Australian Politics

Israel’s colonial secrets are hiding in plain sight

A rejoinder to Australia's antisemites

Journalists should be more sceptical of people claiming to be victims of colonial oppression.

In a week when a highly paid Aboriginal senator with English and Irish heritage claimed King Charles’s ancestors had stolen her land, too few asked about Lidia Thorpe’s generous salary or elite status as a federal parliamentarian.

Nor did enough pay attention to her mixed heritage. Neither is she ever challenged about standing with Palestinians against their Israeli colonisers.

Indeed, reporters here seldom ask the obvious question about pro-Palestinian, largely Muslim, anti-Israel protesters: aren’t they colonisers here?

Educated journalists should have worked out there is no evidence Jews, synonymous with Israel and Palestine for 3800 years, are colonisers.

Most of this column’s Aboriginal friends have no time for Thorpe. Many admit they have benefited from the education this “colony” has given them.

That’s not to downplay the history of frontier violence in Australia’s early days, especially in Tasmania. But Thorpe is wrong to claim Aboriginal imprisonment rates and deaths in custody today justify her protest in front of the King.

Friends of this column – Anthony Dillon and Warren Mundine – have pointed out many times that the 1991 Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Royal Commission report showed Aboriginal people die in prison at lower rates than the rest of the prison population.

The real problem is Aboriginal offending rates, especially in regional and remote communities, that often involve violence against women and children.

Yet no one, least of all King Charles, would deny Australia was taken from its Indigenous owners without treaty or negotiation.

Sky News host Peta Credlin observes the latest comments from Lidia Thorpe as the senator lands herself in “more hot water”.
That’s not the case with Jews in Israel.

The colonisers of Europe have far more in common with Palestinians than they do with Jews, either those who fled Europe after the Holocaust or those who never left their ancestral lands.

Most people who claim to be ethnic Palestinians also identify as Arabs, and Arabs did not originate in Palestine. They invaded from Arabia.

Arab Muslims outdid the Romans, Greeks and Alexander the Great in the colonising stakes.

Genealogical evidence today confirms most people who claim to be Palestinian are in fact of Arab background. Some can trace genetic links to the original Canaanite settlers of Israel and some converted to Islam after the Arab conquest. But all ethnic Jews, including Jewish families who fled Europe after World War II, can trace genetic heritage to the Canaanites.

The original Jews, who settled in ancient Israel and Judea, were a Canaanite clan. Only in the 1960s, after the formation of Yasser Arafat’s PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation), did the area’s Arabs start referring to themselves as Palestinians.

The word Jew is a translation of the Hebrew “yehudi” – a member of the tribe of yehuda (Judea).

Jews speak Hebrew, as did the ancient biblical Israelites. Their scriptures are written in Hebrew, the only Canaanite language still in use today.

Palestinians speak Arabic, not a language known in the area until after the Muslim conquest between 636 and 640AD. The word Palestine comes from the Hebrew, Anglicised as “Paleshet”, meaning “invader”.

Prominent local Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah last week shared a post from another Palestinian activist demanding people use the proper spelling for cities in Israel: Al-Quds for Jerusalem, Umm Khalid for Netanya and so on. This is laughable: the original Hebrew names predate Arab settlement by thousands of years.

Abdel-Fattah is in effect saying to someone like Thorpe that the real name for Uluru should be the coloniser’s name, Ayers Rock.

Palestinian activists rely on resettlement of Jews from post-Holocaust Europe to claim Israel is a settler colony without any apparent awareness that 400,000 Arabs moved to the area under the British Mandate between the late 19th century and 1930. They came because Britain enforced labour and wages conditions not available in the wider Middle East.

Arab Palestinians used to know the history. Yousef al-Khalidi, Arab mayor of Jerusalem, said in 1899: “Who can challenge the rights of Jews in Palestine? Good Lord, historically it is really your country.”

The famous Nazi collaborator and Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, oversaw a 1929 publication that said the Al Aqsa Mosque had been built on top of two Jewish temples. This is correct, archaeologically.

