The 70th anniversary of the ill-conceived, apartheid state of Israel is looming, and Murdoch's Australian is literally salivating at the prospect.
On Thursday, we had a 6-page supplement - INNOVATION NATION - "Seventy years ago on May 14, David Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of Independence proclaiming the state of Israel. In an arid landscape, the nation has succeeded through ingenuity in endeavours including agriculture and, more recently, hi-tech centred on Tel Aviv and its Silicon Wadi" (19/4/18) - and a lead article by Bruce Loudon, A miracle shaped from the desert, in which he amusingly confuses Israel's apartheid Law of Return with the Palestinians' international law-backed right of return:
"The 'right of return' has attracted migrants with a commitment to the future of Israel."
"And then there is the upsurge of violence in Gaza. Hamas terrorists are inciting impoverished Gazans into defiant protests under the banner of a 'Great March of Return' aimed at reclaiming Palestine, to coincide with Israel's 70th anniversary."
But for me the highlight of Loudon's leader was his resurrection of the hysterical words of Israel's first ambassador to the UN, Abba Eban (who, btw, once cynically quipped that "Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what one does not believe oneself"):
"Surrounded by hostile armies on all its land frontiers, subjected to savage and relentless hostility, exposed to penetration raids and assaults by day and by night, suffering a constant toll of life among its citizens, bombarded by threats of neighbouring governments to accomplish its extinction by armed force - embattled, blockaded, besieged, Israel alone among the nations faces a battle for its security anew with every approaching nightfall and every rising dawn."
An oldie but a goldie. Made my day.
Showing posts with label Abba Eban. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abba Eban. Show all posts
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Oliver Sacks' NYT Obituary: A Corrective
The following paragraph appeared in the New York Times obituary for the late neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), and was re-run in the Sydney Morning Herald of September 1:
"Oliver Wolf Sacks was born on July 9, 1933, in London, the youngest of four sons of Samuel Sacks and the former Muriel Elsie Landau, who were both doctors. His father, in Sacks' words a 'moderately Orthodox' Jew, read the Bible daily, and Sacks often demonstrated a spiritual impulse in his books. But in Uncle Tungsten, his 2001 memoir about his childhood love of chemistry, he explained that the inflamed Zionist meetings his parents held before the war helped turn him away from organised religion." (Author demystified brain's quirks, Greg Cowles)
So Zionist meetings turned Sacks off... religion?
Why would political meetings turn one off religion?
The NYT appears to be (deliberately?) conflating Zionism with Judaism here.
Yes, Sacks was an atheist, but it was not the aforementioned "inflamed Zionist meetings" which turned him away from "organised religion."
No, what they turned him away from was something very different - political Zionism and Zionists, as can be seen from the relevant passage in his 2001 memoir:
"Zionism played a considerable part on both sides of my family. My father's sister Alida worked during the Great War as an assistant to Nahum Sokolov and Chaim Weizmann, the leaders of Zionism at the time, and with her gift for languages, was entrusted with the translation of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 into French and Russian, and her son Aubrey, even as a boy, was a learned and eloquent Zionist (and later, as Abba Eban, the first Israeli ambassador to the UN). My parents, as doctors with a large house, were expected to provide a venue, a hospitable place, for Zionist meetings, and such meetings often took over the house in my childhood. I would hear them from my bedroom upstairs - raised voices, endless argument, passionate poundings on the table - and every so often a Zionist, flushed with anger or enthusiasm, would barge into my room, looking for the loo.
"Those meetings seemed to take a lot out of my parents - they would look pale and exhausted after each one - but they felt a duty to host them. I never heard them talk between themselves about Palestine or Zionism, and I suspected they had no strong convictions on the subject, at least until after the war, when the horror of the Holocaust made them feel there should be a 'National Home'. I felt they were bullied by the organizers of these meetings, and by the gangsterlike evangelists who would pound at the front door and demand large sums for yeshivas or 'schools in Israel'. My parents, clearheaded and independent in most other ways, seemed to become soft and helpless in the face of these demands, perhaps driven by a sense of obligation or anxiety. My own feelings (which I never discussed with them) were passionately negative: I came to hate Zionism and evangelism and politicking of every sort, which I regarded as noisy and intrusive and bullying. I longed for the quiet discourse, the rationality, of science." (Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, pp 15-16)
The question arises: is the NYT covering for Zionism here?
PS: Considering his childhood experience of Zionist bullying, Sacks would have been well-placed to write another book with a title as catchy as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - 'The People Who Mistook Someone Else's Country for Their Own'.
"Oliver Wolf Sacks was born on July 9, 1933, in London, the youngest of four sons of Samuel Sacks and the former Muriel Elsie Landau, who were both doctors. His father, in Sacks' words a 'moderately Orthodox' Jew, read the Bible daily, and Sacks often demonstrated a spiritual impulse in his books. But in Uncle Tungsten, his 2001 memoir about his childhood love of chemistry, he explained that the inflamed Zionist meetings his parents held before the war helped turn him away from organised religion." (Author demystified brain's quirks, Greg Cowles)
So Zionist meetings turned Sacks off... religion?
Why would political meetings turn one off religion?
The NYT appears to be (deliberately?) conflating Zionism with Judaism here.
Yes, Sacks was an atheist, but it was not the aforementioned "inflamed Zionist meetings" which turned him away from "organised religion."
