The flags will unfurl, the crowds will cheer, the bands will play, an explosion of red, green, black and white balloons will fill the air. Children will dance and sing joyously, and the sound of festive firecrackers will be heard above the merry laughter of the singing, dancing, ululating, jubilant crowds rushing into the streets after blessings and prayers. And in their hearts, the citizens of this new, peace-loving State of Palestine will forever hold a special place, on this special day, for those wonderful Labor folk far away in Punchbowl, Marrickville and Maroubra who made it all possible.

Such is the latest fantasy of the deluded fools of NSW Labor.

The reality, of course, will be different. It won’t be firecrackers crackling in the festive air, it will be Kalashnikovs. It won’t be balloons bursting over Ramallah skies, it will be Katyusha and Qassam rockets, shipped in specially for the festivities by the ever-so-helpful Iranian government with the express purpose of bringing terror and death to innocent women and children only a few miles away.

Far from righting some imagined grave historic wrong, moves by the NSW branch of the Labor party to demand a future Australian federal Labor government unconditionally recognises a Palestinian state will only encourage and reward the same ideology in which terror and Islamism have so successfully thrived.

Whatever merits the case for an independent Palestinian state may or may not have (and let’s not forget, there are plenty of other groups who equally hanker after their own nation), the inescapable conclusion is that this particular quest for an aggrieved people to achieve statehood was long ago infused and riddled with the cancer of radical Islam. Indeed, it was the Palestinian Liberation Organisation who early on set the blueprint for modern terrorism with the grotesque and tragic murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, along with a spate of hijackings. Fellow-travellers the PLF then slayed Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro. More recently, a beautiful Australian teenage girl, Malki Roth, was murdered along with fourteen others by a Palestinian suicide bomber at a birthday party at a pizza parlour in Jerusalem. Sickeningly, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated woman who organised those murders (she especially chose a place where there would be lots of kids) is feted throughout Jordan and Palestine as a hero and a celebrity. Which is hardly surprising, given that in the Hamas-controlled enclave of Gaza (freely and unconditionally handed over to the Palestinians by Israel in 2005), there is a special luxury suburb reserved exclusively for those whose family members have killed Jews.

Not that they need much encouragement. From the pulpits of the local mosques, where frenzied imams brandishing sharpened daggers implore their Palestinian congregations to ‘Stab! Stab! Stab!’ Jews in the name of Allah, to the local TV stations, where cartoons and chat shows pump out instructions to Palestinian kiddies on how best to stab Jews to death, much of the culture and political ideology of the potential Palestinian ‘state’ is geared towards one ultimate goal: the removal and preferably death of every Jew and the eradication of any hint of a state of Israel.

Tellingly, when a group of Australian journalists visited the PLO headquarters in Ramallah not long ago, they were informed as to what the ‘two-state solution’ would look like from a PLO perspective. The first state, they were told, would obviously be called Palestine; it would be Muslim and have absolutely no Jews in it. And the second state? According to this particular spokesperson it could be called ‘Israel or whatever you want to call it’. And how many Jews in that State? After a huddled discussion in Arabic, the spokesperson declared: ‘A handful of Jews in it, at most’. Not desperately encouraging if you’re hoping for an harmonious, longterm relationship.

The NSW branch of the Labor party, no doubt encouraged by the likes of Bob Carr and Tony Burke, choose to ignore the realities of entrenched Palestinian anti-Semitism. Indeed, addressing a pro-Palestinian event, Mr Burke once spoke of ‘the bravery that comes with putting your life on the line and at risk, in engaging in politics in different ways.’ To the best of our knowledge, he has never retracted or explained those comments; comments which can easily be interpreted as tacit support for terrorism. Certainly that is how they would be received in Gaza and the West Bank.

‘Settlements’ are of course the rationale for this latest push, despite the fact that such Israeli developments take up a small and inconsequential footprint of land. But however important, the issue of settlements is dwarfed by the murderous ideology espoused at so many levels of Palestinian society.

To reward such an ideology with unconditional recognition of statehood sans guarantees of peace is to reward and encourage more murder and mayhem. NSW Labor should hang their heads in shame.