That push is backed by Labor “elders” Bob Hawke, Gareth Evans, Bob Carr and Kevin Rudd, who also needs the support of Arab nations for a good United Nations job.

For Labor to push so hard to reward the Palestinians makes no moral sense — and is dangerous.

What exactly is the nature of this country it wants to recognise?

The Palestinian Authority’s president is Mahmoud Abbas, who 12 years ago was voted into the job for four years. That’s right: there hasn’t been an election since.


Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Picture: AFP
That’s in part because a key part of this “nation” — the populous Gaza Strip — is actually run by the Islamist Hamas party. These guys not only hate Abbas but Jews as well. In fact, their official charter calls for jihad to destroy Israel.

“Our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave,” it states, declaring it “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” and quoting the Koranic passage foretelling when “Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them”.

Labor thinks we should recognise a country represented by the unelected and the jihad-preaching?

Why? There is only one rational explanation, other than the Left’s yearning for the tribal and the primitive as it retreats from freedom.

It’s the numbers. Australia has only 100,000 Jews, many of whom vote for Labor anyway. But it has 500,000 Muslims, many in key marginal seats, and those votes need wooing.

Muslim imams are already playing politics with those numbers.

Right now in Western Australia, seven prominent imams have distributed a flyer in mosques arguing “the ideal result for Muslims in this state election is a Labor victory with as many Greens … to counter the presence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation”.

This is not the first political intervention by Muslim leaders.

Three years ago, Australia’s Grand Mufti, Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, threatened to punish federal Labor in western Sydney if it picked union leader Paul Howes for the Senate.

The mufti accused Howes of a “blind bias for Israel” and warned Labor would lose the Muslim vote mustered for it at the last election if it picked him. It worked. Howes lost.

Bob Carr, one of the Labor “elders” not being supportive of Israel, has long urged Labor to follow this Muslim vote.

As foreign affairs minister in 2012, he led MPs in a successful revolt against prime minister Julia Gillard when she wanted Australia to abstain from a vote to give Palestine observer status at the United Nations.

As The Australian reported: “Cabinet ministers began to complain there was no real explanation for the position, arguing … many Labor seats were affected by Middle Eastern populations … ”

Troy Bramston, a former Labor speechwriter, reported the same thing: “Carr stood in Gillard’s office and told her, eyeball to eyeball, to change her mind or she faced a humiliating defeat ...

“Critically, there is the growing Muslim and Christian makeup of several key western Sydney Labor seats … Some sections of the party suggest Victorian Labor is too close to the Israel lobby and does not fully understand the underlying changes in Sydney’s outer suburbs.”

It is no accident that NSW Labor MPs are more hostile to Israel than the Victorian ones, notably Gillard and now Labor leader Bill Shorten.

NSW is where the big Muslim minorities are, and they have forced some MPs into taking astonishing positions.

Take Labor frontbencher Tony Burke, the member for Watson, where Muslims make up 20 per cent of voters.

Three years ago Burke gave a speech at a fundraiser for the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network in which he accused Israel of “trashing” the drinking water of Palestinians.

He then added: “For those who are political advocates within Palestine itself, I will never know the bravery that comes with putting your life on the line and at risk, in engaging in politics in different ways.”

Pardon? Who are these death-defying “people engaging the politics in different ways”?

Something in Labor has broken when a senior Labor politician praises what listeners would assume are terrorists and jihadists.

What’s broken are Labor’s values — its commitment to democracy and peace above tyranny and terror.

Its anti-Israel jihad is a disgrace.

rced some MPs into taking astonishing positions.

No link? Just copied and pasted the text without attribution? That's plagiarism.

https://static.mediapart.fr/etmagine/portfolio/files/portfolios/481816/56a252cfb...

Who's the REAL aggressor ?

Is it any WONDER Palestinians fight for what's left of their HOMELAND ?