Wednesday 31 December 2014

Australia 'damaged' relations with Arab world by voting down UN Palestinian resolution

Australia 'damaged' relations with Arab world by voting down UN Palestinian resolution

Australia 'damaged' relations with Arab world by voting down UN Palestinian resolution






Warning from the chief Palestinian representative in Canberra comes
after Australia votes against the resolution demanding an end to Israeli
occupation












Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour



Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour at the UN
security council on Tuesday. Photograph: Frank Franklin II/AP


Australia’s relationship with Palestinians and the Arab world will be damaged by its decision to vote against a United Nations
resolution that demanded the end of Israeli occupation within three
years, the chief Palestinian representative in Canberra has warned.



Australia was one of only two nations, along with the United States, Israel’s closest ally, to vote against the resolution.


Five other nations, including Britain, abstained from the vote,
meaning that just eight of the 15 UN security council nations voted in
favour of the resolution – one vote short of nine necessary for passage.



Advertisement
Izzat
Abdulhadi, head of the general delegation of Palestine to Australia and
New Zealand, said he was surprised at Australia’s vote as he expected
it would “at least” abstain.



“It was very disappointing and regrettable ... and will unfortunately
affect relations with Palestine and the Arab world,” Abdulhadi told
Guardian Australia.



“It’s really very disappointing and I can’t understand why the decision was taken. We don’t know what the reasons are for this.”


Abdulhadi claimed there had been a shift in Australia’s position on
the long-running conflict, citing what he viewed as a new Australian
stance on East Jerusalem.



In June George Brandis, Australia’s attorney general, said it wasn’t appropriate to refer to East Jerusalem as occupied as it was a pejorative term.


“There is a policy shift in Australia’s voting position, as
represented with the East Jerusalem issue,” Abdulhadi said. “I hope
there will be a discussion with Australia on the issue and an
opportunity for engagement with the foreign minister.”



He added that Palestinians would continue the process of getting
international support, despite the “bad advice from US and Australia to
wait before continuing the process”.



Even if the required nine UN votes were achieved, the US would have
been able to use its veto power as a permanent member of the security
council. China, Russia, Britain and France are the other veto-wielding
permanent members, with Australia among the 10 non-permanent members.



Advertisement
The
Palestinian resolution set out a year-long process for a “just, lasting
and comprehensive peaceful solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, which it stipulated should include a “sovereign and viable”
Palestinian state based on 1967 borders. All Israeli forces would
withdraw from the occupied territory by 2017, under the resolution.



Gary Quinlan, Australia’s ambassador to the UN, said Australia was committed to a future where Israel and Palestine exist peacefully in side-by-side states.


“Regrettably, the draft resolution under consideration today will not
help this process and that is why we have voted against it,” he said.



“It lacks balance and seeks to impose a solution put forward by one
party alone. Final status issues can only be resolved between the two
sides. A process agreed by both sides is the only way forward to reach
an enduring agreement.



“The violence experienced in recent months in the Palestinian territories
and Israel underlines the terrible human costs of the failure of final
status negotiations and how fragile the situation is in the absence of
genuine progress towards establishing a Palestinian state – an objective
in which Australia believes and to which we are committed.”



Britain said while it supported much of the resolution’s content, it
had to abstain because normal negotiation processes didn’t take place.
Russia and China both supported the resolution.



Liu Jieyi, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations,
said: “This draft reflects just demands of Arab states, including the
Palestinian people, and is in accord with the relevant UN resolutions,
the ‘land for peace’ principle, the Arab peace initiative and Middle
Eastern peace roadmap.



“We express deep regret over the failure of the draft resolution to be adopted.”


Australia joined the security council last year. Its two-year term ends as 2014 draws to a close.


Australia has used its security council membership to pressure Russia
over the shooting down of flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, in which 38
Australians died. The foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has also
addressed the security council on the threat posed by Islamic State.



The Israeli embassy in Canberra said: “We are glad that the UNSC
understood that accepting the proposed resolution would do nothing but
harm chances for peace and undermine hopes for a better future for
Palestinians and Israelis alike. We commend the Australian government
for its level-headed vote, which characterised Australia’s time at the
UNSC ending today, and call for the Palestinian Authority to return to
the negotiation table.”







Saturday 13 December 2014

Labor for Palestine: It's About Time | newmatilda.com

Labor for Palestine: It's About Time | newmatilda.com

Labor for Palestine: It's About Time



By Stuart Rees





It's
time for the ALP to ask itself serious questions about the situation in
Israel and move to new policy platform, writes Stuart Rees




Earlier
this week a meeting in was held in western Sydney to discuss whether
the Federal Labor Party should support Palestinians’ rights to
self-determination.



In response to the unspeakable suffering of all Palestinians -
Gazans, West Bankers, Arab citizens of Israel, and the 5 million
refugees still served by the UN Refugee Works Association (UNRWA) - why
would the ALP not take a stand for Palestine?    



But change from adherence to the Israeli narrative to fearless
support for the Palestinian cause may not be easy. Questions to ALP
members, which relate to the identity of a party which claims to promote
social justice, might do the trick. Here are the questions. 



Key Questions


How can you retain self-respect if you appear to collude with Israeli
Government’s occupation of Palestinian lands? Do you have any sense of
disbelief at the displacement and replacement polices which have been
occurring since 1948, or at the blood bath of Operation Cast Lead which
began on December 27, 2008? 



Surely the disproportionate use of force in the 2014 Operation
Protective Edge in Gaza would affect your attitude?In that operation,
over 2000 Palestinians were killed and 11,000 wounded. The non-combatant
ratio of Palestinians to Israelis who lost their lives was
approximately 600:1.



Eighteen thousand housing units were destroyed, 24 medical facilities
damaged and at least 16 health workers killed. Twenty-six schools were
destroyed, 228 were damaged and another 31 schools left to serve as
shelters for displaced people.



Will you acknowledge the unnecessary Israeli deaths but also the
massive imbalance in Israeli/Palestinian casualties, property destroyed
and the means of livelihood lost?



Since 2007, within Israel, at least 402 civilians and 58 security
forces have died as a result of suicide bombing. UN figures also
indicate that in Operation Protective Edge, the number of Palestinian
children killed – approximately 500 – exceeds the total number of
Israelis, civilians and soldiers, killed by Palestinians in rocket
attacks and all other attacks over the past decade.



Far away from the Middle East, Australians may become blasé about
body counts, but how could you not protest the cruelty involved  in
control of the most precious life force – water?



