Fairfax Is All Yours, Gina 2

Further to my previous post, it doesn't get much worse than this:

Fairfax journalist, Jonathan Swan, writes an astonishingly puerile opinion piece which lashes Israel with a limp lettuce leaf over its treatment of African refugees (while failing completely to reference its prior creation and treatment of Palestinian refugees) and comprehensively misrepresents the Zionist entity's  founding by portraying it as some kind of humanitarian rescue mission. Added to this folderol are quotes from Israel lobbyist, Vic Alhadeff, and a Canadian bozo who can still, in the first decade of the 21st century, without a blush, write a book with the title Why I am a Zionist. (Opening sentence: "I am a Zionist because I am a Jew and without recognising a national component in Judaism, I cannot explain its unique character as a National Liberation movement for the Jewish people.") Swan's pathetic piece, in short, is Zionist to its bootstraps.

Yet, despite conveying the impression throughout that butter hadn't melted in Israel's mouth until the African refugee issue came along, he came under attack on the letters page in the following issue of the Sydney Morning Herald, not from anyone with a real knowledge of Palestinian history, but  from two diehard defenders of Israel for whom any criticism of their home-away-from-home is anathema. 

Presumably, no letters were received from readers pointing out the bleeding obvious, namely,  that Israel was founded on Palestinian dispossession, statelessness and exile, stemming from the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948.

So then, why did no one among the paper's readership bother to write in with this kind of critique? 

Simple. This is knowledge from which Herald readers have been shielded by decades of Zionist propaganda pieces; a corresponding dearth of anything in any way critical of the Zionist project and its bloody record in Palestine and surrounds; vacuous, always Israel-friendly, editorials; reliably lame cartoons on the Middle East conflict (G'day, Moir); and red-carpet treatment onto the letters page by legions of Israel lobbyists and apologists (Greetings, George Fishman).