Australia, on Monday, joined the nations of France, Great Britain, and Canada by vowing to support a so-called Palestinian state during a United Nations gathering in September.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the situation in Gaza a "humanitarian catastrophe” and put the blame squarely on Israel, ignoring terrorist group Hamas and its mission to find and kill Jews.
Michele Bachmann, the former congresswoman and now a dean at Regent University, is a vocal defender of Israel. She tells AFN the Gaza War now nearing the two-year mark has been a military disaster for Hamas but a propaganda bonanza.
“When they've made every wrong move that there is, their last move is the PR campaign,” she says. “And so they put pressure on these Western nations to make a dumb decision, which is to ‘recognize’ a Palestinian state.”
What is known as Gaza, or the Gaza Strip, is a 25-mile strip of territory that is the approximate size of Las Vegas and Detroit.
Gaza has been controlled by Jew-hating Hamas since 2007, when it defeated political rival Palestinian Authority in elections there. Two years earlier, in 2005, Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon handed over the area in a naïve bid for peace. He withdrew the military, and evacuated 10,000 Jews from settlements, only for Hamas to gain control and maintain a fanatical grip on the territory.
Even though Israel’s liberal government hoped for peace, the 1988 charter for Hamas states all of the historic land in Palestine belongs to Islam, and it describes a religious war against Jews and Zionists.
Bachmann says the governments lining up to condemn Israel want to be praised and recognized, which she likens to a “cool kids club” of Western nations. One thing all of them have in common, she adds, is “unlimited, unvetted” mass migration of Islamists who are changing the cultures.
'Islamic council' but not a court
The cultural shift that warmed up to Islam across Europe came from a feel-good movement from native Europeans to become more multicultural and less judgmental. That effort has created no-go zones in parts of France, and Sharia councils in Great Britain, but Westerners who criticize it are accused of bigotry.
Claims of lawless no-go zones in areas of France have been dismissed as conspiracies, or condemned as xenophobic lies, but their actual locations are known across France. When the no-gone zones are acknowledged, their existence is blamed on poverty and not Islam.
Great Britain’s Sharia councils are supposedly not a replacement for civil court matters, but they are used by Muslim men to permit or deny divorce and to rule on inheritance disputes.
A 2024 story by The Times found an Islamic scholar’s fatwa, which cited Islam in the case of a brain-dead child, was accepted by a High Court judge in his ruling.
Bob Maginnis, a national security analyst, tells AFN he was not surprised when Germany's government recently announced it was ending its export of military equipment to Israel because of the Gaza War.
"Clearly the Leftists in German continue to run the place," he observes. "They already suffer tremendously from Islamists that are terrorizing many German people. So it's what it is."
Down in Australia, a fact-checking article criticized social media for “misleading” video footage that shows an annual Islamic march in July in Melbourne. The crowd of 5,000 Muslim men appears to stop and chant outside the famous St. Patrick’s Cathedral, suggesting the Muslim men were taunting the church and Christianity as they passed by.
The article, which included a parade route, reports the church is only one location along the marchers’ route. Much farther down the article says the men did stop in front of the church for an unusually long time. A march spokesman blamed it on traffic and a police officer speculated the pause was necessary for the rear of the procession to catch up.
Melbourne is also the site of a 90,000-person rally, organized by the Palestine Action Group, which was held last week. Marchers condemned Israel and demanded an end to the war in Gaza.
"I want to see all ties cut with Israel. I want to see sanctions imposed. I want to see the Israeli ambassador kicked out. I want to see human life prioritized," Ahmed Azhar, the march organizer, said.
Looking ahead to the UN meeting, Bachmann predicts President Trump could pull the U.S. from the United Nations if Israel is condemned and Hamas is not.
"That's a big deal," Bachmann warns, "to have so-called sane Western countries say that a foreign terrorist organization has the right to organize themselves as a legitimate country and be recognized."
