After two years of non-stop rabble rousing by pro-Palestinian mobs, the government is finally getting hot and bothered about the perpetual protesters. It’s not hard to see why. Last Sunday, independent Senator Lidia Thorpe said she would ‘burn down Parliament House if she had to,’ to help Palestine.

It’s not clear why Thorpe thinks burning down parliament would help Palestinians, but then again, Hamas and its supporters set cars, houses, tanks and whole kibbutzes alight on 7 October, and plenty of Australians shared the videos of those atrocities, expressing their delight and approval. So, when Thorpe and the Pallywags get together, why should we be surprised that her talk is ‘incendiary’?

Twenty-four hours later, Thorpe put out a statement explaining that her threat to burn down Parliament House was a figure of speech, a metaphor for the pain of her communities, accusing her critics of clutching their pearls in fake horror.

But those with memories longer than a goldfish will recall that in 2021, Thorpe said that Old Parliament House’s doors being set on fire seemed like the ‘colonial system burning’.

The federal police are investigating Thorpe’s comments, which, if they are taking their lead from the NSW police, probably means that in two months, they will announce that they have consulted an expert and what Thorpe actually said was ‘turn down parliament’s mouse’, a cryptic complaint about the IT department.

The Minister for the Resettlement of Gazans in Australia, Tony Burke, was unhappy at Thorpe making a bid for the Hamas-hugging vote that he has assiduously cultivated over the last two years by banning Israelis and turning up at the airport to personally welcome new arrivals from Gaza.

Burke said his department officials were focused on allowing the 600 to 700 people who had already been granted visas into Australia. But as shadow spokesman for just-about-everything Senator James Paterson put it, Australians ‘are entitled to be sceptical’ about Burke’s assurance that proper checks have been done on the 700 visas granted to Palestinians due to enter the country in coming weeks.

How Burke’s burka-crats conducted security vetting on the residents of Gaza as Israel was busy blowing up terror tunnels and Hamas executed collaborators is a challenge for the imagination.

When he was asked about Thorpe’s threat to barbecue the parliament, Burke said that ‘of course’ Senator Thorpe’s comment was not acceptable, and that if the temperature could be lowered in Gaza, ‘it should be able to be lowered in Canberra’. Throwing himself into metaphor, he continued that, ‘The concept of wanting to inflame, push the temperature up, is not what anyone should be doing, least of all a member of parliament.’

For his part, the Prime Minister pleaded with the protesters to ‘turn down the heat’, before heading off for a week’s holiday, sunning himself on a secret tropical island. Like former prime minister Morrison, Albanese has not disclosed in an official statement that he is headed overseas. While Morrison spent time with his family in Hawaii in 2019, Albanese and Labor shamelessly demonised him for taking an overseas break while bushfires were burning in Australia, turning his wreath of tropical flowers into crown of thorns that they made him wear right through to defeat at the 2022 election. So Albanese was no doubt desperately hoping that Thorpe’s rhetoric would not spark a political firestorm. No such luck.

Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek leaned into the metaphor, saying that Labor didn’t want to give Thorpe’s remarks extra air, adding, ‘We’re holding our breaths.’ Better late than never, perhaps, but it’s a pity Labor didn’t hose down the flames of antisemitism two years ago when wannabe jihadis were burning Israeli flags on the steps of the Opera House and chanting ‘Gas the Jews!’

Notwithstanding Thorpe’s invective, it’s been a depressing time for the rent-a-crowd crew. Her Melbourne rally was part of a series of coordinated demonstrations across the nation, which marched for the 105th time in the streets of Australia’s CBDs, yelling ‘globalise the intifada’ and ‘Israel is a terror state’.

Yet, having shrieked themselves hoarse calling for a ‘ceasefire NOW!’ for two years, it has been a bitter pill to swallow that a peace treaty has been brokered by none other than the ‘Orange Man’ progressives loathe more than anyone on Earth, with the exception of the Israeli prime minister. Indeed, Trump Derangement Syndrome has transmogrified into Israel Derangement Syndrome, which can be confusing since the president and the prime minister are both meant to be Hitler.

Times are dire. After lugging around the banners of Hamas, Isis, the Taliban, the Trotskyists and the teachers’ union every weekend to wave in the glaring faces of Australian shoppers fed up with loudmouths clogging up the CBD for the umpteenth time, imagine seeing, among the extraordinary scenes of jubilation in Gaza, a group of young men chanting, ‘I love you, Donald Trump!’ No wonder the 90,000-strong crowd that marched over the Sydney Harbour Bridge only a few weeks ago had dwindled to a few thousand people last weekend.

Staying at home glued to social media offered no respite. There was no sign of their Big Fat Gazan Genocide. Instead of Instagram reels about famine, dozens of videos showed fat Gazans guzzling pizza and scoffing baklava from vast baking trays. One tubby lad walked proudly on screen with a huge board laden with flat bread. No need to ask, ‘Who ate all the pita?’ The caption said that he’d finally got bread to feed his family. Presumably, previously, he’d only found enough to satisfy his own visibly capacious consumption requirements.

Australian Juliet Lamont, who joined Greta’s Club Med/Hamas cruise, told the faithful at a Sydney rally that the Prime Minister needed to distance Australia from the ‘Trumpian bully-boy death cult’. Fellow flotilla participant Abubakir Rafiq started to tear up at the memory of his two-day-long detention in Israel. But there was such a shortage of starving people that Greta Thunberg accidentally posted, as proof of ‘the suffering of Palestinian prisoners’, a photo of skeletal Israeli hostage, Evyatar David, crossing off the days on a calendar while entombed in a Hamas terror tunnel for two years. Did the irony of her error get through to the flotilla fans who shrieked in horror at Greta’s two-day detention? It seems unlikely.