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I believe the west is in denial,:
West is US, Canada,eu, Australia and Japan Korea.south
But Turkey SA and India Indonesia will look at own interests first
I believe the west is in denial,:I've wondered about the wisdom of inviting India to join the Quad.
This doesn't help.
Genocide is a deliberate act.
The Zionists made this a mission over 100 years ago when Jews began to settle Palestine. Terrorism soon followed with Haganah formed in 1920, and two more radical Zionist paramilitaries formed decades later: Irgun (1931) and Lehi or "the Stern Gang" (1940). Few at ASF would have been born that far back.
Skipping the history lesson and moving to post Oct 7, 2023 events, the IDF has perfectly met every contemporary definition of genocide.
Israel has been:
The United Nations also includes a mental element - "the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". In this regard Israel has vowed to wipe Gaza off the map.
- Killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza
- Causing them serious bodily and mental harm
- Deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births by deliberately targeting women
- Forcibly kidnapping and deliberately killing children
Other acts of the Zionists that defy every concept of morality:
Despite what the world knows has happened and continues to happen, there is no western sanctioning of Israel's actions, and Australia continues to contravene the ICJ ruling that prevents military aid to Israel. Our Penny Wong is MIA on genocide.
- Deliberately bombing schools, hospitals and places of worship, including historic sites
- Preventing the supply of food, water and medicine
- Continuing declarations of safe zones that are then deliberately bombed
- Specifically targeting and murdering civilians via drones
- Specifically targeting media, with most PRESS now murdered
- Specifically targeting NGOs and a myriad of international aid agencies.
And just to show how far back the well documented demise of Palestinians goes, this photo from April 1948 shows the work of Irgun and Lehi militants who jointly committed the Deir Yassin massacre of at least 107 Palestinian villagers, including women and children. (Deir Yassin was a Palestinian village of around 600 people near Jerusalem).
View attachment 183382
Arab nations are quietly backing Israel. Why can’t the West do the same?
There’s an open secret among the governments of the Middle East that’s driving their respective approaches to the war between Israel and Iran: they all welcome a weakened Iran and the dismantling of its terrorist proxies almost as much as Israel does.
This is why Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is conducting a campaign across the region to convince the Saudis and others to join him against Israel.
But whatever the regional views of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Araghchi’s mission is doomed to fail.
The main reason for this, of course, is that these terrorist groups are also a threat to countries across the region and help expand Iranian power at the expense of their own. Iran and its proxies, including Hamas, Hezebollah and the Houthis, are destabilising the region. And, what’s more, they would do so whether there was a war with Israel or not.
The Gulf states and regional powers such as Turkey and Egypt have watched for decades as Tehran manufactured political instability among its regional neighbours while cultivating and arming violent proxies within destabilised border areas.
This is the story of Iran in Iraq and the Popular Mobilisation Forces that the Iranian Republican Guard Corps groomed and still supports. It’s also the story of Iranian-backed pro-Assad militias in Syria, which have joined Hezbollah in attacking Israel since October 7 last year.
This is also the case in Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthis defeated the Saudi and United Arab Emirates-supported Yemeni government in a civil war.
Where Iran arms and trains armed groups inside the borders of other countries, it accelerates institutional weaknesses and feeds chaos, dysfunction and economic stagnation. Syria and Lebanon are two of the classic case studies. You also can extend this chaos-sowing influence to Iran’s supply of missiles and drones to Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine.
Turkey welcomes Iranian weakness and Israel’s systematic dismantling of Hezbollah’s leadership because this lessens Iranian influence on Syria and Lebanon. This in turn can reduce the flow of Syrian refugees into Turkey.
The Saudis, moreover, welcome a weakened Iran for the potential leverage it gives over Tehran’s support to the Yemeni Houthis and for the reduced military threat Iran poses to the region. Almost every Arab nation supports Israel’s attack on Iran’s decades-long strategic cultivation of armed proxies. They just won’t say so publicly.
