Sadness escalates!

Clive Palmer has announced a lega case on behalf of 300 Qld Vax mandated cops and nurses. ABC, Courier Mail and Daily Mail already covering the story and Clive’s full press release on his Twitter.

Your weekly dose of Gemma. From the Oz.

Let’s not be bystanders and help turn this country around
Gemma Tognini

How many Australians will it take to turn this nation? It was quite the question for a Monday night, but it’s never the wrong time to tackle big issues, I say, especially over ­dinner.

For context, this week I chaired a conference session here in Sydney which addressed difficult questions about what it will take to rebuild our social fabric, and raise children who are resilient, not reticent, in the face of life’s challenges.

The conference was held by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and at a gathering of speakers the night before we were asked how many of us will it take to right Australia’s path. 

It’s hard to put words to the times we’re living in. The strange and pervasive sense of unease, a ­latent, edge of anger and conflict to everything. I asked someone the other day, is this what it felt like ­living under the Whitlam government? Yep, they said, but worse. At least Whitlam got a few things done …

Strange and serious times. Perilous, even. Not physically; we are for the most part safe in our blessed isolation on our island at the ­bottom of the world. No, I believe that today, our greatest threat lies within. A threat born of multiple, daily sins of omission but no less menacing.

I don’t often bring poetry into these conversations, perhaps I should. The world needs more engagement with pointless beauty. That aside, the Irish poet WB Yeats in his 1934 poem Meru, laments the illusion of civilisation and points to the chaos beneath. “Civilisation is hooped together, brought under a rue, under the semblance of peace by manifold illusion.” A very elegant, melodic way of saying, scratch the surface and there’s a big problem underneath. Ninety years later, his words feel somewhat prophetic. 
If it’s wisdom (and I say it is) not to judge a nation on its past, but rather the direction in which it’s going, then Australia, we have a problem.

Unprecedented social fracturing. Stagnant productivity. Multiple sectors struggling under the weight of crippling over-regulation, and suffocating industrial laws that make no sense to anyone in the real economy. A government that doesn’t know how to live within its means. Inflation tipped to be higher than every other advanced economy in the world, bar one.

Dangerous ideology infiltrating everything from energy to education. The devaluing of parenthood. A focus on institutional childcare rather than developing policy that will give choice and flexibility to parents to care for their own children. Full-time ­childcare for a three-year-old? I wouldn’t have put my dog in full-time childcare. 

Despite this grim inventory, I remain, as ever, the optimist. Actually, it’s not just optimism. There IS a better story to tell, and my life bears witness to that. On paper at least, I should have been a statistic (and not a good one).

On paper, a kid who grows up amid relational chaos, alcohol abuse and the myriad challenges that go with it, should repeat that history. There’s other stuff, too, but forgive me for not wanting to lay everything on the altar for public consumption. Just believe me when I tell you it’s never too late, we do get to rewrite our stories, and there is a better one waiting to be told. Not just at a personal level, but for Australia too.

Yes, our social fabric is frayed and, in some places, torn, but I truly believe the days are numbered for the vile, noisy, rabble on our streets and the equally vile Greens in our parliament. I have nothing to go on other than instinct and faith. Instinct, I suppose, comes from being old enough to have seen some of this stuff play out before, and a sense of faith that comes by hearing. Hearing what people are saying in everyday conversations. They’re tired of where we are. I sense the baseball bats are at the front door and voters are getting ready to swing hard. I might be wrong, but I don’t think so.
So, what does it take to write a different story, to turn this country around? I suspect many of us feel a sense of inertia, perhaps even a lack of clarity about where to start. 

For me, it’s about refusing to be a bystander any more. I think I reached that place a few years back during the insanity of the immoral, polling-driven Covid lockdowns and border closures.

What will it take for you? Perhaps you think there’s no harm in being a bystander? You’re wrong. In the ’60s, social psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley identified what’s known as the Bystander Effect after the murder of a 28-year-old woman in New York City. Kitty Genovese was brutally stabbed in front of her apartment and police later found that dozens of neighbours ignored her cries for help. Nobody called police. Nobody intervened. Latane and Darley found two reasons for the fatal indifference of Genovese’s neighbours. First, what they called a “diffusion of responsibility”. Second, social ­influence. Put simply, everyone thought someone else would do something. They all thought it was up to someone else.

