War & Peace... and Horse Manure.

Rebecca Weisser I 14 September 2024 I Spectator Australia

Watermelon protesters only seek to disarm the West.

Nothing better epitomises the Greens’ contribution to the national debate than protesters who support its causes hurling horse manure and garbage bins around the streets of Melbourne.

Marvellous Melbourne has been a shadow of its former self since Premier Dan Andrews kicked the stuffing out of the city with one of the world’s longest lockdowns. Businesses and the cafes that cater to the workers and were once a charming respite from throngs on the pavements are struggling to survive as workers have refused to return to the CBD.

Those who do still come to the city were punished for their efforts by a rowdy band of Green left radicals on Wednesday. Police had expected 25,000 people but luckily only 1,000 to 2,000 members of the Socialist Alternative, Students for Palestine, Victorian Socialists, Greens and other assorted ratbags crawled out from under their doonas to don their keffiyehs and protest the Land Forces 2024 International Land Defence Exposition chanting ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘How many kids did you kill today?’

Prime Minister Albanese criticised the rabble-rousers for hurling objects at the police but Victorian Greens leader Ellen Sandell defended state Greens MP for the well-heeled electorate of Richmond, Gabrielle de Vietri, who joined the mob saying Greens constituents did not support a weapons expo in Melbourne.

Naturally, Ms Sandell said protest organisers had intended for the rally to be peaceful but the ‘incredible barrage of increased police presence’ might be what had caused the bad behaviour and called on the police – note, rather than the protesters – to ‘deescalate’ the situation.

As for the disruption to everyday Victorians Ms Sandell blamed the Victorian Labor government who, she said, should have simply caved in to the Greens and ‘cancelled the Land Forced weapons expo as we asked them several weeks ago’.

Echoing his state counterpart, federal Greens leader Adam Bandt defended the mass protests piously claiming on ABC radio that ‘peaceful and non-violent protest is critical in this country’ before adding his get-out-of-jail-free caveat, that before criticising the protesters ‘the media’ needed to ‘pay attention to what people are protesting about and in this instance, people are protesting against the proliferation of weapons of war’.

The implication is obvious. The wrongs that the protesters are seeking to right are so terrible, and the cause of the protesters is so noble, that surely any reasonable person would understand their wrath.

‘What people are protesting about here,’ Bandt explained, ‘is an end to the escalation of war’ of starting not to treat weapons manufacturing ‘as somehow an inherent good’.

Well, we can all agree that manufacturing weapons to deliver to terrorists is a bad thing. So why aren’t the protesters condemning the manufacture of weapons in Gaza, and Iran which supplies weapons to Gaza, and Qatar which funds the sales of weapons in Gaza?

Israel’s capture of the Philadelphi corridor has allowed it to uncover a massive infrastructure of 180 cavernous tunnels that have been used to ship arms funded by Iran and Qatar to arm Hamas to the teeth. The trafficking it turns out, unsurprisingly, is only possible because senior Egyptians are accepting bribes to turn a blind eye.

An investigation published in?Le Monde?in May exposed that an Egyptian businessman has been dubbed ‘the King of the Rafah crossing’ because he has controlled the border between Gaza and Egypt for over a decade and is making a fortune in the process. The protesters should be horrified. After all, they were proudly carrying banners saying, ‘Capitalism Kills, No $ for War’.

Yoni Ben Menachem, Middle East intelligence analyst for the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs told the Jewish News Syndicate that the Egyptians, despite signing a peace treaty with Israel, were ‘playing a double game’.

Even though Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi sees Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood as a deadly threat, and has worked with Israel to defeat Islamic State which was training terrorists in the Sinai desert, they’ve been letting Hamas smuggle weapons into Gaza both through the newly uncovered tunnels and through Rafah.

Ben Menachem says a deal was done between Egyptian intelligence head Abbas Kamel and Yahya Sinwar when he took over Hamas in Gaza in 2017. Kamel agreed to allow Hamas to import arms through Egypt in exchange for Hamas agreeing not to support attacks in Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic State.

Echoing these concerns, Israeli Defence Force Brigadier General Amir Avivi, the co-founder and chairman of the Israel Defence and Security Forum, said last week that thousands of Hamas terrorists and tens of thousands of rockets are waiting in the Egyptian Sinai to go into Gaza through Philadelphi corridor.

Avivi, who was in charge of securing the border with Egypt for two years says with one battalion Israel could secure the 14 kilometre Gaza border so that ‘even a mosquito wouldn’t get through’ but that Egypt had declined to do so.

Egypt’s treachery is deeply disturbing, Avivi points out because it is building a vast army, conducting war exercises and deploying a huge number of tanks on the Gazan border in complete contravention of its peace agreement with Israel. It is also building tunnels under the Suez Canal as well as 30 bridges over it so that, as Ben Menachem explains, they could ‘in one night, change the whole deployment of the Egyptian army in Sinai and get ready’ for a surprise attack on Israel.

For anyone who remembers the Six Day War or the Yom Kippur War when Egypt, with other Arab states, amassed an army on Israel’s borders to attack it in 1967 or launched a surprise attack on Israel in 1973, this is deeply alarming. As Ben Menachem says, before October 7, Israel deluded itself that Hamas had been deterred. Now, he says, Israel needs to ‘wake up’ to the threat Egypt poses and work on the relationship to turn the situation around.

Surely the protesters must be outraged at this perfect illustration of how arms trafficking is fuelling the threat of war. After all, pro-Palestinian protester Tully McEwen, 23, told the?Australian?she was protesting against ‘people pocketing and making money at the expense of Palestinians’, adding that she didn’t think society should be about ‘making money at the expense of people’s lives’, blissfully unaware, it seems, of how the Palestinian elite has enriched itself for decades at the expense of the Palestinian people, repeatedly provoking wars with Israel as they did most recently on 7 October 2023 and doing everything they could to maximise Palestinian casualties by turning them into human shields and cannon fodder for propaganda purposes.

The assorted Red and Green watermelons that made up the majority of the protesters in Melbourne on Wednesday know only too well that, as Mao Zedong said, ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. Unfortunately, they are determined to protest only the arming of those who seek to defend the West.

Author: Rebecca Weisser