The Australian Labor Party Goes To The Mattresses On Israel

How Very Clever.  We Haven't Seen Anything Like This Before

geoffff

This is the cartoon that headed an article by Graham Richardson in this morning's Australian  that cites the Prime Minister's courage in standing up for Israel and standing by the US, Canada and the Czech Republic  in the critical UN vote that has given "Palestine" the status of a state as reason why her political judgement is lacking and simplistic. Why she had to be rolled.

We shall see about that.

It's behind a pay wall so this is my summary.

The "Israel right or wrong" group in the Victorian right of the Party, Richardson complains, "can't bring themselves to say no to Israel." Bob Carr used to be like that, he says, but "has long harboured deep concerns about Israel's policy of allowing more and more settlements on the West Bank" .Carr says there is "no hope of peace without a two state solution" and there is no hope of that "if the settlements keep spreading".

Minister after minister concurred with Carr, he says, but the PM stood her ground. Gareth Evans was lobbying ministers furiously at the time (big surprize there) , Richardson informs us, no  doubt declaring to anyone who would listen that to stand up for Israel was to be on the "wrong side of history".  Whatever it takes, I guess.

.Anthony Albanese withdrew support and Carr said that if the issue went to caucus he would break cabinet solidarity and vote against the Prime Minister. This would bring her down. She would have lost her job over Israel.

I'm not even going to comment on the sheer bloody minded offensiveness of the cartoon that the Australian editors (and Richardson?) allowed to illustrate the piece. If they don't know by now how provocative and degrading those symbols are, especially right now in the middle of a global tsunami of antisemitism, they never will. They know. They just don't care.

 I will say the courage of Australia's cartoonists is  truly remarkable. They are always standing up to the all powerful and spiteful "Jewish lobby". The Jews don't scare them, they boast. They have Jewish friends who agree with them. They all do.  Cartoonists have a job to do. To bring balance by being unbalanced; or something.

What heroes of the hour they are. Of course the Jews don't scare them. What a delicious thrill it must be to upset them. One thing is certain. You could bet the house not one of them would have the balls to draw an image of Mohammed.

Like Andrew Leigh's piece in the Drum a few days ago it is astonishing how wrong and perhaps dishonest Richardson's narrative is. I suppose his position is now mainstream in the chattering classes but these are supposed to be informed men with power and influence.  As Isi Leibler said yesterday about liberal Jewish Israel bashers  --- are they malicious or ignorant?

The starting point is Richardson's description of the UN vote. It was on "the admission of the Palestinian Authority to observer status" he says.  Sucked in, Richardson and the ALP. The Palestinians have already made fools of them. 


Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer's latest article is entitled "Palestine: Trojan Horse Exposes Duplicitous Doublecross".

He writes: 

'Any doubt that the Oslo Accords and the Bush Road Map are dead and buried has been put to final rest by John V Whitbeck – an international lawyer who has served as an advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel.

Writing in the Cyprus Mail on 13 January Whitbeck reveals that the Palestinian Authority "has been absorbed and replaced by the State of Palestine" in a decree issued by Mahmoud Abbas on 3 January and signed by him acting in his capacities as president of the State of Palestine and chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

With Respect,  Graham Richardson and the ALP --- Don't You Feel Just  A Little Embarrassed?

Look at this from the "Palestine Ambassador to the UK" in the British Parliament just two days ago.

Everything else I wrote to Andrew Leigh yesterday applies to Richardson mutatis mutandis. All of them really.  Especially the bits that follow in a moment..  At least  he didn't try on the "illegal" under "international law" blind red furphy.  How seriously perverse is that one especially after a year in which Hamas and its allies fired 2556 rockets and mortars from Gaza into Israel.

Each of those rockets and mortars was fired indiscriminately at a civilian population with the intention of causing as much death and injury as possible. Every one was fired from under the cover of another civilian population with the intention of using casualties from any provoked response as war propaganda to incite racist genocidal hatred in Gaza and abroad.

At least Richardson did not claim to be a friend of Israel. 

•  Jerusalem and the adjoining "settlements", and E-1,have always been earmarked for Israel under any realistic two state deal. This "settlement activity that roars ahead" of which you speak and which you claim is blocking the Palestinian state is in Jewish neighbourhoods in Jerusalem and other areas that have never previously been contested as part of Israel under  land swaps.

 Read Isi Leibler's just published piece on this. Do you have any idea of what you and the ALP  have bought  by signalling that this is again open as far as Australia is concerned? Especially in the explicit context of the following point?  Do you seriously think you are helping?

