What Turns Tony Abbott On

If the old adage 'you are what you eat' is true, how much more so is 'you are what you read'? So what's Tony Abbott reading these days? Thrillers, apparently:

"'Something I haven't done for years I've been able to do a bit of over the last 12 months and that is to read thrillers. I've started reading some of the Daniel Silva books,' he said, praising the American novels as fascinating and 'high pressure yarns'. 'The hero is an Israeli secret agent and he gets up to all sorts of adventures all around the world, whether it's dealing with dodgy priests in the Vatican or Islamist terrorists. One way or another, he's busy,' Mr Abbott said." (Fifty Shades, thrillers & war: bookworm Abbott, Fergus Hunter, Sydney Morning Herald, 12/12/16)

Daniel Silva is described by Wikipedia as a US Roman Catholic convert to Judaism who lives in Florida. Adam Kirsch, writing at tabletmag.com, describes him as "thrilling to the romance of Israeli power," and "relish[ing] the idea of Israel as the champion of Jews worldwide - the tough Zionist Jews who come to the rescue of soft Diaspora Jews." (The unsettling exploits of Daniel Silva's Mossad superspy, 3/8/16)

IOW, just the kind of peddler of puerile pulp nonsense for a halfwit like Abbott.

To give you some idea of just where Silva is coming from and just how appalling he is (and how Zionists conflate the Islamic State phenomenon with Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation and colonisation), here he is on something called 'The Hugh Hewitt Show':

HH: "The other thing that's genuinely spooky, Daniel Silva, about The Black Widow [Silva's latest concoction], ... this past Sabbath, Jews around the world and people who support the state of Israel are grieving the death of Hallel Ariel, a 13-year-old American stabbed to death in her West Bank home as a result of a young Palestinian acting spontaneously. And throughout The Black Widow there is this background murmuring of the reality of life in Israel today, which informs The Black Widow... And it's in the headlines... today, in a way, because it's an American victim, that maybe they... normally aren't aware of it, and it's explained in The Black Widow. That's also spooky.

DS: Well, I was in Israel working on the book when this... started to percolate. And Gabriel Alon [Silva's Mossad hero] is a great lover of Jerusalem, as I explain in this novel, and I am a great lover [of Jerusalem]. And I go all over the place in Jerusalem, including into neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian area in East Jerusalem. And, you know, every day when I was there last summer, it would be some little incident somewhere around the Damascus Gate in the Muslim quarter of the Old City... one of the things that people don't realize about East Jerusalem is that there are sort of abutting neighborhoods of religious Jews right up against Palestinian areas. And... there's a lot of friction there. And I just had a sense that something was about to really happen there. And then, you know, I would go to the Damascus Gate, and a few hours later someone would be stabbed, and I had just been there with my son... you know, feeling like a complete idiot. And then it's really broken out into the open. And I think it's symptomatic, unfortunately, of the remarkable job that the Israeli Security Services have done in shutting down the Palestinian terrorist networks." (hughhewitt.com)

Of course, there's no mention of Israeli settlers invading Palestinian homes, or of a Palestinian community under a turn-of-the-screw occupation. God forbid that any note of reality should disturb this charmed circle. Spooky!