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Yesterday was Australia Day and, like most people around this magnificent, occasionally malfunctioning continent, I was celebrating it.

I’m celebrating the country that took a few boatloads of half-starved British misfits and somehow turned them into the safest, freest, wealthiest society in human history — a nation so stable, that even people who loathe it feel perfectly safe living here while denouncing it.

Which brings us to Western Sydney councillor Ahmed Ouf.

According to Councillor Ouf, if you celebrate Australia Day, you’re celebrating a holocaust.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s not rhetorical exuberance.

That’s an actual accusation of genocide — casually lobbed like a hand grenade into the middle of social cohesion week.

Maximum Outrage

In one sentence, he manages to insult Jews — who suffered an actual holocaust — and Australians, whose ancestors never committed any such thing.

It takes a special kind of moral clumsiness to trivialise the worst crime in history while accusing your neighbours of being latent mass murderers.

But wait — it gets worse.

Councillor Ouf goes on to suggest that anyone who celebrates Australia Day should be treated with deep suspicion.

Why?

Because, he says, if you’re willing to celebrate a “holocaust”, who’s to say you wouldn’t be happy to run one yourself if the opportunity arose?

Apparently, the backyard barbecue is just phase one. Phase two is genocide.

Have a listen to this masterpiece of community-building:

“If you are okay with celebrating the beginning of a genocide, maybe one day when you have the chance, you might start another genocide”

Ah yes. History shows… nothing escalates into mass extermination quite like a sausage sizzle and a few kids with sparklers.

At a time when Australia desperately needs calm heads, shared values and a tiny bit of gratitude, it beggars belief that an elected councillor would pump out this kind of deliberately incendiary nonsense.

I’ll show you more of his comments in a moment.

But first, let’s acknowledge the breathtaking irony at work here.

Puzzling

Councillor Ahmed Ouf arrived in this country in 2010 — as an immigrant — from Egypt.

Australia gave him and his family the opportunity to build a life that would have been almost unimaginable back in the country of his birth: safety, prosperity, free speech, political participation, religious freedom — the whole Western bundle.

We even gave him the privilege of standing for office and being elected to local government.

As a member of local government, paid a handsome wage by ratepayers, he’s meant to organise garbage removal and the maintenance of local parks.

Instead, he uses the privileges we’ve afforded him to post videos saying things like this:

The Australian holocaust began on 26 of Jan 1788.

At that time Australia was home to around 1 million Aboriginal people. These were stable societies that lived for tens of thousands of years.

What followed was catastrophic.

Massacres, genocide, forced removals, ethnic cleansing, introduced disease. The destruction of land, food systems, families and culture.

If all of that were true — and of course it isn’t — there was no genocide, no ethnic cleansing, and certainly no “holocaust” … but if it WERE true, there’s an obvious question:

Why did Councillor Ouf move his family here?

If Australia is nothing more than a vast open-air crime scene soaked in permanent moral contamination, why choose it as your destination of choice?

Why raise your children here?

Why seek public office here?

Why accept a taxpayer-funded salary here?

Unless, of course, you don’t actually believe your own rhetoric — you just find it politically useful.

Beggars Belief

Councillor Ahmed Ouf is, shall we say, an interesting character.

He has been accused of meeting with members of Hamas.

Yet somehow… in his telling… he is not the problem.

No. The real threat to Australia is not radical ideology, imported grievance politics or moral arson. The real danger is ordinary Australians who like their country.

He says of people celebrating Australia Day:

I have my doubts, and I have my concerns about them. Living amongst them is something that doesn’t bring any peace or comfort with me because

And then he casually adds:

If you are okay about celebrating, then maybe one day you might start another genocide.

So if you enjoy Australia Day, you’re basically a genocidal maniac in waiting.

Which raises a practical question.

If Councillor Ahmed feels so unsafe living among Australians who celebrate their own nation… he could always leave.

Egypt is lovely this time of year.

But of course he won’t.

Because in Egypt you don’t get paid by taxpayers to insult your host nation, flirt with extremist rhetoric and lecture the public about moral purity from the comfort of a Western democracy.

Manufactured Division

Which brings us to Council Ahmed Ouf’s final flourish of absurdity:

“If you truly care about the victims of Bondi, if the mass killings of Palestinians over the past two years has moved you, and if the suffering of Ukrainian people has shaken you, then stand with us this Monday.

“Join us on the streets of Sydney and across Australia as we push for an Australia Day that represents everyone. We will keep pushing until truth is recognised, until justice is honoured.”

Councillor Ahmed Ouf was endorsed to run at the last federal election by the Muslim Votes mob.

You’d imagine they might want to improve their candidate screening. Then again, maybe their screening worked exactly as it was designed.

He stood in Jason Clare’s seat of Blaxland and won 20 percent of the vote.

One voter in five – in that Western Sydney seat – believes this bloke is needed in the federal parliament.

And that tells you something important about the direction certain activist blocs would like this country to travel.

They want us to travel away from liberal democracy and towards imported tribal politics where loyalty is demanded, dissent is pathologised, and national identity itself is treated as a moral disease.

That’s the real argument beneath the shouting about January 26.

Anyone who thinks this is an argument about a date hasn’t been paying attention.

It’s not about where in the calendar we celebrate Australia Day. It’s about whether Australia remains a confident nation… or becomes merely a neutral economic zone where everyone is free to take, complain, and reshape it into something unrecognisable.

I’m celebrating Australia Day today.

Not because Australia is perfect — no country is — but because it is decent, free, generous, inventive, and remarkably self-correcting.

And because, unlike some of its critics, I actually love the place that gave me everything.

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Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report. Image courtesy of Adobe.