It’s the latest mad leftist doctrine, as insisted on by the well-meaning and ever-so progressive elites, and it runs something like this: ‘By all means go to war to defeat your deadly and diabolical foe but, er, make sure you don’t actually hurt anyone on the way’. This would appear to be the mantra currently adopted by those hand-wringing leaders of the Western world with their tut-tutting and ever so sanctimonious approach to Israel. ‘Yes,’ they cry as one, ‘of course you have a right to self-defence… but we’re keeping a very strict eye on you!’

This condescending admonishing and cautioning of Israel is, quite frankly, sickening. Our own Prime Minister and members of his team delight in wagging a finger at the Israeli government, hiding their self-evident distaste for the Jewish state behind asinine comments such as, ‘We say that Israel has a right to defend itself but how it defends itself matters. Every life matters’. (Funny, isn’t it, how ‘All Lives Matter” was deemed a ‘racist’ and highly offensive slogan during the Black Lives Matter riots and deaths of only a couple of years ago. Yet now that is all we hear from the bellowing left, apart, of course, from when it comes to condemning the deaths of over 1,400 Jews at the hands of Hamas, where they retreat into cowardly silence.)

The people of Israel do not need lectures from Mr Albanese or anyone else as to how to conduct their affairs.

Sadly, this magazine does not recall any similar admonishing or warnings over recent years being meted out by Western leaders on prime time television to the rulers of Gaza itself. Nothing along the lines of, ‘Of course Hamas has a right to protest against Israel’s settlement of those areas of the Negev that they believe they have a God-given right to, but how it goes around raping women, putting their babies in ovens or chopping off parents limbs and eyes in front of their children is what matters.’

There is good and there is evil. From time to time even the most sceptical individual should appreciate that a moral equivalence between two foes does not always apply. Sometimes, evil crosses a threshold and must be stopped. This is what is taking place in Gaza. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be fair. It won’t be without its own awful tragedies. But Hamas must be irrevocably destroyed.

Yet as always, Israel is held to not only a much higher standard than everyone else, including other Western powers, but it is also held in barely disguised moral contempt. Always the calls for ‘restraint’, even after the most bloodthirsty, evil and barbaric pogrom since the Holocaust.

The rot of moral relativism and the blight of pernicious critical race theory has opened a further danger to the West. Sadly, and predictably, an entire generation of university students appears largely marinated in Marxism, soaked in grievance politics and floundering with no clear moral compass to guide them. Those individuals and academics who have disgraced themselves by tearing down the flyers of kidnapped Israeli children or who somehow justify the Hamas murders deserve utter condemnation. It is time to hold to account those Western universities and schools that have abandoned traditional values and decency, permitting hard-left activists to ride roughshod throughout campuses.

We have seen Foreign Minister Penny Wong applauded on the social media account of the Hamas-supporting Quds News Network, as David Adler points out in this week’s cover story. Alas, no such lauding on any Jewish or Israeli websites for her condemnation of the murders and atrocities of 7 October that we’ve noticed thus far. Indeed, Dr Adler, who accurately predicted in these pages not only that Joe Biden would bring war to the Middle East, but who also led the battle to prevent Australian tax dollars going to fund terrorism via UNRWA, now rightly asks the question: is Labor policy complicit with Hamas? Read and judge for yourself.

Also this week, Ida Lichter explains how insidious the Iranian regime is and how far the reach of its terrorist tentacles. And yet again, the moral perversion of the left is plain for all to see: laughably accusing Israel of being a ‘coloniser’ whilst ignoring the vast Iranian empire being built through blood and terror. And finally, Peter O’Brien asks another pertinent question: are all these Australian pro-Palestinian protest groups being asked to pay for the huge police presences required to maintain the peace?

Difficult and uncomfortable questions also arise surrounding immigration and assimilation policies throughout the West. When 100,000 angry Palestinian supporters, the vast majority of whom are likely to be second-generation immigrants from strife-torn Islamic countries, can march through the streets of London and perform mass Islamic prayers in Trafalgar Square and in front of Downing Street, one must question – as John Howard has rightly done – the wisdom of so-called ‘multiculturalism’.

At a time when the Albanese government is planning on bringing in far more immigrants per annum than this nation has ever dealt with, cultural alarm bells should be ringing.