Compounding this is the truth that individuals tend to check our behaviour against the people around us before deciding what to do. A sort of situational and moral paralysis. Turns out, being a bystander is not so innocent after all. 

So, how many Australians will it take to turn a nation? I’m not sure, but I do believe we’re reaching critical mass, with one caveat. If you think someone else is going to start writing a better story for you, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re looking around waiting to see if someone else will take the first step, you might be waiting a while. It is all of our responsibilities to pick up our metaphorical pens. It is all of our responsibilities to lead ourselves, and our neighbours, as we do. These are serious times, not days in which we can afford to shrink back. There’s a better story to be written; join me as we put pen to paper.

Terminal surge

The ‘terminal surge’ can happen when someone, despite being in their final moments, has ‘a sudden burst of energy and acts like their old self again.’

Lucy explains: ‘They may suddenly look like they are “better” and will eat, talk, laugh and maybe even walk.

‘However, this can often happen in a patients’ last few days or hours before they die, so learning more about it can help relatives and caregivers emotionally prepare.’

This is even stranger and represents a strong challenge the traditional view of cognition and consciousness.

Terminal Lucidity: What We Know and What We’re Learning

The growing rift between the NSW judiciary and the state’s top prosecutor has been dramatically laid bare with a senior judge alleging Sally Dowling tried to ‘exert influence’ over the judiciary and engaged in ‘ethically questionable’ behaviour.

All the more reason for mandatory sentencing and tougher judicial guidelines. Kiwiblog had report up yesterday on their judiciary that I think mirrors ours, maybe we need to borrow Roger Partridge here:

https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2024/10/arguably_the_most_important_nz_initiative_report.html

After how the judges strayed outside the separation of powers of an elected Parliament in Qld with Carmody (Yes he isn’t perfect) I have little time for this bunch of a sheltered workshop and their pompous, inflated egos.

Penny should be sacked by Parliament but wont be, O’Shane got away with worse.

As requested, from today’s Oz.

Brutal home truths for those marching in support of Palestinians

Alan Howe

“This is not the end of the war … it is the beginning of the end,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the killing of Yahya Sinwar last week.

So, where and when did this all begin? Oddly, it started in Moscow in 1964. When will it end? It won’t, because it can’t. The Palestinian “leadership” won’t let it. 

In 1964, the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti – KGB), was funding and sometimes organising various Marxist armies for national liberation around the world, and is believed to have come up with the idea of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. It reportedly even helpfully drew up a list of members and assisted with its charter. 

This blended a disparate people – the Palestinians – and shaped their grievance into a policy calling for the destruction of Israel. At the time, Nikita Khrushchev was first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had in recent years brutally suppressed unrest in Georgia and Poland, and a revolution in Hungary, while coming perilously close to superpower nuclear war in 1962. He wanted to destabilise Israel – indeed, eliminate it – and exert more power and influence across the Middle East. A common denominator in the region was a hatred of Jews (Khrushchev wasn’t keen on them either). He would give this unity and focus.

The PLO officially formed in Egypt at a meeting of the Arab League in 1964. The Egyptian president, Gamal Nasser, was a client of Moscow, which supplied Egypt with weapons, trained its military leaders around its Eastern European possessions, and even offered to defend it with nuclear weapons during the 1956 Suez Crisis. 

Any would-be nation needs a national anthem and the poet Said Al Muzayin obliged the following year, writing bellicose words pretty indicative of the Palestinian mindset then and now: “Warrior, warrior, warrior,” it starts, before going on about “my determination, my fire and the volcano of my vendetta”. No word here about saving gracious kings. In any case, they were girt by Jews. It continues: “With the resolve of the winds and the fire of the weapons.”

The first leaders of the PLO disappointed Moscow, so they lobbied for their man. After the Arabs’ humiliating defeat in 1967’s Six-Day War, Nasser, who briefly resigned, declared Egypt-born Yasser Arafat to be the leader of the Palestinians. By 1969, Arafat was chairman of the PLO, as well as the KGB’s chief asset in the region. By then Yuri Andropov, who would in 1982 replace Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union, was running the KGB – and Arafat.

Andropov told a senior Romanian colleague, General Ion Pacepa, that: “We needed to instil a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States.” 

