https://quadrant.org.au/
Late last year, two arsonists broke into a hamburger eatery in Caulfield, as captured on CCTV footage. Victoria Police allege the duo emptied a pair of jerrycans, struck a match and bolted into the night as the restaurant exploded in a massive fireball.
Buildings go up in flames for all sorts of reasons — vengeance, bad luck and bad wiring, insurance scams — but owner and high-decibel Palestinian advocate Hash ‘River to Sea’ Tayeh was having none of that. Nor were senior Muslim organisations, which pumped out press releases blaming … you guessed it … those rotten Jews.
“It is imperative that this investigation be handled with the utmost care and urgency, and that the offending parties are dealt with by law enforcement for their racial and politically motivated violence,” demanded the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV), paying no heed whatsoever to the assurances of police investigators adamant the fire-bombing was garden variety arson connected to the ongoing “tobacco wars” and in no way an attack on Muslims.
Like so much of what VicPol does these days — apart, that is, from blasting anti-lockdown protesters with rubber bullets, doing what Labor demands, arresting pregnant women in their kitchens for social media posts and collecting speeding-fine revenue — efforts to calm the Prophet’s followers were worse than useless.
How could it not be the Jews? That was the immediate surmise of, let us be frank, noxiously aggressive bigots and anti-Semites. Tayah’s restaurant was in Caulfield, the heart of Jewish Melbourne, there was a synagogue nearby, and the October 7 massacres were a recent memory — a heartening one, according to ICV president Adel Salman. “What we don’t denounce, very clearly, is legitimate acts of resistance and for the Palestinians to rise up on October 7 and say we are no longer going to tolerate this siege, this occupation,” said Salman, whose organisation, it is worth knowing, receives generous state government funding.
Who knew roasting babies alive is “legitimate” resistance?