UN figures indicate that Israeli citizens receive 300 cubic meters of
water per year, Palestinians 35-85 cubic metres. Israeli settlers on
the West Bank are allotted 1,500 cubic metres and enjoy green lawns and
swimming pools while Palestinians often get no water at all. Haaretz
journalist Amira Hass warns there’s little point in arguing whether
Israelis’ water consumption is four or only three times that of
Palestinians. Instead she requests, “Open your eyes: the thick pipes of
the Mekorot (Israel’s national water provider) are heading to the Jordan
valley settlements, and a Palestinian tractor next to them transports a
rusty tank of water from afar.”



“In the summer, the faucets run dry in Hebron and never stop flowing in (settlements) Kiryat Arba and Beit Hadassah.”


On 9 February 2014, B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for
Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, reported that “over 90 per
cent of water in the Gaza Strip is unfit for drinking. Wastewater
treatment facilities have been damaged, sewage seeps into ground water
and fills the sea.”



Following massive floods across the Gaza Strip in early November
2014, the head of Gaza’s water authority admitted, “The recent war
destroyed everything in Gaza. Many sewage pipes and water networks are
still buried under the rubble.”



East Jerusalem Violence


The record of suffering grows. How would ALP members respond if they
observed the hopelessness which Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem
feel when faced with attacks from armed settlers?



Admittedly there have been awful tit for tat killings, as in the
recent fatal stabbings in a synagogue. This violence occurs in the
context of incitement from settlement leaders, Jerusalem being cut off
from the West Bank, more evictions, more house demolitions and excessive
police brutality.



Israeli author and human rights activist Jeff Halper calls the
collective punishment involved in the demolition of people’s homes,
‘atavistic revenge.’ He emphasizes that the targeting and punishing of
family members innocent of any crime constitutes a violation of Article
33 of the Geneva Convention relative to the ‘Protection Of Civilian
Persons In Time Of War.’



What do party members know of the civil rights of Palestinians living
on the West Bank and in an East Jerusalem almost completely surrounded
by large Israeli settlements?



Israeli leaders encourage Jews to attempt to worship in Moslem holy
places and have given a green light to settlers to attack Palestinians
and their property. Gershon Baskin writes,
“The only real services that Palestinian neighbourhoods of East
Jerusalem receive are those of Border Police arresting suspects, closing
neighbourhoods as well as house demolitions and taxation.”



He reminds us that 80 per cent of East Jerusalem Palestinians live under the poverty line.


Hate speech in Israel and from leading members of the Knesset is an
almost daily occurrence.  A right wing settlers’ slogan reads, “A Jew is
a blessed soul, an Arab is a son of a whore.”



In response to the current discrimination, hate speech and violence
in East Jerusalem, distinguished Palestinian lawyer Dianna Buttu
comments, “This has been the most dehumanizing ordeal in my experience.
All you hear about is the idea that Palestinians don’t value human life,
‘They have a culture of martyrdom’.”



To add to these cruelties a Jewish Nation State Bill is in legal
preparation as the right wing’s one-state solution which would include
the annexation of the territories and the establishment of a Jewish
apartheid State. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy writes that in the
proposed new law, Palestinians will become formally, legally second
class citizens. The architects of this new Israeli state must make sure
at any price that it will not be democratic and egalitarian.



Not Standing Alone


In recognising Palestine as a state, Australian Labor is not being
asked to go it alone, though there would be every reason for taking a
leadership role irrespective of the attitude of other nations.



Several European countries have already taken this stand. The Swedish
Government proposes to extend full diplomatic recognition to the State
of Palestine. By large majorities the Irish Parliament, the British
House of Commons, the Spanish Parliament and the French National
Assembly have voted to recognise the state of Parliament. The motion in
the French Assembly invited “the French Government to recognise the
state of Palestine in order to obtain a definitive settlement of the
conflict.”



Australian state Labor parties have also moved on this issue. A South
Australian Labor resolution mirrors similar statements passed in
Tasmania, NSW and Queensland. The South Australian resolution recognises
peace in the Middle East will only be assured by the foundation of a
Palestinian State based on 1967 borders with agreed land swaps and
security guarantees for itself and Israel.



“SA Labor welcomes the decision of the Palestinian Authority to
commit to a demilitarised Palestine with the presence of international
Peace keepers including US forces,” it says.



Will the Labor Party leadership also heed the cues being given by significant Israeli citizens?


In September 2014, 660 Israeli public figures called on the Danish
Parliament to recognise the State of Palestine. “This would be no
anti-Israel act,” they wrote, “it would help Israel’s future.”



In November 2014, 106 ex-Israeli generals, senior police, and former
heads of Mossad urged Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to negotiate with
“moderate Arab states and with Palestinians in the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip”.



Their letter refers to the Saudi backed peace proposal that was
adopted unanimously by the Arab league in 2002. It offered full peace,
diplomatic recognition, and “normal relations” between Arab states and
Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal to borders based on the
pre-1967 armistice lines, with negotiated land swaps and a ‘just’ and
mutually ‘agreed’ compromise solution to the Palestinian refugee
problem.  



If Labor supports Palestine, will political leaders be sufficiently
resilient to not bend in the face of the torrent of derision which
always follows anyone who dares to criticise Israeli government
policies?  



In response to an article of mine explaining why the world wide
Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement was neither racist nor
anti-Semitic, one threatening letter read, “Go hide in a tunnel… or
stick a grenade up your arse like ur crocodile buddies”.



One of those crocodile buddies was presumably Bob Carr who had
identified and condemned the small group of largely Melbourne
businessmen who supported Israel’s fundamentalist position on illegal
colonies and who sought to veto any change in an Australian government’s
attitude towards Israeli policies.



Carr’s criticism prompted the usual howls of derision from the Israel
right or wrong lobby. Melissa Parke MP received similar vitriol when she spoke in the House of Representatives about the merits of the BDS campaign.




Labor politicians who have spoken in support of the rights of
Palestinians know that the criticism they receive is nothing compared to
the violence and humiliation meted out to Palestinians. They should
know that some Israeli leaders are also dismayed by reactions to any
criticism of the policies of their government.



Quoted in The New Yorker,
the current President of Israel Reuven Rivlin said, “It is time to
honestly admit that Israel is sick, and it is our duty to treat this
illness.”



He also commented, “I must say that I’ve been horrified by this
thuggishness that has permeated the national dialogue…I’m not asking if
we’ve forgotten how to be Jewish but if we’ve forgotten how to be
human.”



From Change of Attitude to Policy?


Beyond the symbolic importance of Labor recognising the state of Palestine, how might such a gesture be converted into a policy?


Although one state already exists in Israel/Palestine, and is about
to be consolidated in the Jewish Nation State Bill, the ALP policy still
envisages a two state solution. In which case a diplomatically sound
elaboration of ‘Labor for Palestine’ could be to return to UN Resolution
242 adopted unanimously in 1967.



