Anatomy of a Beat-Up

*Sigh* - yet another Christian Kerr EXCLUSIVE in the Australian:

The headline: ANU faces rage over conference

Really? It must be a pretty outrageous conference then:

"Australian National University officials have gone to ground in the face of Jewish community outrage for hosting Middle East hardliners at a Human Rights in Palestine conference this week."

Right.

So a conference on Palestinian rights is ipso facto "outrageous," and anyone speaking at it is ipso facto a "hardliner." (Definitions courtesy of the "Jewish community," aka the Executive Council of Australian Jewry's Peter Wertheim, and the Australian Union of Jewish Students' Dean Sherr.)

Now if the conference were about human rights in Burma or Tibet, say, it would no doubt be seen as being to the university's credit, but the very fact that the ANU is hosting a conference on Palestinian human rights apparently constitutes a damning indictment of the institution:

"The ANU was included in the international top 30 institutions in the QS World University Rankings released yesterday, but the conference has led to questions being asked about the university's credibility."

And who is asking the questions?

Now for those "hardliners" and their 'crimes'. (Beware, you are about to enter a Zionist twilight zone of false allegations, smear tactics and innuendo.):

There's Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton University and the UN's special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, "who was publicly rebuked by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon in 2011 for 'preposterous' remarks questioning whether the September 11 terror attacks were orchestrated by the US government."

Falk, of course, has made no such claim. His crime  - apart from standing up for Palestinian rights - seems to consist of being sufficiently open-minded to have once raised the idea of an independent investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

(Incidentally, if it's "preposterous" you want, look no further than Ban - Is anyone home? - Ki-moon: "United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with students at the UN headquarters in Jerusalem on Friday afternoon, and admitted that his organisation was biased against Israel. Responding to a student who said Israelis felt their country was discriminated against in the international organisation, Ban confirmed that there was a biased attitude towards the Israeli people and Israeli government, stressing that it was 'an unfortunate situation'." (UN chief admits bias against Israel, Omri Efraim, ynetnews.com, 16/8/13))

There's Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi of Sydney Peace Prize (2003) fame, "who was among a few PLO members who in 1996 voted not to remove clauses in the PLO charter calling for Israel's destruction." (That, BTW, is a Zionist distortion of the reference, in Article 15 of the now defunct 1968 Palestinian National Charter, to the need to "eliminate Zionism in Palestine." Eliminating Zionism means no more and no less than dismantling Israel's system of apartheid legislation, which condemns Israeli Palestinians to second class citizenship and Palestinian refugees to eternal exile.)

The simple fact of the matter here is that not one Israeli government has ever lifted a finger to amend any of Israel's discriminatory and exclusionary (that is, anti-Palestinian) laws and practices.

Finally, there's Israeli activist Jeff Halper, who allegedly "claimed in 2011 that Israel has developed 'spectral dust' it could spray over wide areas of land, every grain of which was a sensor programmed with a person's DNA to track, locate and kill that individual."

I'm sorry, I've given up on this one. Trying to track it down to any credible source is about as fruitful as the search for Saddam Hussein's mythical people-shredder.

Having marshaled the suspects and their alleged crimes, judge and jury in the form of Zionist apologist Wertheim and footie fanatic* Sherr (aka 'the Jewish community') are duly wheeled in to deliver the guilty verdict:

Wertheim: "A conference that features fringe conspiracy theorists and ideologues and omits recognised scholars in the field has no academic credibility. It is appalling that one of our top universities, the ANU, seems no longer to understand the difference between genuine scholarship and political advocacy."

Sherr: "It is highly concerning to see someone with such a history of anti-Semitic slurs invited on to [sic] Australian university campuses. We repeatedly come up against extreme anti-Israel groups on campus that blur the line between attacking Israel and attacking Jews. Our fear is Falk will only inflame this."

"Sigh" - only in Murdoch's Australian...

[*Check out his tweets.]