Prime Minister Turnbull’s appointment of Craig Laundy as Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs looks like another blunder, and not merely because the whole concept of multiculturalism as a politically-directed institution is being increasingly questioned by authorities. If it was not a blunder it was something worse.

This new Minister is also Co-chairman of the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine. Tony Abbott appointed another member of the PFOP, Sussan Ley, to be Minister for Health and Sport, to which portfolios Turnbull has now added aged care.

Apparently oblivious to the Muslim terrorist atrocities and massacres committed around the world on an almost daily basis, Ley, like Turnbull himself, has been given to uttering such pearls as: ‘We must be really careful with the – we must recognise several things about Muslims… One is that Islam is a religion of peace. It absolutely is.’

She evidently hasn’t heard the chants by young men outside the Lakemba Hotel either, two of the milder being ‘Allah hedik Israel (God destroy you Israel)’ and ‘The solution is Jihad’. Or for that matter read the papers.

However, Ley’s various portfolios seem to have less direct significance in the world of culural politics than does Laundy’s new portfolio of multitculturalism. It is easy to see how conflicts of interest might arise. Turnbull’s giving Laundy this portfolio is a sign of either a strange blindness, a disingenuous attempt to buy Muslim votes, or part of a deeper and darker agenda.

Laundy has said that ‘the issues that we as a globe confront today’ can be traced back to the creation of the State of Israel. He has appeared on platforms with speakers with lengthy form on the subject, demanding sanctions against Israel.

Andrew Bolt writes: ‘Craig Laundy was one of the Liberal MPs loudest in opposing the restoration of our free speech, helping to defeat the reform of (18C). No wonder: 10 per cent of the voters in his seat are Muslim, and Muslim leaders demanded we keep our gag.’

In a speech in Parliament supporting a motion to recognise 2014 as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, Laundy admitted he had never been to the region but that many Palestinians ‘call my electorate home’.

So PFOP has at least two members in the Turnbull Ministry. If PFOP were simply a friendship society like any other, there might be little cause for concern. But Palestine is different. The overwhelming, virtually the only, issue of Palestinian politics (whatever private citizens may feel) is hatred of Israel and of Jews. The first, and only the first, Palestinian objective is to push Israel back to its barely-defensible 1967 boundaries – the borders of the new Auschwitz, one Israeli called them to me. The next step is the total destruction of Israel. None of the murderously bickering Palestinian factions is prepared to settle for anything less as a goal. But not an ultimate goal – beyond that is the vast vague prospect of joining in jihad against the non-Muslim world – a jihad which quite obviously is already under way.

The only visible ways out appear to be for the totally intransigent Palestinian leadership and the various armed forces its factions control to go, or for Israel and its people to be obliterated. For now, Israel must hang on and cultivate what friends in the Middle East it can – and in this there some modest signs of hope.

The charter of the Palestinian Authority completely rejects any compromise. The talk beloved by the UN bureaucrats and Western politicians, including Australian, of a ‘two-state solution’ is specious nonsense, unless the Arab countries give up land for it, which they will never do. Israel has hardly enough land for one state as it is.

Relations with Egypt, Jordan and other ‘moderate’ Arab states are improving in the face of a common enemy (Isis), but these will not give up land to give the Palestinians a State of their own, and last I heard it remained a capital offence in nearby and neighbouring Arab countries to sell land to a Jew.

Israel has won three defensive wars of survival, but the Palestinians have made it plain that it only needs to lose one war and it’s Auschwitz time. The Constitution of the PA incorporates the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, indicating Jews plot ceaselessly to rule the world. Cartoon films produced by the Palestinians for children depict Jews as monsters, the descendents of pigs and apes. The Palestinians have made no attempt to keep any peace accords except under the threat and actual use of force.

Israel has, of course, been subjected to ceaseless rocket attacks from Gaza and the opportunistic murders of scores of Jews – mainly soft targets such as women and children. The old PLO was at the core of world terrorism, responsible among other things for the Munich Olympic Games massacre. Given this, it is hard to imagine what PFOP could be except an anti-Israel – anti-Jewish – lobby group. In 2014 PFOP co-hosted with the Palestine Advocacy Network and other groups, the opening of the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestine People. To Australia’s shame, 24 parliamentarians from various parties were among those attending. A typical statement attacked the Israeli settlements: ‘[W]hose very purpose is to deny the Palestinians a viable State of their own.’ Actually, of course, its purpose is to give the Jews of the world, threatened today by a wave of anti-Semitism on a scale unseen since the Third Reich, a tiny sliver of ground on which to stand in some sort of security.

Further, whatever the ethnic composition of Mr Laudy’s seat, the overwhelming majority of Australians side emotionally with Israel, and regard the daily diet of Arab/Islamic atrocities with horror and disgust. Instead of giving its members Ministries, Turnbull and Shorten should act to shut down this noxious group, and have the whips serve notice that membership of it is incompatible with membership of a mainstream political party, as both Liberal and Labor did with the Communist Party during the Cold War. As a commentator at the Gatestone Institute put it: ‘When you support the Palestinians exclusively, you offer support to censorship and state control of expression.’ Given the Palestinians’ record of officially-sponsored murder, and massive corruption within their own government, our leaders have no excuse for not acting. If Turnbull does not reign them in immediately and very hard, it will give further credence to the belief of many Liberals that their party has been hi-jacked by people whose values are strange to them.