“Poster girl for Hamas, Senator Lidia Thorpe, should resign. Her latest radical chic is a green Hamas-style headband in Arabic drawing attention to her ill-conceived support of their cause,” says Indigenous Friends of Israel International co-founders Norman and Barbara Miller.
“Outrage over her selfie wearing the headband on X led to her removing it yesterday less than 24 hours after posting it. Many complained about her ‘dressing up’ as a terrorist and that it was offensive and divisive, so she apologized saying she was pushing for a ceasefire.
Strangely, the Arabic script on her headband read ‘I love chocolate milk’ with the caption on her post ‘I wholeheartedly support this message. I hope you do too.’
Thorpe is pushing a narrative that the Jewish people are colonizers and occupiers of Israel ignoring the fact that it is their ancient homeland, and they are Indigenous to Israel with a 4,000 year history there.
Many nations invaded and colonized the land of the Jews over thousands of years. Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamelukes, Ottomans, and Britain to name some of them but there was always a Jewish presence in the land.
When Israel reformed as a modern nation in 1948, it was decolonizing the land which had been a British mandate under the League of Nations which became the United Nations. Australia presided over the vote admitting Israel to the United Nations in 1949.
Hamas is not pushing for a Palestinian state that would include Gaza and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). It wants the whole of Israel as its maps show and it wants the destruction and removal of the only Jewish state in the world. It also wants the removal of all Jews from the Jewish homeland. This is genocidal and is in the Hamas charter.
About 800,000 Jews were traumatically made refugees from Arab lands in the Middle East in 1948 losing their homes, businesses, jobs, nationalities etc. So, it was not just the Jews of Europe who survived the Holocaust who made Israel home.
Thorpe’s misguided attempt to align the Blak Sovereign Movement with the Palestinian cause is flawed. The Palestinian people are not Indigenous to Israel.
The Jews have never invaded any land in all of history. They simply returned home, joining those who had never left.
Senator Thorpe spoke on Monday at a ‘free Palestine’ rally in Melbourne asserting that the violence in Gaza was like the attempted genocide of Indigenous Australians by European settlers.
There is no comparison here. Yes, Australia was colonized by British settlers and yes there was loss of life despite instructions otherwise by the British crown. Israel instead is defending itself against an invasion and massacre by Hamas on October 7 and trying to ensure that Hamas cannot keep its promise to keep repeating October 7. Also, the captives taken by Hamas in a war crime need to be freed.
It seems dressing up to make a point has form with Lidia Thorpe who arrived in a pro-Palestine dress at the mid-winter parliamentary ball earlier this month with the genocidal phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ embroidered down the front.
A blood-stained look at the bottom of her dress completed the picture. It is time for Senator Thorpe to resign. This was not the platform she was voted in on, having resigned from the Greens last year, supposedly a representative on environmental issues.
’Not my senator,’ many Indigenous and other Australians are saying about Senator Lidia Thorpe.”
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