Gareth Evans coined the term ‘relevance deprivation syndrome’ after going into opposition in 1996. He still seems to suffer from an acute strain, one that afflicts former Labor foreign ministers and manifests in the delusion that peace in Palestine can be achieved by punishing Israel. He’s called for targeted sanctions on Israel, immediate recognition of Palestine to enhance its leverage, and a re-evaluation of Australia’s relationship with the Jewish state. It’s a remarkable reward for Hamas terrorists while attacking a democracy facing existential threats on multiple fronts.

Kevin Rudd showed symptoms even before he was ejected from office. Bob Carr has a florid case, accusing the Jewish state of engaging in Nazi-style mass starvation. Mark Latham may be manifesting signs of susceptibility even though he never got near the portfolio, trumpeting attacks on the ‘Jewish lobby’ and his support for a pro-Palestinian march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, to broadcast his support for freedom of speech by marching with those who, at home and abroad, enthusiastically oppose it.

Could it be that the rage of aging envoys is driven less by principle than by the desire to stay on the diplomatic cocktail circuit and qualify for career opportunities at the United Nations open to subprime, superannuated politicians? Is being pally with the Palestinians about groupthink with benefits? Or currying favour with Qatar?

Carr’s claim that Israel’s actions in Gaza are comparable to the mass murders of millions by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao might be offensive to Russia and China, who are actively airbrushing the atrocities of their heroes from the historical record, but it will win him brownie points with bureaucrats on the Hudson River, and Doha’s diplomatic double-dealers.

Mercifully, Prime Minister Albanese has eschewed the demands of these phantoms of failed peace plans to immediately recognise the state of Palestine with no strings attached. Yet while announcing that he would not follow France down this path, Albanese comforted the Hamas huggers by accusing Israel of starving children, a lie the terrorists manufactured to manufacture outrage at the Jewish state.

The globally circulated image, supposedly showing that mass starvation is occurring in Gaza, features Mohammed Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, a child whose skeletal frame and protruding spine are primarily caused by cerebral palsy and related complications. A May 2025 medical report from the Basma Association for Relief in Gaza confirms Mohammed’s diagnosis and states that his condition likely stems from an inherited genetic disorder.

Publicly available images of Mohammed show that his mother and his older brother Joud are of normal weight. Obviously, this is inconsistent with the notion of widespread famine in Gaza, but this was not a problem for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, Sky News UK, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, the UK Times and the Daily Mail. They simply published images that were cropped, blurred, or excluded his healthy older brother.

According to the New York Times, Mohammed’s father was killed while desperately searching for food. In fact, he seems to have been killed by a Hamas missile launched by its Al-Qassam Brigade that killed up to six Israeli soldiers and up to six civilians or Hamas operatives.

The BBC broadcast a 64-second interview with Mohammed’s mother, in which she mentioned her prolonged struggle to help her son stand and how physiotherapy helped, but the interviewer did not ask why he was having physiotherapy or acknowledge the signs of cerebral palsy, such as his pronounced spinal curvature. Instead, it presented the boy’s condition as a direct result of Israeli policy, implicating it in a crime against humanity while ignoring the culpability of Hamas in both prolonging the war and preventing the distribution of food. In doing so, the BBC acted not like a public broadcaster but as a propaganda organ for the terrorists who exploit children, living and dead, as fodder in their wildly successful media war.

If Hamas is good at this, perhaps it is because it has a long tradition to draw on and has learnt from the best. During the second world war, Lord Haw-Haw, Axis Sally and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem were assisted by Goebbels in demonising Jews and demoralising the allied forces. The Grand Mufti was the first to fuse antisemitism with religious rhetoric, invoking the Koran and Islamic history to justify the extermination of the Jews, and calling for the ‘sons of Arabia’ to ‘Kill the Jews wherever you find them’ saying, ‘This pleases God, history and religion.’ Today, this is enshrined in Hamas’s charter.

The facts about Mohammed and his family were uncovered by David Collier, an independent British journalist who has been exposing antisemitism and historical revisionism in the media for more than a decade, with no resources other than his wits, publishing them on his blog, david-collier.com. They were ignored by mainstream outlets even after they went viral for days before the New York Times begrudgingly admitted that Mohammed had ‘pre-existing health problems’.

Collier says Mohammed’s mother is not trying to hide her son’s cerebral palsy. On the contrary, she’s appealing for help for him. Yet rather than assist her by telling the truth about his condition, they helped Hamas slander Israel.

It’s the same with media coverage of the UN. Rather than expose its complicity with Hamas in preventing the delivery of food aid, the media reports Hamas’ unverified claims of Israelis killing civilians queuing for food without demanding video evidence of the alleged crimes in a territory flooded with mobile phones.

If the famine in Gaza is real, why is the media reduced to illustrating it with photos of a child with cerebral palsy? Why does an Australian prime minister, who sought to legislate against evils of misinformation, accept the narrative of a terrorist organisation ahead of its democratic ally? As Jonathan Swift observed, ‘Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.’ Australia may not have a long tradition of antisemitism, but most European countries do, to say nothing of those who have come from the Middle East. Whatever the reasons, the unpalatable truth seems to be that there is an insatiable appetite for cooked-up Israeli war crimes and no stomach to confront terrorists, their supporters, and their lies.