No, what they turned him away from was something very different - political Zionism and Zionists, as can be seen from the relevant passage in his 2001 memoir:
"Zionism played a considerable part on both sides of my family. My father's sister Alida worked during the Great War as an assistant to Nahum Sokolov and Chaim Weizmann, the leaders of Zionism at the time, and with her gift for languages, was entrusted with the translation of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 into French and Russian, and her son Aubrey, even as a boy, was a learned and eloquent Zionist (and later, as Abba Eban, the first Israeli ambassador to the UN). My parents, as doctors with a large house, were expected to provide a venue, a hospitable place, for Zionist meetings, and such meetings often took over the house in my childhood. I would hear them from my bedroom upstairs - raised voices, endless argument, passionate poundings on the table - and every so often a Zionist, flushed with anger or enthusiasm, would barge into my room, looking for the loo.
"Those meetings seemed to take a lot out of my parents - they would look pale and exhausted after each one - but they felt a duty to host them. I never heard them talk between themselves about Palestine or Zionism, and I suspected they had no strong convictions on the subject, at least until after the war, when the horror of the Holocaust made them feel there should be a 'National Home'. I felt they were bullied by the organizers of these meetings, and by the gangsterlike evangelists who would pound at the front door and demand large sums for yeshivas or 'schools in Israel'. My parents, clearheaded and independent in most other ways, seemed to become soft and helpless in the face of these demands, perhaps driven by a sense of obligation or anxiety. My own feelings (which I never discussed with them) were passionately negative: I came to hate Zionism and evangelism and politicking of every sort, which I regarded as noisy and intrusive and bullying. I longed for the quiet discourse, the rationality, of science." (Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, pp 15-16)
The question arises: is the NYT covering for Zionism here?
PS: Considering his childhood experience of Zionist bullying, Sacks would have been well-placed to write another book with a title as catchy as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - 'The People Who Mistook Someone Else's Country for Their Own'.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Everyone Loves Rowan 2
Following his first appearance as an instant Middle East expert in The Australian, adman Rowan Dean, next pops up in Quadrant with RIP Hamza, a polemic which asks the burning question, In light of the brutal torture and mutilation of 13 year-old Hamza al-Khatib in Syria, is it time to admit that the Arab Spring will never lead to an Arab Summer of Love? (7/6/11).
Summer of Love?
Well, you can blame that on Obama. No sooner did he refer to the Arab Spring and Israel's 1967 borders in his latest speech on the Middle East, than Rowan's fertile imagination went into top gear: "The western world's Summer of Love began on June 1st, 1967 with the release of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Switching on their radios from Los Angele to London, millions of excited fans were seduced by the sweet harmonies of the fab four proclaiming: 'With our love, with our love we can save the world'."
Of course, the Beatles started no such thing: "The term 'Summer of Love' originated with the formation of the Council for the Summer of love in the Spring of 1967 as a response to the convergence of young people on the Haight-Ashbury district [of San Francisco]." (Summer of Love, wikipaedia) But what really took place in the West at the time is of little interest to our adman.
No, the point here is to concoct a fictional West, blissed out on peace & love, as a foil to an equally fictional Arab East, focused solely on the destruction of Israel: "June 1st 1967 also saw millions of Arabs from Baghdad to Beirut switching on their radios to hear the mesmerizing incantations of Iraqi president Abdel Rahman Aref proclaiming: 'The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity... to wipe Israel off the map'."
Rowan appears to have cribbed this from the Zionist propaganda site CAMERA, but tweaked the date for Aref's speech, 31 May, to June 1 to coincide with the release of Sergeant Pepper's. But, hey, what's a little fiddle with the facts to one who single-handedly put several London advertising agencies on the map?
Still, you get the picture: while the West was being seduced by the "sweet harmonies" of the "fab four," the Arab East was being hypnotised by the "mesmerizing incantations" of the decidedly unfab Aref.
Having invented his own Summer of Love, Rowan then hypes it as the guiding principle of all post-1967 history, Bush and Blair's little forays into Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding: Obama invokes Israel's 1967 borders because he's "a child of the sixties." Vietnam was lost to the commies because "the philosophy of All You Need Is Love spread its tentacles throughout the university campuses of Europe, America and Australia..." And, "[l]ying in a bed with his Japanese girlfriend by his side, a guitar and a bag of acorns, John Lennon redefined a new political strategy. Give Peace A Chance."
But, says Rowan, and here's the rub, Obama's 2011 hit, Give 1967 Borders A Chance, simply doesn't cut the mustard in Israel. Bibi just doesn't dig those "borders of the Summer of Love." In the words of the late Abba Eban, these are 'Auschwitz borders'. But wasn't he the guy who also said: "Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what one does not believe oneself" - which is one hell of a great contextualiser whenever an Israeli politician opens his mouth, no? Anyway, back to Bibi. He's a "pragmatist and soldier who saw his own brother killed in a hostage rescue... He, more than any Israeli Prime Minister since Menachem Begin, does not trust words, only actions."
So here's where Bibi's coming from: "During the lead up to the Six Day War in June '67, the stated goal of numerous Arab nations was the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish race. To this day, echoes of that intent remain, lurking in Hamas's charter and much of the poisonous schoolyard propaganda foisted by their rulers onto impressionable young Arab minds. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, putting the finishing touches to his nuclear arsenal, often repeats his desire for Israel to be engulfed in a sea of flames."
I'm sorry, but there's far too much folderol* here to overburden this post with rebuttals, so I'll restrict my commentary to Ahmadinejad's supposed oft-repeated "desire for Israel to be engulfed in a sea of flames." Of consuming interest, of course, but, like the Yeti, I've been able to find neither hide nor hair of the creature.
[*On the hollowness of Arab threats in '67 see my 14/6/11 post Straight for the Jugular. On Israel's supposed vulnerability, propaganda line, and eagerness for a stoush with Nasser, see my 24/9/09 post Koutsoukis Gets Real. Just click on the 1967 tag below. On the Hamas charter see my 30/3/08 post Jerusalem Prize Syndrome.]