But it’s striking that none of these states has reduced its relations with Israel as the war unfolds. Even the Saudis have signalled that the normalisation of relations with Israel, deliberately disrupted by Yahya Sinwar’s organised atrocities on October 7 last year, can proceed when ceasefires are reached in the war.
While Sinwar had hoped Hezbollah and Iran would join Hamas in its attack on Israel on October 7, he would’ve had no hope of the Arab states surrounding Israel. He knew that despite statements of political solidarity with Palestinians, no regional government really wants to carry the burden of the Palestinians more than they already do.
Yahya Sinwar
Egypt’s insistence on keeping its border to Gaza shut to fleeing Palestinians is a good measure of things because it highlights the dominance of interests over emotions.
From Jordan to the UAE, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Middle Eastern states have clamped down on pro-Palestinian protests since the Hamas attack, largely because they see them as threatening the domestic stability of their own states. The Palestinian issue is seen by them as a “gateway to dissent”.
Another measure of regional thinking is the stalled detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, trumpeted as a diplomatic breakthrough brokered by China in March last year.
Since the beginning of the war its implementation has been stuck on low-level items because Iran is refusing to reduce its support of dangerous armed groups in the region, with the Houthis being highest on Riyadh’s list.
Iran continues to pretend that it’s not the key backer of the Houthis. Tehran is also clearly doubling down on Hezbollah to stop its most powerful terrorist proxy from being irreparably damaged by Israel and losing the group’s powerful role within Lebanese politics.
Many Israelis are critical of the Netanyahu government. While they’re clear about the existential threat that Hezbollah, Hamas and Tehran pose – even with the recent bounce in support for Netanyahu – many Israelis want a new government that can build on the country’s resurrected military deterrent power once this phase of the war is over.
Many Israelis support the current fighting to damage Hezbollah and remove a much larger threat to northern Israel than Hamas ever posed from Gaza. Like the Saudis, Israelis understand the strategic problem Iran poses to Israel and to the broader region.
None of this is new. Israel is fighting a regional war against Iran and its proxies and the results of this could be a less dangerous Middle East with more open space for regional nations to craft diplomatic solutions and assist weakened states once Iran’s toxic reach is reduced.
It’s time for policymakers in places such as Australia and Europe to not just grapple with the larger regional picture – which provides the context for the war – but also to communicate some of it back to their populations and use it to shape their policies.
That would make a healthy change from the increasingly empty calls for unilateral ceasefires and tepid condemnation of the terrorism that Iran is now so obviously cultivating and enabling across this intricate and essential region of the world.
Michael Shoebridge is director of Strategic Analysis Australia.
Genocide is a deliberate act.
The Zionists made this a mission over 100 years ago when Jews began to settle Palestine. Terrorism soon followed with Haganah formed in 1920, and two more radical Zionist paramilitaries formed decades later: Irgun (1931) and Lehi or "the Stern Gang" (1940). Few at ASF would have been born that far back.
Skipping the history lesson and moving to post Oct 7, 2023 events, the IDF has perfectly met every contemporary definition of genocide.
Israel has been:
The United Nations also includes a mental element - "the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". In this regard Israel has vowed to wipe Gaza off the map.
- Killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza
- Causing them serious bodily and mental harm
- Deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births by deliberately targeting women
- Forcibly kidnapping and deliberately killing children
Other acts of the Zionists that defy every concept of morality:
Despite what the world knows has happened and continues to happen, there is no western sanctioning of Israel's actions, and Australia continues to contravene the ICJ ruling that prevents military aid to Israel. Our Penny Wong is MIA on genocide.
- Deliberately bombing schools, hospitals and places of worship, including historic sites
- Preventing the supply of food, water and medicine
- Continuing declarations of safe zones that are then deliberately bombed
- Specifically targeting and murdering civilians via drones
- Specifically targeting media, with most PRESS now murdered
- Specifically targeting NGOs and a myriad of international aid agencies.
