Last week, Grumpy Greta, the pint-sized prophet of Climate Doom cum Hamas hobgoblin, claimed to have been abducted by Israel from her Hamas-sponsored Club Med flotilla. On seeing her hostage video, at least one incensed Swede begged Israel to keep her.

Plenty of Australians feel the same. For 104 weeks, Australia’s civic spaces have been hijacked by leftists and Islamists, calling for the annihilation of Israel. We have seen the flags of multiple terrorist groups – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban and Isis – waving in our streets and a portrait of the Ayatollah Khamenei paraded over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Firebrand sheikhs have addressed jubilant throngs celebrating the Hamas massacre from 8 October 2023 to 7 October 2025.

The war launched by Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, on 7 October 2023, was a new chapter in the war on the West. Yet while it paralleled the attacks of 11 September, 2001, in many ways, it has been both more devastating for Israel and more successful globally.

Numbers tell only part of the story. Some 2,977 people were murdered on 9/11 in the US out of a then population of 285 million. In Israel, 1,195 were murdered out of a population of only 9.8 million. So, on a per capita basis, the Hamas massacre was at least twelve times more devastating for Israel than al-Qaeda’s attack on the US.

Scale also matters. In Israel, there are only two or three degrees of separation between individuals. Almost no one was untouched. That so many of the victims were in the flower of their youth added an unbearably poignant dimension.

Scale matters geographically too. Israel is only 470 km from north to south at its longest, 135 km at its widest, and less than 15 km at its narrowest. From the Nova music festival site in the Negev desert to the furthest border is only a few hours’ drive.

Then, there are the hostages. Once the planes had crashed on 9/11, the attacks were over. The pain though immense was finite. With 251 hostages dragged into Gaza – men, women, children, infants, and the elderly – 20 of whom are still subject to starvation – there is no end to the nightmare: for families waiting in agony, for the nation seeing hostages paraded in propaganda videos, for Jewish communities worldwide, and for anybody with a shred of decency. It has turned 7 October into an ongoing nightmare that Israel lives with, without respite.

Nor was 7 October the work of just a handful of fanatics. Nineteen men carried out 9/11, masterminded by Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and backed by Al-Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden, based in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban.

On 7 October, some 3,000 Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel, backed by tens of thousands of militants and hundreds of thousands of supporters in Gaza, and backers in Qatar, Iran and Turkey. Videos showed crowds in Gaza cheering and abusing hostages, and rallies around the world celebrated the massacre, most notoriously on the steps of the Sydney Opera House

Polling showed support for armed struggle in Gaza peaking in March 2023 at 55 per cent and 54 per cent in the West Bank. A poll in December 2023 still showed support of 54 per cent overall and was especially strong in the West Bank. By May 2025, it was still at 41 per cent overall but had fallen significantly in Gaza to only 31 per cent, where the folly and devastation of war was experienced firsthand, but remained at 48 per cent in the West Bank. So, in 2023, about 1.15 million in Gaza out of a population of 2.1 million and about 1.85 million in the West Bank out of a population of 3.4 million supported armed struggle.

Israel was also plunged into a war on seven fronts. The core battlefield was in Gaza, with over 13,200 rockets and projectiles fired at Israel, as well as rockets, missiles, drones, and shelling from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and attacks from Iranian proxies and militias in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, from terrorists in the West Bank, and from Iran itself.

The most devastating aspect of the attack on Israel, however, was that everything about its history, the history of the Jews, and of the Holocaust, has been twisted and inverted to demonise Israel and falsely accuse it of hideous war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Those engaged in this task are not just barbaric Islamists but university-brainwashed Westerners who claim the moral high ground as they lie and distort to portray Israel as a state unworthy of existence.

Meanwhile, the perpetrators of horrific war crimes against Israel, who make no secret of their genocidal intentions towards Jews, present themselves as innocent victims of Israeli and Western aggression and demand a state as a reparation for all their suffering, a state which they have repeatedly said they will turn into a platform from which to destroy Israel.

On his way back from the United Nations, Prime Minister Albanese stopped in at Abu Dhabi. Unfortunately, he didn’t visit the Abrahamic Family House, a single complex that houses a mosque, a church and a synagogue. It is a symbol of interfaith harmony and the foundation for the UAE’s recognition of Israel. It should stand as a model.

Australia should only accept Muslims who genuinely embrace coexistence with Jews and Christians. Citizenship must mean loyalty to the Western values of the Enlightenment. Those who support Islamist terrorism should be denied entry. The brides of Isis, secretly allowed to re-enter Australia without facing a trial for treason, are a case in point.

What happened on 7 October in Israel was only possible because it became complacent. Australia should learn the lesson and follow the lead of those Arab states which have banned the Muslim Brotherhood, its propaganda arm, Al Jazeera, Hizb-ut Tahrir and all other Islamist organisations. The threat these organisations pose is real.

When Greta Thunberg claimed last week to have been abducted by Israel, it was an obscene parody of what happened to Eli Sharabi and 250 other people in Israel on 7 October. Entombed in a terror tunnel, Sharabi lost nearly half his body weight, shrinking to only 44 kilos. He recounts how his captors repeatedly watched the footage of 7 October and said that after Israel, they would come for France, the UK, and the US. You can be sure that Australia would not be spared in this quest for a global caliphate. We have been warned.