What with Syria in murderous convulsions, the Egyptian army throwing its weight around, mayhem in Libya, and the Saudi crackdown at home and in Bahrain, reckons Rowan, "[t]his is hardly the dawning of a Middle Eastern Age of Aquarius."
Maybe, maybe not. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?
But it's obvious Rowan doesn't really give a rats for the Hamza al-Khatibs of the Arab intifadas. Their heroic struggle to break the shackles imposed on them for decades by authoritarian regimes, many of them US clients, pales into insignificance beside the only issue of consequence in the Middle East today - ensuring Israel's peace of mind: "Only when Israel can escape the ever-present fear and threat of imminent annihilation, with the mental security that gives her the confidence to cede the appropriate territory, will the option of two peaceful states co-existing side by side be feasible."
The confidence to cede the appropriate territory?! Takes your breath away, doesn't it?
Actually, Rowan (or is it now Dr Dean?), has hit on something here. He's spot on in acknowledging that his patient has a serious mental condition, but as usual, his diagnosis is off with the pixies. Israel is no naked, trembling virgin transfixed with fear as the swarthy, hairy, moustache-twirling members of the Arab chapter of the Hell's Angels circle her in drooling anticipation of an imminent collective deflowering. For starters, she's a he. (Trust Rowan to stuff that one up.) And a right piece of work he is too, judging by his case summary, which I just happen to have before me.
The following two extracts from the case summary of Dr Dorit Oz, his treating psychiatist at the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center in Jerusalem, should set the picture straight.
First his attitude towards the Arab world:
1) "Fear of loss of control torments Israel, and his aggressive behavior provides catharsis. When his feelings of vulnerability become unbearable, he imposes the destruction he fears others would impose on him. Although he characterizes his perceived foes as foolish and weak, he behaves as if they were implacable and more robust than he, lashing out in a manner others call disproportionate. This dynamic only reinforces his construct of a hostile universe in which his aggression is necessary and justified (and, paradoxically, nuanced)." (Israel in nut house, documents reveal, circusisrael.blogspot.com, 8/7/09)
Second (and here it gets kinky) his attitude towards the Palestinians:
2) "Israel's sexuality is ambiguous. Compulsive and earthy virility vies with a stifling, shame-based revulsion towards eroticism. Functionally, he cohabits with the Palestinians, whom he alternately regards as a treacherous but exotic concubine and a sullen, ungrateful wife. He rages that they 'take up all my time' and that his life would be a virtual paradise if they would 'just leave'. Yet his life is organized around controlling and disciplining them, and they provide a ready outlet for his aggression. Quiet interludes make him especially anxious, and he inevitably resumes intimacy through belligerent overtures." (ibid)
Stay tuned for the third fun-filled episode of Everyone Loves Rowan.
Summer of Love?
Well, you can blame that on Obama. No sooner did he refer to the Arab Spring and Israel's 1967 borders in his latest speech on the Middle East, than Rowan's fertile imagination went into top gear: "The western world's Summer of Love began on June 1st, 1967 with the release of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Switching on their radios from Los Angele to London, millions of excited fans were seduced by the sweet harmonies of the fab four proclaiming: 'With our love, with our love we can save the world'."
Of course, the Beatles started no such thing: "The term 'Summer of Love' originated with the formation of the Council for the Summer of love in the Spring of 1967 as a response to the convergence of young people on the Haight-Ashbury district [of San Francisco]." (Summer of Love, wikipaedia) But what really took place in the West at the time is of little interest to our adman.
No, the point here is to concoct a fictional West, blissed out on peace & love, as a foil to an equally fictional Arab East, focused solely on the destruction of Israel: "June 1st 1967 also saw millions of Arabs from Baghdad to Beirut switching on their radios to hear the mesmerizing incantations of Iraqi president Abdel Rahman Aref proclaiming: 'The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity... to wipe Israel off the map'."
Rowan appears to have cribbed this from the Zionist propaganda site CAMERA, but tweaked the date for Aref's speech, 31 May, to June 1 to coincide with the release of Sergeant Pepper's. But, hey, what's a little fiddle with the facts to one who single-handedly put several London advertising agencies on the map?
Still, you get the picture: while the West was being seduced by the "sweet harmonies" of the "fab four," the Arab East was being hypnotised by the "mesmerizing incantations" of the decidedly unfab Aref.
Having invented his own Summer of Love, Rowan then hypes it as the guiding principle of all post-1967 history, Bush and Blair's little forays into Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding: Obama invokes Israel's 1967 borders because he's "a child of the sixties." Vietnam was lost to the commies because "the philosophy of All You Need Is Love spread its tentacles throughout the university campuses of Europe, America and Australia..." And, "[l]ying in a bed with his Japanese girlfriend by his side, a guitar and a bag of acorns, John Lennon redefined a new political strategy. Give Peace A Chance."
But, says Rowan, and here's the rub, Obama's 2011 hit, Give 1967 Borders A Chance, simply doesn't cut the mustard in Israel. Bibi just doesn't dig those "borders of the Summer of Love." In the words of the late Abba Eban, these are 'Auschwitz borders'. But wasn't he the guy who also said: "Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what one does not believe oneself" - which is one hell of a great contextualiser whenever an Israeli politician opens his mouth, no? Anyway, back to Bibi. He's a "pragmatist and soldier who saw his own brother killed in a hostage rescue... He, more than any Israeli Prime Minister since Menachem Begin, does not trust words, only actions."
So here's where Bibi's coming from: "During the lead up to the Six Day War in June '67, the stated goal of numerous Arab nations was the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish race. To this day, echoes of that intent remain, lurking in Hamas's charter and much of the poisonous schoolyard propaganda foisted by their rulers onto impressionable young Arab minds. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, putting the finishing touches to his nuclear arsenal, often repeats his desire for Israel to be engulfed in a sea of flames."
