September 7, 2024
There are sound reasons to check Palestinians if we bring them to this country
Gaza is not just a volatile hotbed of genocidal Jew-hating, it is the epicentre of the deluded, self-pitying Palestinian sense of historical injustice. Who says so? The people of Gaza. Just ask them.
Last June, the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research did just that. Its polling of the attitudes of Gazans and Palestinians more widely makes depressing reading.
The people of Gaza don't feel helpless. And they are not, even if they have been deprived of the opportunity to vote these past 18 years. They voted in Hamas back in 2006. With enthusiasm, they would do so again were an election held tomorrow.
Not only have they accepted the barbaric Hamas rule, they have adapted to it, even warming to the idea.
The poll results reveal that so many people from the region are armed with views that would make them troublesome immigrants. A total of 57 per cent of Gazans believe it was right to attack Israel on October 7 last year. That figure had been as high as 71 per cent. And even 54 per cent of Palestinians who have seen the videos of triumphant Hamas recruits murdering Israelis that day still insist Hamas did not commit atrocities.
This would indicate that the Palestinian perception of what is humane is at odds with ours.
Gazans blame mostly Israel, but also the US, for what had happened to them. Not more than 8 per cent of Gazans blamed their situation on Hamas.
The other 92 per cent seem to see no connection between their poverty and the more than 500km of concrete tunnels Hamas built with airconditioning, running water, medical centres and stores of weapons with which to kill Jews - rather than develop housing and port facilities so Gaza could flourish.
The poll shows that Palestinians overwhelmingly believe Israel is committing war crimes, but almost none believes Hamas is doing so. (The confinement, rape, torture and murder of innocent, kidnapped Israelis apparently resonates with so few.) Once again, the PCPSR surveyed 75 communities including in the cities of Rafah, Khan Younis, Al-Mawasi and other areas of the Gaza Strip, along with displaced people in shelters and others at tent "gatherings". It estimates the margin of error at plus or minus 3 per cent. In all, 1570 adults were interviewed faceto-face: 760 in the West Bank and 750 in Gaza.
Almost 80 per cent of Gazans, already happy with the October 7 massacres, believe the events then and since have put Palestinians at the forefront of international thinking. It has certainly done that. And about 70 per cent of Palestinians - these are people who do know which river and what sea - believe the mass demonstrations by ignorant students at Western universities and on capital city streets around the world will influence Western policies less supportive of Israel.
And it has. In May the UN voted overwhelmingly to grant Palestinians additional rights as a way forward to full membership of that body - a shameful reward for Hamas's savagery.
Close Australian allies, including the US, Israel and Papua New Guinea, voted against the motion.
Our wise and trusted Five Eyes colleagues Canada and Britain, abstained. But Anthony Albanese's manipulative government, with an eye on Muslim votes in western Sydney and with an election due next year, voted for it.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong thought it an excellent move.
Oddly, the LGBTI community she vigorously supports also seemed little troubled by it. About the same time I saw a news report in which a protester bore a placard reading "Gays for Gaza". T-shirts with this motif soon were for sale online. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in June this was absurd and that a gay person in Gaza would be "shot in the back of the head".
Netanyahu was probably wrong about the method. While Palestinians, even reportedly the families of gay men, harass and torment them, the last reported murder of a gay Palestinian was less than two years ago: Ahmad Abu Marhia, 25, was beheaded in the West Bank.
About 75 per cent of Gazans do not want a joint Arab security force to control the area after the war; in any election, a winning number of them would side with Hamas, whose leader-in-hiding is Yahya Sinwar. Only he could have authorised the slaughter last weekend of those six kidnap victims.
When all Palestinians are asked whom they support, they would overwhelmingly vote for Hamas rather than Fatah which, through the Palestinian Authority, runs the West Bank. And the poll showed support for Hamas was increasing.
Put it this way: in 1966, Liberal prime minister Harold Holt won the federal election in a historic landslide with a record majority, double the number of Labor seats, with Liberal support about the same level as Hamas today.
Wong may hope for a twostate solution to all this, but support for it had slumped in Gaza with only 32 per cent wanting a two-state solution and a rising commitment to armed struggle 64 per cent of Gazans want a violent intifada to break the deadlock.
But none of these Palestinian attitudes comes as a surprise: the people of the West Bank and Gaza have been bombarded with antiSemitic, anti-West bile for decades - it's why so many Palestinians define themselves by their hatred for Israel, notwithstanding that this so obviously helps perpetuate poverty, both physical and spiritual, for them and their children.