Commitment to the terms of that resolution would require all the
parties to cease military activities and return to borders existing
before the 1967 war.



The ALP needs to recognise that if they want to remain a friend of a
democratic Israel, let alone find enough vestiges of humanity to support
the Palestinians, they should be urging negotiations under UN auspices
regarding the goals of Resolution 242. Those goals have much in common
with the Arab Peace Plan and with ALP state branch resolutions.



In the process of moving from a change of attitude to the crafting of
a new policy, emotions will come into play. But it should not take much
courage for Federal Labor to at last say, ‘We’ve had enough of cruelty
as a government’s policy. We’ve had enough of indifference to
international law. We object to violence from all sides but we have not
forgotten about justice; and we will not be intimidated by the Israel
lobby.’



In relation to a change of policy towards all Palestinians we want to
re-craft Gough Whitlam’s unforgettable slogan: ‘It’s about time!’’



Monday 1 December 2014

Labor and Liberal MPs call for Australia to recognise Palestine

Labor and Liberal MPs call for Australia to recognise Palestine


Labor and Liberal MPs call for Australia to recognise Palestine






Australian Parliamentary Friends of Palestine group says
international recognition is the only way to end deadlock and bring
peace to Middle East










Palestinians hold a large Palestinian flag during a rally in Rafah.

Demonstrators hold a large Palestinian flag during a rally in Rafah.
Photograph: Abed Rahim Khatib/Abed Rahim Khatib/NurPhoto/Corbis



Australia must recognise Palestine as a separate state to help facilitate international peace, a Labor MP said.


Maria Vamvakinou tabled a motion in parliament on Monday calling for
the government to support Palestine, in response to the UN international
day of solidarity with the Palestinian people, which was on Saturday.



“On this day, we need to acknowledge and understand that the
prospects for a two-state solution are increasingly dissipating and we
are left with very few options,” Vamvakinou said in tabling the report.



Advertisement
“We
are, potentially, embarking on a road map that leads to nowhere. Such a
prospect will have horrendous implications not only for the
Palestinians and the Israelis, but for the international community.
Essentially there will be no peace for any of us.”



Vamvakinou, who co-convenes the Australian Parliamentary Friends of
Palestine group, said international recognition was the only way to end
the deadlock.



“Australia and indeed this parliament must now recognise the state of
Palestine and Australia must vote yes at the UN for Palestinian
statehood,” she said.



The motion had bipartisan support, with Vamvakinou’s co-covenor the Liberal MP Craig Laundy, speaking for the motion.


“The people of Palestine, for the last almost 60 years, haven’t had a
fair go,” he said. “Imagine if you will, coming home this afternoon to
your home, going to put your key in the door and it didn’t fit.



“You knock on the door. Someone you don’t know opens the door and
they’re in your home. That’s what happened here, that’s what happened
all those years ago. And a people have been displaced and fighting for
an identity ever since.”



He accused lobbyists of hijacking the debate. “The things we discuss
in this chamber should not be influenced by the lobby. They should be
influenced by what’s right.”



Advertisement
Laundy
told Guardian Australia that he is using his position as co-chair of
the friendship group to “continue the discussion with my colleagues and
try to progress the debate towards a meaningful, two-state solution”.



A number of countries – most recently, Sweden
– have formally recognised the state of Palestine in a diplomatic push
to get UN backing for a resolution on ending some Israeli settlements.



Three state branches of the Labor party
– New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland – have adopted
positions recognising Palestine, a move the head of the Palestinian
delegation to Australia, Izzat Abdulhadi, calls encouraging. “We need
international support … We’re not asking for the moon,” Abdulhadi told
Guardian Australia.



He said he has regular dialogue with the government over the issue.
“We’d like to have a Palestinian state based on negotiation [with
Israel] ... but it is impossible now,” he said.



Guardian Australia contacted the Israeli embassy for comment.


Relations between Australia and the Palestinian delegation have been strained for more than a year, since Australia softened its stance on Israeli settlements.


“This shift reflected the government’s concern that Middle East
resolutions should be balanced,” the foreign minister, Julie Bishop,
said in November 2013.



“The government will not support resolutions which are one-sided and
which prejudge the outcome of final-status negotiations between the two
sides.”



Supporters of Australia’s policy shift
see it as vital for a more fair and frank discussion on the vexed
Israeli-Palestinian issue within the UN, which they say is biased
towards Palestinians.





Sunday 14 September 2014

Breaking The Last Taboo: Gaza And The Threat Of World War | newmatilda.com

Breaking The Last Taboo: Gaza And The Threat Of World War | newmatilda.com

Breaking The Last Taboo: Gaza And The Threat Of World War



By John Pilger





As the world lumbers once more to war John Pilger looks at the rise of the people admist the predicatable silence of the media.



“There
is a taboo,” said the visionary Edward Said, “on telling the truth
about Palestine and the great destructive force behind Israel. Only when
this truth is out can any of us be free.”



For many people, the truth is out now. At last, they know. Those once
intimidated into silence can’t look away now. Staring at them from
their TV, laptop, phone, is proof of the barbarism of the Israeli state
and the great destructive force of its mentor and provider, the United
States, the cowardice of European governments, and the collusion of
others, such as Canada and Australia, in this epic crime.



The attack on Gaza was an attack on all of us. The siege of Gaza is a
siege of all of us. The denial of justice to Palestinians is a symptom
of much of humanity under siege and a warning that the threat of a new
world war is growing by the day.



When Nelson Mandela called the struggle of Palestine “the greatest
moral issue of our time”, he spoke on behalf of true civilisation, not
that which empires invent. In Latin America, the governments of Brazil,
Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru and Ecuador have made their
stand on Gaza. Each of these countries has known its own dark silence
when immunity for mass murder was sponsored by the same godfather in
Washington that answered the cries of children in Gaza with more
ammunition to kill them.



Unlike Netanyahu and his killers, Washington’s pet fascists in Latin
America didn’t concern themselves with moral window dressing. They
simply murdered, and left the bodies on rubbish dumps. For Zionism, the
goal is the same: to dispossess and ultimately destroy an entire human
society: a truth that 225 Holocaust survivors and their descendants have
compared with the genesis of genocide.



Nothing has changed since the Zionists' infamous “Plan D” in 1948
that ethnically cleansed an entire people. Recently, on the website of
the Times of Israel were the words: “Genocide is Permissible”. A deputy
speaker of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, Moshe Feiglin, demands a
policy of mass expulsion into concentration camps. An MP, Ayelet
Shaked, whose party is a member of the governing coalition, calls for
the extermination of Palestinian mothers to prevent them giving birth to
what she calls “little snakes”.



