PETER VAN ONSELEN: Do Lefties realise what Hezbollah and Hamas would do to people like them if THEY ran Australia?

Weekend protests in Sydney and Melbourne saw all manner of banners, flags and pictures emblazoned with Hezbollah and Hamas advocacy. 

They included pictures of slain terrorist leaders Hassan Nasrallah and Ismail Nasrallah, including signs declaring ‘a nation led by martyrs will triumph’. 

Hezbollah and Hamas are listed as terrorist organisations. It is an offence to display symbols of such organisations. 

The law isn’t an old one – the criminal code was amended less than a year ago, seemingly to prevent exactly the sort of scenes we witnessed in Australia’s two largest cities over the weekend. 

However, the AFP released a statement claiming that merely holding a flag of a terrorist organisation, or photo of a terrorist leader, isn’t enough to fall foul of the law. 

If that is true the law needs updating and quickly. 

Scenes like those we saw on the weekend have no place in Australia.  

Flags representing these terrorist organisations being waved by young men hiding their identity behind face masks, presumably in a bid to evade police detection, can’t be justified under the banner of free speech. 

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has called for action. Labor’s finance minister Katy Gallagher called him divisive when he did. 

Dutton is the divisive one because he’s prepared to call out the bad behaviour of a few? Give me a break.  

The PM took a deep breath and said what transpired on the weekend was ‘worrying’, refusing to name the terror organisation when doing so. 

The government announced a special envoy to ‘combat Islamophobia’, as though that will fix this worsening situation on our streets. 

The right to protest is something democracies hold dear, but there are limits. 

Where are the left wing voices expressing concerns about what we are now bearing witness to? 

Remember when then-opposition leader Tony Abbott addressed a rally outside parliament house and signs appeared behind him while he was doing so stating: ‘Juliar is Bob Brown’s b**ch’? 

It was an anti-carbon tax rally. 

Abbott claimed not to have known the signs were there, condemning them when confronted with the images. 

The famous signs that got Tony Abbott in trouble 

Either way, the offensive natures of those banners – and they certainly were offensive – pales into insignificance alongside advocacy signs now calling for martyrdom on behalf of an officially listed terrorist organisation. 

And some federal parliamentarians have even attended these weekend rallies and others like them in recent months, presumably as a show of support. 

On the weekend the Deputy Leader of the Greens, Mehreen Faruqi, was in attendance in Sydney according to reports yesterday. 

Where is the outrage on social media that still permeates today when it comes to Abbott’s far lesser of evil actions more than a decade ago for what we are now witnessing? 

The hypocrisy is off the charts. 

Labor’s political timidity dealing with the growing public advocacy for violent terror organisations is no doubt because it doesn’t want to face a backlash in Muslim communities in outer metropolitan electorates ahead of a tight election campaign. 

Protesters at a pro-Palestine rally in Melbourne earlier this year. It is not suggested those pictured above support Hamas or Hezbollah

As sickening as that rationale is, the Greens are also looking to tap into pro-Palestine advocacy in inner city areas of Sydney and Melbourne. 

We’ve already seen how anti-Semitic (and out of control) such protests can get on university campuses. 

You wonder if some of the more radical cause advocates on the Left – who wheel out supporters on a variety of issues designed to ‘smash capitalism’ – ever stop to consider how they would go living under the terrorist regimes that have been in charge in parts of Palestine. 

In short they probably wouldn’t live under them for very long, because most left wing values on everything from sexuality, to drug liberalisation, to many other freedoms of expression are anathema with how, for example, Hamas governs Gaza. 

And that is just for starters. 

But from the luxury of enjoying the protections in this country, these perennial opponents of the western values they benefit from choose to side with the sort of organisations that would strip away their rights. 

Politicians need to rise above such stupidity and look after the national interest. In the case of the Labor government, that means doing much more than it is now.