Brendan Nugent describes himself on X as a ‘plant person’ who believes ‘The world should be run by dogs and children’. If that sounds a little like a certain failed Austrian painter who was a vegetarian, loved dogs and was fond of children, it should be a warning to all: benign personal enthusiasms are no guarantee of benign political convictions.

Nugent, charged over the horrific attack on independent MP Helen Haines, spent years campaigning against logging old growth forests before pivoting his attention to Gaza. Police have yet to establish a motive for the attack, but the trajectory of his interests reflects a wider phenomenon: the convergence of environmental radicalism and militant anti-Israel activism.

The most conspicuous international example is Grumpy Greta. The Swedish schoolgirl with an innocent-looking plait who went on strike over climate change has become the poster girl for Gaza, donning a keffiyeh and joining Hamas-sponsored flotillas attempting to breach Israel’s naval blockade. The transition from saving the planet to saving Palestine required net-zero ideological adjustment.

The Greens have made the same journey, from tree-huggers and dam busters to becoming the most prominent parliamentary champions of the Palestinian cause. The ideological connection is easily understood once you think of the Greens as ‘watermelons’ – green on the outside, red on the inside. The Marxist worldview divides humanity into oppressors and oppressed, with Western democracies, capitalism and colonialism all variations of the same original sinners.

It makes for an extraordinary alliance. The secular, feminist, sexually progressive Western left has found common cause with Islamist movements whose authoritarianism, treatment of women and hostility to homosexuality contradict everything the left professes to defend.

Hamas, it hardly needs to be said, is not a progressive national liberation movement but an Islamist terrorist organisation, rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood, whose vision for Palestine is a local branch of a global caliphate. Yet hatred of Israel obscures this inconvenient truth from the Islamists’ useful Western idiots.

That does not mean everyone who campaigns for Palestinian rights supports Hamas, or turns a blind eye to its atrocities. Yet Hamas’ political narrative – Israel as an illegitimate, genocidal oppressor and Palestinian violence as legitimate resistance –has found a distressingly receptive audience among Western activists, including some working in the media, notably at the ABC. In this telling, the atrocities of 7 October, the origins of the war and Hamas’s objectives blur into the background, a mere footnote to the main game.

The main game is the accusation of genocide – and the deliberate slaughter of children – an allegation of criminality and moral depravity that would place Israel in the company of the perpetrators of history’s worst atrocities. It is a deliberately calculated inversion of reality that takes the crime of the Holocaust and hurls it in the face of victims and their descendants. It takes the behaviour of Hamas and brazenly projects it onto Israel. And it more or less erases everything that Israel has done to minimise civilian casualties while eliminating the terrorists hiding behind them.

Compare this with Ukraine, whom Russia invaded in February 2022. Ukraine has killed up to 450,000 Russians (overwhelmingly soldiers), yet few question its right to retaliate. Israel, in retaliating against the invasion of Hamas, has killed some 74,000 Gazans (of which a significant number are combatants), yet it is treated as if it had no right to eliminate an enemy who targets its civilians and take them hostage, while hiding behind its own, and openly seeks Israel’s destruction.

Yet the genocide accusation has acquired a veneer of authority in the eyes of the protesters through international lawfare. South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice in December 2023. The Court’s widely misrepresented interim order of January 2024 did not find that Israel had committed genocide, or that genocidal intent had been established, merely that Palestinians in Gaza had plausible rights under the Genocide Convention requiring protection while the case proceeded. That has been falsely interpreted as a finding of genocide.

The accusation received further spurious substance from the United Nations – who could be surprised? In September 2025, its Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. This was a foregone conclusion not a court judgment. The kangaroo court was comprised of three unashamedly anti-Israel critics, its findings were not tested through adversarial judicial proceedings, and its interpretation of Israeli conduct and statements was outrageously biased and thus fiercely contested.

Yet the distinction between accusation, investigative finding and judicial determination has been erased by activists, for whom questioning it is tantamount to defending genocide.

That is where the heat in this dispute comes from.

Following the appalling attack on Helen Haines, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urged politicians, journalists and social-media users to ‘turn the temperature down’. But political violence is not simply the result of people speaking too loudly or disagreeing too vehemently.

His own intelligence chief has been specific about multiple sources of extremism. In his November 2025 Lowy Lecture, Asio director-general Mike Burgess singled out Islamist groups who are normalising antisemitism and warned that revolutionary extremists were increasingly willing to threaten or embrace violence, citing arson, vandalism and intimidation of employees at defence companies accused of supplying Israel as well as confirming that Iran had directed antisemitic arson attacks in Australia.

Despite these warnings, the Albanese government has fanned the flames of dissension, approving grants to organisations that promote antisemitic and inflammatory Islamist content, preaching that husbands may beat their wives, calling for terror to be cast into the hearts of Zionists, and dismissing antisemitic attacks in Sydney as fabricated. Only after the grants attracted mainstream media coverage did the government move to revoke them.

Albanese cannot credibly call for moderation while failing not only to confront the extremism identified by his own intelligence chief but abetting it. He also has to stop treating the genocide accusation against Israel as an uncontested fact rather than a scurrilous allegation against an ally with no credible evidence to back it up because it transforms political opponents from people with whom one disagrees into accomplices to humanity’s worst crime.

If the Prime Minister wants to turn down the temperature, he must confront what is feeding the fire. His problem is not a shortage of warnings. It is his government’s shameful failure to act on them.