First, let me congratulate Albo on signing a treaty with Tuvalu that ensures Australia will take all its residents if Tuvalu sinks under the sea as a result of climate change. Indeed, I think we need to extend the same offer to any other threatened South Pacific nation. They will be good migrants, and I believe we have a duty to them.

I actually agree with part of a letter by correspondent Omar Mohammed in last week’s magazine. He is indeed correct in saying I am extremely biased in my comments on Hamas – for good reason. I regard them, like I regarded Adolf Hitler and his Nazis and Josef Stalin and his NKVD, as vicious, murderous, evil monsters who need to be destroyed before we can have true peace. 

I would love to see the day when Iran’s evil influence, which caused this war, ceased, and the narrow-minded Jihadists who have contempt for the long-suffering people of Palestine and Israel, were rejected by the mass of ordinary Palestinians, and a true two-state solution could progress. Israel then needs, in my view, to withdraw all its provocative settlements on the West Bank (or suitable territorial adjustments made between the West Bank Authorities and Israel), and the Palestinians to agree to recognise Israel’s right to exist within secure borders. 

I think the protagonists would be amazed at just how good a true and lasting peace could be to all parties.

It is very worrying to me to see the useful idiots of the Australian Left all come out and support Hamas. They invariably have no idea of what it is that they are supporting. I encourage readers to read the article in last Thursday’s Australian by famous Lebanese Muslim Australian doctor Jamal Rifi. His thoughts are with Abdul, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who lives in Gaza, who was being treated in an Israeli hospital for a severe deformity that cannot be fixed in Gaza. Dr Rifi worries about what will happen to young Abdul because of the war. 

Dr Rifi became famous for standing up to Muslim extremist clerics pushing Islamic State in Western Sydney in 2014. He had a wonderful calming effect on the hotheads within his community.

I will make a suggestion. It would be great if Dr Rifi and other sensible moderate Australian Muslim leaders, together with local Jewish leaders, the PM and Peter Dutton, and federal and state MPs for the local areas, organised a public meeting in Lakemba, committed to an end to violence and hate speech, and affirmed the fact we are all Australians first and foremost. If a prominent member of the local Muslim community could hold an Israeli flag, and a local Jewish rabbi could hold a Palestinian flag (and Albo and his parliamentary colleagues could hold the national flag and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags), it would send a powerful message.

I think moderate Muslim Australians would like it, as would Australia’s Jewish community. It would marginalise the extreme Hamas supporters, and send a strong message of multicultural solidarity in this great country of ours.