‘Je suis Charlie!’ was the cry adopted by supporters of freedom of speech and freedom of the press after the massacre of twelve people in the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo. But after the massacre of more than twelve hundred Jews where is the hashtag campaign declaring ‘We are all Israelis now’?

Hamas spokesman Abu Obeid marked 7 October saluting Iran and its proxies and urging West Bank Palestinians to carry out lone-wolf attacks but Gaza activist and pianist Jayson Gillham claims he was ‘silenced’ for telling his audience the ‘uncomfortable’ truth that, ‘Israel targets journalists’, a statement based on the testimony of the terrorists in charge of the Palestinian territory. ‘This situation goes beyond just artistic freedom; it strikes at the heart of our right to free speech and the role of art in addressing important social issues,’ he claimed.

In a similar vein, the ABC reported late last month that its viewers were shocked when heavily armed Israeli soldiers raided Al-Jazeera’s bureau in the West Bank and ordered it to shut down for 45 minutes because of its support for terrorism which Al-Jazeera claimed was an assault on press freedom.

The ABC doesn’t seem to have managed to report that on 6 October Jamal Rayyan, veteran presenter and journalist on Al-Jazeera, shared a tweet of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem illuminated by a glowing seven that proclaimed, ‘This is the day that restored the honour and prestige to (our) nation’. Hers was hardly an isolated view. Sanaa El-Younoussi, Middle East editor for Al-Jazeera in English retweeted her post from a year earlier rhapsodising, ‘If only all days could taste like that day’. Former managing director of Al-Jazeera Arabic Yasser Abu Hilalah retweeted his message from a year earlier in which he wrote, ‘…what is happening is a rewriting of history… as if we are in a dream… Oh Allah, be with them….’ Al-Jazeera presenter Ahmed Mansour tweeted, ‘The defeat of October 7 will remain the greatest defeat of the Israeli entity and… will remain forever in history. Israel’s wounds from the attack have not healed and will never heal, and no one will succeed in erasing them’.

New South Wales police assistant commissioner Peter McKenna said he was ‘very pleased’ with the policing of terrorist sympathisers in Sydney on Sunday, the night before the anniversary of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Protesters who showed their enthusiastic support for terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah and for Iran, the largest state sponsor of terror in the world, were not arrested. That’s because, as McKenna explained, the legislation regarding support for terrorism is ‘nuanced’ and ‘quite complex’ and the legal advice the police had received was that there is nothing wrong with cheering on the slaughter of Jews.

A protester carrying a green and gold flag styled like that of Hezbollah with Ned Kelly waving an assault rifle said he was just a ‘sporting -enthusiast’ backing ‘Ned Kelly and the boys in the green and gold’ who would ‘win’.

One of the few people to be charged by NSW police was an 82-year-old woman for allegedly making harassing phone calls to Masjid Arrahman mosque in Kingsgrove in Sydney’s south on Tuesday 1 October and Friday 4 October.

Sheikh Youssef Nabha, who livestreams from the Arrahman mosque, blames the ills of the world on the ‘Jewish lobby’ which, he said in a 5 October address, ‘controls this country and all the countries of the world’. Indeed, the whole world is a ‘slave’ to America and America is a ‘slave to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Zionist Israeli lobby’.

Nabha referred listeners to statements on the war made by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. It wasn’t clear which comments he was referring to but in an interview on Iranian TV on 4 October Reza Taghavi, the Iranian official who sets the topics for Friday sermons in Iran, said that Hitler was right in his approach towards the Jews, explaining that Zionists must be persecuted, deported, and killed everywhere; that soon they would create strife in the West; and would eradicate America, Europe and the ‘arrogant’ countries that support them.

Taghavi explained that Zionists are not real Jews but a ‘bunch of crazy, barbaric, wolf-like predators whose cartels’ have taken over global media and Western economic hubs. ‘As soon as we open our mouths,’ he whinged, ‘they yell “antisemitism”.’ True Christians, Jews, and Muslims, he claimed, ‘can stand together against the front of heresy and polytheism’.

This is a view shared by the much lamented Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah who said in July 2023 that gay people, ‘even if they do it once… are to be killed’. Nasrallah liked to call Lebanon’s LGBTQ community ‘deviants’ and was quite clear about the threat they posed. ‘They’re a danger… a real and present danger more than ever’, calling on the authorities to ‘oversee, monitor and follow the educational and cultural content in Lebanon’. He was backed by Lebanon’s Culture Minister Mohammad Mortada who tried to ban the movie Barbie claiming that it promoted ‘homosexuality’.

Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi has accused Labor of seeing ‘white people as victims and brown people as villains’ but Australian politicians who have marched in solidarity with the raping, bomb-chucking, hostage-slaughtering ‘resistance’ have yet to spell out their views on killing ‘deviants’ and banning Barbie. Homophobia it seems is tolerable. Islamophobia is not.

Speaking to an audience of 120,000 on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg, US President John F. Kennedy said, ‘Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum (“I am a Roman citizen”). Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner!.. All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner!’

Who among world leaders today takes pride in saying ‘I am an Israeli’? Who spoke up for the Jews in the second world war? In both cases, to our eternal disgrace, not Australia.