Hamas is not only a truly evil organisation that is committed to the destruction of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish race; their hatred and bile are so toxic that they will sacrifice their own people for their ends. Evidence of this in past conflicts where they have used childminding centres as places to launch attacks, missile attacks, into Israel. So, when the Israelis retaliate back to where the bomb was, where it was launched, the collateral damage is supposed to outrage the world—that these atrocities happened. Hamas will launch missiles from hospitals. They are prepared to sacrifice their own people in retaliations, because of the political benefit or the so-called perceived benefit of the world’s sliding eye.
Mr BUCHHOLZ (Wright) (20:16): I stand to associate myself with the words of members on both sides of the House who have offered comment tonight in support of Israel. Whilst it’s not my intention to detain the House, having recently returned from Israel and Palestine and having seen it firsthand, I thought with the time afforded to me I would speak about what I saw on the ground, because, with the unspeakable events that have transpired in this part of the world in recent weeks, it is hard to comprehend the modus operandi of Hamas. Why would they and the Palestinian community have committed such atrocities, such unthinkable acts, as to prey on the weak, the innocent and the youth. We’ve heard speaker after speaker—I have purposely not looked at the file footage; it’s too galling to see and then comprehend.
What did Hamas think that they were achieving by committing such atrocities? To comprehend that, you have to have gone there and seen it firsthand. I need to declare that I was a host of the Australian Jewish exchange program. We went to Israel, and we went to Palestine. We saw the Palestinian community firsthand. They were wearing Nike shoes and they were good-looking lads. We had lunch with them before we went to meet the prime minister; I don’t think they were fans of the government.
We saw cenotaphs in suburbs of Palestine for ‘pay for slay’ kids who had strapped bombs to themselves and had gone into Israel and killed innocent life. The ‘pay for slay’ principle is that the more people you kill as a bomber, the more the stipend or remuneration that will be paid to your family for your sacrifice. The stipend is calculated on how many Israelis or Jews you eradicate. The stipend is on a sliding scale. In some of the kids’ textbooks we saw the American Walt Disney character of Mickey Mouse, which is loved by the world. But, in the Palestinian playbook, Mickey Mouse has a bomb vest strapped to him, and kids are encouraged to take this path.
Hamas is not only a truly evil organisation that is committed to the destruction of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish race; their hatred and bile are so toxic that they will sacrifice their own people for their ends. Evidence of this in past conflicts where they have used childminding centres as places to launch attacks, missile attacks, into Israel. So, when the Israelis retaliate back to where the bomb was, where it was launched, the collateral damage is supposed to outrage the world—that these atrocities happened. Hamas will launch missiles from hospitals. They are prepared to sacrifice their own people in retaliations, because of the political benefit or the so-called perceived benefit of the world’s sliding eye.
So how did Hamas come about? Back in 2006 they were an elected body. There was a general election, and they won, over the then existing governing party, which I think was Fatah. They won 74 seats—Fatah was all but wiped out, back down to 54—out of 132 in the Palestinian Legislative Council. I don’t think there has been an election since. So you’ve got kids that are 18 years old now that have never seen an election under Hamas. I feel for the Palestinian people under the rule of Hamas.
Hamas is not that sophisticated. We spoke with one of the Israeli military chiefs about previous ceasefire attempts. In good faith, they would come to the table with Hamas and say, ‘Right, we’ll have a ceasefire.’ But the little skirmish groups off to the side of Hamas, left and right, would work independently, and so one of the tasks that Hamas were given by Israel was to control the troops: ‘Control your troops.’
When we look through the prism of our televisions at Hamas, one of the problems we have as a democracy is that it is hard to identify who they are. They are not identifiable by uniforms. When we saw the kids running for their lives after the horrific attack at the festival, you could not tell the difference between the Hamas perpetrators and the victims. In contrast, you can tell the difference between an Israeli soldier and an Israeli citizen because the soldiers wear uniforms. In Hamas, they don’t. So, when you see images of Palestinians taking their wounded into a hospital, you don’t know if they’re civilians or Hamas, because they’re indistinguishable.
Recently we saw a Palestinian hospital bombed, and the first thought was that it was Israel. But what if it wasn’t Israel? What if it was not Israel? The whole commentary now is about protecting the innocents, and civilian life must be protected. But what if the bomb that hit that hospital was not from Israel and it is found in the days or weeks to come that the bomb that killed innocent lives in Palestine in that hospital, the most needy, was at the hands of the Palestinians—a bomb that started in Palestine and took out their own people for whatever reason, by accident or by engineering? What I would leave the Australian public with, as I leave this chamber, is this: don’t jump to conclusions when it comes to Hamas. These people are cruel. They are cruel to their own people. They are cruel to their own children. They are cruel to their weak. They are cruel. I would just say that the state of Israel, the Jewish community, has every right to defend itself against such abhorrent cruelty.