If Only Our Problem Was Ignorance

How to explain Australia's indifference to the fate of Israeli hostages

The response to Israelis held hostage by Hamas has been outrage, then annoyance, and finally indifference.

Our politicians have gone from staunch support of Israel to equivocation about whether they would apprehend the Israeli Prime Minister for war crimes.

What has happened to our country?

Footage released this week of five Israeli girls held captive by Hamas sex pests has elicited not a peep from our government.

Remember, this is a government that never misses a chance to trumpet its credentials on women’s rights.

Where is Penny Wong?

Why the silence from Tanya Plibersek? Katy Gallagher?

But wait a moment. These are Israeli women. They don’t count.

Could that really be the explanation?

Andrew Bolt asked me on Sky News last week if the problem was ignorance. Is the apathetic response to Israelis held hostage more than seven months a matter of mass ignorance.

I wish.

If the reason for Australia’s indifference toward Israel’s plight was ignorance, it could be corrected.

Exposure.

Information.

Education.

And yet the hostages are not a secret. We’ve all seen the videos of bloodied women dragged by the hair, others laying naked in the back of pick up trucks while River to the Sea goons surround them with AK47s.

Anthony Albanese is not ignorant. Well, not in regard to the hostages anyway. (Economics, migration and energy are different matters)

Penny Wong is not ignorant. She travelled to Israel. But while in Israel she chose not to make the one hour trip to the scene of the October 7 attack.

If she is ignorant, it is wilful ignorance. There’s a lot of that.

Ed Husic is not ignorant. Neither is Chris Bowen. Nor Tony Burke.

These people have the same, if not more, information than you and I. So how to explain their lack of interest in the fate of our Middle Eastern ally’s women?

Tanya Plibersek is more likely to speak out on behalf of koalas than Israeli girls.

Our elected officials are not ignorant of Israel’s plight. They are, rather, blinded by a lust for power.

Their willingness to speak up for Israeli women is constrained by their desire to retain votes (and through votes seats and through those seats power) in marginal Western Sydney electorates.

There are almost a million Muslims in Australia. There are less than 100,000 Jews.

And it turns out that our politicians are much better at math than morality.

The young people I spoke to on a recent safari to Sydney University were not blinded by a lust for power so much as a perverted ideology.

A simple discussion with student protestors on the fate of hostages turned into a guided tour through the evils of colonisation, capitalism and LGBTQ rights.

These kids have been given a lens through which to view the entire world as a battle between the oppressed and the oppressors. They cannot imagine Jews as victims, not even when looking at the blood soaked tracksuit pants of petrified Jewish women surrounded by insane bearded terrorists.

Remember when posters of the hostage victims were plastered around Sydney in the aftermath of the October 7 attack?

And remember how uni students tore those posters down, screwed them up and threw them in the trash?

These kids are not ignorant. These kids are blinded by a perverted ideology that will not permit them to see even the faces of the hostages. They immediately dismiss anything that might contradict their leftist progressive ideology.

It is why in no the not too distant future, they will stand by, unmoved, as their own parents are executed for being too this, or too that.

That’s where the revolution always ends up, doesn’t it?

Self-righteous, self-certain young people who haven’t even begun to pay off their HECS debts, baying for blood so they can get on with building the utopian wet dream they imagined less than five minutes ago.

What tiresome, whiny, spoilt brats we have produced.

If only these kids were ignorant. Ignorance can be corrected. But how do you help the blind see?

If our politicians are blinded by lust for power, and if our protesting uni students are blinded by perverted ideology, then what explains the reaction of my taxi driver, and the Imams not far from where I live, and the mob on the steps of the Sydney Opera House last October?

Bloody hatred. They are blinded by a bloody hatred of the Jews that knows no rhyme and no reason. They don’t even know why they hate the Jews. They just do, as if driven to the point of distraction by an unseen force.

How to explain my Sydney taxi driver, a well spoken Turkish migrant aged in his 50s, who told me very matter-of-factly that he would gladly join Hamas and wipe the Jews from the face of the earth?

How to explain grown men in Sydney exalting over the rape, kidnapping and murder of Jewish civilians as they did after October 7?

“A glorious day,” they called it. And then they kissed their children before driving through Sydney traffic to they workplaces.

Surreal.

Frightening.

But, of course, most people are not politicians blinded by a lust for power or uni students blinded by a perverted ideology or Muslim radicals blinded by bloody hatred.

So many others are just confused. It’s all too difficult; so confusing; and a long, long way away. Clarity is lost in the cacophony of competing claims.

The problem in our country is not ignorance, it is moral clarity. Moral clarity is in shockingly short supply.

And that should scare us all.