For years, reporters have watched Israeli soldiers bait Palestinian
children by abusing them through loud-speakers. Then they shoot them
dead. For years, reporters have known about Palestinian women about to
give birth and refused passage through a roadblock to a hospital; and
the baby has died, and sometimes the mother.



For years, reporters have known about Palestinian doctors and
ambulance crews given permission by Israeli commanders to attend the
wounded or remove the dead, only to be shot through the head.



For years, reporters have known about stricken people prevented from
getting life-saving treatment, or shot dead when they’ve tried to reach a
clinic for chemotherapy treatment. One elderly lady with a walking
stick was murdered in this way – a bullet in her back.



When I put the facts of this crime to Dori Gold, a senior adviser to
the Israeli prime minister, he said, “Unfortunately in every kind of
warfare there are cases of civilians who are accidentally killed. But
the case you cite was not terrorism. Terrorism means putting the
cross-hairs of the sniper’s rifle on a civilian deliberately.”



I replied, “That’s exactly what happened.”


“No,” he said, “it did not happen.”


Such a lie or delusion is repeated unerringly by Israel's apologists.
As the former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges points out, the
reporting of such an atrocity invariably ends up as “caught in the
cross-fire”. For as long as I have covered the Middle East, much if not
most of the western media has colluded in this way.



In one of my films, a Palestinian cameraman, Imad Ghanem, lies
helpless while soldiers from the “most moral army in the world” blew
both his legs off. This atrocity was given two lines on the BBC website.
Thirteen journalists were killed by Israel in its latest bloodfest in
Gaza. All were Palestinian. Who knows their names?



Something is different now. There is a huge revulsion across the world; and the voices of sensible
liberalism are worried. Their hand wringing and specious choir of
“equal blame” and "Israel's right to defend itself" will not wash any
more; neither will the smear of anti-Semitism. Neither will their
selective cry that "something must be done" about Islamic fanatics but
nothing must be done about Zionist fanatics.



One sensible liberal voice, the novelist Ian McEwan, was being
celebrated as a sage by the Guardian while the children of Gaza were
blown to bits. This is the same Ian McEwan who ignored the pleading of
Palestinians not to accept the Jerusalem Prize for literature. “If I
only went to countries that I approve of, I probably would never get out
of bed,” said McEwan.



If they could speak, the dead of Gaza might say: Stay in bed, great
novelist, for your very presence smoothes the bed of racism, apartheid,
ethnic cleansing and murder – no matter the weasel words you uttered as
you claimed your prize.



Understanding the sophistry and power of liberal propaganda is key to
understanding why Israel’s outrages endure; why the world looks on; why
sanctions are never applied to Israel; and why nothing less than a
total boycott of everything Israeli is now a measure of basic human
decency.



The most incessant propaganda says Hamas is committed to the
destruction of Israel. Khaled Hroub, the Cambridge University scholar
considered a world leading authority on Hamas, says this phrase is
"never used or adopted by Hamas, even in its most radical statements".
The oft-quoted "anti-Jewish" 1988 Charter was the work of "one
individual and made public without appropriate Hamas consensus.... The
author was one of the 'old guard' "; the document is regarded as an
embarrassment and never cited.



Hamas has repeatedly offered a 10-year truce with Israel and has long
settled for a two-state solution. When Medea Benjamin, the fearless
Jewish American activist, was in Gaza, she carried a letter from Hamas
leaders to President Obama that made clear the government of Gaza wanted
peace with Israel. It was ignored. I personally know of many such
letters carried in good faith, ignored or dismissed.



The unforgivable crime of Hamas is a distinction almost never
reported: it is the only Arab government to have been freely and
democratically elected by its people. Worse, it has now formed a
government of unity with the Palestinian Authority. A single, resolute
Palestinian voice – in the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council
and the International Criminal Court – is the most feared threat.



Since 2002, a pioneering media unit at Glasgow University has
produced remarkable studies of reporting and propaganda in
Israel/Palestine. Professor Greg Philo and his colleagues were shocked
to find a public ignorance compounded by TV news reporting. The more
people watched, the less they knew.



Greg Philo says the problem is not “bias” as such. Reporters and
producers are as moved as anyone by the suffering of Palestinians; but
so imposing is the power structure of the media - as an extension of the
state and its vested interests - that critical facts and historical
context are routinely suppressed.



Incredibly, less than nine per cent of young viewers interviewed by
Professor Philo’s team were aware that Israel was the occupying power,
and that the illegal settlers were Jewish; many believed them to be
Palestinian. The term “Occupied Territories” was seldom explained. Words
such as “murder”, “atrocity”, “cold-blooded killing” were used only to
describe the deaths of Israelis.



Recently, a BBC reporter, David Loyn, was critical of another British
journalist, Jon Snow of Channel 4 News. Snow was so moved by what he
had seen in Gaza he went on YouTube to make a humanitarian appeal. What
concerned the BBC man was that Snow had breached protocol and been
emotional in his YouTube piece.



“Emotion,” wrote Loyn, “is the stuff of propaganda and news is
against propaganda”. Did he write this with a straight face? In fact,
Snow’s delivery was calm. His crime was to have strayed outside the
boundaries of fake impartiality. Unforgivably, he didn’t censor himself.



In 1937, with Adolf Hitler in power, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The
Times in London, wrote the following in his diary: “I spend my nights in
taking out anything which will hurt [German] susceptibilities and in
dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them.”



On 30 July, the BBC offered viewers a masterclass in the Dawson
Principle. The diplomatic correspondent of the programme Newsnight, Mark
Urban, gave five reasons why the Middle East was in turmoil. None
included the historic or contemporary role of the British government.
The Cameron government’s dispatch of £8 billion worth of arms and
military equipment to Israel was airbrushed. Britain’s massive arms
shipment to Saudi Arabia was airbrushed. Britain’s role in the
destruction of Libya was airbrushed. Britain’s support for the tyranny
in Egypt was airbrushed.



As for the British invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, they didn’t happen, either.


The only expert witness on this BBC programme was an academic called
Toby Dodge from the London School of Economics. What viewers needed to
know was that Dodge had been a special adviser to David Petraeus, the
American general largely responsible for the disasters in Iraq and
Afghanistan. But this, too, was airbrushed.



In matters of war and peace, BBC-style illusions of impartiality and
credibility do more to limit and control public discussion than tabloid
distortion. As Greg Philo pointed out, Jon Snow’s moving commentary on
YouTube was limited to whether the Israeli assault on Gaza was
proportionate or reasonable. What was missing – and is almost always
missing – was the essential truth of the longest military occupation in
modern times: a criminal enterprise backed by western governments from
Washington to London to Canberra.



