Vindictive MPs sell out their Prime Minister

What a dangerous moment in our politics.

Media reports have focused on how Gillard was humiliated by most of her ministers and backbenchers when she tried to insist on voting in the UN against granting state observer status to the Palestinian Authority.

The Prime Minister was right, of course.

The "moderate" Palestinian Authority runs only the West Bank while Gaza is actually controlled by the Islamist Hamas, which vows to destroy Israel and has fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian targets.

Giving Palestinians a UN foothold in fact rewards Hamas and does nothing for peace, which is why Israel and the US wanted Australia to vote against it.

Gillard agreed, but Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr helped whip up an internal revolt that humiliatingly forced her to back down and abstain on the vote.

Many MPs have told reporters why they rolled the Prime Minister and their reasons run from wishful thinking to the puerile.

Some claimed they wanted to encourage Palestinians to make the peace they won't or that they didn't want Australia "on the wrong side of history".

Others were angry at an alleged increase in Israeli settler violence - although they don't seem equally fussed by Hamas rockets.

Government Whip Joel Fitzgibbon reportedly didn't want us to look "a puppet of the US" - as if seeming the puppet of Islamists is better.

Incredibly, The Australian reports some Labor MPs were cross "a Right-wing Israeli prime minister ... backed Mitt Romney over Barack Obama".

Is that how Labor now decides foreign policy? By which Middle Eastern leader is most Left-wing? How vindictively partisan.

BUT of all reasons given, the worst and most repeated was as the Daily Telegraph said: "NSW Right MPs ... were more concerned a no vote at the UN would offend Middle East and Muslim communities in their fragile southwest Sydney seats." The Sydney Morning Herald heard the same: "Many MPs in western Sydney, who are already fearful of losing their seats, are coming under pressure from constituents with a Middle East background."

It is a surrender to tribalism that warns of worse to come

Carr reportedly stressed "the electoral problems in Sydney" to Gillard, and The Australian reported the "demographically challenged" Water Minister, Tony Burke, insisted on not rejecting the Palestinian resolution.

Burke's "demographic challenge" is that the proportion of Muslim voters in Watson, his Sydney seat, has rocketed to an astonishing 20 per cent.

Next door in Blaxland, held by Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare, that challenge is even bigger - 23 per cent.

In nearby Reid and Werriwa, it's 10 per cent; in Parramatta and Barton, 9. In fact, of the 20 seats with the most Muslim voters, Labor holds all but one.

Most are in NSW but in Victoria they include Calwell, with 16 per cent being Muslim voters, according to the latest Census.

What's focused Labor on these voters is that its polling says it could be wiped out in next year's elections just in NSW, where more than 10 seats - even Burke's supposedly safe of Watson - are at risk.

Eight have at least 5 per cent Muslim voters, including Parramatta, Barton, Reid, Werriwa, Fowler, Banks and McMahon, held by Immigration Minister Chris Bowen.

Note also that Labor has sacrificed our wider interests before to placate Muslim voters.

In 1986, Chris Hurford, immigration minister in the Hawke Labor government, tried to deport Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali for overstaying a tourist visa and preaching a violent hatred of Jews.

But Hurford was overruled by Labor chieftains Paul Keating and Leo McLeay, who had growing Muslim communities in their western Sydney seats of Blaxland and Grayndler.

Since then, Hilali hs settled at Sydney's Lakemba mosque, has called suicide bombers heroes and the September 11 attacks "God's work against oppressors". In 2010, he led an anti-Israel protest, leading chants of "Down, down, Israel".

Here's the thing.

Would Australians have agreed to take in so many Middle Eastern migrants had we been told beforehand we'd have to change our foreign policy to keep sweet the ill-assimilated?

Would we have agreed had we been told we'd have to abandon democratic Israel, snub ally US and let pass a UN motion, which pro-terrorist Hamas this week called "a new victory on the road to the liberation of Palestine"?

To have warned then this would be a price of Muslim immigration would have meant damnation as a racist.

To have Labor now do it is a betrayal of voters and our national interest. And it is a surrender to tribalism that warns of worse to come.