•  The Palestinians have rejected the two state solution with a vengeance. You have no right not to know this.. They demand all the land to the sea. They do this openly and in every speech and they are being encouraged.. Just look at this from just yesterday in the British Parliament from the "Ambassador of Palestine to the UK"  .. in the presence of British MPs.

 Every Palestinian faction is united on this now. Why wouldn't they be? Wherever they look in the West they are being told they are winning .  "Armed struggle" it is. Or the ethnic cleansing of the Jews outside of the 1949 armistice lines, just like from Gaza where they had lived pretty much for as long as there has been a Gaza,,; followed by the  forced collapse of the state through the spurious and offensive Muslim right of return. That is their bottom line.  With respect are you deaf? Do you think the Israelis are? That you overlook Palestinian intransigence and ignore the numerous repeated and specific offers by Israel and the world of a Palestinian state both before and after 1967 right up until Olmert's extraordinary offer a few years ago causes concern about your sincerity when you talk about peace.

•  No where in your essay do you mention the campaign of Nazi inspired genocidal antisemitism that is part of Hamas and Islamist ideology and reaches as far as Australia. That this  has reached this  far , and the threats this conflict and all the others involving radical Islam present on the home front, you appear to have no inkling of at all.  It is as if it does not exist. It is as if this and Islamist imperialism are simply not factors in the equation despite all the evidence.. Just as the human rights of the Israelis to their liberal democracy appear to be of little concern to you, beyond some somewhat condescending quips about technology and economic innovation and independent judges, academics and journalists. Just like Czechoslovakia before she was handed to the Nazis.

More innovative and independent than in Australia. For better or for worse.

•  To expect the Israelis to retroactively deep freeze their vibrant state permanently along 1949 armistice lines in the teeth of all this is an invasion of their human rights. Would you put up with that? . This is not the border. It never was and there have been three wars since then. These lands are not "occupied". They are disputed and especially in regard to those areas which were supposedly settled to be part of Israel under any two state deal long ago,  with land swaps, Jewish East Jerusalem, E-1  and the surrounding neighbourhoods, it is absurd and offensive to suggest that the Fourth Geneva Convention has application as you and the overt Israel bashers, including naturally the UN, have done.

 As far as the Palestinians and their foreign string masters are concerned it is not just these lands that are disputed. All the land is disputed all the way to the sea. Now more than ever. This is at the very core of the problem.  There are reasons why this problem is worse now than ever before.. These are the Islamic Revolution and Islamism. Not necessarily in that order. Did they miss that at your universities? Do you think you are helping by feeding it?

Perhaps you think these are Israel's fault. That you don't even mention the core of the problem suggests you are part of the problem.

•  The Israelis are not going to give up their brilliant little democracy without a fight.. Would you? To paint them into a corner is to invite war. That you can not see this, and you ignore completely the most pressing issue for Israel and the world, the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran, as if it was an entirely different and irrelevant topic,  in favour of the by now clearly outright fraudulent  "Palestine"  ruse of the Islamists suggests a serious deficit of political courage. You just cannot bear to face the real problem, as huge as it is, so you look in the exact opposite direction.

I am an Australian of some generations and let me tell you something true, friend. Mate. Friends like you Israel can do without. That you appear to not understand that a liberal democracy anywhere is not dispensable in the face of this vile ideology without us all being dispensable , and that she is not in any way responsible for this vile ideology, or any of the other sick political cultures that have plagued the Arab world since the end of the First World War, including  the Palestinians,  suggests you do not appreciate how crucial this issue is for the health and future of the West and for Australia. The Islamists mean to win. Essays like yours embolden them.   Friends like you both Israelis and Australians can do without.  That is why all Australians, not just Jewish Australians,  who care about ideas like democracy, self determination and human rights should vote against the ALP this year.

Che Gorilla
Resident Human Rights Activist
Geoffff's Joint

The plan still is for the son of an ape to keep on making  a pig of himself at Richardson's and Leigh's and the ALP's blogs and wherever he can find anyone who will listen. Just like Gareth Evans but without being a complete arsehole.

Readers are invited ... requested ... pleaded ...  to send links  to these posts to their local members and everywhere else where it might do some good. The ALP have locked themselves in on this . They have shattered the bipartisan policy on supporting Israel in the face of this vile ideology about which they are in stunned denial.. Among other things perhaps it is time to shatter the bipartisan policy on multiculturalism and immigration; at least how it operates in modern Australia in tolerating, indeed encouraging,  hateful and violent religious extremism and ideological antisemitism, racism and anti-Western radicalism. 

Let us see just whose political judgement is exposed as simplistic on this.  . 

cross posted
Geoffff's Joint