As for the myth that "vulnerable" and "isolated" Israel is surrounded
by enemies, Israel is actually surrounded by strategic allies. The
Palestinian Authority, bankrolled, armed and directed by the US, has
long colluded with Tel Aviv. Standing shoulder to shoulder with
Netanyahu are the tyrannies in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United
Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar - if the World Cup ever gets to Qatar,
count on Mossad to run the security.



Resistance is humanity at its bravest and most noble. The resistance
in Gaza is rightly compared with the 1943 Jewish uprising in the Warsaw
Ghetto – which also dug tunnels and deployed tactics of subterfuge and
surprise against an overpowering military machine. The last surviving
leader of the Warsaw uprising, Marek Edelman, wrote a letter of
solidarity to the Palestinian resistance, comparing it with the ZOB, his
ghetto fighters. The letter began: “Commanders of the Palestine
military, paramilitary and partisan operations – and to all soldiers [of
Palestine].”



Dr. Mads Gilbert is a Norwegian doctor renowned for his heroic work
in Gaza. On 8 August, Dr. Gilbert returned to his hometown, Tronso in
Norway which, as he pointed out, the Nazis had occupied for seven years.
He said, “Imagine being back in 1945 and we in Norway did not win the
liberation struggle, did not throw out the occupier. Imagine the
occupier remaining in our country, taking it piece by piece, for decades
upon decades, and banishing us to the leanest areas, and taking the
fish in the sea and the water beneath us, then bombing our hospitals,
our ambulance workers, our schools, our homes.



“Would we have given up and waved the white flag? No, we would not!
And this is the situation in Gaza. This is not a battle between
terrorism and democracy. Hamas is not the enemy Israel is fighting.
Israel is waging a war against the Palestinian people’s will to resist.
It is the Palestinian people’s dignity that they will not accept this.



“In 1938, the Nazis called the Jews Untermenschen – subhuman. Today,
Palestinians are treated as a subhuman people who can be slaughtered
without any in power reacting.



“So I have returned to Norway, a free country, and this country is
free because we had a resistance movement, because occupied nations have
the right to resist, even with weapons – it’s stated in international
law. And the Palestinian people’s resistance in Gaza is admirable: a
struggle for us all.”



There are dangers in telling this truth, in breaching what Edward
Said called “the last taboo”. My documentary, Palestine Is Still the
Issue, was nominated for a Bafta, a British academy award, and praised
by the Independent Television Commission for its “journalistic
integrity” and the “care and thoroughness with which it was researched.”
Yet, within minutes of the film’s broadcast on Britain’s ITV Network, a
shock wave struck – a deluge of emails described me as a “demonic
psychopath”, “a purveyor of hate and evil”, “an anti-Semite of the most
dangerous kind”. Much of this was orchestrated by Zionists in the US who
could not possibly have seen the film. Death threats arrived at a rate
of one a day.



Something similar happened to the Australian commentator Mike Carlton
last month. In his regular column in the Sydney Morning Herald, Carlton
produced a rare piece of journalism about Israel and the Palestinians;
he identified the oppressors and their victims. He was careful to limit
his attack to "a new and brutal Israel dominated by the hard-line,
right-wing Likud party of Netanyahu". Those who had previously run the
Zionist state, he implied, belonged to "a proud liberal tradition".



On cue, the deluge struck. He was called “a bag of Nazi slime, a
Jew-hating racist.” He was threatened repeatedly, and he emailed his
attackers to “get fucked”.



The Herald demanded he apologise. When he refused, he was suspended,
then he resigned. According to the Herald’s publisher, Sean Aylmer, the
company “expects much higher standards from its columnists”.



The "problem” of Carlton's acerbic, often solitary liberal voice in a
country in which Rupert Murdoch controls 70 per cent of the capital
city press - Australia is the world's first murdocracy - would be solved
twice over. The Australian Human Rights Commission is to investigate
complaints against Carlton under the Racial Discrimination Act, which
outlaws any public act or utterance that is “reasonably likely … to
offend, insult, humiliate another person or a group of people” on the
basic of their race, colour or national or ethnic origin.



In contrast to safe, silent Australia - where the Carltons are made
extinct - real journalism is alive in Gaza. I often speak on the phone
with Mohammed Omer, an extraordinary young Palestinian journalist, to
whom I presented, in 2008, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.
Whenever I called him during the assault on Gaza, I could hear the whine
of drones, the explosion of missiles. He interrupted one call to attend
to children huddled outside waiting for transport amidst the
explosions. When I spoke to him on 30 July, a single Israeli F-19
fighter had just slaughtered 19 children. On 20 August, he described how
Israeli drones had effectively “rounded up” a village so that they
could savagely gunned down.



Every day, at sunrise, Mohammed looks for families who have been
bombed. He records their stories, standing in the rubble of their homes;
he takes their pictures. He goes to the hospital. He goes to the
morgue. He goes to the cemetery. He queues for hours for bread for his
own family. And he watches the sky. He sends two, three, four dispatches
a day. This is real journalism.



“They are trying to annihilate us,” he told me. “But the more they bomb us, the stronger we are. They will never win.”


The great crime committed in Gaza is a reminder of something wider and menacing to us all.


Since 2001, the United States and its allies have been on a rampage.
In Iraq, at least 700,000 men, women and children are dead as a result.
The rise of jihadists – in a country where there was none – is the
result. Known as al-Qaeda and now the Islamic State, modern jihadism was
invented by US and Britain, assisted by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The
original aim was to use and develop an Islamic fundamentalism that had
barely existed in much of the Arab world in order to undermine pan-Arab
movements and secular governments.



By the 1980s, this had become a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan. The CIA called it Operation Cyclone; and a cyclone it
turned out to be, with its unleashed fury blowing back in the faces of
its creators.



The attacks of 9/11 and in London in July, 2005 were the result of
this blowback, as were the recent, gruesome murders of the American
journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. For more than a year, the
Obama administration armed the killers of these two young men - then
known as ISIS in Syria - in order to destroy the secular government in
Damascus.



The West's principal "ally" in this imperial mayhem is the medieval
state where beheadings are routinely and judicially carried out - Saudi
Arabia. Whenever a member of the British Royal Family is sent to this
barbaric place, you can bet your bottom petrodollar that the British
government wants to sell the sheiks more fighter planes, missiles,
manacles. Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, which
bankrolls jihadists from Syria to Iraq.



Why must we live in this state of perpetual war?


The immediate answer lies in the United States, where a secret and
unreported coup has taken place. A group known as the Project for a New
American Century, the inspiration of Dick Cheney and others, came to
power with the administration of George W Bush. Once known in Washington
as the “crazies”, this extreme sect believes in what the US Space
Command calls “full spectrum dominance”.



