Kahane Down Under?

Anti-Zionist journalist and blogger Antony Loewenstein's newmatilda.com essay, Are the Greens ready for hard ball? (30/3/11) shines some light on the dirty war waged behind the scenes against the Greens' candidates in the seats of Marrickville and Balmain in the context of last Saturday's NSW state election:

"Jamie Parker revealed to New Matilda the extent of the hatred directed at him during the campaign due to the Greens BDS policy. He had countless letters sent to him calling him a Nazi and Jew hater. His car was vandalised and campaign signs spray-painted with swastikas. He received death threats and some abusers said they knew where he lived. 'One letter said I wanted to turn Balmain power station into a gas chamber and the light rail would take people there', Parker tells me. 'Lefty Jews told me that you can't be surprised if extreme people do extreme things but they wouldn't come out in public and condemn it'. He was appalled. When the Murdoch press editor David Penberthy wrote that '(Fiona) Byrne's been busy advocating a polite modern rendering of Kristallnacht in the Inner West', Parker hoped progressive Jews he knew would condemn the offensive comparison. They did not. 'These Jews provide cover for extreme actions if they occur. If there's a sniff of you being critical of Israel, such Jews will attack you and cut you loose'. BDS simply made many Jewish people unreasonable and extremely upset, Jews told Parker. Parker says that the reaction of the Zionist lobby and local Jewish community during the election has revealed that they are willing to allow smears and violent actions against the Greens. Parker, who has spent years working on collaborative projects between local Jews and Palestinians, is now fed up with what he sees as Jewish silence. Local Jewish leaders have contacted him since Saturday to try and repair the damage but they still refuse to apologise for aggressive Jewish behaviour."

So who are these extremists? I have aleady, in a previous post on the Greens and BDS, alluded to the late US Rabbi Kahane's fascist, terrorist Jewish Defense League (JDL), and wonder if we are now seeing here the first stirrings of our own version of this creature.

For those unfamiliar with the JDL, Robert I. Friedman's The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane - from FBI Informant to Knesset Member (1990) provides the best intoduction. Here, for example, is Friedman on the founding of the JDL in New York in 1968:

"Preaching Jewish pride and Jewish power, [Kahane] captured the imagination of thousands of Jews, particularly from the lower-middle-class sections of Brooklyn and Queens that were near black ghettoes. His slogans were 'Never Again' and 'Every Jew a .22'. With a Torah in one hand and a gun in the other, Kahane set up a weapons and martial arts training camp in the Catskill Mountains in New York State, just a shotgun blast away from Grossinger's, the famous Jewish-owned hotel. A handful of his elite bodyguards, known as chayas (animals), were trained in munitions and sharpshooting by former officers of the Irgun and Stern Gang. Soon the JDL graduated from confronting black militants to bombing Soviet and Arab diplomats in Europe and America." (pp 83-84)

In his Forward to Friedman's study, Christopher Hitchens succinctly described the JDL as a "movement which spits on democracy, reviles the secular Jew, borrows the language and tactics of the Munich beer-hall and elevates the Fuhrer principle while boasting of an addiction to war, expulsion and triumphalism." (p xi)

One can only hope I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but the behaviour described by Parker, and the silence of so-called progressive (Zionist?) Jews in the face of such behaviour, is a worrying trend indeed.

Loewenstein's expose also quoted the recently retired Greens MLC Ian Cohen. Cohen's words, interestingly, contain no hint of condemnation of the smears and thuggery perpetrated against his fellow Greens, and leave little doubt as to where his sympathies lie:

"Many pro-Israel people worried about the lack of consistency and this included Greens members. Nothing was said about dictatorships in the Arab world from the Greens... I believe there is a huge scope for criticism of Israeli behaviour against the Palestinian people but BDS for the Greens was an old style, in the trenches method of pushing a campaign. It wasn't properly assessed how it would affect the NSW election campaign. The Jewish community outrage had a significant impact on our candidates."

It is surely time for the Greens to break with Zionists of whatever hue, euphemistically referred to by Cohen as pro-Israel people, and come out strongly and unapologetically in support of BDS.