Melbourne pro-Palestine protesters ambush Israeli hostage families: Australia deserves better than this mob
Pro-Palestinian activists have sparked outrage after they ambushed visiting friends and families of Israeli hostages at the Melbourne hotel they were staying at.
10:55AM NOVEMBER 30, 2023
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Australia has rarely, if ever, seen a more odious and misguided group of activists than those who are running the pro-Palestine protests in Australia.
Even their name is misguided because these activists are anti-Israeli and anti-Jew first, and pro-Palestinian a distance second.
Their disgraceful stunt of invading the Melbourne hotel where those Israelis who have had loved ones killed or taken hostage in Hamas’s murderous raid on October 7 were staying, says much about the ignorance and nastiness of these activists.
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Earlier that day, in the same hotel, I was interviewing Tali Kizhner, a mum whose 22-year-old son Segev was senselessly murdered by Hamas at the Supernova music festival.
Mother Tali Kizhner with a poster of son Segev who was murdered by Hamas at Nova Music Festival.
Tali Kizhner with son Segev who was murdered by Hamas at Nova Music Festival.
She was in tears as she told me about her loss but she wasn’t in Australia to play politics or discuss the war, she was here to honour the memory of her son and to plead for an end to the rise in anti-Semitism here.
Travelling with her were many others who were direct victims of the October 7 massacre, either through losing loved ones or having them taken hostage and whose fate remains uncertain. Their personal trauma is unspeakable, as it would be for any of us in the same situation.
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To think that this group of vulnerable people would return from an community event at the Mt Scopus Memorial College Jewish school to find an angry pro-Palestinian mob in their hotel foyer baying for the end of Israel, with bloodied baby dolls on the floor beggars belief.
But it goes to the heart of what is rotten with this movement in Australia. The activists who are running pro-Palestinian protests have no interest in nuance or facts in this conflict. To them the targeted and pre-planned massacre, rape and torture of 1200 men, women and children in Israel on October 7 is nothing of consequence. It is all but airbrushed from their narrative. If it is mentioned, it is with a shrug of the shoulders as if to say ‘what did they expect’ given the decades of failed progress on Palestinian statehood, as if this somehow justified such an act of mass terrorism.
And what of Hamas? The pro-Palestinian movement in Australia cannot even speak the word, much less than call them terrorists, as the Australian government does. I have asked activists at these protests what they think of Hamas and they fumble for an answer, as if I have asked them about an inconvenient truth. They don’t know what to say because it goes against their simplistic narrative that all Muslims in Gaza are victims of the colonial oppressors of Israel.
THEAUSTRALIAN.COM.AU02:38
Pro-Palestinian protesters harass Israeli hostage families at Melbourne hotel
Families of Israelis kidnapped or killed by Hamas have been harassed by pro-Palestinian protesters at a Melbourne… hotel. Footage shows the protesters entering the hotel lobby waving around a huge banner and chanting through a megaphone while police monitored the crowd. The Israeli Embassy has confirmed they are aware of More
I should point out that I am talking here about the activists who organise these pro-Palestinian protests and not the many ordinary people who turn up at a Sunday rally to express concern about the extent of Israeli’s retaliatory military campaign against Hamas. The large number of civilian deaths in Gaza is a completely valid point of debate and one which is playing out in many countries.
What is not valid, however, is to argue that Israel is the sole villain in this conflict while ignoring - or justifying - the evil committed by Hamas on October 7. Yet this is the playbook of the activists who organise these rallies. Many of this hardcore group of organisers are professional protesters who gravitate to the cause of the day. Some even bring along the Indigenous flag, as if that is relevant to Gaza. They are the sort of ragtag antifa crowd we see breaking car windscreens at G20 summits around the world for reasons they cannot articulate.
And yet their sudden compassion for Muslim civilians in Gaza is strangely selective. Where were these protesters, when Muslim civilians were being slaughtered in large numbers in the war in Chechnya? Or in Yemen? Or Syria? What about the violent repression of the Uyghurs in China?
For the Australian left, the Palestinian cause is the fashionable protest-je-jour, and even better when the protagonist is a functioning democracy rather than a dictatorship.
Pro-Palestinian activists at the Melbourne hotel.
But when these organisers rightly highlight the large number of deaths of women and children in Gaza, they are completely silent about the murders of Israeli women and children on October 7.
These are the same pro-Palestinian organisers who encourage Australian schoolchildren to leave their classroom to shout genocidal slogans against Israel. The fruits of their activism could be seen last week as Australian school kids chanted Allahu Akbar (God is Great) outside Melbourne’s Flinders St Station, presumably not knowing that those were the last words of the terrorists as they flew their planes into New York’s World Trade Centre before they were even born or that this is the favoured chant of Islamic militants around the world.
NSW premier Chris Minns said it best, when he said, while opposing these school protests, ‘if you want to change the world, go get an education.’ Victoria’s premier Jacinta Allan was too fearful of losing Labor votes in Melbourne’s inner city to take a similar principled stand.
The bottom line is that the activists who are organising pro-Palestinian protests in Australia are failing even their own supporters with their whitewashing of Hamas, their bullying and their genocidal, anti-Semitic chants. Australia deserves better than this mob.
CAMERON STEWART

CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT
Cameron Stewart is the Chief International Correspondent at The Australian, combining investigative reporting on foreign affairs, defence and national security with feature writing for the Weekend Australian Magazi... Read more
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