Bob Carr Mugged By Usual Suspects

Bob Carr's declared transition from Labor Friends of Israel (1977) to Labor Friends of Palestine (2014) has the usual suspects ducking for cover or jumping up and down. What a pathetic rabble they are:

"As the party prepares for a rancorous ALP national conference battle over the issue [of recognising Palestinian statehood], several of Mr Carr's former colleagues moved to distance themselves from his comments - or openly attack him. Deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek said recognition of Palestinian statehood must occur in the context of a negotiated peace process. 'I don't think we should diminish the seriousness of the apartheid struggle in South Africa,'* the opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman told Sky News's Viewpoint." ('Pope' Carr raises party ire on Israel apartheid claim, Jared Owens/Verity Edwards, The Australian, 10/11/14)

Here's South Africa's Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils writing about his visit to Israel in 2007:

"We are leaving through Tel Aviv airport and the Israeli official catches my accent. 'Are you South African?' he asks in an unmistakable Gauteng accent. The young man left Benoni as a child in 1985. 'How's Israel?' I ask. 'This is a f**cked-up place,' he laughs, 'I'm leaving for Australia soon.' 'Down under?' I think. I've just been, like Alice, down under into a surreal world that is infinitely worse than apartheid." (Israel 2007: worse than apartheid, Mail & Guardian, 21/5/07)

But then what would he know?

"Melbourne Ports MP Michael Danby... called Mr Carr 'the Pope of Social Democracy' pronouncing party policy. 'Bob Carr never says anything about the 7 million peaceful Tibetans living under Chinese oppression,' he said. 'He has never said anything about the 300,000 North Koreans in concentration camps. He said little about the 200,000 dead in Syria, or the Christians and other minorities facing death right across the Middle East,' Mr Danby, one of two Jewish federal Labor MPs, told The Australian."

Funny how Labor's unofficial Minister for Israel, Israel, and Israel, in that order, only ever pipes up on Tibet etc whenever a thinking politician has the guts to point out the bleeding obvious in relation to Palestine.

"Josh Frydenberg, the Coalition's only Jewish MP, attacked Mr Carr as a 'lazy' minister and a 'dilletante' on foreign affairs. 'This grandstanding by Bob Carr is all about him. It is nothing else but an obsession on Bob Carr's part,' Mr Frydenberg told Sky News's Australian Agenda. 'I just think it is because he has got relevance-deprivation syndrome. He was a failure as a state premier, he was a failure as a foreign minister'."

Well, what else is he going to say?

[*Carr had said: "... an indefinite occupation morphs into the extremists' goal of a Greater Israel. With one catch. It will have two classes of citizen. 'A term used about another country on another continent', Ehud Barak told me when I as foreign minister discussed this very dilemma. The word is apartheid, of course... and the only word that can be applied if, within one nation, there is one set of laws for one race and an inferior set for the other - the other being the majority." (Why I'm now a friend of Palestine, The Australian, 8/11/14)]