It says: “The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest (perhaps prehistoric) times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This too is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built an altar to the Lord.”

The UN’s own definition of indigeneity lists seven prerequisites. The Jews in Israel meet them all.

The third – a strong link to territorial and natural resources – is a slam dunk. Jewish practice and culture are inextricably linked to the physical land of Israel – much like traditional Aboriginal custom here.

Zion is a hill in Jerusalem. The return to Zion, a central feature of Jewish practice, happened after the Babylonian exile (and biblically, after the exodus from Egypt).

Jews still pray at the same sacred sites they prayed at thousands of years ago: what’s left of the temple in Jerusalem and the tombs of the matriarchs and patriarchs in Hebron, among others.

Hebrew place names today are the same as those used by the ancient Israelites. Even the Jordan River comes from the Hebrew word “Yarden”, meaning to descend.

Jews see themselves as custodians of the land. A major part of the Jewish project is environmental restoration: making the desert bloom again like the fertile land of the Israelites. They believe desertification and the rise of coastal swampland came from unsustainable Arab farming practices.

Like fallow land in Europe, Jews still use an ancient kosher practice called “shmita”; every seven years the land is rested from farming.

Arguing Jews are colonisers flies in the face of documented history, archaeology and genealogy.

Yet Palestine and Arabia are the crucibles of the greatest colonising forces in history: respectively the world’s 2.4 billion Christians and 1.9 billion Muslims. While Judaism predates both by thousands of years, there are only 14 million Jews worldwide.

As this column wrote on October 14 last year, a week after the October 7 massacre, Judaism is not a missionary religion. Jews have only one country and seek neither converts nor colonies.

That column also said “Israel needs to be feared” to survive in a region largely committed to its destruction.

The murders of October 7 last year and the anti-Semitism of Hamas and Hezbollah have cost tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian lives. Like the Islamist terror of al-Qa’ida and ISIS, most victims of Islamism globally are other Muslims.

That’s the real Palestinian tragedy – the repeated failures of their leaders to accept two-state solutions offered several times since 1947. And the willingness of Islamists to risk innocent Muslim lives.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/israels-colonial-secrets-are-hiding-in-plain-sight/news-story/209e69c04d56fc689dafc6df11a8ddb6

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Jewish leaders take radical cleric Wissam Haddad to court amid government inaction

The country’s peak Jewish body has taken a radical cleric to the Federal Court after a slew of sermons referring to the Jewish community as “vile and treacherous people” and peddled anti-Semitic tropes.

The legal action is an example of the escalation of testing how, and whether, hate speech can be prosecuted in Australia.

The action comes after state and federal police recently laid charges against people who waved the flag of listed terror group Hezbollah, and high-profile restaurateur Alan Yazbek for displaying the Nazi swastika symbol.

On Friday, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry instigated proceedings in the Federal Court against extremist preacher Wissam Haddad, also known as Abu Ousayd, and his Bankstown-based Al Madina Dawah Centre.

The Australian in January revealed how the ECAJ had lodged a vilification complaint with the country’s human rights body against the preacher and the Bankstown centre, given perceived police inaction and an inability to lay charges, partly due to NSW’s “toothless” hate-speech criminal provisions.

The proceedings are made under part IIA of the Racial Discrimination Act – which outlaws offensive behaviour based on racial hatred – and brought to the court by the ECAJ’s co-chief executive, Peter Wertheim AM, and deputy president Robert Goot AO SC.

Mr Wertheim said attempts at mediation between the parties at the Australian Human Rights Commission had failed and that the court move was a last resort forced upon the Jewish community and its leaders.

“We have commenced proceedings to defend the honour of our community, and as a warning to deter others seeking to mobilise racism in order to promote their political views,” he said.

Among other things, the ECAJ is seeking declarations that Mr Haddad and his centre contravened section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, injunctions to remove the sermons from the internet, and an order that the cleric refrain from publishing similar speeches in future.

Mr Wertheim and Mr Goot are also seeking publication of a “corrective notice” on the centre’s social media pages and costs, although no order for damages or monetary compensation is sought by the ECAJ.