The Russians soon started funding and arming the PLO and its terror offshoots with shipments of machine guns, remotely detonated landmines, grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, and rifles for long-distance sniper attacks. Some of these were used in the 1970 Black September attacks when the PLO, which had taken up residence in Jordan, sought to take over that country. 

They were used in other terror attacks including the hijacking in 1976 of an Air France flight on a stopover in Athens during a Tel Aviv-Paris service. The hijackers directed the plane first to Libya and then on to Uganda’s Entebbe Airport, where psychotic dictator Idi Amin, a pro-Palestinian racist, drove to the airport to welcome the terrorists to his country. They demanded Israel free about 40 Palestinian prisoners for the more than 100, mostly Jewish, hostages.

Instead, the Israelis launched their audacious raid on the airport on the night of July 3. They killed the hijackers and left with all but three of the hostages. One Israeli soldier was killed: Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of today’s Israeli Prime Minister.

One hostage, Dora Bloch, 74, had been taken to hospital. An enraged, humiliated Amin ordered that she be murdered. Soldiers killed her. Her body was found three years later in a sugar plantation. Her face had been burned. (It is worth noting that Amin was chairman of the Organisation of African Unity and the following year his country was elevated to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.)

Arafat would remain leader of the PLO until his death in 2004. Indeed, our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese once travelled to Ramallah to meet the man who used to boast that he invented hijacking. Foreign Minister Penny Wong did not go. Very sensible. According to the UN, where Wong likes to have the floor, the Palestinian territories are not safe for women: “Women and girls in the occupied Palestinian territory face discrimination and risk of gender-based violence, including early/forced marriage, intimate partner/family violence, sexual harassment, rape, incest, ­denial of resources, psychological abuse and risk of sexual exploitation and abuse.”

Arafat defiantly stood in the way of peace and refused generous offers for a separate Palestinian state. He never wanted a two-state solution, even though for years he pretended to. He wanted one Palestinian state and no Jews next door. The map of the world on his office wall had Israel marked as Palestine – a common sight. 

While playing along with US plans for peace and a two-state solution, Arafat was reported speaking to a group of Arabs in Sweden in 1996: “Within five years we will have six or seven million Arabs in the West Bank … We will replace Israel with a Palestinian Arab state … I have no use for Jews, they are and remain Jews.” About that time he was also reported as stating: “We will not bend or fail until the blood of every last Jew from the youngest child to the oldest elder is spilled to redeem our land!”

Had there been a lever the pulling of which would obliterate Jews from the earth, Arafat would have elbowed his way to it. 
You couldn’t negotiate in good faith with Arafat, he had none. Like his understudy and now Palestinian leader, the poisonous, Moscow-educated liar Mahmoud Abbas. His doctoral thesis insisted that the Jews were secretly partners with the Nazis.

Since October 7 last year, various Palestinian leaders have made it clear that not only was that atrocity welcomed and celebrated, but there was more to come and that it would not end until Jews were wiped out in a new Holocaust. The misguided masses at pro-Palestinian marches in Western capitals are supporting that.

The other day, my friend Itamar Marcus explained what was being said to Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza. Marcus founded Palestinian Media Watch, has negotiated with the Palestinians, and advised governments around the world including in the US, UK, ­Europe, Canada and Australia. His news was depressing. The Palestinian people are being shepherded, without noticeable resistance, to disaster by a committed death cult. Hamas is more popular now than ever. 

Marcus says that even good people will support terror if they believe “it is the right, moral, ethical thing to do”. He described the videos (taken by the terrorists) of joyous, cackling gunmen shooting people running away, raping girls, beheading others, blowing up youngsters and setting fire to Jews as evidence they had been taught that Jews were less than human, indeed evil beings best eradicated. 

He says that Palestinians have been convinced that Jews endanger all humanity, and that has become part of their national identity. 
And it starts at the top, with Arafat’s replacement, Abbas. The lies to “his” people are on such a scale, they sound absurd to any normal listener. He told a Fatah conference six weeks before the October 7 attacks that Hitler killed the Jews, not because of their religion, but their “social role, which is connected to usury and money … they caused ruin in his opinion, and therefore he hated them”. Abbas is telling Arabs that killing Jews is just self-defence.