I'm sorry, but there's far too much folderol* here to overburden this post with rebuttals, so I'll restrict my commentary to Ahmadinejad's supposed oft-repeated "desire for Israel to be engulfed in a sea of flames." Of consuming interest, of course, but, like the Yeti, I've been able to find neither hide nor hair of the creature.
[*On the hollowness of Arab threats in '67 see my 14/6/11 post Straight for the Jugular. On Israel's supposed vulnerability, propaganda line, and eagerness for a stoush with Nasser, see my 24/9/09 post Koutsoukis Gets Real. Just click on the 1967 tag below. On the Hamas charter see my 30/3/08 post Jerusalem Prize Syndrome.]
What with Syria in murderous convulsions, the Egyptian army throwing its weight around, mayhem in Libya, and the Saudi crackdown at home and in Bahrain, reckons Rowan, "[t]his is hardly the dawning of a Middle Eastern Age of Aquarius."
Maybe, maybe not. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?
But it's obvious Rowan doesn't really give a rats for the Hamza al-Khatibs of the Arab intifadas. Their heroic struggle to break the shackles imposed on them for decades by authoritarian regimes, many of them US clients, pales into insignificance beside the only issue of consequence in the Middle East today - ensuring Israel's peace of mind: "Only when Israel can escape the ever-present fear and threat of imminent annihilation, with the mental security that gives her the confidence to cede the appropriate territory, will the option of two peaceful states co-existing side by side be feasible."
The confidence to cede the appropriate territory?! Takes your breath away, doesn't it?
Actually, Rowan (or is it now Dr Dean?), has hit on something here. He's spot on in acknowledging that his patient has a serious mental condition, but as usual, his diagnosis is off with the pixies. Israel is no naked, trembling virgin transfixed with fear as the swarthy, hairy, moustache-twirling members of the Arab chapter of the Hell's Angels circle her in drooling anticipation of an imminent collective deflowering. For starters, she's a he. (Trust Rowan to stuff that one up.) And a right piece of work he is too, judging by his case summary, which I just happen to have before me.
The following two extracts from the case summary of Dr Dorit Oz, his treating psychiatist at the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center in Jerusalem, should set the picture straight.
First his attitude towards the Arab world:
1) "Fear of loss of control torments Israel, and his aggressive behavior provides catharsis. When his feelings of vulnerability become unbearable, he imposes the destruction he fears others would impose on him. Although he characterizes his perceived foes as foolish and weak, he behaves as if they were implacable and more robust than he, lashing out in a manner others call disproportionate. This dynamic only reinforces his construct of a hostile universe in which his aggression is necessary and justified (and, paradoxically, nuanced)." (Israel in nut house, documents reveal, circusisrael.blogspot.com, 8/7/09)
Second (and here it gets kinky) his attitude towards the Palestinians:
2) "Israel's sexuality is ambiguous. Compulsive and earthy virility vies with a stifling, shame-based revulsion towards eroticism. Functionally, he cohabits with the Palestinians, whom he alternately regards as a treacherous but exotic concubine and a sullen, ungrateful wife. He rages that they 'take up all my time' and that his life would be a virtual paradise if they would 'just leave'. Yet his life is organized around controlling and disciplining them, and they provide a ready outlet for his aggression. Quiet interludes make him especially anxious, and he inevitably resumes intimacy through belligerent overtures." (ibid)
Stay tuned for the third fun-filled episode of Everyone Loves Rowan.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Gullible's Travels
Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian of the same day, (19/1/08) afforded the reader a textbook contrast between factual and informative journalism on the one hand, and pure PR on the other. In the former category, came Under a state of siege, by the Middle East correspondent for the SMH and The Age, Ed O'Loughlin. In the latter, came Deep inside the plucky country, by The Australian's Foreign Editor (and recipient of the State Zionist Council of NSW/Zionist Federation of Australia/World Zionist Organization-sponsored Jerusalem Prize), Greg Sheridan.
O'Loughlin and Sheridan are planets apart, with O'Loughlin's feet firmly on planet Earth, and Sheridan off in deep space on a planet all his own.
Palestinian (Swiss) Cheese
O'Loughlin tours the Israeli-occupied West Bank in the company of an Israeli human rights activist. He reports that the territory is rapidly in the process of being transformed into "an archipelago of disconnected Arab enclaves, controlled by walls, fences and checkpoints which Palestinian people and goods cannot cross without Israeli permission," while "in the settlements and on the bypass roads...Jewish settlers...enjoy freedom of movement and superior rights and protections to the indigenous Palestinians."
He quotes independent Palestinian MP and winner of the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize, Hanan Ashrawi to the effect that "The settlements and walls and roads and tunnels are the superimposition of an Israeli reality over Palestinian land, a grid put in place to control Palestinian movement, resources and land, that is making it impossible to build a Palestinian state." And he talks to a settler, Arieh King (one of 450,000 in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem), who wants a West Bank without Arabs, and to Rabbi Ascherman (of Rabbis for Human Rights), who opposes King and his kind. O'Loughlin is a correspondent who simply and honestly bears witness to the politicide of the Palestinian people. Sheridan, on the other hand, is there to sell us the Zionist dream.
Abba Eban, a former Israeli foreign minister, once opined that "Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what one does not believe oneself." I suspect that Sheridan believes every word he's written, therefore, let me introduce:-
Gullible's Travels
The opening paragraphs of Gullible's account of his most recent Israeli gig is a corker. Rivetted by "the countless gum trees that populate Israel"... "exotic Australian settlers in the land of the Bible," he experiences a distinct - but profoundly irrelevant - patriotic surge: "It's as if a single ghost gum represents every Australian soldier who ever fell in the Middle East, through all the many decades that Australian soldiers have been fighting and dying there." Hilarious! Wonder if he had his Akubra on?
