USE MY PASSPORT: Hamas mass murderer got what he deserved

If Israel brought the Hamas mass murderer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh to justice – and we’ll never know whether they did or whether he fell foul of fellow terrorists – then we can only celebrate.

How they did it is a tenth-order issue.

Why they did it is to stop Hamas blowing buses full of school-children, crowded pizza parlours, airplanes and airports, kindergartens and beach resorts.

Kevin Rudd and his blow-dried Foreign Minister Stephen Smith are good men and they have a role to play on the national stage we don’t envy. Protecting the integrity of our passports is a part of the job, we suppose.

WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE IS NOT ALWAYS GOOD FOR THE GANDER
Protecting our national reputation might be considered even more important and when Indian politicians and their sensationalist tabloid media call Melbourne racist, their reaction seemed strangely muted.

Smith seemed to want to agree, no doubt following a DFAT brief with all the obedience of a well-trained, coiffed prize show poodle.

But when it’s Israel, lashing them is always considered good sport. They’re fair game. Unlike some Indian political extremists, Israel takes criticism of all bizarre kinds in good grace.

CAN WE STOP THIS TRIVIAL PURSUIT?
And in this case where the allegation – completely unproven – that those responsible for protecting Israeli citizens safe from those whose intentions are the same as Adolf Hitler before them (just not quite as organised) have engaged in a little creative Photoshop and Passport manufacture in order to get their agents in and out of hostile dictatorships, we look at the front-page outrage and we hear the Prime Minister’s Churchillian denunciations and are left saying ‘so what if they did?’

Being a victim of a one-off identity theft is obviously not nice. And we can entirely understand the confusion and unhappiness about the individuals in that position. We’re sure not even the knuckle-headed authorities in the Dubai one-man dictatorship will hold them responsible for the death of the Hamas arms-buyer.

But after everyone has had a Bex and a good lie down, then surely the paramount issue is the need for Israel to protect itself from those who wish to terrorise it into madness, blast Jerusalem with nukes and drive six million Jews into the sea.

The world continues to apply a double-standard to Israel.

Where’s the front-page outrage when missiles land in southern Israel? We’re all too keen to contemplate the “cause” or motivations of crime rather than staying focused on stopping the criminals.

Where’s the Prime Ministerial or DFAT frenzy over the nuclear arsenal being slowly and hopefully incompetently assembled by Iran’s perverted regime? Make no mistake, when Iran has a live nuclear missile capable of hitting Israel, it will be used. We have no higher authority on that than Iran’s president himself to support the proposition.

And yet DFAT still makes nice with these people, hiring the best and brightest lefties out of our universities with Honours degrees in social theory and preferably Arabic to bow and scrape to rulers of lands where democracy has never existed, women are treated like cattle and their oil is becoming less and less useful to us every day.

PASSPORTS FOR ALL OF US
This whole business reminded me that I need a new passport. Not that I wish to become James Bond in slightly less stylish and considerably less womanising form but if any nation keen to hunt down Hamas terrorists needs an extra passport to ensure their operatives can slip in and out of the hostile dictatorships that give mass murderers sancturary, then that’s fine by me.

Never again, all decent people say quietly to themselves when the contemplate the obscenity of what transpired in supposedly civilised Europe not that many decades ago. In my father’s lifetime, all this happened, the most sickening horror the world has even known, unleashed by one of its most cultured and advanced societies  in Germany.

Never again, I said through the tears when I walked through Yad Vashem.

Never again I said to myself when I saw for the first time a faded tattooed number on the arm of a kind old lady standing in a queue for an ALP plebiscite and contemplated just how much of a miracle it was that she’d made it from the mouth of hell to a great triumph of freedom in the St Kilda Park Primary School.

It’s easy to say.

It’s another thing to step up and comprehend that the same evil forces still exist in the world and that if you do nothing to stop it, then it will triumph. Those evil forces are positively nurtured by a hostile European and Arab world press who beat up every imaginable negative story about Israel and gloss over the barbarism of those who seek destroy Israel.

Israel defends itself well from these threats. We’ll never know just how many near misses they avoid, how much carnage they are able to pre-emptively defeat.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is dead.

We don’t know why he was killed. But if Israel did it, then that’s fine by me. If it had been possible to do so, I don’t doubt the preference would have been to extract him from the one-man dictatorship of Dubai and bring him to Israel to see how many of his blood-thirsty ghoul comrades he’d give up.

If you really believe that the Holocaust ought happen never again, if you’re really Israel’s friend as I’ve seen Kevin Rudd and Stephen Smith insist over the years then you might consider that true friends stick even when slight offence has been caused. True friends don’t act opportunistically to denigrate the other. True friends see the big picture.

Whining about identity theft, the integrity of passports and such things is not the act of a friend.

It shows a contemptible lack of understanding about the reality of life in the Middle East and situation Israel is put in by those who seek to destroy it.

Kevin Rudd and Stephen Smith will rarely do something more popular than lash at Israel over this passport row but I’ve never been so troubled about the banality and the lack of real perspective many of our elected leaders have. The Liberals are not much better of course, they get hot under the collar about pink batts but stay mute when there’s an unpopular but important truth to speak up for.

The next time I go through Ben-Gurion Airport, after the euphoria fades from arriving in a very, very special place, I’ll probably think about whether my passport could be faked and used in Israel’s defence.

If that’s the only contribution I could make to ensuring “Never Again” then I’d be happy to make it. I’ve been all talk and no action so far.

From the comfort of suburban Melbourne, I am in no position to second-guess how the brilliant Israel security forces and services do their work. But I thank God they do. And while debate will rage in Israel about whether operations against scum like Mahmoud al-Mabhouh are worth all the grief, real friends of Israel are just relieved that there’s one less genocidal maniac on the loose.