ONLY AMERICA IS HOLDING FAST TO ISRAEL'S SECURITY AND DEFENSE

One eye and four blindfolds

Australia’s sudden realism concerning a malign Iran cannot repair the harm it is doing to Israel and the West. 

 

By Melanie Phillips 

 

JNS

Aug 28, 2025 

 

 

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his virulently anti-Israel foreign minister, Penny Wong 

 

The reluctance of Western governments to respond robustly to Iranian aggression ever since the Islamic revolutionary regime in Tehran came to power in 1979 has hugely increased the danger that this malign actor poses to the free world.

Not only has Iran committed countless acts of terrorism against Western interests and Jewish targets. The Islamic Republic has also created a network of jihadi sleeper cells in Western countries. It’s been involved in coordinating the pro-Hamas hate marches in Western cities ever since the Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

And it’s tried to murder Iranian dissidents and political figures in Britain and America, including plots to assassinate on American soil the former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton and the former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

This week, the Australian government, headed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, suddenly announced that Iran had been behind two terrorist attacks against Jewish targets last year, the firebombing of the Adass Synagogue in Melbourne and the kosher Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Sydney.

According to the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), it’s likely that the Iranian regime was also involved in other attacks.

As a result, the Australian government has thrown out the Iranian ambassador—the first time it has expelled an ambassador since World War II—and has pulled its own diplomats out of the Islamic Republic. It also intends to proscribe Tehran’s terrorist shock troops, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

This is, to put it mildly, a startling development. The Albanese government has taken an eye-wateringly hostile attitude to Israel in its war against Iran. Albanese and his virulently anti-Israel foreign minister, Penny Wong, have never shown any sign that they’ve understood the threat posed by Iran to both Israel and the West.

Instead, they’ve consistently sucked up to the fanatics of Tehran. At the beginning of August, Iran’s ambassador to Australia, Ahmad Sadeghi, called for the “wiping out” of the “Zionist plague” by 2027.

This was but the latest in a string of deeply concerning remarks by Sadeghi that had received no adequate ministerial pushback. Last year, he extolled the now-deceased Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah as a “remarkable leader” and a “prominent standard-bearer,” while defaming Israel as “the most notorious killing machine in current world history.”

Calling his “Zionist plague” remarks “abhorrent,” “hateful” and “antisemitic,” Albanese implied that Sadeghi had been summoned for a dressing-down. In fact, he was reportedly called in for talks with foreign ministry officials merely about how to “de-escalate” the war in Gaza in order to have “a sustained ceasefire.”

Yet since the start of the Gaza war, Israel’s ambassador to Australia, Amir Maimon, has been summoned for a dressing-down by the Albanese administration on at least three occasions because it doesn’t like the way that Israel has been conducting its military operations.

The government has presided over an explosive frenzy of Jew-hatred in Australia. Not only has it failed to douse this, it has actually fueled it by recycling the Hamas lies that have painted the Israelis as evil people who deliberately kill civilians and starve children to death.

It has arguably displayed more malice towards Israelis than has been shown by any other country. Earlier this month, it canceled a visit by Simcha Rothman, chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, shortly before he was due to begin a solidarity tour with Australia’s Jewish community.

Among its reasons, the government said Rothman’s statements, including “the elimination of Hamas and the expansion and sovereignty of the Israeli state, and denial of any wrongdoing by Israel against Palestinians and Gaza during the current conflict,” were viewed by members of the Australian community as “inflammatory and concerning.”

In fact, the Albanese government has a shocking track record of canceling the visas of Israeli Jewish visitors, including the former government minister Ayelet Shaked and the high-tech influencer Hillel Fuld, whose brother, Ari Fuld, was murdered at the Gush Etzion Junction by terrorists in 2018.

Yet it’s happily issued visas to terrorist sympathizers, including the London-based Tunisian media entrepreneur Sammi Hamdi, who encouraged people to “celebrate” Oct. 7, and preacher Mohammed Ghuloom, who had also praised Nasrallah.

So remarks made by Albanese and Wong, when announcing their action against Tehran, struck a note of quite sickening hypocrisy.

Iran, said Wong, had tried to “undermine social cohesion”; Albanese said it had tried to “sow hatred and division in our community.” But it’s Albanese and Wong themselves who have been sowing hatred and division against the Jews of Australia by regurgitating Hamas lies and maliciously discriminating against Israelis in order to appease their country’s Muslims.

Moreover, government sources have reportedly disclosed that the Albanese government has been aware for several months of possible Iranian links to the attacks on Jews in Australia.

So why has Albanese suddenly decided to act against the Islamic regime? The reason is almost certainly that he has begun to feel some heat over his government’s appalling behavior.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed diplomatic niceties to one side by chewing him out in public over the Rothman ban, while Israel has stripped some Australian diplomats of their visas. This may have concentrated Albanese’s mind on the fact that intelligence-sharing with Israel remains crucial to Australia’s national security.

In 2017, Israel alerted ASIO that there was a plot to blow up an Etihad Airways flight leaving Sydney. And this week, Sky News revealed that a tip-off from Israeli intelligence had assisted ASIO during its investigation, which unraveled the Iran connection to the terror attacks.

More significant still, U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be taking a very dim view indeed of Australia’s anti-Israel antics. He has yet to meet Albanese.

And Australia’s defense minister, Richard Marles, was humiliated this week by American defense officials’ ambiguity over whether exchanges with his U.S. counterpart, Pete Hegseth, in Washington, D.C., were an actual “meeting” or a “happenstance encounter.”

Any idea that Albanese has now seen the light over Israel is vanishingly unlikely.

On Sky News Australia, Sharri Markson revealed that in 1998, a “starry-eyed” Albanese met Yasser Arafat, head of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization, which had sponsored and funded his trip to Ramallah.

Two years later, she said, during the Second Intifada, when Palestinian Arabs were blowing Israelis to bits on buses and in pizza parlors, Albanese joined protests against Israel, during which American and Israeli flags were burnt.

In a speech to the Australian parliament while Israel was struggling to stop the slaughter of more than 1,300 of its citizens, Albanese condemned Israeli roadblocks and other restrictions on Palestinians as abuses of their civil rights.

Albanese has now admitted that he has been an advocate for the Palestinian cause his whole life and says he is angry at the anti-Israel protesters—only because their extremism is undermining that cause. In other words, in the great battle now underway between civilization and barbarism, Albanese has put Australia on the wrong side.

This matters not just to Israel but to the West. Australia is a member of the Five Eyes security alliance. The other four members are the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and New Zealand.

In its hostility to Israel—the West’s indispensable front line of defense in the Middle East—Australia has been puncturing that alliance, a breach that its belated burst of realism over Iran cannot repair.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not alone in this. The United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand have also turned into foes of the Jewish state, demonizing it with lies aimed at its delegitimization and preparing to recognize the illusory “state of Palestine” which is being willed into existence purely as a means to Israel’s destruction.

Only America is holding fast to Israel’s security and defense. So the Five Eyes alliance has now turned into One Eye and Four Blindfolds.

Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand can no longer be trusted with the defense of the West. It’s now America and Israel fighting for a free world that no longer understands what that means.