Besotted Bob

The received wisdom is that Bob Carr has the hots for the US, but having just read an opinion piece of his in The Australian, I reckon it's really Israel that gets his juices going.

Now he's not talking here about just any old nation, right? He's talking about a right little minx whose criminal record is as long as your bloody arm - an occupying, genocidal, Jewish supremacist, apartheid state for God's sake! And yet, have you ever before read such an expression of tender concern for someone's welfare as this?

"As a friend of Israel, I can say there is another fundamental issue at stake [other than Hamas rockets vs Israeli settlement expansion]: the survival of Israel as a democracy. The durability of Israeli democracy requires the existence of a viable Palestinian state. Without it Israel will be trapped, governing a burgeoning Arab population to which it cannot grant full and equal civil rights and remain a Jewish state." (No Plan B for the Middle East, 3/7/13)

'What with all those Arabs breeding like rabbits, my dear, you might one day wake up and find you've lost your precious Jewish majority and then where will you be? No, trust me, it'd be better for you if the Palestinians had their own bantustan, or as we like to call it so as not to frighten the horses, viable Palestinian state.'

The man just doesn't get it. He just doesn't get what the rest of the world gets. All he sees is a sexy, if somewhat brazen and bumptious, young democracy.The little vixen's addled his brain.

You could point out to Carr till you're blue in the face that any democracy worth its salt is sect-neutral, and that 5 million Palestinians (consisting of 750,000 refugees and their descendents) were gerrymandered out of a vote at the point of a bayonet in 1948, but he's in so damn deep that he just doesn't want to know.

And please, don't be fooled by all that talk about the need for a Palestinian state. Carr is no more interested in Palestinian rights than he is in football. No, his only concern is that Israel will end up with the kind of terrible reputation that other little brazen hussy, white South Africa, had, and that'll reflect badly on him, considering he's been singing her praises ever since he set up that fan club back in the 70s - what was it called? Oh yeah, Labor Friends of Israel. For God's sake, he can't even bring himself to use the word 'apartheid' in the above paragraph. Probably because she'd scratch his eyes out if he did.

And how's this for special treatment?

"[T]he path to Palestinian statehood does not lie through UN resolutions." (ibid)

No, none of that nasty international law stuff for Israel! None of those scary UN resolutions like 242 and 194. Oh no, "Israel and the Palestinians should be nudged towards a return to direct talks." (ibid)

Nudged? Nudged? Israel? Is the man serious?

Still, you never know. After all, nudging seems to have worked a treat for George Bush:

"If you're asking me, 'am I nudging them forward', well, my trip was a pretty significant nudge because yesterday they had a meeting." (Bush:'I'm nudging' Israelis, Palestinians toward peace, cnn.com, 9/1/08)