Why I joined the Greens
and why Labor must lose in the next election
Earlier today I spoke at a community BBQ held by Senator Faruqi and the NSW Greens in Guildford. I was asked by a Deaf/hard-of-hearing man at the event if I could share the speech online, so I’m posting it here.
Asalaamu alaikun, and thank you Senator Faruqi for the invitation. I’m honoured to be here on Bidjigal land and to stand beside you, one of the only politicians in this country who has vocally opposed the genocide in Palestine and who consistently stands for justice. A little bit about me: my mother was born in Tripoli, Lebanon and my father was born in Ceyhan, Turkey, and I was born and raised in Liverpool. I live in Auburn now and I work in Fairfield, so I’m a Western Sydney man through and through. Western Sydney is called a Labor heartland and I’m here to tell you why that has to change.
We’re ten months now into the livestreamed genocide, the mass slaughter and mass starvation of Palestinians at the hands of Zionist forces. I make the distinction of Zionist forces, as opposed to merely Israeli, in recognition of the multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-faith coalition that comprises the people who are killing on average over 160 children a day, as well as dozens of women and men. This is not a Jewish issue or Israeli-only or American-only issue, it is and has always been an international issue. Recently, it was estimated by researchers in The Lancet that the true death toll of the genocide in Gaza can be put conservatively – meaning at the very least – at 186,000, on a scale that goes up to over half a million. This, like most of the realities Palestinians have been telling us about for decades, has largely been ignored by Western media and governments.
People say, Well, what’s this got to do with us? Let’s be clear, first, that is an evil response to the slaughter of people, regardless of who they are, and secondly, even if we had literally nothing to do with it, we’d still have an obligation to do whatever we could to stop it, and to help Palestinians fleeing from it. But in fact, to our shame, we have a lot to do with it. I mentioned Zionist forces earlier; among them are an estimated 1,000 active Australians in the IDF who are on what I can only describe as a murder holiday. We have a Labor government that, several months into the daily massacres carries executed by Zionists, signed a $900m deal with Elbit, an Israeli military company so untrustworthy that even the US government won’t use their equipment and whose gear we had to remove from our own army a handful of years ago because they were using it to spy on us. And still, Albanese decided to give them almost a billion dollars, in the middle of what the International Criminal Court has said amounts to the crime against humanity of extermination and genocide.
We have political, military, and financial deals in place with the apartheid State; we supply jet parts to the planes dropping bombs on refugee tents, we supply satellite intelligence to the US and Israel through the Pine Gap military base, we run political and media cover for Israel even when it murders Australian citizens. We are deeply involved in this nightmare and in fact our leading politicians have been referred to the International Criminal Court by Australian lawyers on the charge of breaching the genocide convention; they are criminally liable for what they have said and done to date.
The next thing people say after, “what’s this got to do with us” is well what can we do about it anyway? There are numerous things the government can do, but for us, on the individual level, the most important thing to do is very simple: we have to vote Labor out of office. It doesn’t matter what the LNP would have done if they were in office, it doesn’t matter even what the Greens would have done if they were in office, it matters what has been and is being done right now by our representatives. They have failed us profoundly, they have failed the most basic test of humanity, they have stained us all with their refusal to condemn Israel, to sanction them, to cease providing weapon parts – and the one true lever of accountability that we have in response is to vote them out, to make them lose their jobs. I truly believe it is the only thing they care about, and if we don’t send a clear message to the political party that has treated the weekly protests of hundreds of thousands of Australians with complete contempt, who have repeatedly condemned us while refusing to condemn their mass murdering “friends” in Israel (their words, not mine); if we don’t send a clear message to the political party that is criminally complicit in genocide, a message that says if you do things like this, you will not only lose your humanity but you will also lose your job, then we effectively create a precedent for every political party that follows. A precedent that says: do whatever you want because it doesn’t matter, we don’t have standards, we can’t stir ourselves enough to stop you, and if that happens, the descent into fascism which is already occurring will accelerate beyond our ability to halt.
There are 1,001 issues that are important to me beyond Palestine, and let me be clear that the Labor party is failing on every single one. It is failing us on education, the obscene gap between private schools enriched by our taxes while overcrowded public schools fall behind and our universities become hollow overpriced corporate shells; it is failing us on housing, which has become a developer’s market for landlords and a desperate underclass of renters; it is failing us on the climate, continually approving new gas and coal mining projects that threaten the sustainability of our children’s future; it is failing us on security, with the absurd farce of the AUKUS submarine deal that dangerously undermines our national independence for no good reason, at an obscene cost. I could go on and on. Name an issue, and I promise you they are failing us – with the key exception that they are absolutely acing being racist, they are absolutely acing making the rich, richer and the poor, poorer. That goes for now and for the past few decades; whether it’s Labor or Liberal, they are two sides of the same shitty coin.
Which brings me to today. I have voted for the Greens for the past decade, but only officially became a member in the last few months. Why? For all the reasons I’ve already listed but also because, fundamentally, I want to see change, and change starts with us. If you do the same thing year in and year out, put in the same level of effort, and still complain that nothing changes, then you need to recognise that the inertia you’re complaining about, the failure of the system, is rooted in you. In us. At least in part. That’s why I’m speaking today as well. Honestly, I don’t want to be here, this doesn’t come easily or naturally to me. I’m not an extrovert. I don’t want to go door knocking, socialising of any kind is utterly exhausting. I’m here because I’ve been pushed to this, because speaking out against Zionism and the profound rot of its genocidal racism has cost me professionally, as it has so many others, and not only do I refuse to be quiet about it, but I’m determined to be louder than ever before.
Most of all I’m here because every day for the past 300 days I have seen Arab men, women, children, and babies butchered and maimed and starved to death and the only political party in this country that had a human reaction to this nauseating traumatic horror was the Greens party, which was to be outraged and horrified, and demand that it stop. It’s the lowest possible bar to clear, and still, everyone else in parliament failed. What we need most in our government, and what it’s currently lacking, is basic humanity, and that’s why I’m going to do everything I can to ensure Labor lose as many seats in Western Sydney as possible and the Greens gain as many as possible.
I hope and trust that you’ll join me in that.
Salaam,
Omar