Something About 'The Australian'

For sheer venomous, strident, pro-Israel zealotry, Murdoch's Australian is hard to beat.

Its January 25 editorial on the occasion of the Malaysian prime ministers's visit to the Gaza Strip, An unwise Hamas dalliance, is a case in point. Hamas is variously pilloried as:

* "an avowedly terrorist organisation that is denounced and ostracised by much of the world";
* "an unashamedly terrorist organisation";
* "a creature of Egypt's extremist Muslim Brotherhood";
* "a cat's paw for Iran's desire to obliterate Israel";
* "an odious outfit."

Then, in its February 2 editorial, Israeli airstrike necessary, on Israel's latest act of unprovoked aggression against Syria, allegedly because anti-aircraft missiles were being transferred to Hezbollah in Lebanon, no effort is spared to justify the attack :

* "Israel had no alternative";
* "No nation anywhere could stand by and watch such provocative transfers under its nose";
* "[Israel] has a clear duty to its citizens to stop the anarchy in Syria spilling into Lebanon."

Which brings be back to one of life's little mysteries. Why is it that, in all of Robert Manne's 140-page essay, Bad News: Murdoch's Australian & The Shaping of the Nation (Quarterly Essay 43, 2011), devoted to an analysis of the paper's various crusades, there is no analysis of the paper's relentless, head-kicking Zionism? (See my 7/9/11 post The Silence of the Intellectual 2.)