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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Australia’s Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, has pried open the country’s fissures by saying that Australia should not take any refugees from Gaza for national security reasons.
He has faced a fierce backlash for stating what is obviously true.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was among many in the parliament, the media, and the commentariat to brand him a racist and do the “Woke” brigade’s usual performative war dance. His governing coalition has granted visas to about 2,000 Palestinians from Gaza, 65 percent of whom have already settled in Australia.
It is a depressing truth in Australian politics that serious topics cannot be debated without name-calling and character smears. It was not enough for the Left to disagree with Dutton; he had to be accused of racism and “Islamophobia” which in modern political discourse is like being declared a leper.
The problem for these sanctimonious fools is that Dutton, a nasty Right-wing politician with many disagreeable views, is absolutely right about this issue.
Claims of racism are specious. Neither Gazans nor Palestinians in the West Bank are a race. They are Arabs. Dutton did not call for a ban on Arab immigration, or on Muslim immigration, but on immigration from one very particular place that has unique circumstances.
Dutton said the Albanese government had “brought people in without doing interviews, from a war zone that’s controlled by Hamas, a listed terrorist organization in our country.”
He could have expressed his concerns better. It is not just that Hamas is a terror group and that Gaza is a war zone. It is that Hamas has spent 36 years systematically indoctrinating and training Palestinian children to be Islamists, to hate and kill Jews, to desire a Jihadist martyr’s death, and to loathe the West.
Gaza has an unusually young population, with about 70 percent of people under 30 years old. It is so young because Hamas has encouraged families to have many children to produce more martyrs to murder Jews. It has tied men’s incomes to how many children they have; the more they have, the more they earn.
Kindergarten children in Gaza play games where they pretend to be Islamist fighters killing Jews and practice burying martyrs. These wicked policies have produced a highly radicalized population.
Disgracefully, this hatred and violence has been taught at schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Shamefully, Australia helps fund this body under the auspices of Palestinian aid. UNRWA employees were directly involved in the October 7th massacres and Hamas habitually uses the organization’s schools and facilities for weapons storage, command centers, and more recently, human shields.
It is insane that Australia, having funded this brainwashing and terror-spawning organization, is now bringing the graduates of this “education system” into Australia. It borders on parody that it does so when the country’s security services have just raised their terror threat level to “probable” from “possible.”
This indoctrination from the womb to adulthood explains why Hamas, despite being Islamist lunatics who have brought ruin to Gaza, enjoys widespread support. Polling from the Palestinian Center for Policy Survey and Research shows that 73 percent of Palestinians in Gaza supported the Hamas-led October 7th pogroms and kidnappings. This is a crucial difference between Gazans and refugees from other places.
Australian Member of Parliament Dai Le, who fled war-torn Vietnam as a child with her family, spoke movingly about Gazan refugees:
“I’m thinking, ‘Gosh, what if there are families like mine, exactly the same position,’ but then another country ... is saying, ‘They’re all terrorists.’ That would mean that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be where I am today.”
She noted that the Palestinians of Gaza are not so different.
That is a fair observation. There is no doubt that this war, which Hamas started, has brought great suffering to many people. However, other places have not spent decades systematically indoctrinating their children to be Jihadists. This is a unique situation in Australia’s immigration history. The leftist government and its supine supporters in the media just want to ignore this and pretend it never happened.
That is madness.
Allowing Gazans into Australia is also deeply insensitive to Australia’s embattled Jewish community, which is facing the worst antisemitism since World War Two, and about which nothing meaningful has been done.
Australia’s Jews have had to stay inside and watch while Islamists and their zombie “Woke” allies continuously be enabled to take over Australia’s streets, target Australia’s Jews, and call for genocide and the destruction of the Jewish state, Israel. The authorities did nothing. Police stood and watched. Now the government is bringing people in from a place where almost everyone has been raised to hate and want to kill Jews.
This is the Albanese government’s latest betrayal of its Jewish citizens, and of its supposed ally, Israel. From the Australian government’s toleration of anti-Israel mobs, to its harsh and dazzlingly ill-informed criticism of Israel, and its resumption of funding for UNRWA, the government has failed its Jews completely.
It cannot be trusted.