Under both Bush and Obama, a 19th-century imperial mentality has
infused all departments of state. Raw militarism is ascendant; diplomacy
is redundant. Nations and governments are judged as useful or
expendable: to be bribed or threatened or "sanctioned".



On 31 July, the National Defense Panel in Washington published a
remarkable document that called for the United States to prepare to
fight six major wars simultaneously. At the top of the list were Russia
and China – nuclear powers.



In one sense, a war against Russia has already begun. While the world
watched horrified as Israel assaulted Gaza, similar atrocities in
eastern Ukraine were barely news. At the time of writing, two Ukrainian
cities of Russian-speaking people – Donetsk and Luhansk – are under
siege: their people and hospitals and schools blitzed by a regime in
Kiev that came to power in a putsch led by neo-Nazis backed and paid for
by the United States.



The coup was the climax of what the Russian political observer Sergei
Glaziev describes as a 20-year "grooming of Ukrainian Nazis aimed at
Russia". Actual fascism has risen again in Europe and not one European
leader has spoken against it, perhaps because the rise of fascism across
Europe is now a truth that dares not speak its name.



With its fascist past, and present, Ukraine is now a CIA theme park, a
colony of NATO and the International Monetary Fund. The fascist coup in
Kiev in February was the boast of US assistant secretary of state
Victoria Nuland, whose "coup budget" ran to $5 billion.



But there was a setback. Moscow prevented the seizure of its
legitimate Black Sea naval base in Russian-speaking Crimea. A referendum
and annexation quickly followed. Represented in the West as the
Kremlin's "aggression", this serves to turn truth on its head and cover
Washington's goals: to drive a wedge between a "pariah" Russia and its
principal trading partners in Europe and eventually to break up the
Russian Federation.



American missiles already surround Russia; NATO’s military build-up
in the former Soviet republics and eastern Europe is the biggest since
the second world war.



During the cold war, this would have risked a nuclear holocaust. The
risk has returned as anti-Russian misinformation reaches crescendos of
hysteria in the US and Europe. A textbook case is the shooting down of a
Malaysian airliner in July.



Without a single piece of evidence, the US and its NATO allies and
their media machines blamed ethnic Russian “separatists” in Ukraine and
implied that Moscow was ultimately responsible. An editorial in The
Economist accused Vladimir Putin of mass murder. The cover of Der
Spiegel used faces of the victims and bold red type, “Stoppt Putin
Jetzt!” (Stop Putin Now!) In the New York Times, Timothy Garton Ash
substantiated his case for “Putin’s deadly doctrine” with personal abuse
of “a short, thickset man with a rather ratlike face”.



The Guardian’s role has been important. Renowned for its
investigations, the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who
shot the aeroplane down and why, even though a wealth of material from
credible sources shows that Moscow was as shocked as the rest of the
world, and that the airliner may well have been brought down by the
Ukrainian regime.



With the White House offering no verifiable evidence – even though US
satellites would have observed the shooting-down - the Guardian’s
Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker stepped into the breach. "My audience
with the Demon of Donetsk," was the front-page headline over Walker's
breathless interview with one Igor Bezler.



"With a walrus moustache, a fiery temper and a reputation for
brutality," he wrote, "Igor Bezler is the most feared of all the rebel
leaders in eastern Ukraine ... nicknamed The Demon ... If the Ukrainian
security services, the SBU, are to be believed, the Demon and a group of
his men were responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines flight
MH17… as well as allegedly bringing down MH17, the rebels have shot down
10 Ukrainian aircraft.” Demon Journalism requires no further evidence.



Demon Journalism makes over a fascist-contaminated junta that seized
power in Kiev as a respectable "interim government". Neo-Nazis become
mere "nationalists". "News" sourced to the Kiev junta ensures the
suppression of a US-run coup and the junta's systematic ethnic cleaning
of the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine.



That this should happen in the borderland through which the original
Nazis invaded Russia, extinguishing some 22 million Russian lives, is of
no interest. What matters is a Russian "invasion" of Ukraine that seems
difficult to prove beyond familiar satellite images that evoke Colin
Powell's fictional presentation to the United Nations "proving" that
Saddam Hussein had WMD.



"You need to know that accusations of a major Russian ‘invasion’ of
Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence," wrote a
group of former senior US intelligence officials and analysts, the
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, to German Chancellor
Angela Merkel. "Rather, the ‘intelligence’ seems to be of the same
dubious, politically ‘fixed’ kind used 12 years ago to ‘justify’ the
U.S.-led attack on Iraq.”



The jargon is "controlling the narrative". In his seminal Culture and
Imperialism, Edward Said was more explicit: the western media machine
was now capable of penetrating deep into the consciousness of much of
humanity with a "wiring" as influential as that of the imperial navies
of the 19th century. Gunboat journalism, in other words. Or war by
media.



Yet, a critical public intelligence and resistance to propaganda does
exist; and a second superpower is emerging – the power of public
opinion, fuelled by the internet and social media.



The false reality created by false news delivered by media
gatekeepers may prevent some of us knowing that this new superpower is
stirring in country after country: from the Americas to Europe, Asia to
Africa. It is a moral insurrection, exemplified by the whistleblowers
Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. The question begs:
will we break our silence while there is time?



When I was last in Gaza, driving back to the Israeli checkpoint, I
caught sight of two Palestinian flags through the razor wire. Children
had made flagpoles out of sticks tied together and they’d climbed on a
wall and held the flag between them.



The children do this, I was told, whenever there are foreigners
around, because they want to show the world they are there - alive, and
brave, and undefeated.



This article is adapted from John Pilger’s Edward Said Memorial
Lecture, delivered in Adelaide, Australia, on 11 September. You can read
more of John’s work at his personal website.





PrintPrint  
 
 
googleplus 





Saturday 13 September 2014

The Fairfax press and the Gaza massacre Part II(b)

The Fairfax press and the Gaza massacre Part II(b)






Image by John Graham


Dr. Evan Jones continues his in-depth analysis of how
Fairfax has propagated an Israeli narrative on the massacre in Gaza. See
yesterday’s Part II(a).




Jihadis for Jerusalem



There was the article, formally straight up down reporting but
substantively subversive, by Nick Toscano and Ben Doherty, ‘Melbourne
school colleagues in Israeli army injured in Gaza’, 5 August. What’s this then?