Among other things, Mr Haddad, or speakers at his Al Madina Dawah Centre, have called Jewish people “descendants of pigs and monkeys”, recited parables about their killing, described them as “treacherous people” with their “hands” in media and business, encouraged jihad, and urged people to “spit” on Israel so Israelis “would drown”.

In most cases, he has claimed that he was referring to or reciting Islamic scripture.

The ECAJ separately filed a vilification complaint at the AHRC against Sheik Ahmed Zoud, who said Jewish people “ran like rats” from Hamas in the October 7, 2023 attacks.

That conciliation process remains ongoing but could be exhausted soon, and The Australian understands the ECAJ could file separate proceedings at the same court against Mr Zoud and his As-Sunnah mosque in Lakemba.

Mr Wertheim said Australia was a “multicultural success story” with different faith and ethnic communities living in “harmony and mutual respect”, and that the court move against Mr Haddad was to protect the Jewish community, but also the country’s social harmony.

“We are all free to observe our faith and traditions within the bounds of Australian law, and that should mean we do not bring the hatreds, prejudices and bigotry of overseas conflicts and societies into Australia,” he said, adding that the ECAJ had “no alternative” than to pursue court action.

“Maintaining and strengthening social cohesion is the role of governments and government agencies, but lately they have failed us. It should not fall on our community, or any other community, to take private legal action to remedy a public wrong, and to stand up to those who sow hatred.”

Federal and state political leaders criticised that “policing” had fallen on the shoulders of Jewish leaders, with opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson calling it “profoundly unjust”, saying the Albanese government had “vacated the field”.

“Incitement to violence against another community is a crime and it should be enforced through criminal proceedings,” Senator Paterson said.

“If we had strong leadership from our Prime Minister, and if police enforced the law, the Jewish community never would have been left to fend for themselves like this amid an unprecedented anti-Semitism crisis.”

NSW senator Dave Sharma said he was “appalled” that a community organisation had been forced to bring private legal action, “not only to protect its own members but to uphold values and norms we all cherish”.

“That the ECAJ has been forced to take matters into its own hands demonstrates just how weak and conflicted this government is,” he said, adding that Australian values and social cohesion must be “fought for”.

NSW Upper House deputy president Rod Roberts said no religious or ethnic community should be having to do “their own policing”.

“Regardless of which community, it should not be their role and they shouldn’t have to do it,” the former police officer said, adding that Mr Haddad’s “inflammatory” comments harmed society as a whole.

Since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7 2023, debate has raged as to whether law enforcement agencies have the legislative tools to clamp down on hate speech.

In the past few weeks, police have successfully charged people under legislation outlawing support for terrorist groups and Nazi symbols, and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has cancelled the visas of American speakers Khaled Beydoun – for calling October 7 a “good day” – and extremist influencer Candace Owens.

“Non-direct” hate speech, however, has been harder to prosecute, given the narrow and high thresholds of both state and commonwealth legislation that outlaw very specific calls to violence, failing to capture hatred or broad incitement against an ethnic or religious community.

NSW’s hate-speech provisions, enclosed in Section 93Z of the state crime code, are subject of a Law Reform Commission review, given operability concerns.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/jewish-leaders-take-radical-cleric-wissam-haddad-to-court-amid-inaction/news-story/cccc8c3d0c4178ffa93ffa22dd4fda01

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Even with a price tag, our renewables future is already broken

The Silverton Wind Farm and Broken Hill Solar plant were supposed to produce enough electricity to power 117,000 homes. They’re supported by AGL’s 50MWh battery facility at Pinnacles Place, one of the largest in Australia. Yet Broken Hill, population 19,000, has been in a semi-permanent state of blackout since a storm brought down the transmission line connecting the town to the east coast grid.

Broken Hill’s plight exposes the gap between the promise of renewable energy and what it actually delivers. AGL claimed its battery would ensure a reliable electricity supply to the town if the transmission lines went down. The combination of wind, solar and storage would allow Broken Hill to operate on a renewable microgrid until its connection to the outside world was restored.

