Let Us Pray for Sussan Ley

The msm can always be relied upon to foreground trivia and ignore matters of substance. Here, for example, is the introduction to an article on Australia's new health minister Sussan Ley:

"But who is Sussan Ley, the rising star of Australian politics many voters may have never heard of? As a high school student in Canberra in the 1970s, Ley walked around with no shoes, black lipstick, spiky purple hair, a dog collar and a nose piercing connected to the razor blade in her ear. Over 30 years later, she still describes herself as a 'recovering punk rocker from a time when it really mattered'." (Sussan Ley: from punk rocker to health minister, Gareth Hutchens, Sydney Morning Herald, 22/12/14)

In a federal parliament swarming with Zionist apologists and dupes, trust a journalist to home in on Ley's punk rocker past.

No, what really distinguishes her from most of her colleagues is that she's neither Zionist apologist nor Zionist dupe. More than that, Sussan Ley actually gets it.

For example, in 2008, the MP for Farrer (in the context of a bizarre bilateral parliamentary celebration of Israel's 60th anniversary) spoke as follows in parliament:

"Israel has many friends in this country and in this Parliament. The Palestinians, by comparison, have few. Theirs is not a popular cause. But it is one I support, in part out of knowledge that the victors of World War II, including Australia, wrote a 'homeland' cheque to cover the sins of the holocaust and centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe, but it was the Palestinians who had to cash it." (Quoted in Blinkers off for the other side of story, Alan Ramsey, Sydney Morning Herald, 15/3/08) (See my 20/3/08 post The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 5.)

And in 2012, back from a trip to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, she had this to say in parliament:

"The Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem told us the government had cancelled his residency permit in spite of family connections dating back to the British Mandate. I met my World Vision foster child in the village of Nahalin, surrounded by encroaching settlements, and stood in the treeless playground amongst the falling-down classrooms and tired soccer balls, looking just across the gully at the settlement school with its modern buildings and latest equipment. Visiting the settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, as I did high on a hill near Jerusalem, inside the West Bank on Palestinian land, the outlook is serene. The Jewish residents travel on Israeli-only roads straight to Tel Aviv and cannot even see the second road network or the villages hidden in the valley below. It is as if the Palestinians have been airbrushed out of existence." (A say for Palestine, sussanley.com, 23/9/12)

In fact, Sussan Ley, got it early in life:

"She is the daughter of a British colonial police officer who served in British-mandated Palestine in the 1930s..." (Ramsey)

Nothing like a first-hand account!

The question is, will she now come under pressure to eat her words, and end up, like Labor's Tanya Plibersek, ignominiously recanting and kissing the ring?

Watch this space...