'Two former students of a Jewish school in Melbourne have been
wounded while fighting for the Israeli army in Gaza. … The combat
soldiers are former students of Leibler Yavneh College in Elsternwick …'




'[Zionist youth movement] Bnei Akiva Melbourne president Romy
Spicer … said that out of the 365 students and leaders in Melbourne's
Bnei Akiva program, as many as 10 had joined the Israeli army in the
past two years. "What drives them is a love and passion for Zionism,"
she said. …'




'There are about 2500 foreign citizens from more than 60 countries enlisted in the Israeli Defence Forces.
… The Israeli embassy in Canberra refused to comment on the number of
Australians fighting for the IDF, but it is believed in excess of 100
are enlisted.'





From the Leibler Yavneh College website:



'Our mission as a Modern Orthodox, Religious-Zionist School is to nurture students to be:



[among others] committed Australians, aware of and loyal to their communal, civic and personal responsibilities. …



We believe in fostering each
student’s personal, emotional and intellectual commitment to
Religious-Zionist ideals and to the State of Israel'


Now why aren’t the Australian authorities visiting Leibler Yavneh
College and Bnei Akiva to inquire of this proselytising process by which
some of their charges become jihadis in an occupying army?




Sensing a public relations dilemma, Danny Lamm, president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, reassures us (7 August):



The implication that Australian Jews go to Israel to join the IDF
is misleading and incorrect. Israel has compulsory national service
because it must, because in its history it has been threatened and
attacked by hostile neighbours. All Israeli citizens must serve in the
army, including immigrants.
[Well not quite all]





Lamm omits that the young Australians choosing ‘to move to Israel to
build a life, find a job and raise their children in the only Jewish
state’ have to serve a rite of passage that involves harassing,
dispossessing and murdering Palestinians. And they do this out of
choice. Committed Australians, aware of and loyal to their communal,
civic and personal responsibilities indeed.








(image by John Graham)



A Sydney Morning Herald ‘balanced’ pairing



The Sydney Morning Herald published a pairing on 30 July, not reproduced in the AgeYuli Novak (sometime Israeli Air Force officer, now Executive Director of Breaking the Silence) and Yair Miller (president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies).



Novak recalls that a one-ton bomb dropped in 2002 that killed 14
civilians as well as its intended Hamas target then raised concerns in
some Israeli circles. She notes that 100 one-ton bombs have been dropped
on Gaza during Operation Protective Edge (sic), raising little domestic
concern. Miller’s article (endless unprovoked terrorism from Hamas,
which means that the promised ‘land for peace’ idea is in tatters) is
rubbish from start to finish.




The Letters pages



The Letters offerings on the Gaza attack offer slightly more
‘balance’ than the Opinion offerings. There is, of course, a swathe of
‘Israel can do no wrong’ letters. Thus, for example, Malcolm Rayne (Age, 24 July):




'I am appalled at the double standards being applied towards
Israel. … How many ‘‘do-gooders’’ would be howling about the injustice
of it all if Australia rightfully defended itself [if rockets started
hitting our cities]? Is this just another sign of anti-Semitism at its
best, because after all, it’s only the Jews? I don’t see any protests to
The Age regarding China’s illegal occupation of Tibet … Israel wants
nothing more than peace.'





And here’s the familiar names (Mark Leibler & Colin Rubinstein) from the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (Age, 25 July)



'Your editorial (‘Might overwhelms the right to defend’, 23/7) was inflammatory. Hamas,
a terrorist organisation proscribed by many nations, including
Australia, initiated this conflict by escalating rocket attacks across
Israel. It rejected Israel's overtures to de-escalate, as well as three
Arab ceasefire proposals Israel accepted. … .




'Every Gazan civilian killed is tragic, but they are
overwhelmingly victims of these callous human-shield tactics. Israel
warns civilians of impending strikes by dropping leaflets, texting and
phoning. … The partial Gaza blockade … targets only materials with
military uses, allowing food, medicine, consumer goods, water, fuel and
power. It was only imposed after rocket attacks.'





This letter is steeped in lies, but what can one expect from agents
for a rogue state. At least Fairfax has ceased publishing articles by
such AIJAC functionaries who, during previous Israeli offensives, have
graced Fairfax’s opinion pages on a regular basis.




The media gives Israel-firsters special dispensation. The press has
long since declined to publish opinion or letters from flat-earthers, or
those who insist that the world was created in 4004BC. Israel-firsters
are given access to endlessly declaim that Israel is as pure as the
driven snow, and to hell with the credibility of the specific claims.




One reason why China’s illegal occupation of Tibet gets less coverage
in the letters pages is because there is nobody being regularly
published who defends that takeover as just and the Tibetans as
terrorists. The claim that Hamas hides behind human shields has been
reproduced as a mantra, but it isn’t true. Ditto firing rockets from
hospitals, etc.




As for Israel’s exit from Gaza, well the lies are now
well-established truths. Here’s one from an inveterate letter-writer,
Alan Freedman, from East St Kilda (SMH, 6 August):




'Remember, too, that the blockade was instituted only after
Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip and was subsequently
subjected to rocket fire and terrorist attacks from
Hamas.'







 


Ah, another standard Hasbara furphy regarding the ‘complete’ withdrawal from Gaza. Noam Chomsky’s recent piece on TomDispatch provides insight into the Gaza ‘withdrawal’ (and its context):



'[The November 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access Between
Israel and the Palestinian Authority] was reached shortly after Israel
withdrew its settlers and military forces from Gaza. The motive for the
disengagement was explained by Dov Weissglass, a confidant of then-Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon, who was in charge of negotiating and
implementing it. "The significance of the disengagement plan is the
freezing of the peace process," Weissglass informed the Israeli press.
"And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a
Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the
borders, and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the
Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed
indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and
permission. All with a [U.S.] presidential blessing and the ratification
of both houses of Congress." …




'In their comprehensive history of Israeli settlement in the
occupied territories, Israeli scholars Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar
describe what actually happened when that country disengaged: the ruined
territory [Gaza] was not released "for even a single day from Israel's
military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants
pay every day." After the disengagement, "Israel left behind scorched
earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a
future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an
unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory
and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military
might."





If Freedman rushed more to the books than to penning missives, he
might have developed some sympathy for one Darren Stein, of Bondi (SMH, 28 July), who wrote:




'… I wish to write that there are indeed many Jews who are
quietly feeling deeply ashamed and conflicted about the fighting in Gaza
and the massive death toll on the Palestinian side, whether Hamas has
provoked this or not. If we were to put our humanity before our
religion, gender or ethnicity, the world would be a more peaceful place.
If I express shock and grief for the innocents who have perished in
Gaza, I am not a self-hating Jew, I am a human being, and anyone who
condemns me for that has clearly compromised that element of themselves.







 


Remember that Fairfax, as with the Murdoch press, has regularly
endorsed its journalists being carried off on paid junkets to Israel
whereupon they return to debase their calling. Fairfax columnist Paul
Sheehan, sometime junketer, evidently on the drip, has well reproduced
the IDF’s story on Gaza (SMH, 4 August).




