Protesters insist violent attacks not antisemitic as speaker predicts Israel's demise
Speakers at Sunday's march, attended by hundreds in the CBD, also attacked Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who last week released a report from his antisemitism envoy, and Premier Jacinta Allan, who announced a taskforce after last weekend's attacks, which included the firebombing of a synagogue.
The protests have been held almost every weekend since Hamas' terror attack on Israel, which killed about 1300 people, and throughout Israel's devastating retaliation that has killed almost 60,000 people in Gaza as well as fuelled wider regional conflicts.
One rally speaker said the media, including The Age, had misrepresented last weekend's incidents at Lovitt Technologies in Greensborough, where cars were torched, and Miznon restaurant, which was violently trashed, as antisemitic.
'The action at Lovitt Technologies was a legitimate target, because they provide military parts to F35 aircraft that are bombing civilians in Gaza right now,' said the speaker, whom this masthead has attempted to identify.
She said Miznon in the CBD was also a valid target, because of part-owner Shahar Segal's former role as a spokesman for the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been widely criticised over its role in the deaths of civilians trying to access food in the enclave.
'The Miznon restaurant [incident] was not antisemitic, because the mother----er that runs that place has direct ties to the GHF that is killing starving civilians,' she said.
She did not say whether she believed the tactics in those two attacks were justified but condemned the East Melbourne synagogue attack, saying the protesters would never target a place of worship.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News AU
41 minutes ago
- Sky News AU
Albanese's great betrayal: The alarming data that shows there is no end in sight to the housing shortage crisis
The numbers scream betrayal. Australia will fall 262,000 homes short of the government's own housing target by 2029. Other reports indicate the shortfall could total 400,000 homes in the capital cities. Some might label this as speculation. They're mistaken. At this point, it's a mathematical certainty. Anthony Albanese's government knew this was coming. They set the target: 1.2 million new homes by 2029. Bold promises, empty delivery. The rental market tells the real story. National vacancy rates sit at 1.2 per cent as of May 2025. That's crisis territory. Anything below three per cent spells disaster for renters. We're not even close. These rates remain 1.5 percentage points below pre-COVID averages. Young Australians know the truth. They're living it. Share houses at thirty. Multigenerational mortgage stress. Dreams deferred indefinitely. Many can't afford to leave home, not out of choice but necessity. Full-time work doesn't guarantee independence anymore. They're working harder, saving longer, and getting less. The ladder to homeownership might not have been torched, but the bottom rung has been quietly sawed off. The median house price continues its relentless climb. Wages don't. Simple arithmetic delivers crushing verdicts. A generation locked out of home ownership. Forever. Labor's response? Build apartments. Stack humans vertically. Problem solved, apparently. Wrong. This is not urban planning. Not the smart kind, anyway. It's bureaucratic crowd control dressed up as policy. Apartments jammed into dense lots, minimal green space, no long-term vision. The goal isn't to help people thrive; it's to make the housing crisis disappear on paper, to tick a box and call it progress. But Australians don't dream of concrete towers. They dream of Saturday morning lawn mowing. Children's laughter in backyards. Space to breathe. Privacy to exist. The apartment obsession ignores something elemental—how people actually live. Families need space to grow, not just square footage. Kids need backyards, not balconies. Parents need storage, quiet, parking, not communal bins and walls that carry every footstep, argument, and appliance hum. Three-bedroom apartments won't solve this. They're band-aids on arterial wounds—luxury-priced, politically convenient, and conceptually bankrupt. Australians want what their parents had. Modest homes on reasonable blocks. A patch of lawn. A shed out back. A place to park without circling the block. But today's policymakers have something else in mind, the kind of housing they'd never dream of inhabiting themselves. The kind they wouldn't raise their own children in. Tower blocks for the masses, leafy suburbs for themselves. And the consequences are already here. When people can't afford to live near where they work, society fragments. When young people can't afford to start families, birth rates collapse. When families are priced out of the market, the dream of upward mobility dies. A nation without children, without aspiration, is a nation in retreat. But solutions do exist. Australia is short on vision, but it's not short on land. Regional areas offer what cities no longer can: space, affordability, and the potential to build real homes, not cramped cubicles. Yet the regions remain neglected—underfunded, underconnected, underutilized. Jobs are sparse, services are threadbare, and infrastructure barely exists beyond the town sign. The answer is there, but it demands investment—leadership, not lip service. Smart countries build new cities. They don't cram everyone into a few mega-centres and then act surprised when crises unfold. They spread their populations strategically. They invest in infrastructure before the nightmare begins. They lay down roads, rail, and internet—not just in capital cities but in the forgotten regions too. They create opportunity across the map. They think 20 years ahead. Australia does none of this. For far too long, the current government has done nothing as cities