Cleaning Up the Mess at Q&A 1

Monday night's Q&A really was a real dog's dinner on the question of Palestine/Israel. Averse to mess, I'll try and clear some of it up in the next few posts.

For example, the opening question on the subject by audience member Greg Weiss (which I've edited for clarity) must surely be one of the most confused and problematic ever asked on the program: 

My question is to Bob Carr... 6 million Jews were murdered while waiting for the world to speak up om their behalf. None did. That is why the Jewish people have been forced to... have their own lobby groups... What is the problem then with a Jewish lobby group? I see no difference between it pushing for its own case any more than a gay lobby group fighting for gay rights... Why single out the Jewish lobby group...?

If Jews, as a faith grouping, had formed a lobby in the wake of the Nazi genocide to blow the whistle on genuine cases of anti-Semitism, no reasonable human being could possibly have a problem with it.

While there are Jews, there is no such thing as "the Jewish people." This is a construct of political Zionism, the ideology which underpins the ongoing colonisation (1917-2014) of Palestine by Western Jewish colons.

The Zionist movement's only interest in the plight of Europe's Jews in the 30s and 40s was to channel them into Palestine in accordance with its goal of achieving a demographic majority there at the expense of the country's indigenous Arab population.

Unlike the gay lobby, assuming there is one, the Zionist lobby fights not for the rights of Jews as Jews but to sustain and promote a supremacist 'Jewish' state in Palestine at the expense of the fundamental human and political rights of Palestine's indigenous Arab population.

This work of sustaining and promoting Israel, moreover, involves the use of a range of tactics designed to influence governments (and societies), particularly those of the US and its Anglophone client regimes such as Australia and Canada. In Australia, these include ensuring that Zionist propaganda dominates all discussion of the Palestine/Israel issue in the ms media; sponsoring propaganda tours of Israel by politicians, journalists and other community leaders; smearing critics of Israel as anti-Semites; and the strategic use of political donations to ensure that both government and opposition adopt pro-Israel foreign policy positions.

This means in practice that while Greg Weiss, an Australian with no real connection whatever to Palestine, has the 'right' as a Jew under Israeli law to migrate to Israel and take up citizenship there, millions of Palestine's indigenous people must remain in exile, denied the fundamental right to return to the homes and lands from which they were driven by Zionist terror gangs in 1948, and no one here bats an eyelid.

Weiss then has the hide to ask: 'Why single out the Jewish (actually Zionist) lobby?'

To be continued...