And just to show how far back the well documented demise of Palestinians goes, this photo from April 1948 shows the work of Irgun and Lehi militants who jointly committed the Deir Yassin massacre of at least 107 Palestinian villagers, including women and children. (Deir Yassin was a Palestinian village of around 600 people near Jerusalem).
View attachment 183382
Pro-Palestine rallies are testing the limits of the silent majority
While modern Australia is the product of immigration, immigration policy is one of least discussed aspects of government even though there are few things that make a more long-term difference to the country.
At a conference soon after his retirement from office, Bob Hawke admitted that there had been “an implicit pact between the major parties to implement broad policies on immigration that they know are not generally endorsed by the electorate” and that “they have done this by keeping the subject off the political agenda”.
Perhaps this official reluctance to discuss the social impact of immigration is a matter of collective shame over the White Australia policy that was in place for the first 50-odd years of our national existence.
Perhaps it’s the recollection of John Howard’s fate, in his first incarnation as Liberal leader, after he suggested that a case could be made for slowing down the rate of Asian immigration.
Perhaps it’s the natural reluctance to give possible offence to anyone who wasn’t born here or whose ancestry differs from our own. Or perhaps it’s fundamental doubt about what it means to be an Australian anyway, other than the fact of living here.
Whatever the reason for this diffidence, it shouldn’t stop us asking what is needed for social cohesion to be maintained, especially when recent overseas events are producing convulsions here, at least partly because many recent migrants have brought their old hatreds to their new country.
While the right to protest is fundamental to any democracy, the latest polling this week suggests a strong majority of Australians are fed up with a perma-protest culture fuelled by grievances abroad.
It’s not just that demonstrations have now been running in Sydney and Melbourne almost every week for a year, with all the attendant disruption to people going about their normal lives. Or the expense, even though the cost of policing dozens and dozens of these protests now runs into literally many tens of millions of dollars. At some point, being against the Middle East’s only liberal democracy, the only country in the region where women and gays have equal rights, and effectively in favour of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran – all of them Islamist theocracies – starts to become un-Australian.
This isn’t the first time a conflict overseas has badly divided our country. The Great War saw bitter divisions over conscription, fuelled in part by some Irish-descended Australians’ antipathy to participation in a “British” war.
The Vietnam War, again, saw bitter divisions over conscription plus a strong anti-war movement.
But both of these examples were wars where our uniform was on the battlefield; this time we’re seeing perhaps the first big internal division in which much of the shouting is coming from recent immigrants (or mere visa holders) such as the sheiks and imams who are willing to defend terrorist regimes if it means they can legitimise the targeting of Israel.
People’s interest in their original homelands is entirely understandable but it becomes a problem if overseas issues are judged less in terms of what’s best for Australia and its people than what’s best for somewhere else.
There are many factors at work in the now routine demonstrations in our big cities explicitly against Israel and implicitly in favour of Middle Eastern terror groups.
One is the leftist mindset that’s behind Black Lives Matter protests and Extinction Rebellion disruptions, as well as the anti-Israel demonstrations.
Protesters march through the Sydney CBD on October 6. Picture: Getty Images
Then there are the obvious humanitarian concerns about the civilian casualties inevitable in urban warfare.
But an undeniable factor is Australia’s changing make-up, largely through immigration.
In the current unrest, the growing influence of a Muslim voting bloc has heightened tensions inside the political left. Since 2006, Muslims as a percentage of our population have doubled (now 3.2 per cent) and, according to The Muslim Vote organisers, the most important issue by far for their constituency is not cost of living (as it is with the majority of other voters) but the situation in Gaza, which is being leveraged against sitting Labor MPs in the dozen federal seats with a 10 per cent plus Muslim population.
Of course, people are entitled to their opinion, but it is disturbing when that opinion is quite at odds with what Australians are supposed to believe.
For instance, the pledge that all new citizens take – and that presumably reflects the civic culture of all of us – cites “loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey”.
There’s no democracy and there’s no liberty, as it’s normally understood, in Gaza, on the West Bank or in Iran.
Then there’s the citizenship test, with five questions about Australian values, that all newcomers are supposed to pass and that, again, presumably reflects what is supposed to be our accepted civic culture.
