UN? Which bunch of Jew-hating terrorists does she prefer?
But I must add one more example of Wong’s dishonesty and cynicism. The UN’s own charter – article 4 (1) – says “membership in the United Nations is open to all peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the Charter”. Which half of terrorist-led Palestine does Wong believe is “peace-loving”, and therefore qualified to join the UN? Nothing Wong says to excuse this vote makes sense. It’s clear Labor is just desperate to appease Australian’s 800,000 Muslims, most packed into Labor seats. But the price of that appeasement now includes encouraging terrorists. What next?
Australia rewards Hamas for anti-Semitic terror
Greg Sheridan The Australian May 12, 2024
The Albanese government has directly, if unintentionally, rewarded Hamas and its long history of anti-Semitic terrorism. In a structural change to our politics, Labor voted for a United Nations General Assembly resolution calling for the Security Council to admit Palestine as a member state and, in the short-term, give Palestine more of the UN attributes of a state.
Foreign minister Penny Wong declared that while Australia had not itself formally recognised Palestine, it would do so “when the time is right”. The government now believed it was not necessary for there to be a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians for a Palestinian state to be recognised. The UN resolution itself achieves absolutely nothing and doesn’t advance the arrival of peace by a single nanosecond.
Though the government claims it is acting in the interests of promoting a peaceful two-state solution, the action is so gratuitous, and such a departure from decades-long bipartisan Australian policy, that the only explanation for it lies in tawdry domestic politics. The macro political calculation for Labor is obvious. There are 100,000 Jews in Australia and nearly a million Muslims. Almost all Muslims are opposed to Israel.
So Australian politics and foreign policy will now contend with a permanent anti-Israel dynamic. The other political consideration for Labor is that the ideological Left, especially but not only parts of the Greens, have succumbed to intense hostility to Israel and increasing anti-Semitism in their ranks. Labor has just watched many local council elections in Britain being won by candidates promising, bizarrely, to “raise the voice of Gaza”. Labor is threatened by the Greens in inner city seats and potentially by community independents in western Sydney. Peter Dutton described Labor’s vote as “shameful”. Former Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he was “dismayed” by the vote which “looks like rewarding the October 7 atrocity”.
It’s difficult to disagree with the assessment of former Prime Minister Scott Morrison that the UN vote was “the most hostile act of an Australian government to the State of Israel in our history”. So, although the parties would be horrified by the idea of confessional politics, here is the new stark sectarian divide which Labor has brought about.
Labor backs the Australian Muslim critique of Israel. The Coalition backs the continued Australian Jewish support of Israel. This is both a tragic and needless development as the UN resolution itself is entirely worthless. A more responsible and experienced government, with an ounce more courage and heart, would have avoided this needless sectarian divide.
The government claims that the UN resolution is a repudiation of Hamas because the resolution backs a two-state solution while Hamas is opposed to a two-state solution. This is utter nonsense. Hamas has as an obvious strategic aim to draw Israel into the inevitable war as a result of the savage, sadistic October 7 atrocities, then by hiding within civilian populations to force Israel to fight among civilians, and then to see Israel flogged and abused internationally, as with this UN resolution.
Hamas would be delighted with this resolution. It can say to Palestinians: yes, our resistance involved your blood sacrifice, but we, and we alone, have achieved for the Palestinian national movement unprecedented UN recognition. And our version of that project demands the destruction of Israel, don’t mind the language about two states, when we impose preconditions which absolutely rule out the survival of Israel as a Jewish state.
Most nations at the UN vote on national self-interest. There is one Jewish state but dozens of Arab, North African and other Muslim states. So the trend is to go with the numbers. But in the AUKUS context the Albanese government frequently tells us our two closest allies are the US, which voted no, and Britain, which abstained. So did Canada. If we’re looking for regional solidarity, the biggest South Pacific nation, Papua New Guinea, voted no, and the second biggest, Fiji, abstained. But we only take these nations seriously sometimes.
In a press conference, Wong did put some useful conditionality around ultimate formal Australian recognition of Palestine. In reality, a two-state solution can only come at the end of negotiations in which Palestinians accept realistic borders and guarantee Israel that their nation won’t be a source of military or terrorist attack.
Most Israelis have historically supported such a solution but, having made the maximum possible offer on four occasions and been met with waves of terrorism in response, Israelis feel it’s off the agenda. But it is the germ of wisdom to know that some problems can’t be solved, but must be managed. And if their management brings normalisation, that in itself can lead to solution.
If the Palestinians had leadership interested in their welfare, they would concentrate on economic development. If there were economic development and no terrorism for even half a dozen years, Israelis would flood back to supporting a two-state solution. That this can’t happen now is reality. But the Albanese government’s actions and gestures on all this have very little to do with Middle East reality, and everything to do with domestic politics at its most sectarian and irresponsible.