The Mike Carlton episode



And then there is (or was) the contracted columnist Mike Carlton, atypically going to the heart of the matter (SMH, 26 July):



'It is a breathtaking irony that these atrocities can be
committed by a people with a proud liberal tradition of scholarship and
culture, who hold the Warsaw Ghetto and the six million dead of the
Holocaust at the centre of their race memory. …




in all these long and agonising decades, Israel has never offered
the Palestinians a just and equitable peace. They would have only a
splintered, vassal state, their polity and economy and even their
borders and freedom of travel and trade managed and determined by
Israel. The occupation of Palestinian lands would remain with the
relentless expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank of
the Jordan and the Dead Sea.'





There followed the predictable tidal wave of abuse from the Israel-firsters, and Carlton’s published rejoinder (2 August):



‘Heil Hitler, you ignorant, Jew-hating, anti-Semitic slime.’
[That phrase is not reproduced online] As I predicted, the abusive
emails and tweets have been thundering in all week, hundreds of them.
That effort was typical. The Israel lobby - or as I prefer it, the Likud
Lobby – rose in fury at last week's column about Israel's war crimes
against civilians in Gaza. I lost count of the times I was called a
Nazi. … More disturbing was a broad streak of Jewish racism and bigotry
every bit as vicious as the anti-Semitism some of these people claimed
to find behind every rock.'







As we now know, Carlton also engaged in a direct rejoinder to his
delightful correspondents, which led to his being disciplined by the
Fairfax headmaster, Sean Aylmer, and his subsequent resignation
(complementing his 2008 sacking before 2009 reinstatement). And there
goes the only plain-speaking person on Israel (or politics generally),
and Fairfax will now concentrate exclusively on its preferred
obfuscatory mush.




Jonathan Holmes (Age, 13 August) took Carlton to task for replying in such a manner, or perhaps for replying at all.



'What you don't do, ever - not to the most abusive, and certainly
not to impassioned but reasonable critics - is tell them to get
f---ed.'





Reasonable critics? They don’t exist in zio-land. But quite so. Never reply to a zio critic because it only encourages them.



The cartoons



Then there was LeLievre’s cartoon that accompanied Carlton’s 26 July SMH
article. The cartoon showed a kippah-ed Israeli watching, TV-style in
armchair comfort (Star-of-David blazoned), the Gaza bombardment.
Following feedback from no doubt ‘impassioned but reasonable critics’
Fairfax editorial apologised (4 August) for the ‘distress’ caused to some readers.
















(By contrast, SMH cartoonist Alan Moir kept under the radar with perennial cartoons implying a dual Israel-Hamas madness.)



Overland Editor Jeff Sparrow agreed with Fairfax editorial (Crikey, 5 August), claiming an essentialist dimension to the LeLievre cartoon, comparable to those demonising Muslims.



Notes the Herald editorial:



'A strong view was expressed that the cartoon, by Glen Le Lievre,
closely resembled illustrations that had circulated in Nazi Germany.
These are menacing cartoons that continue to haunt and traumatise
generations of Jewish people.'





The comparison is inappropriate. The infamous odious graphics from Julius Streicher’s Hitler-era Der Stürmer
‘essentialise’ Jewry as financial predators, sexual predators, etc.
LeLievre’s cartoon only thinly caricatures an actual event. The Star of
David is not essentialising Jewry, but is the emblem of the Israeli
state.




Perhaps LeLievre might have omitted the kippah, but (as noted by
MarilynJS on the Sparrow article), there were kippah-ed groups on the
Sderot hill who came to witness the pulverisation of a subject people.




The same thing happened during Operation Cast Lead (sic) in 2008-09.
Who is suffering distress and being traumatised? Palestinians are the
new Jews.




Simultaneously, The Age’s John Spooner had published several cartoons
which are straight out of the Hasbara songbook – the whole problem is
due to Hamas fanaticism. One cartoon has a Hamas operative firing a
rocket from a hospital operating room.


 


What constraints one puts on press cartoonists is a difficult issue.


 


Cartoonists are at the forefront of lateral thinking and courageous
social and political commentary, and Australian cartoonists have a
global reputation for it.




Over the years in the present context, Bruce Petty and Michael Leunig (The Age), Geoff Pryor and Ian Sharpe (Canberra Times) and David Rowe (Australian Financial Review), with varying degrees of subtlety, have had published powerful indictments of Israeli perfidy.



But then The Age editor Michael Gawenda pulled Leunig’s cartoon juxtaposing the hyperbole of Auschwitz and of the Israeli war machine in 2002. And The Age leaves untouched Spooner’s mythical characterisations of the Gaza bombardment while the SMH apologises for LeLievre’s naturalistic characterisation of the squalid Sderot spectacle. Two weights, two measures.







(image by John Graham)



The quintessence of the Fairfax coverage



What is missing is the root cause of the latest Gaza catastrophe
—Israel’s imperative, in its DNA, towards ethnic cleansing. The 1948-49
Occupation is its foundation, the 1967 Occupations its natural
extension. The step-wise obliteration of Gaza is the grisly sideshow for
entertainment-deprived sadists. But day after day, the less heralded
details of the purification machine press on relentlessly.




The paltry Fairfax coverage is certainly not a reflection of
objective detachment. It highlights more than a casual inattention to
contemporary moral priorities. Rather, it reflects a conscious
partisanry towards a long-standing tyranny that makes Fairfax editorial
both cowardly and complicit.




During this wretched period of myriad large-scale calamities, Waleed Aly had an article in the Age (25 July),
titled ‘Deciding which deaths matter and which don’t’. In referring to
the appalling celebration of Gazans’ suffering in the Egyptian media
(‘now effectively a propaganda arm of the government’), Aly notes:




'But that's what happens when the sanctity of life meets the
power of politics. … It doesn't matter who dies. It doesn't matter how
many. … We decide which deaths to mourn, which to ignore, which to
celebrate, and which to rationalise on the basis of what story we want
them to tell. … And that, I fear, is a universal principle.'





The Jewish Holocaust (as with other Holocausts) was a product not
merely of global lack of awareness – it was also partly a horrendous
casualty of contemporary power politics. 




So also with Palestine, and Gaza in particular. Of course, with
official and social media intrusion, we all know this story in the
finest detail, but knowledge of criminality is of little import.




Power politics and particular interests still reign, and the official
media, including Fairfax, is their handmaiden. ‘Never again’ is a
slogan that can’t be taken seriously.




See yesterday’s Part II(a).



Buy John Graham originals, including those above, from IA's online store.







Creative Commons Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License