Yet the battery wasn’t switched on until Friday. Diesel generators are being used to recharge it because the wind and solar generators are disconnected from the rest of the grid. Rooftop solar is affecting the grid’s stability. Essential Energy, which supplies power to Broken Hill, has asked customers to turn off their solar supply main switch to prevent the 40-year-old backup gas turbine generator from tripping.

Yet Broken Hill’s experience shows how crucial baseload generation is to the grid’s stability. Without it, balancing supply and demand becomes impossible.

Some $650m worth of renewable energy investment within a 25km radius of Broken Hill has proved to be dysfunctional. The technical challenges of operating a grid on renewable energy alone appear insurmountable using the current technology.

Broken Hill’s experience should serve as a cautionary tale for the incoming Liberal National Party government in Queensland as it assesses the energy policy mess left by Labor. Among the expensive proposals on the books is CopperString, a 100km high-voltage transmission line from Townsville to Mount Isa, crossing the remote and rugged terrain of North Queensland.

Mount Isa operates on a micro-grid served by two gas-fired power stations with diesel generators used as a backup. Replacing locally generated power by linking Mount Isa to the National Energy Market is costly and introduces the risk of transmission failure.

The latest estimate for CopperString, which would be funded entirely by the government, is $5bn, but the cost of building transmission lines is escalating dramatically.

David Crisafulli has every reason to put the project on hold while other options are considered. One solution could be micro modular reactors – self-contained, mass-produced nuclear power plants that are relatively easy to transport and install close to where the electricity is needed. This is the preferred option in Canada, where MMRs are seen as a breakthrough for remote indigenous communities and mining operations.

Bowen’s claims about the cost of renewable energy were called into question last week when senior executives from the Australian Electricity Market Operator gave evidence under oath to a Senate select committee.

AEMO’s assertion that its blueprint for the transition to renewables was “the lowest-cost pathway” is misleading. AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman told the committee its modelling only considered the wholesale cost of electricity. AEMO did not model network costs, transmission and distribution costs or retailer margins. “A home electricity bill will need to consider all of those factors,” he said.

Senator Matt Canavan asked: “You’re saying you cannot guarantee that the current government policy settings you model will deliver lower power prices?”

Westerman replied: “I can’t guarantee that. No.” He said AEMO “explicitly doesn’t consider other parts of the consumer energy bill”.

Westerman was asked if AEMO had costed other policy options before concluding that the cheapest path was renewable energy backed by storage and gas.

No, said Westerman. “It is the role of policymakers to identify alternatives and make those public policy decisions.

“If policymakers wanted to ask AEMO for advice, we would be pleased to provide it. But it’s not really our role to judge on whether it’s a good policy or not.”

Canavan asked: “So there’s no analysis of whether that’s a good idea or not?”

“No. Sorry. We don’t analyse that,” replied Merryn York, AEMO’s executive general manager for system design.

In summary, AEMO’s “least-cost pathway” turns out to be the wholesale cost of a transition to renewable energy on the accelerated timetable stipulated by the government. The destination of this plan is not cheaper electricity or cleaner energy.

Instead, AEMO’s lowest-cost pathway aims to meet Labor’s political target of 82 per cent carbon-free electricity by 2030 and 100 per cent renewable power by 2050, using mostly wind, solar and some gas. AEMO’s model excludes any consideration of nuclear energy.

It’s alarming that AEMO has not even attempted to model the retail cost of electricity. AEMO’s Integrated Systems Plan is the blueprint for the government’s energy transition. It sets the deadline for phasing out coal generation by 2038, a fourfold increase in rooftop solar, a sixfold increase in grid-scale wind and solar, and a 13-fold increase in battery storage.

Yet AEMO doesn’t consider it part of its brief to estimate how much this will cost. Nor does AEMO attempt to vouch for the technical feasibility of its plan. Engineering, like economic modelling, is not part of its job.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/even-with-a-price-tag-our-renewables-future-is-already-broken/news-story/889525e04688e0bd112988428a37cad7

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Australia has two Green partie

Much is being said about the Greens’ ‘failure’ in the Queensland election. At the time of writing, the Greens have failed to win any new seats and likely lost one of the two seats they held. Already, mastheads are proclaiming that federal Greens leader Adam Bandt has been put on notice.

