Gaza’s carnage, Australia’s complicity
The situation in Gaza is catastrophic, the silence in Australian press and political circles is devastating.
Eighteen pages of dead babies in Gaza—like anyone can pretend that is normal. The Gaza Health Ministry has released a 1,000-page document listing the names, ages, and details of 52,959 Palestinians killed in Gaza. Of those, the first 5,000 are children under five years old, with the first eighteen pages naming infants under one year old. This is the minimum count, yet Australia remains largely unaware. With a government basking in a post-election high and the press fixated on the Coalition’s split, the most devastating phase of Israel’s genocide in Gaza unfolds unnoticed.
The ABC website ignores the eighteen pages of dead infants, prioritizing Alan Kohler’s analyses suggesting the Liberals could become more palatable with a credible climate policy and coverage of former opposition leader John Pesutto’s legal woes. Its ‘World News’ section highlights Trump and the PM’s Europe tour via the Vatican, relegating two Gaza updates—‘Israel issues evacuation warning ahead of “unprecedented attack” in south Gaza’ and ‘Five aid trucks enter Gaza after months-long humanitarian blockade’—to smaller thumbnails.
The five aid trucks allowed into Gaza carried consignments of lime dust and shrouds for the dead, while the “unprecedented attack” in south Gaza marked the start of ‘Operation Gideon’s Chariots,’ through which Israel began occupying the entire Gaza Strip to displace its 2.1 million Palestinians, aiming to ethnically cleanse the region. Yet, such analysis is absent from Australian media, even the once-trendsetting ABC. Consequently, the nation remains ignorant of a horror that appalls those who witness it and condemns those who hide it behind ‘impartiality.’
Gideon, a biblical figure, led the Israelites to annihilate the Midianites, descendants of the Amalekites. In October 2023, as Israel’s reprisal for the events of October 7 escalated into genocide, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked this legacy, equating Palestinians with Amalek: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” Centuries later, Israel’s modern ‘Amalekites’ are Gaza’s malnourished, devastated children and innocents, crushed by tanks—Gideon’s chariots—in a mechanized, combined-operation genocide.
As the ‘operation’ began with 60,000 IDF troops declaring half of Gaza a ‘warzone,’ over a twenty-four-hour period where at least 153 people and children were shredded in Gaza, people like Palestinian weightlifting champion Hussein Odeh left his last surviving family behind at home—his three sons, Khaled, Yusuf, and Mohammed—in a rush to get a vehicle to evacuate the newly declared war zone. When he returned, he found his home flattened by an Israeli airstrike and his children under the rubble, breaking down into a mess. “I just want at least one of my children to be alive,” he screamed in a state of overwhelming grief. “I swear I dressed them up to get them out of here.”
Within a week, the massacre’s pace has intensified, with desperate pleas from Gaza’s trapped civilians leaking through the mainstream press’s information vacuum. The UN warns that 14,000 babies face death from starvation and malnutrition within 48 hours, adding to hundreds of pages of dead children. Strikes on Jabalia’s refugee camps, burning tents at Al-Mawasi, dawn bombings in Khan Younis, and decaying patients at the Indonesian Hospital escalate the carnage. More journalists, health workers, and children perish in Israel’s genocidal campaign.
The moral disconnect on display from our leaders is stark, wide, and devastating. Exposed in the light of the hundreds of lifeless children crushed by Israeli ordnance and the screams of thousands like Hussein Odeh, Foreign Minister Penny Wong posted her bare minimum about the need for a ‘full and immediate resumption of aid into Gaza’ without daring to acknowledge the genocidal realities or the need for a full and immediate suspension of diplomatic and economic activity with Tel Aviv. The Prime Minister has met with an Indonesian President, a new Pope, an unelected EU Commission President, and schmoozed with global leaders at the Vatican since winning a historic election victory only weeks ago, but he hasn’t mentioned Israel or Gaza in months.
The Australian media bolsters the bleak moral stance of our political class, acting as a filter to suppress Gaza’s genocide. By sacking journalists critical of Israel or supportive of Palestinians and enforcing executive-defined ‘impartiality,’ the media, honed by disinformation tactics from pandemics and bushfires, obscures stories like Hussein Odeh’s, the eighteen pages of dead infants, the 18,000 babies lives at risk in 48 hours, the reality of ‘destroying the rubble’, and the daily deaths of dozens of children.
With the government and media rerouted by Zionist interests, the chariots of Israels war ride out against those with a platform who speak out at home or abroad, chipping away at the reasonable humans who voice their concerns. In a country where whistle-blowers are punished with vigour, and criminals are board members and public servants—if you captain a football side, play concert piano in an orchestra, work at a public broadcaster, act as a public servant, operate at a public hospital, or inhabit a public profile, you are at risk of being compressed into oblivion by the incessant weight of disproportionately powerful Zionist whistle blowers. Corporate remits have seen the sudden removal of sports commentators, preferred candidates, and seasoned academics. Our leaders are not just complicit in a genocide in some way or another, but for allowing the wheels of Israel’s reprisal to roll in or far-away secular society, and over the rubble of what was once our sovereign moral soul and our national collective humanity.
As the IDF’s tanks—Gideon’s bloodthirsty chariots—destroy Gaza’s rubble with unrelenting hatred, aided by Western enablers including Australia’s government, the world grows numb to Israel’s systematic killing. The genocide’s scale shifts with external pressure, emboldened by empty rhetoric from figures like Penny Wong, pushing toward the eradication of Gaza’s 2.1 million Palestinians. This physical devastation creates a psychological nightmare for global witnesses, trapped in nations led by leaders who shield an irreconcilable horror, enabling the destruction of an entire people.
Eighteen pages of dead infants—likely a fraction of the true toll—are ignored by our leaders in Canberra who do little to pressure Israel to stop the carnage, and shelved by a media who have abrogated their duty to shape domestic discussions on the nature of this horrible genocide. Canada, France, and the UK have updated their stances on Israel’s slaughter, yet the Albanese government remains silent. Even if Canberra offers belated, sterner words, it lags behind growing global action against Israel. As the UN pleads for aid to prevent 14,000 babies’ deaths within 48 hours amid countless dead children, where is the progressive Labor government’s voice, more focused on criticising minor parties than condemning Western weapons and starvation policies devastating Gaza’s children?
Anyone in Australia who cares knows that eighteen pages of dead babies, a hundred pages of dead pre-school children, sniped toddlers, burnt civilians in tents, and perhaps even 14,000 starved-to-death babies in 48 hours won’t yet change Penny Wong’s words to actions, nor tempt the media’s reticence to form objective criticism of Israel in the name of impartiality. Just like another week’s worth of decapitated youth and starved-to-death kids won’t sway people in Canberra who feign concern and talk mightily about values and friendship with other like-minded countries that want the world to be as it currently is. Not this week, and not for over eighteen months of unprecedented carnage—its the silence between the feeble words that wound the most.
You will want to know there has been consistent analysis and strong criticism of Israel in Pearls & Irritations — which has a wide reach.
Dave Milner at The Shot also strong.
It’s MSM that have been weak. ABC sending John Lyons to US a great loss.
You should also note the demotion of outspoken Ed Husic from the ministry by the right wing of the Labor party. Prior to that they forced another outspoken Muslim out of the party.