The Australian government may claim that it engages in security assessments when it makes immigration decisions. That is fanciful. This Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war has shown unambiguously that foreign governments have not the slightest idea of what is going on in Gaza. They seem to get most of their information from Hamas propaganda, so there is no way they can credibly conduct background checks on individuals.
What is more, these individuals are being brought into a febrile environment. Street rallies and university protests have shown that there are many Australians who support Hamas and its vile Jihadist goals of destroying Israel and the West.
The country’s security chiefs have said that radicalized Australians (of many stripes) now pose a greater threat than foreign terrorist plots against Australia. That is a significant change from previous assessments. It is crazy to add to this by bringing in people who have been brain-rinsed in radical Islam.
It is also especially unwise to do so at a time when Muslim politicians are bringing sectarian politics to Australia. Senator Fatima Payman, who is the first woman to wear a Hijab in Australia’s parliament, recently quit the ruling Australian Labor Party over the government not being sufficiently anti-Israel. She betrayed her Western Australian voters who elected her as a Labor Senator so she could work with an Islamic political movement called “The Muslim Vote.”
This movement was established after the October 7th atrocities. It is disgusting and revealing of The Muslim Vote’s motives that it was moved to action not by half a million Muslims dying in the Syrian civil war, or by the internment of a million Muslim Uyghurs in Chinese concentration camps, but by the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
It would be disastrous if Australia allowed sectarian politics to get a foothold in the country. Sectarianism has ruined every country in which Islamists operate.
It might sound like a harsh way to look at refugees, whose advocates claim have been through hell and are just seeking a better life. Unfortunately, many things can be true at once: Having suffered greatly, seeking a better life, and holding extremist views are not mutually exclusive.
While we should not dehumanize any people, we also must not deny that human beings can do terrible things in the name of evil ideologies. If you have ever seen footage of Adolf Hitler playing with his German Shepherds, you will be struck by the sparkle in his eyes and his joy for his dogs. It is a reminder that it is human beings who laugh and cry like everyone else — and who also commit genocidal atrocities. It is not non-human monsters. We forget this because we do not like to think about it.
Even if these Gazan immigrants are not Hamas supporters, their indoctrination means they are primed to be radicalized. Muslim immigrants getting radicalized in the West does not get talked about enough.
When Europe opened its doors to refugees from the savage Syrian civil war, millions fled the violence. Very few of them were extremists until the preachers at mosques in Holland, France, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere got to them. These people were not extremists but as traumatized strangers in a foreign land, with mosques a key place for cultural connection, they were vulnerable to radicalization.
People from Gaza are even more vulnerable because they have spent their school years being programmed for it.
Australia should not ignore that those countries which are the most familiar with Gaza’s Palestinians are the ones that want the least to do with them. The Egyptians have heavily fortified their border with Gaza to stop people from entering Egypt. The Egyptians know that Hamas is an offshoot of the debased Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Caliphate-seeking terror organization that Cairo banned in 2013.
While many Western countries, such as Australia, have agreed to take refugees from Gaza, Arab countries have not done so. They understand the security risks involved. Moderate Arab states have spent the past two decades trying to crush Islamist radicals in their own countries. They do not want to import more.
Only an intellectual pauper could conclude that Australia’s Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, is racist and “Islamophobic” for taking the exact same position that so many Muslim Arab states have taken.
This is partly cynical politics. Albanese has sold out Australian Jews to win votes from supporters of the Australian Greens, a quasi-Stalinist party popular with self-absorbed inner-city dunces. He is more interested in votes than he is in Australia’s national security or its Jewish citizens’ welfare.
Most worrying is that Australia, like much of the West, is in clinical denial about the threat that Islamists pose to Australia, and to the West more broadly.
Truths do not cease to be true just because they are unpalatable. Bringing in refugees from Gaza is reckless and dangerous, especially at this time. There are plenty of long-suffering refugees around the world who would not pose any risks to Australia’s national security.
Surely, that is not scandalous. It is common sense.
Yes they are. I’m from Australia and trust me a lot of us don’t agree with it. But we have a weak, lefty government who is pandering to the Muslim vote.
I wonder if the government of Australia has ever taken a second to ponder why it is that NO Arab country in the Middle East will take in the Palestinians.