Gullible informs us that he had attended "a seminar at Ariel [an Israeli settlement] on the international media's treatment ["biased & hostile" of course] of Israel." "The world media," he laments, "cover the Palestinian territories and only cover Israel as a brooding and malign presence in the territories," and Israel itself is "under-reported," even when "only a few years ago terrorists were murdering 1500 of its citizens a year."
Hm, "1500" Israeli citizen deaths in Israel, year after year, presumably since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000? Do the math for 2000-2005 (5x1500=7500) and, according to Gullible, Palestinian terrorists/suicide bombers slew 7500 Israelis in 5 years! And that's not including those Israelis (troops/settlers) slain in the occupied Palestinian territories. Crikey, this even tops all 5315 Palestinian (4228), Israeli (1,024), and foreign (63) Intifada-related deaths from 2000-2007 at 5315! [Source: Israeli-Palestinian Fatalities Since 2000 - Key Trends, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 31/8/07]
Enter stage LEFT, the "biased and hostile" international media in the form of the BBC: Their data, Analysis: Palestinian suicide attacks (29/1/07) estimates the number of Israeli victims of Palestinian suicide bombers for 2000-2005 at 522, while OCHA's estimate of Israeli civilian deaths at the hands of suicide bombers in Israel is just 460 (402 civilians/58 security forces personnel).
Gullible's religious prejudices emerge in his caricature of Jerusalem: "Jerusalem is an eternal city: the centre of Judaism, the fountainhead of Christianity and an important site for Islam." Good one, Gullible! "Visually it is quite stunning, its character maintained by the most enlightened civic ordinance on record: that all new buildings must be constructed of white Jerusalem stone." Ah, Israel, you've done it again! Except that it was the British who were responsible for the original stone construction regulation, and the Israelis who have reduced the the role of stone to a mere cladding material. Nor is it quarried in Jerusalem, but mainly from the bedrock around the Palestinian cities of Hebron and Ramallah. [See Eyal Weizman's chilling 2007 book Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation.]
"Tel Aviv is predominantly secular Jewish, with very few Arabs and ultra-orthodox Jews." Gullible, of course, doesn't tell us that that's because the Palestinian Arab villages of Abu Kabir, Manshiyya, Summayl, Shaykh Muwannis and Salama (along with their inhabitants) were wiped off the map in 1948. [See http://www.zochrot.org/]
"The Druze are a small separate, Arab religious group found in Lebanon, Syria and Israel. Within Israel they are fiercely loyal to the state of Israel...and serve in the Israeli army with great distinction..." Nowhere near as "fiercely loyal" as Gullible though: at Israel's http://www.ynetnews.com/ we read in Rift between Israel, Druze growing (18/1/08) that "patriotism in the Druze community is quickly waning," because, says a Druze MK, Israel's Druze are waking up to the fact that service in the army as a path to equality with Israeli Jews is "a mere illusion," and that "we are first and foremost Arabs." Ouch!
Flying over "illegal" Bedouin encampments in the Negev Desert, Gullible informs us that "The problem they cause is for those trying to get education and social services to their children." Those boody Bedouin! Must the white man forever shoulder his burden? Gullible, of course, evinces no awareness whatever of the Bedouin's history of evictions and deportations, or the current Israeli campaign of uprooting (or aerial defoliation) of their crops in an effort to force them out of their encampments and into sterile development towns. No, he's literally and figuratively above all that.
In the Israeli- occupied Syrian Golan Heights, Gullible sees bunkers from which "Syrian soldiers...would fire...at workers on the kibbutz below" in the bad old days before the miraculous victory of 1967. Now you might justifiably expect a real journalist, as opposed to a PR peddler, to question what his Israeli minders are telling him. Take veteran UK Middle East correspondent David Hirst, for example. In his comprehensive and deadly accurate 1977 history of the Middle East conflict, The Gun and the Olive Branch, he described his own response to the seductions of Israel's Golan Heights myth: "A post-war visit to the windswept, battle-scarred plateau was a moving experience - at least it was for those of this writer's fellow tourists, probably all of them, who accepted what our guide told us...about the Syrian guns which used to rain destruction on the farmers peacefully tilling their fields in the valley below...However, the guide did, with an air of complicity, tell us one unexpected truth. 'We are now entering what used to be the demilitarized zone,' he said, 'regular soldiers were forbidden to enter it. Of course, we got around that by sending them in disguised as police. But that's another story.' It is another story, a long one, and naturally he did not tell it." [211-212] Hirst does though, detailing the premeditated Israeli campaign of illegal encroachments and provocations that acted as a "curtain-raiser to the June War." Gullible, the tourist, is content with what the guide tells him.
Then he's off to see "Jewish settlements in the West Bank," first filling us in with some invaluable historical background: "After the 1967 war, when Israel was attacked by a coalition of its Arab neighbours, Israel took territory in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza," some of which "is necessary for security." Gullible thus relays yet another Israeli myth: that the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 was an act of self-defence by Israel against a Hydra-headed Arab existential threat. The reality? Israel was just itching for a blue with Nasser's Egypt. Listen to the latest research by Israeli historian, Tom Segev: "Some time before the crisis with Egypt, Allon [leader of Ahdut Ha'avoda and ethnic cleanser of 1948] had developed a theory that Israel's strategic circumstances necessitated a preemptive attack. In his 1959 book, A Screen of Sand, he described in great detail the danger that the Arabs might destroy Israel's air force on the ground. In an interview that was not supposed to be made public for many years, he claimed he had written this only to avoid complications with the Israeli censor: in fact, he had meant that Israel should destroy the Arab air forces. He called this 'active defence', or 'preemptive counterattack', and he maintained that 'there is no substitute for aggression, in the positive sense of the word'." [1967: Israel, the War and the Year that Transformed the Middle East p 312] Allon's theory informed Israel's 4/6/67 decision to launch an unprovoked preemptive strike against Egypt: "Warhaftig [minister of religious affairs] asked...how they [cabinet] could present an Israeli first strike as a response...Allon thought that the prime minister could announce to the world's heads of state that the Egyptians had attacked, and minutes later Israel would respond. The prime minister would risk a lie, but only historians would know the truth...The resolution that evolved asserted that Israel was acting against 'the ring of aggression tightening around it'." [1967 p 336] Gullible's "attack" by a "coalition" of Arab states is a variation on this discredited theme.
