Baldwin's Balderdash

The Australian's tedious Zionist crusade against Professor Jake Lynch of Sydney University's Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies continues in the form of an opinion piece by a former Labor politician with a Zionist bee in his bonnet about Hamas.  

Peter Baldwin "was minister for higher education (1990-93) in the Hawke-Keating government." (Where the right to speak is howled down, 2/4/15)

There's the usual tiresome tripe about "mob rule" at Sydney University, "genocide by Hamas," and "the vicious persecution of Christians [presumably by Hamas] most of whom have now fled the territories."

Then there's the following eye-rolling stuff and nonsense: 

"Riemer gave a detailed defence of the disruption in a long article in the online journal New Matilda. This piece of casuistic nonsense..."

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. What's casuistry compared to the confusion that stems from a failure to distinguish between polar opposites? (Remember that this bloke's the convener of something called the Blackheath Philosophy Forum): 

"My sense is that increasingly anti-Zionism is a mask for occulted anti-Semitism."

Which, of course, is merely the obverse of the classic Zionist conflation of Judaism (faith) with Zionism (political ideology).

Just as bad is Baldwin's failure to see the issue of Gaza in its historical context:

"As for the stuff about failing to promote human flourishing, perhaps Riemer should consider that by turning Gaza into an armed camp... Hamas and its supporters and apologists are failing to 'promote human flourishing'."

Leaving aside the hypocrisy of describing Gaza as an "armed camp" while ignoring the Zionist movement's turning of what was once Palestine into the Middle East's largest and most powerful armed camp, Baldwin blithely ignores the fact that the rise of an armed resistance movement in the Gaza Strip was the inevitable result of Israel's ethnic cleansing of southern Palestine in 1948, the population of which was not only forced to seek refuge there but forced to remain there in violation of international law and common humanity so that their ethnic cleansers could get on with the business of stacking their former homes with Jews from all over. 

Maybe he thinks those refugees should have set up a 'Gaza Philosophy Forum' instead.