When Australia’s ABC decided to take feeds from the Qatari state broadcaster, Al Jazeera, it should have known Qatar was a haven for terrorists and a money-laundering centre for violent extremist groups. That Qatar hosted the Hamas party hierarchy when Hamas head Khaled Mashal relocated from Syria to Doha. That it famously held a party for newly freed arch-terrorist Samir Quntar. And it certainly would have known that Doha condones human trafficking and forced labour and punishes homosexuality and adultery with stoning and imprisonment.

Yet it still carried Al Jazeera’s coverage of the war in Gaza which predictably favoured the Hamas line. When the Israel Defense Forces confirmed Al Jazeera journalists were embedded in the Hamas military and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror groups abd were actively ‘spearheading’ Hamas propaganda, the ABC simply turned blind eyes. But then anti-Western, anti-Judeo-Christian beliefs run deep within today’s ABC’s DNA.

Nothing illustrates this better than its clumsy attempt to damage the fine reputation of Australia’s soldiers in Afghanistan, fighting the repressive militant Islamic Taleban political system. Alleging a war crime, the ABC doctored footage of an Australian commando firing six shots at unarmed Afghani civilians. Yet, the raw footage heard only one ‘pop’ from an unknown source. When the fabrication was exposed, the ABC apologised and claimed the doctored audio was ‘inadvertent’. Its claim to be Australia’s most trusted source for news and information is equally unbelievable.

Whatever the motivation, the relationship between Al Jazeera and the ABC appears close. The Qatari broadcaster happily colluded with a politicised ABC using hidden cameras in a sting to undermine Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party’s chances during the 2019 federal election campaign.

And no doubt the Qatar connection finds favour with John Lyons, the ABC’s Global Affairs Editor, who has long been a critic of Israel and its Australian supporters. Lyons spent six years in Jerusalem as Middle East correspondent for the Australian and contends the present conflict is about Israel’s 1967 defensive seizure of ‘Palestinian land’ and its subsequent refusal to vacate. He conveniently ignores the reality that Palestine was never a country. Indeed the current inhabitants of Gaza are descendants of those who rejected the 1947 UN partition plan and those who lost the Six-Day Arab-Israeli war. The latest UN proposal, supported by Australia, to recognise two states, is simply appeasement and foolishly ignores Israel’s 2000, 2001 and 2008 offers of Palestinian statehood, all of which were rejected.

But then Israel’s enemies, like the ABC, conveniently ignore the reality that since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, it has received hundreds of millions in international aid, injections of cash from Iran and other ideological partners, as well as money from taxes, cryptocurrency, extortion and smuggling. Estimates of Hamas’s annual military budget range from US$100 million to US$350 million spent on tens of thousands of troops equipped with rockets and drones. Much of the aid money was diverted to building an elaborate network of tunnels under Gaza prior to the 7 October 2023 music festival atrocities which was intended to provoke the reaction they got.

Prior to the latest bloodshed, the United Nations estimated 80 per cent of Gazans lived in poverty and suffered an unemployment rate of 47 per cent. That wasn’t Israel’s fault. And rather than being subject to genocide, thanks to early marriage and restricted opportunities for female workforce participation, the Palestinian fertility rate was exceptionally high. If anyone should be worried about genocide, it’s Israelis, not Palestinian Arabs.

Nevertheless, the ABC continues with its antisemitic propaganda. It caused the Executive Council of Australian Jewry to observe that a Q&A program was ‘an outpouring of undiluted and uncontested falsehoods and vitriol’. It sought an apology for the ‘inaccuracies and the omission of material context’. ECAJ also complained, ‘No Jewish or Israeli voices were represented’. A defiant ABC disingenuously countered its offers had been declined, omitting those invitations were not as a panel member but as a member of the audience.

Is it simply coincidence that the ABC’s former Middle East correspondent, Sophie McNeill, is now a Greens candidate in Western Australia, the only political party that refuses to support a federal parliamentary motion condemning the Hamas massacre? Or that Antoinette Latouff was hired when she published various comments on Instagram which were allegedly antisemitic? Or that Sarah Schwartz president of the left-wing Jewish Council of Australia, a fringe group of academics, lawyers and writers, is provided a platform to give the impression many Jewish ‘experts’ support the Palestinian cause?

But nothing demonstrates the ABC’s antisemitic position better than its refusal to join over 1,000 journalists from nearly 50 countries to cover Holocaust Remembrance Day which, this year, coincided with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland.

Notwithstanding, ABC management maintains all content is assessed on its merits, ‘ensuring that content broadcast on the ABC is consistent with all editorial policies, including recognised standards of accuracy and impartiality.’ Which means the 63 per cent of complainants alleging pro-Palestine bias obviously had it wrong, a view confirmed by Al Jazeera which alleges the ABC ‘favours the Israeli narrative over objective reporting’. ABC staff agree, citing the broadcaster’s refusal to use words like ‘invasion’, ‘occupation’, ‘genocide’, ‘apartheid’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ to describe Israeli government policy. How pro-Israel can a broadcaster be? The truth is, at the ABC,  ‘impartiality’ has lost all meaning. Its biases are all one way. Whether it’s Aboriginal presenter, Stan Grant, during King Charles’s coronation, lamenting the hurt the monarchy and colonialism have inflicted on indigenous Australians or, doing the bidding of Al Jazeera and its Qatari bosses, the ABC is an unaccountable creature of the left, protected, thanks to state patronage, from the financial sanctions its commercial rivals face.

Like a modern day quisling it predictably sides with those who despise our heritage and free democratic way of life. That’s the return taxpayers’ get for $1.2 billion a year.