In 2005 I spent a dispiriting few hours in Jerusalem with Itamar Marcus, whose organisation, Palestinian Media Watch, monitors and translates Arab language newspapers, radio and television to understand how this poison shapes the contours of Palestinian thinking.
I wrote then that Marcus "showed children's television programs broadcast by the Palestinian Authority in which beautifully innocent pre-teenage kids glorified the activities of suicide bombers. Colourful plastic Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck characters adorned the walls in the TV studio. It would have had poor Walt Disney spinning in his cryogenic chamber." I was given translated newspaper stories about sports teams named after "brave" young suicide bombers. Palestinian children are taught that Jews are the descendants of pigs and apes.
Palestinians have long glorified those among them who manage to kill Israelis, especially in large numbers: in 2011, and pointedly during a visit to the area by then US vice-president Joe Biden, many young locals gathered for a ceremony to mark the naming of a Ramallah square after their "martyred" heroine Dalal Mughrabi.
Mughrabi was 19 and was leading a terror squad that sailed down the Israeli coast and landed near Tel Aviv where they bumped into a young American nature photographer on the beach. They asked her where they were, she told them, and then Mughrabi shot her dead. During the rampage that followed they killed 38 innocents, including 13 children.
"We are all Dalal Mughrabi," declared a leading Palestinian.
Schools, sports carnivals, computer centres and streets are named after people who in a civilised territory would be jailed for life.
Last year an independent report identified 133 UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East teachers and staff, at schools partly funded by Australian taxpayers, who promoted hate against Jews. Just one was suspended.
UN Watch reported that their materials "regularly call to murder Jews . glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonise Israelis and incite anti-Semitism".
UNWRA employees were zealous team-members among the murder and kidnap crews last October.
It has been 19 years since the nature of Palestinian brainwashing was first explained to me. The median age of Gazans is 18. People that age have had almost no hope of avoiding the indoctrination of the daily barrage of this sinful deception. No wonder it was easy for Hamas to muster 2900 young Gazans to enter Israel to shoot, rape, decapitate, blow up and incinerate innocents, including at least 38 children.
Now, thousands of Gaza's citizens are being considered for visas to come to Australia. Of course, we need unprecedented vigilance while considering their applications. Quite how we check the backgrounds of people living under a terrorist regime at war with its neighbour and with no functioning administration I cannot imagine.
And it is not Islamophobic to seek to protect our country from people who might struggle to subordinate their religious or cultural imperatives to the Australian Constitution and way of life.
As Lord Pearson, an independent member of Britain's House of Lords, told that house last month: "If we so much as try just to talk about Islam or Islamism, we are immediately accused of Islamophobia. A phobia is an irrational fear of something, but it isn't irrational to fear the modern world's most violent religious ideology." A document updated on May 24 this year by Australian National Security lists 30 banned terrorist organisations, 26 of them Islamic.
Given the unending brainwashing of Gazans, Australia could perhaps seek to deradicalise Hamas-sympathetic would-be immigrants, but those techniques are regularly questioned and probably would generate more claims of Islamophobia.
Just last May, Perth police were forced to shoot dead a youth who had stabbed a stranger and then attacked them. He had been part of a deradicalisation program for two years.
Usman Khan, one of the Islamic terrorists who killed eight innocents during the 2017 London Bridge Attacks - including Australians Sara Zelenak, 21, and Kirsty Boden, 28 - had been on two counter-terrorism programs.
The opposition spokesman on Home Affairs, Senator James Paterson, has been focused on whom Australia might issue visas to given events in Gaza: "The tragic reality is that the people of Gaza have been subject to the genocidal rule of Hamas for almost 20 years.
No institution in society has been untouched by its violent ideology, including schools and the media." He added that young Gazans had "been raised on a diet of hate and indoctrinated to think Jewish people are sub-human and the West is the enemy. While there are undoubtedly many innocent people who want to leave Gaza and pose no risk to Australia, there are also many who wholeheartedly support Hamas and the atrocities they carried out on 7 October." It is the natural and noble urge of Australians to welcome here people from troubled lands who wish to make a new start in life, but we must be wary of people sequestered in their one-person worlds of hate.
You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.
None of these Palestinian attitudes comes as a surprise: the people of the West Bank and Gaza have been bombarded with anti-Semitic, anti-West bile for decades it's why so many Palestinians define themselves by their hatred for Israel
