So much to record. So little time. Here's one I've so far had to put on hold. It concerns the woes of, in the words of the appended bio to the opinion piece I'm about to highlight, "Jamal Rifi AM is a Lebanese-born Australian citizen who runs a medical practice in Sydney. He is a prominent member of the Lebanese Muslim community and was awarded The Australian newspaper's Australian of the year in 2015. https://projectrozana.org/"
Dr Rifi's woes are connected with his involvement in Project Rozana, but I'll leave it to him to relate them, as he has in a 31/5/19 opinion piece in The Australian, The children are all that count: Politics & Religion have no role on Project Rozana, where healthcare is paramount:
"During the past two weeks I have been subjected to an enormous amount of abuse from people whose agenda runs counter to mine Most of that abuse has appeared in Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar, an influential Arabic language newspaper affiliated with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the country of my birth."
Now if I may interrupt here to clarify the status of Al-Akhbar. Asad Abukhalil, aka The Angry Arab, a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, has not only been a contributor to Al-Akhbar's pages but has had something of a love-hate relationship with the paper over the years, making him something of an objective source on the subject. Here, for example, are just two of his blog (The Angry Arab News Service) posts on Al-Akhbar:
"Ignorant Western correspondents who can't read Arabic refer to Lebanese daily, Al-Akhbar, as 'Hizbullah's paper'. Here is a supplement on Lenin published by the paper. You think Hizbullah likes Lenin?" (Al-Akhbar has a special supplement on Lenin: and you think that a Hizbullah paper would honour Lenin and Bolsheviks? November 13, 2017)
"Al-Akhbar's publisher, Ibrahim Al-Amin, published a scathing critique of Hizbullah and its corrupt role in Lebanese domestic politics. He takes on the party for its reluctance to engage in social justice struggle. But the party is not a progressive party so it is not surprising to me." (Criticisms of Hizbullah's political role in Al-Akhbar, September 15, 2017)
Having, I hope, clarified that Al-Akhbar is emphatically not "affiliated" with Hizbullah, let us return to the words of Dr Rifi:
"I have even been referred to the military court in Lebanon in a poorly disguised attempt to discredit me and silence my brother in Beirut, Major-General Achraf Rifi, a former director-general of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, former minister of justice and an outspoken critic of Hezbollah and its masters in Iran." (ibid)
(What Dr Rifi does not divulge here is that his brother has "close ties to Saudi Arabia." (See Wikipedia entry for Achraf/Ashraf Rifi.))
"The abuse is directed at my involvement with Project Rozana, a humanitarian organisation that started in Australia in 2013 and is active in the US, Canada, Israel and Palestinian territory. I joined as a director in 2017. Among my fellow directors are inspirational communal leaders of the Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths... Our single-minded desire is to build bridges to better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians through health... A cornerstone of Project Rozana is to provide lifesaving treatment for Palestinian children and to build the health capacity of Palestinian society... It's about the children... So why am I accused of promoting a policy of 'normalisation' between Palestinians and Israelis? Why have I become the punching bag of people in Australia and Lebanon who regard any affiliation with Jews, let alone professed Zionists, as being haram (forbidden according to Islamic law)? [...] During my 2017 visit [to Israel], I was privileged to meet Palestinian and Israeli volunteers who each day drive critically and chronically ill Palestinian children from their homes in the West Bank to the checkpoints and from these checkpoints to hospitals in Israel... This is a lifesaving service in the real sense of the word." (ibid)
You'll note here that there is no mention of taking critically ill children from Gaza to Israel for medical treatment. The case of Aisha a-Lulu, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 14/6/19 under the title A little girl lost in Gaza politics (Isabel Debre & Fares Akram) is a case in point. Here are the relevant extracts from that piece:
"When Palestinian preschooler Aisha a-Lulu came out of brain surgery in a strange Jerusalem hospital room, she called out for her mother and father. She repeated the cry over and over, but her parents never came. Instead of a family member, Israeli authorities had approved a stranger to escort Aisha from the blockaded Gaza Strip to the east Jerusalem hospital. As her condition deteriorated, the child was returned to Gaza unconscious. One week later, she was dead... So far this year, about half of applications for patient companion permits were rejected or left unanswered by Israel, according to the World Health Organisation. That has forced more than 600 patients, including some dozen children, to leave the territory alone or without close family. [...] The Shin Bet [Israel's FBI] declined to comment on the case. But in a statement, it emphasised Israel's security concerns about Gaza patients and their companions. 'The terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, headed by Hamas, are working tirelessly to cynically exploit the humanitarian and medical assistance provided by Israel,' it said. Efrat, of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, said he was confident that 'most of these rejections are arbitrary'."
Which begs the question: why isn't Dr Rifi's Project Rozana involved in cases like that of Aisha a-Lulu in Gaza? If Project Rozana has the ability to do what it does in the West Bank, with gravely ill Palestinian children such as Rozana, who have their parents by their side in hospital, then why doesn't the same pertain in Gaza? Has Dr Rifi ever raised the matter of gravely ill children from Gaza with Project Rozana? If so, what was their response? And if he hasn't raised the matter, why not?
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Dr Rifi has prior form. He was the subject of the following remarkable article in the SMH on 29 December 2019:
“Go home, community leaders tell Lebanese asylum seekers
Dozens of Lebanese asylum seekers detained on Nauru and Manus islands are being urged to return home voluntarily to avoid spending the ''best years of their life'' locked up in detention.
Lebanese community leader Jamal Rifi and Sheikh Malek Zeidan, the Australian representative of the Mufti of Lebanon, are travelling to Manus Island and then to Nauru to speak to the detainees and counsel them about their future.
It is unusual for Lebanese citizens to have arrived in Australia by boat seeking asylum and Dr Rifi told The Sun-Herald he was going to advise them not to ''waste their life'' in detention and to make the sensible decision to return home to their loved ones.
''For the first time, we have Lebanese nationals in detention who have been the victims of people smugglers who have duped them with false promises,'' said Dr Rifi, who is also on the Immigration Minister's Council on Asylum Seekers and Detention.
There are 23 Lebanese nationals believed to be on Manus Island and 43 on Nauru who have come by boat.
It has been reported that people smugglers have been targeting villagers in the north of Lebanon who had been badly affected by the conflict in Syria and the overflow of refugees into their villages.
Their plight was highlighted in September when a boat filled with many Lebanese asylum seekers sank off the coast of Java, killing 28 men, women and children, many from the region of Akkar.
About 22 people remain missing, presumed drowned. After the tragedy it had been revealed by family members that they had been promised journeys on luxury vessels, visas on arrival in Australia and new lives and jobs.
Dr Rifi said a lot of ''unwary'' Lebanese had fallen victim to the propaganda of the people smugglers who had deliberately targeted ''the illiterate, the poor and the people who don't have much contact with the outside world''.
He said he hoped that the Lebanese returning voluntarily would have some impact on other detainees making sensible decisions, as well as educating other Lebanese about the realities of coming to Australia by boat. ''There is no point in postponing the inevitable and suffering the physical and mental effects of detention. We don't want them to be damaged goods on their return,'' Dr Rifi said.
Dr Rifi also said people returning home voluntarily would help in a public campaign to inform others that if they came to Australia by boat they stood to lose three things: ''Their money, their life and their liberty.''
The good doctor’s words here say it all. No need to guess where he stands on the political spectrum or on the plight of victims of persecution. His comments read like Peter Dutton talking points. Not at all surprising that the good doctor was The Australian’s 2015 Australian of the Year. Particularly gobsmacking is that at the time of spouting forth this shite he was a member of the advisory council to the Minister for Immigration on asylum seekers and detention.
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