Michael Sukkar MP

Adjournment Debate: Support for Israel

There’s no doubt that Hamas are a bloodthirsty death cult. That’s all they are. I say to Australians: imagine that your worst enemy, the person you hate the most in the world, the person that you feel most aggrieved about. There’s no Australian that could harm the child of that person that they hate. The idea that Hamas has entered the sovereign territory of Israel, killed, raped and caused destruction in a way that we wouldn’t have thought could occur since medieval times is extraordinary. Hamas revels in that death.

Many have said, in commentary that I’ve seen in recent days, that, in World War II, when the Nazis were committing the greatest atrocity of all time, brutally murdering six million innocent Jews, they went to extreme lengths to hide it. They went to extreme lengths to deny it, once it occurred. Here with Hamas, we see grown men entering civilian areas, kibbutzim, towns and villages, and revelling in the most brutal crimes against men, women and children. It is extraordinary to think that anybody could pick up an innocent baby, an innocent child, murder its parents in front of them and then mutilate that child’s body—burn it, behead it and then revel in that by taking photos, footage, and boasting about it on the internet.

All I can do is offer my deepest condolences to the people of Israel, indeed, to Jews around the world, who I know will be feeling it more keenly than anybody. But I have to say that, even for myself, I have felt this very deeply because, to continue where I started, in our way of thinking as Australians and Westerners there’s no way in the world we can fathom that somebody could do that to an innocent person, let alone an innocent child. It’s not within our frame of thinking that you could do that to an innocent civilian. All the time on the news we see heart-wrenching scenes, whether you’re seeing it in the conflict in Ukraine at the moment. It’s devastating, but there you’re seeing armed professional men in the military fighting one another. There’s a great injustice there with Russia invading the sovereign territory of Ukraine, but in the end it’s two nations with military capability fighting one another.

Here there are examples of families found dead—a family of five found dead, their bodies found hugging one another—and you can imagine the scenes: family having breakfast, going about their day, whatever, hearing firstly the mortar shells, then hearing gunfire and then hearing somebody perhaps picking down the door or breaking a window and entering the house. They all cling together on a bed in a bedroom. They probably lock the door. The door is kicked in and they’re shot in their beds, cuddling one another. Parents are found over the bodies of their children, trying in their last breath to take that bullet rather than that bullet hitting their child.

And so it’s extraordinary to me that anybody could show the wanton disregard of those set of circumstances as we’ve seen here from the Greens and from some of the teals. They’re professional politicians, so when they give their speeches they start by saying in the first 20 seconds, ‘We abhor violence and we condemn Hamas,’ and they spend the next 9½ minutes attacking and criticising Israel. It’s very clear what they’re doing. It’s clear that they are happy to overlook the bloodthirsty cult that Hamas is because of their deep-seated animosity towards the state of Israel and, I suspect for, sadly, many people protesting around the world, including, shockingly, people protesting at the foot of the opera house, chanting ‘gas the Jews’, because of a pathological hatred of Jewish people. That’s not new. Sadly, we’ve known antisemitism for the entirety of human history.

I want to congratulate the vast majority of the members of this House, who have unequivocally provided support to Israel. You cannot compare what Israel is doing in defending themselves now with their actions in Gaza in any way, shape or form with what occurred on that fateful morning. Calling on Israel to show restraint? Can I tell you that most Australians would look at that and say, ‘If there was the prospect of somebody entering my house and slitting the throat of my child, restraint is the last thing that would be shown.’ We’ve got Hamas cowering within a civilian population to try and do what they always do, which use their people as human body bags for their stated aims. Their aims are just to destroy the Jewish state and to expunge it of Jewish people. We have seen what ‘expunge’ means. It doesn’t mean to politely asked them to leave Israel. It means slitting their throats, killing their children, burning the bodies and raping and kidnapping the women.

I think we all feel uncomfortable talking about these sorts of things, particularly in the Australian parliament. It’s not something that gives us any joy, but it is important we talk about this. It’s important we describe what has occurred in the way it’s occurred, because these people—’people’ is a very generous term I could give to Hamas—don’t think like we do. They exult in death, destruction and murder. There is no human emotion; the evidence for that is the images we’re seeing now. We’re seeing hostages in Gaza. We’re seeing babies being held in Gaza, whose parents were slaughtered by Hamas just days ago. We pray that they can be returned home.

I’d say this to the Greens political party, and to those teals that condemn Israel: by doing that you are giving aid and comfort to the worst filth in human history. On this side of the House—and, I’m sure, across the vast majority of this chamber—we won’t do that, and we’ll encourage Israel to do everything it can to defend itself and its people.

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