As Queensland Labor congratulates itself for holding its inner Brisbane seats – glossing over the slashed margins in those once-safe electorates, not to mention the outer suburban and regional seats that fell to the LNP and drove Labor out of government – there is a glaring truth hidden in plain sight.

Only one person has come close to acknowledging what happened: Michael Berkman, Greens MP for the university-dominated seat of Maiwar.

On election night, wedged between bouts of predictably overblown grandstanding about how the Greens had really, truly, if you hold it at arm’s length and squint, done exceptionally well, Berkman made a comment that exposed how far Labor has drifted from its once-proud status as the party for ordinary people.

He observed that in politics, winning can take many different forms, and sometimes you can still win even though you lose seats. He went on to say that whatever the final count, the Greens – and the constituency they represent – have won, because Labor has adopted so many of their policies.

He was right, but he also pulled back from the full truth, one that – curiously – pollsters, pundits, and self-styled political gurus have omitted from discussion.

There is no real need for people to vote Green anymore because the Labor left is firmly in ascendancy around Australia.

This is not just about Labor coddling a few vacuous, tattoo-covered women who are so desperate to be liked that they will adopt any cause going. Nor is it about tactically deploying a handful of policies crafted to placate the massively over-privileged vegan latte set. Sorry, I mean, ‘being progressive’ as left-leaning commentators like to term it, particularly when they call for more of it.

What has happened to Labor runs far, far deeper.

Climate lunacy. Astonishing attacks on farmers, miners, and the other industries that keep this country going. Transgender issues. Genuflecting to Indigenous mysticism. Sheer loathing for the rednecks outside the cities. A war on ‘masculinity’. Public health fascism. The endless Nanny state.

There is a reason why Labor around the country has adopted, wholesale, almost all of the Greens’ obsessions, prejudices, and hatreds. As a surprisingly honest Laborite once let slip to me: ‘I joined Labor rather than the Greens because I want real power.’

Labor’s left and the Greens are indistinguishable. They have the same perpetual whining and pious thought bubbles, the same bandwagon-jumping, and the same never-ending obsession with identity and victimhood. They are one united, sanctimonious bloc that just happens to operate under two brands. The reason for this is because they come from a shallow – and narrow-minded – pool of people.

The dead giveaway in Queensland is that despite a few token mumblings about needing to do better outside Brisbane, still-standing Labor members appear unconcerned to see their colleagues losing seats in the outer suburbs and regions. They don’t like losing government, of course, but they seem oddly sanguine about how the geographic aftermath of that loss looks.

A real Labor party would care deeply about losing touch with the masses and start doing serious work to reverse its endless procession of city-centric, damaging, and alienating policies. A Labor-branded branch of the Greens would not, because having to govern for plebs outside the cosy intelligentsia bubble means having to moderate one’s views, genuinely listen to different opinions, and accept that diversity is about more than recruiting firmly Woke middle class professionals who have slightly differently coloured skin.

A counterfeit Labor party would, in fact, be glad to lose those awkward seats. Getting rid of them means less schism, less pressure, less dissent within the party room, and a clearer run for ever-greater flights of self-indulgence inside the echo chamber where the perennially petulant feel most at home.

Labor’s faux-attacks on the Greens, in Queensland and federally, are just a diversion. A cynic could even suggest that Labor doubling down on its own ‘progressivism’ is intended to draw attention to how well the Greens branch of Labor is operating, and damn the consequences for MPs outside its precious city enclaves.

Labor’s real voter problem lies within itself. Its already shrivelled right shrinks further by the day, and its false flag left thinks maintaining war on that emasculated right, along with perpetuating undergraduate ideologies and petty grievances, is the only game in town. Whether Labor can excise its gangrenous core is doubtful, and in all probability, it will not really try. But until and unless it does, it has little chance of regaining credibility with the very Australians it now needs the most.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/labors-green-gang-is-killing-it/