The official practice test gives peaceful protest as an example of freedom of speech but it also makes clear that Australia is a secular society, with equal rights for all, where people can freely vote in elections, and where disagreement must be peaceful and respectful.
There hasn’t been too much respect on our streets for Australian Jews who report anti-Semitism at unprecedented levels. And there hasn’t been much respect in the mosques where Islamist preachers have rejoiced in the October 7 atrocity as recently as this week as a “good day” that ought to be “celebrated”.
No one wants to see a change to the non-discriminatory immigration policy that has helped to make Australia what is arguably the world’s most successful immigrant society. But this can continue to be the case only if migrants are genuinely coming to join us rather than to change us; because the only way a diverse, multi-ethnic society, with no majority religion, can continue to flourish is with a strong civic ethos and a deep commitment to Australia and our shared values.
In the absence of an ethnic or religious patriotism, we need a civic one. That’s what we had in the decades after World War II as our immigration program shifted from the British Isles to continental Europe and eventually to Asia too. There was a strong focus on integration into what was then thought to be the world’s best country.
But that was before schools and universities started teaching the black-armband view of Australian history, the government started flying three flags instead of the one Australian flag, and every official and community event started with an acknowledgment that it was some people’s country more than others’.
It’s telling that there was no public mourning for Osama bin Laden when he was killed 13 years ago, unlike the recent outpouring of grief for the dead terrorist Hassan Nasrallah.
Multiculturalism has gone too far when it extends to celebrating terrorist leaders on the streets of Australia. John Howard often used to say that the things that unite us as Australians are always more important than anything that divides us.
But if some of us can’t see that supporting terrorism is wrong, if we can’t unite in condemning the slaughter of October 7, then what social glue have we left?
I had to log out to read the bollocks you were responding to there.Sound like you have been corrupted by the lies of the old Stalinist rule book, same as most of the extreme left.
If it ain't Joooz it ain't Noooz?
You might have taken my point a bit backwards, but the overarching point is there.I think that is true. There are Jewish diaspora all around the world and they make their views known loudly when anything happens to them.
Some might remember the genocide in Rwanda, 40 od years ago when the Hutus and Tutsis massacred each other. No a word from Israel and most Western countries. So yes, if it aint Jews it aint news.
It strikes me that according to the definition of genocide offered in that post, that any losing party in any war is the victim of genocide, especially if the losing party was the one that started the war.
Why do you assume I am a supporter of the UN ?Where are the UN resolutions against the Syrian government, the Nigerians, the Yemenis and the Azerbaijanis. Where was the UN during the ethnic cleansing of joooz from northern Africa and the rest of the Middle East?
I didn't assume that and was just making a general point. And I agree with you thereWhy do you assume I am a supporter of the UN ?
Imo they have been hijacked by Russia, China, Saudis, and other nasty governments that don't support the West.
I think we should withdraw from the UN and form an alliance of western democracies, and Putin et al can go play with themselves.
A great day for Israel and the West.
The butcher is definitely dead. Dramatic drone footage captured his last stand before the vile slimeball took a tank shell to the cranium.
A great day for Israel and the West.
Surprisingly, an excerpt from the White House statement is a good summary:
"As the leader of the terrorist group Hamas, Sinwar was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Israelis, Palestinians, Americans, and citizens from over 30 countries. He was the mastermind of the October 7th massacres, rapes, and kidnappings. It was on his orders that Hamas terrorists invaded Israel to intentionally – and with unspeakable savagery – kill and massacre civilians, a Holocaust survivor, children in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children."
I just wonder how many Israeli hostages are being killed in these raids.
If Hamas uses Palestinian civilians for shelter then they won't shirk about doing the same with hostages.
But if Israel thinks that the collateral damage is worth the price, that's their choice.
Don't drones have 4k video? why is the resolution so low? That could be CGI or an actor in a hollywood scene or really anyone anywhere. We got better videos for Sadam and Gaddafi.Better still ..
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