The Carr Diary 5: One Who Only Gargles

If all the letters ever written on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians were laid end to end they'd circle the earth - again and again and again and...

Most, of course, are simply regurgitated Zionist propaganda tropes by the usual suspects and their dupes. The rest try to inject a little balance into the debate, some more successfully than others. A few, however, are so off the wall that they make the informed reader wince. These are the kind of letters that remind us that, while some drink deeply from the fountain of knowledge, others only gargle. Here is one such from Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald:

"There is an alternative explanation to that suggested by Mark Hawthorne for Bob Carr's views on the Israel-Palestine conflict. During the 1970s many people in the Labor Party and broader left became partisans of one or other side of the conflict... Bob Carr was a partisan for Israel, and in 1979 I became a partisan of the Palestinians. Since then the more thoughtful people on both sides came to recognise the conflict was between two peoples who both had national and democratic rights that must be upheld, and that it was in their mutual interest to achieve a political settlement based on two states for two peoples. Carr and I have both made this journey from our respective sides of the argument. The real bigots in this debate are not people like Bob Carr, but the unreconstructed partisans like the Australia-Israel & Jewish Affairs Council on one side, and the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement on the other, who have not had a single new idea between them since the days when the Bay City Rollers were topping the charts." Paul Norton Nerang (Qld)