This wasn’t news to anyone. He had addressed the UN a few months earlier where he explained Britain and the US wanted rid of their Jews and had cooked up a scheme after the war to create a place for them, with the added bonus that it would give the West a toehold in the oil-rich region. The UN delegates sat in silence.
 
That slogan “from the river to the sea” is not about real estate. For Arafat and Abbas and Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Sinwar it is, and was always, what they see as the noble cause of ridding us of Jews. Hitler failed. They and their successors don’t plan to. From the river to the sea, they want the job done. And they have broad support at home and abroad. Even on Australian city streets. But perhaps that is to be expected while Albanese and Wong vandalise Australia’s reputation for fairness in Middle East affairs. Those puerile calls for a ceasefire were morally neutral at best. 

Mahmoud Al-Habbash is Abbas’s adviser on religious and Islamic affairs and said in a recent broadcast that there never had been a Jewish nation – it was invented by Europeans to gather them together.

Al-Habbash called Jews “grazing herds of humanoids … those whom Allah has cursed and with whom he became angry and made of them apes and pigs”. They are also Satan in human form. So to kill one is not to kill a human. Advice the attackers of October 7 took to heart. It was Allah’s will. This view was reinforced at mosques across the Palestinian territory in sermons distributed en masse in the days after the attacks. 

On July 9 this year a preacher on official Palestinian Authority television said: “O Allah, power of hand and might, support the jihad fighters in the Gaza Strip … strike the thieving Jews … count them and kill them one by one.”

The morning after the October 7 slaughter, a Fatah member was on television delighted with the carnage that had claimed whole families in Israel, including babies. Abd Al-Rahman Abu Al-Rub said: “We say to our people … a morning of victory, a morning of pride. We ask Allah to send a blessing to our heroic martyrs in the Gaza Strip.” 

These are the words of a savage. And they sound familiar. A day later, Sydney’s Sheikh Ibrahim Dadoun excitedly addressed a crowd gathered at Lakemba in the city’s west. “I’m smiling,” he said. Indeed he was so beside himself, he said it again: “I’m smiling and I’m happy. I’m elated. It’s a day of courage. It’s a day of pride. It’s a day of victory. This is the day we’ve been waiting for.”

Then, bending history, and falling in line with Arafat and Abbas and their repugnant footsoldiers, he said: “Seventy-five years of occupation … What happened yesterday was the first time our brothers and sisters broke through the largest prison on Earth.” By claiming 75 years of occupation, Dadoun renders illegitimate the state of Israel from 1948. This is river-to-the-sea talk. 

Dadoun was born in Sydney. We cannot cancel his citizenship, even if he is among the most dangerous Australians. But those chanting “Allah” as he spoke may not yet be Australians. Or they may be naturalised Australians. That could be a problem for them and some of the thousands of Australians wearing keffiyehs and demanding the Jews be murderously swept from the Middle East. 

Two days after October 7, some of the world’s most significant buildings – the Brandenburg Gate, 10 Downing Street, the EU headquarters, the Eiffel Tower – were ­illuminated in Israel’s colours. At only one was there a riot: Sydney’s Opera House, where police stood mute as thugs burned Israeli flags, lit flares, even throwing them at police, and chanted “F..k the Jews” and “Where’s the Jews”. 

None of them was arrested that night. Not one. Jews were warned not to attend. The government and NSW police had abandoned them.
The names of each offender should have been taken and checked against their immigration status. Any of them here on a variety of student, business, family or visitor visas should have been removed from the country. And those who had gained citizenship should have had their migration status reviewed. 

It’s pretty simple. The Australian Citizenship Pledge states: “From this time forward, I pledge my 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.” 

Clearly anyone who had taken that pledge and criminally rioted that day lied at the time they uttered the pledge. Anyone who has defaced the offices of our members of parliament, smashed windows and painted crude pro-Palestinian slogans, and who has taken that pledge, lied while doing so.

Those are acts against our democracy. Indeed, they are terror attacks, even if governments indolently leave the investigations to suburban police. 
Anyone who daubs buildings and signs with Hamas slogans is supporting a terrorist organisation and, if they took the pledge, lied at that time. 

The Australian Citizenship Pledge is important and serious. I thought so when I took it. Those words define how we choose to live in this country. If you choose not to live that way then this is not the place for you.

Endeavour River north of Cooktown yesterday.