To justify Israel's refusal to give up the occupied West Bank, Gullible asserts that, in "the two places it has done that, in southern Lebanon and Gaza, the result has been disastrous. [Israel] was subject to thousands of rocket attacks from southern Lebanon until it went to war with Hezbollah and now every day Qassam rockets are fired from Gaza at nearby Israeli civilian towns..."
First, let's clarify what he's saying about Lebanon: that in the years between Israel's forced withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000 and its 2006 rampage, "thousands" of rockets had rained down on Israel. Not so, I'm afraid. According to Hezbollah expert, Professor Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University, "Generally...this six-year period was a relatively quiet, peaceful time by historical standards, and this was frequently commented on by Israeli officials prior to the summer of 2006. The more serious clashes tended to occur in the Shebaa area of the occupied Golan Heights...Hezbollah also began firing Katyusha rockets, mostly into the occupied Golan Heights, with a few episodes of Katyusha firings into Israel proper as well. Although several dozen incidents occurred over the last 6 years, in almost every case, according to Israeli sources, the culprits were Palestinian fedayeen, not Hezbollah." [Hezbollah, p 91-92]
Second, Gaza: neither the infinitely greater and more lethal rain of Israeli shells and missiles on Gaza, nor the Hamas Government's cease-fire offers comes within Gullible's blinkered purview. Israeli dissident, Uri Avnery has written, "If the Qassams were really bothering our political and military leaders, they would have jumped at the [December 07 Hamas] cease-fire offer. But the leaders don't really care about what's happening to the Sderot population, out on the geographical and political 'periphery', far from the centre of the country. It carries no political or economic weight. In the eyes of the leadership, its suffering is, all in all, tolerable. It also has an important positive side: it provides an ideal pretext for the actions of the army. The Israeli strategic aim in Gaza is not to put an end to the Qassams. It would still be the same if not a single Qassam fell on Israel. The real aim is to break the Palestinians, which means breaking Hamas." [Help! A Cease-fire! 22/12/07]
Despite spending "days driving up and down the West Bank" and visiting "as many Jewish settlements as I could," Gullible was unable to find even one "belligerently bearded Jew with a knit skullcap on his head, a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other," concluding that Israeli settlers are unfairly stereotyped. While the stereotype exists, he believes, "they are a minority." "The settlers I met lived where they did...mainly [because of] the lower cost of housing, the communal lifestyle and educational opportunities and sometimes because of a desire to be connected to biblical lands." Just regular guys it seems, nary a fanatic among them - except that their presence on occupied Palestinian land is in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and makes a mockery of the concept of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state.
Of Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, Gullible avers that "no Israeli government will give up central suburbs such as Har Homa and Gilot [sic: Gilo]." Too risky! "For an Australian it is almost impossible to imagine the smallness of the distances involved. Gilot was routinely fired on by snipers in Bethlehem several years ago...[which] is like Sydney's Surry Hills being fired on by Redfern..."
Ahem! Let's take a closer at these fearsome "snipers." Palestinian pastor, Mitri Rihab, writing of the period October/November 2000 in his 2004 book, Bethlehem Besieged, says, "It was becoming routine that in the night, a few armed young Palestinian men would appear in the outskirts of town and fire a few bullet rounds at a Jewish settlement that wasn't even in the range of their fire. What they were doing made no sense to the majority of the population, since the shooting had no political reason or justification. Most of Bethlehem's residents were against these acts, and many viewed the young men as potential criminals or gang members who thought of themselves as some kind of Palestinian Rambos. Not only was it impossible for the bullets to reach the other side, but the Israeli soldiers used the shooting as justification to fire back with heavy artillery on the civilian neighbourhoods." [p 95-96] And that is why Gilot cannot be given up!
Gullible concludes predictably with the traditional Zionist shrug: If only the Arabs/Palestinians would give peace a chance, then "compromise on borders might be possible." Alas, "too many Arab...and Palestinian leaders are playing for the long-term and still believe that in time they will wipe Israel off the map."
In reality, of course, is that the Zionist movement has always played for the long-term and has almost succeeded in wiping Palestine off the map.
O'Loughlin and Sheridan are planets apart, with O'Loughlin's feet firmly on planet Earth, and Sheridan off in deep space on a planet all his own.
Palestinian (Swiss) Cheese
O'Loughlin tours the Israeli-occupied West Bank in the company of an Israeli human rights activist. He reports that the territory is rapidly in the process of being transformed into "an archipelago of disconnected Arab enclaves, controlled by walls, fences and checkpoints which Palestinian people and goods cannot cross without Israeli permission," while "in the settlements and on the bypass roads...Jewish settlers...enjoy freedom of movement and superior rights and protections to the indigenous Palestinians."