swelled, costs surged and families were priced out. Sydney and Melbourne are bursting at the seams. Brisbane and Perth aren't far behind. And still, no new cities. No bold planning. Just higher density, higher prices, and higher stress. The government could act. It could release land, not drip-feed it to inflate prices, but actually make it available. It could fast-track approvals, not tie them up in years of bureaucratic purgatory. It could cut the red tape strangling builders. But it won't. Because this government is hooked on stagnation. It mistakes inertia for prudence. It governs like a property manager, not a nation builder. It wants tax receipts, not transformation. The Australian dream isn't dead, but it is being euthanised. Slowly. Bureaucratically. Smothered by incompetence and indifference. And as always, it's the young who pay the price. The renters. The first-home buyers. The would-be parents. Paying off someone else's investment portfolio. Watching the dream of a backyard vanish while politicians blame local councils and 'market forces'. There's nothing natural about this crisis. It's manufactured. Maintained. Managed by people too spineless to challenge the status quo and too visionless to build something better. Albanese's government had a chance. A mandate. The numbers. They chose failure instead. Future historians will judge this era harshly. They'll ask how a nation with so much space became a place where families couldn't afford to start, where a home became a luxury, where the middle class—the engine of prosperity—was gutted in real time. Young Australians deserve better. Something must change, or watch an entire generation simply give up. John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist who writes on psychology and social relations. He has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Israel said Hamas was looting aid — then it armed the gangs who were actually stealing it
Groups of men huddle around fires, waiting for aid trucks to roll through central Gaza. Some of them used to be teachers and other professionals. Now, they have banded together to form gangs and raid aid convoys. The scene is like one from the Mad Max movies, a dystopian setting where there are no rules. "We are a group of men organised into crews — we call ourselves 'the ones who block the roads'," one of the men, Mohammad Salman, told the ABC. "If you want to get aid and secure food, you have to come through here; otherwise you won't eat. "Today, all these people have become gangsters. They seize food from trucks and anything they find on the road. They'll take food away from anyone. If someone grabs food from a truck and I don't get my share, I'll go after him. "That's how we have become. If someone gets something, I will take it from him to eat. Some of the men say they have worked with a gang leader named Yasser Abu Shabab. Once a wanted criminal, it's now widely believed that Abu Shabab has been armed and protected by the Israeli government — to take control of the part of southern Gaza where his family holds sway. Abu Shabab is apparently an unlikely figure to lead a resistance against Hamas's rule in Gaza, Gazan analyst Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in The New Arab. "To them, he didn't seem like someone with the leadership skills necessary to form a group of 300 armed militants, steal truckloads of aid, and store it under the radar." Israeli media have reported Abu Shabab escaped from jail with Israeli assistance early in the war. "He was in a Hamas prison until October 2023 for theft and drug offences, and his release came under the cover of an Israeli attack on security facilities in the Strip at the beginning of the war. From that moment on, his name emerged as someone who would fill the security vacuum in eastern Rafah," the Israeli newspaper Maariv wrote. The United Nations has identified Abu Shabab's gang as one of those raiding aid convoys when they entered Gaza, saying they were doing so with the apparent protection or indifference of the Israeli military. Former French diplomat Jean-Pierre Filliu, who spent one month in Gaza with Doctors Without Borders from December 2024 to January 2025, said he witnessed the gang being protected by the IDF while looting trucks. "The Israeli military recognised its inability to promote a clan-based alternative to Hamas and decided to rely more or less openly on organised crime," he wrote in Le Monde. "The key figure in this manoeuvre was a previously minor member of a Rafah family, Yasser Abu Shabab, whom Hamas had imprisoned in the past for his various trafficking activities. But Israeli protection allowed Abu Shabab to substantially expand its activities and poach, from other clans, some 100 loyalists ready for anything, often ex-convicts. "What could only be called a gang operated under the eyes of the Israeli army … and it was equipped with brand-new weapons, an irrefutable indication of its collaboration with the occupiers." A gang member confirmed to the ABC that Abu Shabab's group had been stealing and selling aid. "People would work normally with Yasser just like employees. He had two shifts. It was easy," the gang member said. The man explained that much of the looted food was then sold to merchants, although he insisted aid groups were given some of it. "They would unload the goods, and traders would come to buy them. Half of the supplies were distributed to institutions like schools," he said. "The aid agency would arrive to collect its share and then distribute it to schools." The gang member alleged Hamas had previously been stealing some aid, something the group denies. "He [Yasser] was working in security when he saw the government and Hamas members stealing from the aid trucks as they passed through central Gaza and Nuseirat," he told the ABC. "That's when he decided to take action — stealing the trucks to distribute some of the aid himself, handing out money, flour … and that was it." Abu Shabab and his men, now calling themselves "the Anti-Terror Service" or the "Popular Forces", have been accused by many Gazans of working with the Israeli government. The Israeli government has said openly it has backed groups like the one Abu Shabab runs. