Australian Senator Posts Photo Wearing a Mock Hamas Headband, Promptly Deletes Post

Lidia Thorpe, an independent senator in Australia, is facing criticism after posting a photo on social media wearing a mock Hamas headband.

as Australian lawmakers take an increasingly negative view of Israel conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah.

On Monday evening Thorpe posted a picture of herself wearing a mock headband which mockingly spelled out “I love chocolate milk” in Arabic, according to the Australian Jewish Association.

She captioned the now-deleted post, “I wholeheartedly support this message. I hope you do too.” 

Robert Gregory, the CEO of the Australian Jewish Association, condemned the post on X / Twitter, “This is one of the most racist and ugly acts to come from a member of Australia’s Parliament for some time,” he said. “This is the equivalent of dressing in a Nazi uniform while changing the SS letters slightly,” he added.

Since Israel’s war with Hamas, Thorpe – who turned independent after leaving the left-wing Greens Party in 2023 – routinely wears a kaffiyeh or Arabian headscarf warn by pro-Palestinian protestors. Just days after Hamas’s massacre on October 7th that left over 1,200 Israelis killed, Thorpe arrived at Australia’s Parliament wearing a kaffiyeh. In her speech to Parliament that day she compared Australia to Israel as both being “illegal occupiers.”

Meanwhile Australian lawmakers have increasingly become wary of an Israeli conflict with Hezbollah. On July 4, the Daily Telegraph reported that Israel’s Ambassador to Australia, Amir Maimon, was summoned for an “extraordinary diplomatic dressing down” by  Tim Watts, Australia’s Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs. The Leader of the Opposition, Simon Birmingham, told ABC News Australia that failing to stand behind Israel in their war against Hezbollah would be an “outrageous abandonment of a democratic friend.”

Increasing hostility towards Israel from Australia’s political class have come amid a surge in antisemitic incidents across the country.

In just the first seven and a half weeks after the Oct. 7 atrocities, antisemitic activity in Australia increased by a staggering 591 percent, according to a tally of incidents by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

In one notorious episode in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas onslaught, hundreds of pro-Hamas protesters gathered outside the Sydney Opera House chanting “gas the Jews,” “f—k the Jews,” and other epithets.

The explosion of hate also included violence such as a brutal attack on a Jewish man in a park in Sydney in late October.

Pro-Hamas sentiment has also led to vandalism. Last month, the US consulate in Sydney was vandalized and defaced by an unidentified man carrying a sledgehammer who smashed the windows and graffitied inverted red triangles on the building. The inverted red triangle has become a common symbol at pro-Hamas rallies. The Palestinian terrorist group, which rules Gaza, has used inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “the red triangle is now used to represent Hamas itself and glorify its use of violence.”

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