He quotes independent Palestinian MP and winner of the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize, Hanan Ashrawi to the effect that "The settlements and walls and roads and tunnels are the superimposition of an Israeli reality over Palestinian land, a grid put in place to control Palestinian movement, resources and land, that is making it impossible to build a Palestinian state." And he talks to a settler, Arieh King (one of 450,000 in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem), who wants a West Bank without Arabs, and to Rabbi Ascherman (of Rabbis for Human Rights), who opposes King and his kind. O'Loughlin is a correspondent who simply and honestly bears witness to the politicide of the Palestinian people. Sheridan, on the other hand, is there to sell us the Zionist dream.
Abba Eban, a former Israeli foreign minister, once opined that "Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what one does not believe oneself." I suspect that Sheridan believes every word he's written, therefore, let me introduce:-
Gullible's Travels
The opening paragraphs of Gullible's account of his most recent Israeli gig is a corker. Rivetted by "the countless gum trees that populate Israel"... "exotic Australian settlers in the land of the Bible," he experiences a distinct - but profoundly irrelevant - patriotic surge: "It's as if a single ghost gum represents every Australian soldier who ever fell in the Middle East, through all the many decades that Australian soldiers have been fighting and dying there." Hilarious! Wonder if he had his Akubra on?
Gullible informs us that he had attended "a seminar at Ariel [an Israeli settlement] on the international media's treatment ["biased & hostile" of course] of Israel." "The world media," he laments, "cover the Palestinian territories and only cover Israel as a brooding and malign presence in the territories," and Israel itself is "under-reported," even when "only a few years ago terrorists were murdering 1500 of its citizens a year."
Hm, "1500" Israeli citizen deaths in Israel, year after year, presumably since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000? Do the math for 2000-2005 (5x1500=7500) and, according to Gullible, Palestinian terrorists/suicide bombers slew 7500 Israelis in 5 years! And that's not including those Israelis (troops/settlers) slain in the occupied Palestinian territories. Crikey, this even tops all 5315 Palestinian (4228), Israeli (1,024), and foreign (63) Intifada-related deaths from 2000-2007 at 5315! [Source: Israeli-Palestinian Fatalities Since 2000 - Key Trends, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 31/8/07]
Enter stage LEFT, the "biased and hostile" international media in the form of the BBC: Their data, Analysis: Palestinian suicide attacks (29/1/07) estimates the number of Israeli victims of Palestinian suicide bombers for 2000-2005 at 522, while OCHA's estimate of Israeli civilian deaths at the hands of suicide bombers in Israel is just 460 (402 civilians/58 security forces personnel).
Gullible's religious prejudices emerge in his caricature of Jerusalem: "Jerusalem is an eternal city: the centre of Judaism, the fountainhead of Christianity and an important site for Islam." Good one, Gullible! "Visually it is quite stunning, its character maintained by the most enlightened civic ordinance on record: that all new buildings must be constructed of white Jerusalem stone." Ah, Israel, you've done it again! Except that it was the British who were responsible for the original stone construction regulation, and the Israelis who have reduced the the role of stone to a mere cladding material. Nor is it quarried in Jerusalem, but mainly from the bedrock around the Palestinian cities of Hebron and Ramallah. [See Eyal Weizman's chilling 2007 book Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation.]
"Tel Aviv is predominantly secular Jewish, with very few Arabs and ultra-orthodox Jews." Gullible, of course, doesn't tell us that that's because the Palestinian Arab villages of Abu Kabir, Manshiyya, Summayl, Shaykh Muwannis and Salama (along with their inhabitants) were wiped off the map in 1948. [See http://www.zochrot.org/]
"The Druze are a small separate, Arab religious group found in Lebanon, Syria and Israel. Within Israel they are fiercely loyal to the state of Israel...and serve in the Israeli army with great distinction..." Nowhere near as "fiercely loyal" as Gullible though: at Israel's http://www.ynetnews.com/ we read in Rift between Israel, Druze growing (18/1/08) that "patriotism in the Druze community is quickly waning," because, says a Druze MK, Israel's Druze are waking up to the fact that service in the army as a path to equality with Israeli Jews is "a mere illusion," and that "we are first and foremost Arabs." Ouch!
Flying over "illegal" Bedouin encampments in the Negev Desert, Gullible informs us that "The problem they cause is for those trying to get education and social services to their children." Those boody Bedouin! Must the white man forever shoulder his burden? Gullible, of course, evinces no awareness whatever of the Bedouin's history of evictions and deportations, or the current Israeli campaign of uprooting (or aerial defoliation) of their crops in an effort to force them out of their encampments and into sterile development towns. No, he's literally and figuratively above all that.
In the Israeli- occupied Syrian Golan Heights, Gullible sees bunkers from which "Syrian soldiers...would fire...at workers on the kibbutz below" in the bad old days before the miraculous victory of 1967. Now you might justifiably expect a real journalist, as opposed to a PR peddler, to question what his Israeli minders are telling him. Take veteran UK Middle East correspondent David Hirst, for example. In his comprehensive and deadly accurate 1977 history of the Middle East conflict, The Gun and the Olive Branch, he described his own response to the seductions of Israel's Golan Heights myth: "A post-war visit to the windswept, battle-scarred plateau was a moving experience - at least it was for those of this writer's fellow tourists, probably all of them, who accepted what our guide told us...about the Syrian guns which used to rain destruction on the farmers peacefully tilling their fields in the valley below...However, the guide did, with an air of complicity, tell us one unexpected truth. 'We are now entering what used to be the demilitarized zone,' he said, 'regular soldiers were forbidden to enter it. Of course, we got around that by sending them in disguised as police. But that's another story.' It is another story, a long one, and naturally he did not tell it." [211-212] Hirst does though, detailing the premeditated Israeli campaign of illegal encroachments and provocations that acted as a "curtain-raiser to the June War." Gullible, the tourist, is content with what the guide tells him.
