Last Sunday was a sombre day for those who did not want to see the Sydney Harbour Bridge hijacked by Hamas huggers and useful idiots, but it wasn’t all gloom and doom. A diluvian downpour suggested that the Almighty, at least, was determined to rain on the radicals’ parade.

That a judge authorised the march, overriding the decision of the elected government and the police, is evidence of just how emboldened the judiciary has become. That it was organised by a Trotskyist only added to the otherworldly absurdity.

Former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr was at the head of the throng, a misguided Moses who’d lost his moral compass, leading the masses across the bridge, only to be told to turn them around and go back. Undaunted, he posed for a photo while a man behind him held up a poster of Ayatollah Khamenei holding a gun.

Carr was so chuffed with the picture that he posted it on his Twitter Feed on 3 August. The following day, after the media commented on the unsavoury juxtaposition, Carr said of the Ayatollah, ‘None of us noticed his picture or recognised him’.

Really? Australia’s former foreign minister couldn’t recognise Khamenei in a larger-than-life photo kitted out in his trademark turban and robes. It’s hard to decide what’s more embarrassing: if he’s telling the truth or lying.

Punters on X passed their judgments. ‘Stick to being a mouthpiece for Beijing, would you,’ wrote one. ‘Next step, get on a flotilla and sail to Gaza banging your pots,’ said another.

Carr said he opposed Iran’s regime for its ‘dictatorial characteristics, its oppression of women, dissidents and gays, and profligate use of capital punishment’ and hoped for its earliest possible overthrow by Iranian democrats, but left the photo online.

It seemed like an understatement considering that a week earlier, he drew a grotesque comparison between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the architects of the 20th century’s worst atrocities, blaming Israel for starving a‘vast civilian population’, visiting ‘unspeakable cruelty on babies and children’, and giving effect to a ‘genocide’ that ‘demanded comparison with Stalin’s Ukraine, the Warsaw Ghetto, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward’.

Meanwhile, the World Food Programme says that 24.6 million people in Sudan are facing acute hunger in ten areas where famine has been confirmed, but nobody seems worried, perhaps because the famine has been created by a civil war between Muslims. As we all know by now, no Jews, no news.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who spent 804 days in Iranian prisons, on false accusations of spying ‘for the Zionist regime’ was not so sanguine about seeing a ‘mass-murdering dictator’ enjoying pride of place behind prominent Australians, commenting how upsetting it would be ‘for the many thousands of Iranian refugees and other victims of the regime’s brutal violence who now call Australia home’.

Carr said he couldn’t understand why someone would parade Khamenei’s portrait ‘at such a peaceful and positive demonstration’ and thought there was ‘a fair chance it was a provocateur’.

That seems a bit rich, given that the demonstration was organised by the same people who organised the march on the Opera House on 9 October 2023, to celebrate the Hamas massacre and chant, ‘Gas the Jews!’

Why wouldn’t some amongst them venerate the Ayatollah who created and funded the ‘Axis of Resistance’– Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria, militias in Iraq and Yemen, and Hamas – to ‘wipe Israel off the map’?

The fan of the Ayatollah wasn’t the only dubious participant at the ‘peaceful and positive’ rally. Marchers waved white flags with the shahada (Islamic declaration of faith) in black letters, the flag of the Taleban, and black flags with the white shahada, used by Al-Qaeda, as well as the Hamas flag, green with the shahada in white, which boys sported across their foreheads, the ‘headband of martyrdom’.

Yellow flags with a green cedar bearing the slogan ‘THE RESISTANCE – GOD’S ARMY’ were designed to look like the Hezbollah ensign without breaking the law since it is illegal to display the symbols of proscribed terrorist organisations. They needn’t have worried. No one was arrested.

Someone wore a pullover that read, ‘Death, death to the IDF’ above an inverted red triangle used by Hamas to mark targets for assassination. Posters depicted Netanyahu as Hitler. Protesters chanted ‘Two, four, six, eight, Israel is a terror state,’ ‘All Zionists are terrorists’, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ and ‘Pack your bags, leave our lands’ which was shared by Hizb Ut Tahrir in the UK (where it is banned) with the caption ‘the banner of Islam rises in the heart of Sydney’.

Posters of watermelons were everywhere, a symbol the PLO adopted when it was banned for terrorism. It was confusing for those used to thinking of the Greens as watermelons, as Greens banners were everywhere too, although it hardly mattered as on this issue the groups were interchangeable. The Teachers Federation and the National Tertiary Education Union were out in force, which probably ‘explains at least in part, the support for Palestine amongst the TikTok generation, and in a triumph of intersectionality, one placard said Anglo Bourgeois for Palestine. There were no mainstream Australians.

How many people attended? The police said 90,000. The Guardian said between 225,000 and 300,000. The organisers said 300,000. All that was missing was the Gaza Ministry of Health, which would have said one million and been quoted without question around the world.

Last week, Arab countries called on Hamas to disarm and leave Gaza, and the Arab League, which includes Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, condemned Hamas’s 7 October massacre in a UN declaration. It was a historic moment, yet no one at the rally even mentioned Hamas, much less condemned it.

The night before the march, Hamas released a video of hostage Evyatar David, who is starving to death and digging his own grave.

Nobody mentioned him either.

Hamas celebrated its surge of Western sympathy by calling off peace talks with Israel. As Johannes Leak quipped in a cartoon, ‘Who says war crimes don’t pay!’

For all the talk of a march for humanity, it was a march for Hamas and a triumph for its godfather, the Ayatollah, who reigned in disgraceful triumph over the harbour that day.