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted in June that his government had "activated" clans in Gaza opposed to Hamas. That sparked concerns from the opposition that their weapons could eventually be turned on the IDF, or used to create unmanageable chaos. "In consultation with security officials, we made use of clans in Gaza that are opposed to Hamas," he said in a video on social media. The Times of Israel said Defence officials had confirmed Mr Netanyahu was referring to the Abu Shabab gang. "The sources confirmed that Israel has been arming the gang with Kalashnikov rifles, including some that were seized from Hamas during the ongoing war," it wrote on June 5. Former Israeli Defence minister Avigdor Lieberman has alleged Abu Shabab had ties to the IS terrorist group. "The Israeli government is giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons, identified with Islamic State, at the direction of the prime minister," he told Israeli public radio. The Abu Shabab group was alleged to be providing security for the new, Israeli and US-backed food distribution operation, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It denied any links with the gang. "GHF has no association with Yasser or the 'Anti-Terror Service'," it said in a statement sent to the ABC. Hamas fighters have attacked the group, but said Israeli forces came to its defence, Israeli media reported. The arrival of the new aid operation has changed conditions in the south of Gaza, but Hamas is still keen to kill or imprison Abu Shabab again. On July 2, the Hamas-controlled Interior Ministry in Gaza gave Abu Shabab 10 days to surrender himself and face trial for treason. The ABC called and sent messages to Yasser Abu Shabab but did not receive a response. Comment has also been sought from the Israeli government and the IDF. Meanwhile, the Israeli government and military continue to dismiss United Nations reports of a worsening hunger crisis in Gaza. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is only distributing food parcels at limited locations in southern and central Gaza. Israel's government last month stopped allowing food shipments into the north. The "men who block the roads" are still waiting by the aid routes, hoping for any chance to seize supplies and stay alive.
Perth Now
2 hours ago
- Perth Now
PM urges work on green steel over red wine in China
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will raise Australian concerns over Chinese steel dumping as he urges industry leaders from both nations to work together to develop low-carbon steel production methods. At a roundtable of Australian iron ore producers and Chinese steelmakers in Shanghai on Monday, Mr Albanese will call on China to address an oversupply of steel in the global market. Excess Chinese steel production - the result of prolonged economic stimulus and weak domestic demand - has flooded the international market in recent years, squeezing producers in places such as the US and Europe, and precipitating allegations of dumping. Australia imposed anti-dumping duties on steel imports from China but the World Trade Organization found they were improperly applied. Mr Albanese knows Australian miners - and government revenue streams - are vulnerable to a downturn in the iron ore price. "As both countries co-operate to advance decarbonisation, we also need to work together to address global excess steel capacity," he will tell the roundtable on Monday morning. "It is in both countries' interests to ensure a sustainable and market-driven global steel sector." It's hard to overstate the Australian economy's dependence on the Chinese iron ore trade. China is by far Australia's largest export destination and iron ore is by far the largest component. In 2024, Australia shipped $104.8 billion worth of the ferrous metal to China - about a sixth of the total value of exports to all trading partners. In addition to Chinese oversupply, the iron ore industry faces another long-term challenge - climate change. Turning iron into steel is a highly carbon-intensive process, accounting for seven to nine per cent of global emissions. Efforts to create green steel are under way but scalability remains a challenge. "Steel decarbonisation presents a range of challenges," Mr Albanese will say. "What we need are enabling policy environments, extensive investments in research to develop new technologies and collaboration across academia, industry and government." With leaders from iron ore giants Rio Tinto, BHP, Fortescue and Hancock in the room, Mr Albanese will pay tribute to the green steel projects those firms have under way. Representatives from a host of Chinese steelmakers will also be present, including Qiu Yinfu, the general manager of Shougang, which is working with Rio on developing green technologies such as low-carbon sintering and blast furnace optimisation. Later on Monday, Mr Albanese will deliver a speech to a high-level business lunch before flying to Beijing for the next leg of his six-day tour. Australian red meat, rock lobster and red wine will be served at the lunch - three menu items that have found renewed favour in China after Beijing lifted trade sanctions on more than $20 billion worth of Australian imports. Mr Albanese will again reiterate the importance of interpersonal relationships between Australian and Chinese business leaders and ongoing dialogue in maintaining positive relations. "There is no fixed model for a stabilised relationship," he will say. "Our job is to make sure that we manage our relationship so that we can contribute to regional and global peace and prosperity."