Then he's off to see "Jewish settlements in the West Bank," first filling us in with some invaluable historical background: "After the 1967 war, when Israel was attacked by a coalition of its Arab neighbours, Israel took territory in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza," some of which "is necessary for security." Gullible thus relays yet another Israeli myth: that the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 was an act of self-defence by Israel against a Hydra-headed Arab existential threat. The reality? Israel was just itching for a blue with Nasser's Egypt. Listen to the latest research by Israeli historian, Tom Segev: "Some time before the crisis with Egypt, Allon [leader of Ahdut Ha'avoda and ethnic cleanser of 1948] had developed a theory that Israel's strategic circumstances necessitated a preemptive attack. In his 1959 book, A Screen of Sand, he described in great detail the danger that the Arabs might destroy Israel's air force on the ground. In an interview that was not supposed to be made public for many years, he claimed he had written this only to avoid complications with the Israeli censor: in fact, he had meant that Israel should destroy the Arab air forces. He called this 'active defence', or 'preemptive counterattack', and he maintained that 'there is no substitute for aggression, in the positive sense of the word'." [1967: Israel, the War and the Year that Transformed the Middle East p 312] Allon's theory informed Israel's 4/6/67 decision to launch an unprovoked preemptive strike against Egypt: "Warhaftig [minister of religious affairs] asked...how they [cabinet] could present an Israeli first strike as a response...Allon thought that the prime minister could announce to the world's heads of state that the Egyptians had attacked, and minutes later Israel would respond. The prime minister would risk a lie, but only historians would know the truth...The resolution that evolved asserted that Israel was acting against 'the ring of aggression tightening around it'." [1967 p 336] Gullible's "attack" by a "coalition" of Arab states is a variation on this discredited theme.
To justify Israel's refusal to give up the occupied West Bank, Gullible asserts that, in "the two places it has done that, in southern Lebanon and Gaza, the result has been disastrous. [Israel] was subject to thousands of rocket attacks from southern Lebanon until it went to war with Hezbollah and now every day Qassam rockets are fired from Gaza at nearby Israeli civilian towns..."
First, let's clarify what he's saying about Lebanon: that in the years between Israel's forced withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000 and its 2006 rampage, "thousands" of rockets had rained down on Israel. Not so, I'm afraid. According to Hezbollah expert, Professor Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University, "Generally...this six-year period was a relatively quiet, peaceful time by historical standards, and this was frequently commented on by Israeli officials prior to the summer of 2006. The more serious clashes tended to occur in the Shebaa area of the occupied Golan Heights...Hezbollah also began firing Katyusha rockets, mostly into the occupied Golan Heights, with a few episodes of Katyusha firings into Israel proper as well. Although several dozen incidents occurred over the last 6 years, in almost every case, according to Israeli sources, the culprits were Palestinian fedayeen, not Hezbollah." [Hezbollah, p 91-92]
Second, Gaza: neither the infinitely greater and more lethal rain of Israeli shells and missiles on Gaza, nor the Hamas Government's cease-fire offers comes within Gullible's blinkered purview. Israeli dissident, Uri Avnery has written, "If the Qassams were really bothering our political and military leaders, they would have jumped at the [December 07 Hamas] cease-fire offer. But the leaders don't really care about what's happening to the Sderot population, out on the geographical and political 'periphery', far from the centre of the country. It carries no political or economic weight. In the eyes of the leadership, its suffering is, all in all, tolerable. It also has an important positive side: it provides an ideal pretext for the actions of the army. The Israeli strategic aim in Gaza is not to put an end to the Qassams. It would still be the same if not a single Qassam fell on Israel. The real aim is to break the Palestinians, which means breaking Hamas." [Help! A Cease-fire! 22/12/07]
Despite spending "days driving up and down the West Bank" and visiting "as many Jewish settlements as I could," Gullible was unable to find even one "belligerently bearded Jew with a knit skullcap on his head, a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other," concluding that Israeli settlers are unfairly stereotyped. While the stereotype exists, he believes, "they are a minority." "The settlers I met lived where they did...mainly [because of] the lower cost of housing, the communal lifestyle and educational opportunities and sometimes because of a desire to be connected to biblical lands." Just regular guys it seems, nary a fanatic among them - except that their presence on occupied Palestinian land is in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and makes a mockery of the concept of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state.
Of Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, Gullible avers that "no Israeli government will give up central suburbs such as Har Homa and Gilot [sic: Gilo]." Too risky! "For an Australian it is almost impossible to imagine the smallness of the distances involved. Gilot was routinely fired on by snipers in Bethlehem several years ago...[which] is like Sydney's Surry Hills being fired on by Redfern..."
Ahem! Let's take a closer at these fearsome "snipers." Palestinian pastor, Mitri Rihab, writing of the period October/November 2000 in his 2004 book, Bethlehem Besieged, says, "It was becoming routine that in the night, a few armed young Palestinian men would appear in the outskirts of town and fire a few bullet rounds at a Jewish settlement that wasn't even in the range of their fire. What they were doing made no sense to the majority of the population, since the shooting had no political reason or justification. Most of Bethlehem's residents were against these acts, and many viewed the young men as potential criminals or gang members who thought of themselves as some kind of Palestinian Rambos. Not only was it impossible for the bullets to reach the other side, but the Israeli soldiers used the shooting as justification to fire back with heavy artillery on the civilian neighbourhoods." [p 95-96] And that is why Gilot cannot be given up!
Gullible concludes predictably with the traditional Zionist shrug: If only the Arabs/Palestinians would give peace a chance, then "compromise on borders might be possible." Alas, "too many Arab...and Palestinian leaders are playing for the long-term and still believe that in time they will wipe Israel off the map."
In reality, of course, is that the Zionist movement has always played for the long-term and has almost succeeded in wiping Palestine off the map.
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