Reproduced with permission from The BFD https://thebfd.co.nz/2024/04/06/the-mask-is-off-now/
It must be such a relief for him. Finally, Anthony Albanese doesn’t even have to bother pretending any more: he’s finally got the excuse he’s been itching for, to rip the mask off and show what he really thinks.
Or, more correctly, what he knows will win precious votes in Western Sydney.
Perhaps Albo isn’t an Israel-hating anti-Semite at heart. Most likely — we hope — it’s just his standard gutless opportunism. Although whether pandering to anti-Semites to win their votes is any less reprehensible than the real thing is debatable. At least the genuine anti-Semite has the poor excuse of being genuine.
Albo would just sell his soul to try and cling to government.
The excuse I’m referring to is the accidental killing of an Australian aid worker in Gaza. It’s the excuse Albanese has been desperate for, so he can give up even pretending to be even-handed, and give over to full-throated hatred of Israel.
And what a pathetic, tawdry excuse it is.
Leaving aside the question of just why even aid workers think they can swan into a war zone with zero risk, or just what the workers were doing delivering aid to the very people who cheered on the October 7 atrocities (consider, for example, that people delivering aid to Nazi Germany would have been treated as the Quislings they were), the hypocrisy from Albo and other world leaders is stunning.
It is hypocritical and ridiculous for the citizens of nations that have accidentally killed far more people than Israel to now lecture Israel about its wayward bombs.
When Australian Galit Carbone was murdered — not accidentally, but deliberately, gleefully, targeted for execution — Anthony Albanese said nothing. When Australian Michael O’Neill was killed while delivering aid in Ukraine, Albo made no thundering public condemnation, or brow-beating phone calls to either Russian or Ukrainian leaders.
Albo’s hypocrisy is just the start.
David Cameron has got some front. The Foreign Secretary is haranguing Israel over its tragic unintentional killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, and yet he oversaw a war in which such ‘friendly fire’ horrors were commonplace. In fact, more than seven people were slain in accidental bombings under Cameron’s watch. Terrible accidents happen in war. It was the Libya intervention of 2011. In that NATO-led excursion, in which Cameron, then prime minister, was an enthusiastic partner, numerous Libyans died as a result of misaimed bombs. Things got so bad that the West’s allies took to painting the roofs of their vehicles bright pink in an effort to avoid NATO’s missiles.
In one awful incident, 13 people were slaughtered by our ‘friendly fire’. Their number included not only anti-Gaddafi rebels but also ambulance workers. It was in the wake of this calamity that the rebels got out the pink paint. ‘How to avoid friendly fire? Libya rebels try pink’, said a headline at NBC News.
Yet now Cameron is on his high horse over Israel’s bombing of trucks carrying volunteers from the World Central Kitchen.
At least the genuine anti-Semite has the poor excuse of being genuine.
It’s also notable that Anthony Albanese and David Cameron are much less forthright in their condemnations of Hamas. Apart from mumbling a couple of half-hearted reprovals, Albo’s kept a constant eye on Western Sydney’s Muslim enclaves — one of the few remaining redoubts in a steadily-shrinking Labor vote.
Joe Biden’s backers have done the maths, too — and coldly calculated that Muslims now outnumber Jews in the ranks of Democrat voters.
US president Joe Biden has also weighed in, saying he is ‘outraged’ by the killing of the aid workers. You can’t help but wonder whether he directed similar outrage at his own nation’s military when 37 Afghanis at a wedding party, mostly women and children, were killed by mistake in a US airstrike.
‘Stop killing Afghan civilians’, the then president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, said to the newly elected US president, Barack Obama. And who was Obama’s vice-president? Biden, of course. You would think a man whose own military has killed huge numbers of people in error would understand that these things happen, even if every decent person would rather they didn’t.
Vast numbers of civilians have been killed by accident by the US in recent years. At another wedding party in 2004, this time in Iraq, 11 women and 14 children were killed by American fire. Was there a ‘full, transparent explanation’ for that calamity?
The double standards are staggering. It is hypocritical and ridiculous for the citizens of nations that have accidentally killed far more people than Israel to now lecture Israel about its wayward bombs.
And the fact remains that Hamas kills civilians, not in error, but as a matter of policy. They don’t even pretend that that’s not the case.
Yet, there are the marching morons of the left, bellowing Hamas’ genocidal battle-cry, day in, day out.
These cretinous idiots don’t give a damn about civilian lives, for all their pseudo-pious grandstanding. It’s only ever been about bashing Jews.
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Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard.
I grew up in a generational-Labor-voting family. I kept the faith long after the political left had abandoned it. In the last decade or two, I’ve voted at times for just about all of the major parties and quite a few of the minor ones.
My vote may have changed, but those basic working-class values I grew up with never have.
