Since the terrorist attacks on southern Israel by Hamas on 7 October (10/7), there has been a spike in recorded antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents in Australia. In the month to 7 November, there were 221 incidents of the former and 133 of the latter. According to the Islamophobia Register Australia, the pre-10/7 average number of incidents per week was 2.5. If representative Islamic associations had condemned the horrific attacks of 10/7 and expressed solidarity with Jewish victims, they would have contributed greatly to combating Islamophobia. Instead, Muslim leaders have collectively failed the victims of 10/7 and the 240 taken hostage. After the attacks on the mosques in Christchurch in March 2019 in which 51 Muslims were killed during Friday prayers, representatives of all faiths conveyed condolences and expressed solidarity. Hijab-clad Jacinda Ardern consoled grieving relatives and held the nation together. When four members of a Muslim family were killed in a racist attack in London, Ontario in June 2021, all Canadian communities including Jews conspicuously stood with Canadian Muslims. Last week Nathaniel Veltman was found guilty of four counts of first degree murder. Rather than consoling Jews, Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s special representative on combating Islamophobia, projects Muslims as the victims of Islamophobia. The Trudeau government gave $123,000 to Laith Marouf as an anti-racism contractor. Then last year they discovered a string of anti-Jewish social posts by him that described Jews as ‘loud-mouthed bags of human faeces’ who deserved only ‘a bullet to the head’.

In the US, 140 ‘prominent feminist scholars’ held in an open letter that to stand in solidarity with Israeli women is to give in to ‘colonial feminism’. Groups committed to ending sexual violence against women have chosen to remain quiet, disbelieve the evidence, or insinuate that they had it coming as settler-colonisers. Sarah Jama, a member of the provincial parliament in Ontario, Canada, has penned an open letter that flatly denies Israeli women were raped and sexually assaulted on 10/7. In her original video, she had described all such incidents as ‘misinformation’ and the open letter says they are ‘unverified accusations’. She was booted from the New Democratic party caucus for her denialism and offered that as proof of ‘the strength of the Zionist lobby’. The open letter’s signatories included Samantha Pearson, director of the University of Alberta Sexual Assault Centre. Clearly, ‘believe all women’ with no evidence needed, but disbelieve Jewish women despite voluminous video evidence from the rapists’ and killers’ own bodycams and eyewitness and postmortem evidence. Where in all this is UN Women – too busy insisting that transwomen are women?

Israel’s strategy has five aims: dismantle Hamas, reduce risks to Israeli soldiers, recover the hostages, limit civilian casualties, and avoid widening the war beyond Gaza. The legal requirement of proportionality does not mean in proportion to the initial attack but in relation to the military objective. The fourth Geneva Convention (1949) deals with the protection of civilians during armed conflict. The protection of hospitals is covered in Article 19. The protection lapses if the hospital is used for military purposes. Israel has taken journalists into Gaza hospitals to show the arms recovered and evidence of their use by Hamas fighters as command posts and to hold hostages.

US intelligence has also concluded that Hamas is using hospitals as command and control centres. This makes them legitimate military targets with some conditions that Israel has tried to satisfy. The responsibility for all resulting loss of civilian life rests wholly with Hamas.

Justin Trudeau is unrivalled in his deluded pretensions to world leadership and rarely misses an opportunity to showcase shallow morality and judgment. At a press conference on 14 November, he said: ‘I urge the government of Israel to exercise maximum restraint. The world is watching on TV and social media… the killing of women and children. Of babies. This has to stop.’ He earned the distinction of becoming the only Western leader to be schooled by PM Netanyahu in a tweet with four deadly sentences:

‘It is not Israel that is deliberately targeting civilians but Hamas that beheaded, burned and massacred civilians in the worst horrors perpetrated on Jews since the Holocaust. While Israel is doing everything to keep civilians out of harm’s way, Hamas is doing everything to keep them in harm’s way. Israel provides civilians in Gaza humanitarian corridors and safe zones, Hamas prevents them from leaving at gunpoint. It is Hamas not Israel that should be held accountable for committing a double war crime – targeting civilians while hiding behind civilians.’

I have in the past warned India’s Prime Minister Modi against the risk of turning India into a ‘Hindu Pakistan’ with efforts to dilute their civic equality of citizenship. For my troubles I have been disinvited from official functions as the main speaker and viciously attacked by Modi’s army of trolls as a self-loathing anti-Indian Hindu, when to my mind it is the rabid Hindutva mob that defiles my religion, with an age-old tradition of multifaith tolerance, with Muslim-hatred. I have also been strongly critical of some Israeli expansionist policies and de facto collective punishment. With the silence of the Muslim majority regarding the atrocities of 10/7 and the hateful chants of the mass demonstrations, all future criticism of Israeli policies will surely be tempered.

Anti-Israeli demonstrators have called for Jews to be gassed, taunted them that the army of Mohammed that massacred Jews in the seventh century will return, urged the globalisation of the intifada, and issued a call to arms for jihad. The terrorists have been valourised, Israel vilified, Jews attacked and threatened, posters of the missing hostages torn down. In Jordan a café is reportedly selling ‘Holocaust coffee’ with the slogan ‘I feel the Arab taste’. It is served with marshmallows in the blue and white colours of the Israeli flag that are burnt before serving. Had community leaders issued statements disassociating the majority of Muslims from these vile chants, their calls for justice for Palestinians would have had credibility and resonance.

Islamic community leaders chose the option of equivocating, contextualising and even justifying what was done. Had they spoken out immediately and forcefully, the attacks would have been widely seen as a cowardly and evil acts of a terrorist group unrepresentative of the Palestinian, Arab and Islamic communities. Instead their silence on the attacks, the triumphalist celebrations by demonstrators and the subsequent acts and words of hostility directed at Jews have given rise to perceptions of a broader support for what was done. This will fuel an anti-Muslim backlash.