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

Protests over the weekend in Sydney and Melbourne featured a variety of banners, flags and images showing the advocacy of Hezbollah and Hamas.

They contained photos of slain terrorist leaders Hassan Nasrallah and Ismail Nasrallah, including signs saying “a nation led by martyrs will triumph.”

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

The law is not old: the Criminal Code was amended less than a year ago, apparently to prevent exactly the kind of scenes we saw in Australia’s two biggest cities this weekend.

However, the AFP has issued a statement saying that simply holding a flag of a terrorist organization, or a photo of a terrorist leader, is not enough to break the law.

If that is true, the law needs to be updated, and quickly.

Scenes like the ones we saw this weekend have no place in Australia.

Flags representing these terrorist organizations, waved by young men hiding their identities behind face masks, presumably in an attempt to evade police detection, cannot be justified under the banner of freedom of expression.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has called for action. Labor Chancellor of the Exchequer Katy Gallagher called him divisive when he did so.

Dutton is the divisive one because he is willing to expose the bad behavior of a few? Give me a break.

The Prime Minister took a deep breath and said what happened this weekend was “worrying”, declining to name the terrorist organization.

The government has announced a special envoy to ‘fight Islamophobia’, as if that will solve the deteriorating situation on our streets.

The right to protest is something that democracies highly value, but there are limits.

Where are the left-wing voices expressing their concerns about what we are witnessing?

Remember when then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was addressing a rally outside Parliament House and signs appeared behind him saying: ‘Juliar is Bob Brown’s b**ch’?

It was a protest against the carbon tax.

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

The famous signals that got Tony Abbott in trouble

In any case, the offensive nature of these banners – and they certainly were offensive – pales into insignificance next to the advocacy signs now calling for martyrdom on behalf of an officially designated terrorist organization.

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

According to reports yesterday, Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi was in Sydney this weekend.

Where is the social media outrage that still resonates today when it comes to Abbott’s far less evil actions from over a decade ago than what we see now?

The hypocrisy is evident.

There is no doubt about Labour’s political timidity in dealing with growing public advocacy for violent terrorist organizations, as Labor does not want to face a backlash in Muslim communities in the outer metropolitan electorates ahead of a tight election campaign.

Protesters at a pro-Palestine rally in Melbourne earlier this year. There is no suggestion that the individuals depicted above support Hamas or Hezbollah

As sickening as this reasoning is, the Greens are also trying to leverage pro-Palestinian advocacy in the inner-city areas of Sydney and Melbourne.

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

One wonders whether some of the left’s more radical proponents—who espouse partisans on a variety of issues designed to “destroy capitalism”—will ever think about how they should live under the terrorist regimes that have been in charge in parts. of Palestine.

In short, they probably wouldn’t live under it for long, because most left-wing values ​​on everything from sexuality to drug liberalization and many other freedoms of expression conflict with the way Hamas, for example, governs Gaza.

And that’s just the beginning.

But out of the luxury of enjoying protection in this country, these eternal opponents of the Western values ​​from which they benefit are siding with the kinds of organizations that would deprive them of their rights.

Politicians must rise above such stupidity and promote the national interest. In the case of the Labor government, this means they need to do much more than is currently the case.