First, condolences to my old parliamentary rugby teammate, former Rudd government minister Joel Fitzgibbon, on the sad death of his son in a 2nd Commando training accident. L/Cpl Jack Fitzgibbon was 31 when his parachute malfunctioned. As the father of a 24-year-old son killed by a drug-affected driver, I know how it feels to lose a child. So does my friend Tom McLuckie, who lost his 20-year-old son, in not dissimilar circumstances, to a drug-affected driver.
As Joel said of his son’s death: “At least the family can take some consolation in the knowledge Jack died doing a job he loved in the service of his country.” But it still doesn’t stop the hurt. Condolences, mate.
Anyone thinking the Israelis are not justified in trying to wipe out Hamas should read the recent UN report on sexual violence in conflict. It was written by a forensic UN team led by special envoy Pramila Patten, a Mauritian barrister, as reported on pages 10 and 11 of last Friday’s (8 March) Australian. It not only details horrendous murders, beheadings, and rapes of women and girls on 7 October by Hamas, but even records at least two counts of necrophilia (rape of dead women). It names 13 women still held alive by Hamas, and names them as sex slaves for Hamas fighters. Shades of the thousands of Yazidi girls sold to Islamic state fighters as sex slaves in 2014.
The poor people of Gaza continue to be used by Hamas as human shields. True peace can only come when these terrorists are destroyed. These new revelations only serve to make the attempt by local Greens member for Yerrabi, Andrew Braddock, to move a motion boycotting Israeli firms all the more hypocritical. Especially when it turned out two of his colleagues, Jo Clay and Emma Davidson, held shares linked to Israeli companies – in Jo’s case, an Israeli-based military technology company… Talk about an own goal.
On a nicer note, I was delighted to see on SBS news last Sunday a story of hundreds of people, including some Chinese Australians, demonstrating outside the Chinese consulate in Sydney to mark 65 years since the Chinese clampdown on what remained of freedom in Tibet in 1959. China invaded a peaceful Tibet in 1951 and crushed a revolt brutally in 1959. The crackdown saw one million Tibetans killed (about 20 per cent of the population); 7,000 monasteries destroyed; and the Dalai Lama flee the country to exile in India, where he preaches world peace and a peaceful resolution to the Tibetan issue. He is only seeking autonomy for his people along the lines of what China promised in their 17-point peace treaty of 1951 with Tibet.
It would be nice to see the Greens protest against the CCP’s oppression in Tibet and in support of the one million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps in China, instead of engaging in what, certainly at a national level, smacks of what appears to be just rank anti-Semitism.
