The Guardian has a piece by Gavin Haynes (26/10), The Stupidest thing a nation has ever done, in which he kicks off a discussion by citing 5 examples: The Trojan Horse; King Vortigan's mercenaries; Myanmar's nines; the Confederacy's cotton ban; and the Maginot Line. As of this morning it's garnered some 864 comments.
Predictably - this is Jonathan Freedland's Israel-friendly Guardian after all - the Balfour Declaration, even as it fast approaches its centenary of November 2 - wasn't on Haynes' list. However, it was cited twice, in the comment thread, the first time with 15 likes, the second with 20, more likes than most other examples, it should be noted. (Sykes-Picot, mentioned once, got 9 likes.)
Apropos the Balfour Declaration, one of the most interesting of the many essays currently appearing on the subject is Gideon Polya's 100th anniversary of Australian Beersheba Charge, UK Balfour Declaration & Palestinian Genocide Commencement.
Deploying the UN Genocide Convention's definition of the crime of genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group," Polya sets out to show that what has happened to the Palestinian people since the British takeover of their homeland in 1917 fits this definition, and quantifies the genocide as 2 million deaths from violence (0.1 million) or imposed deprivation (1.9 million) since WW I.
By way of encouraging a reading of the whole, here is section 4:
Summary of the horrendous dimensions of the ongoing Palestinian Genocide, the 50-year Occupation and egregious violations of Palestinian human rights:
(1) The Palestinian Genocide commenced in earnest with the famine deaths of 100,000 Palestinians after conquest of Palestine in WWI by the British and the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACS).
(2) The violent killing of Indigenous Palestinians commenced with the 1918 Surafend Massacre by ANZAC soldiers.
(3) Since WWI there have been 2 million Palestinian deaths from Zionist violence (0.1 million) or Zionist-imposed deprivation (1.9 million).
(4) There are 8 million Palestinian refugees and all of the 14 million Palestinians are excluded from all or part of Palestine.
(5) Of about 14 million Palestinians (half of them children), 7 million are forbidden to even set foot in their own country, 5 million are held hostage with zero human rights under Israeli guns in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million) or in ever-dwindling West Bank Bantustan ghettoes (3.0 million), and 1.8 million live as Third Class citizens as Israeli Palestinians under Nazi-style Apartheid Israeli race laws.
(6) 90% of Palestine has now been ethnically cleansed of Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants in an ongoing war criminal ethnic cleansing that has been repeatedly condemned by the UN and most recently by UN Security Council Resolution 2334 that was unanimously supported (with a remarkable Obama US abstention but subsequently fervently pro-Zionist Trump America and Turnbull Australia opposition).
(7) GDP per capita is US$2,900 for Occupied Palestinians as compared to US$37,000 for Apartheid Israel.
(8) Through imposed deprivation, each year Apartheid Israel passively murders about 2,700 under-5 year old Palestinian infants and passively murders 4,200 Occupied Palestinians in general who die avoidably under Israeli Apartheid each year (this violates Articles 55 & 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War that demand that an Occupier must provide life-sustaining food and medical services to the Occupied "to the fullest extent of the means available to it.").
(9) Apartheid Israel violently kills an average of about 550 Occupied Palestinians each year.
(10) Occupied Palestinians are deprived of essentially all human rights and civil rights by Apartheid Israel (e.g. Apartheid Israeli home invasions, beatings, executions, killings, exilings, mass imprisonments, seizures of land and homes, and population transfers in violation of the UN Genocide Convention and the Geneva convention).
(11) Nuclear terrorist, serial war criminal, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel determines that 74% of its now 50% Indigenous Palestinian subjects who are Occupied Palestinians cannot vote for the government ruling them (i.e. egregious Apartheid).
(12) US-, UK-, Canada-, France- and Australia-backed Apartheid Israel in its genocidal treatment of the Palestinians ignores numerous UN General Assembly Resolutions and UN Security Council Resolutions, the UN Genocide Convention, the Geneva Convention, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and many other aspects of International Law.
(13) Apartheid Israel has attacked 12 countries (including the US) and occupied 5 with 1950-2005 avoidable deaths from deprivation in countries neighbouring and variously occupied by Apartheid Israel totalling 24 million.
(14) 5 million Occupied Palestinians (half of them children) are routinely blackmailed through torture or denial of life-saving medical care to spy on fellow Palestinians for Apartheid Israel.
(15) 5 million Occupied Palestinians (half of them children) are excluded by checkpoints from Jews-only areas and Jews-only roads.
(16) 50% of Israeli children are physically, psychologically or sexually (17%) abused each year but 100% of the 5 million Occupied Palestinian children (2 million in Gaza Concentration Camp, 3 million in West Bank ghettos) are subject to traumatizing human rights abuse by the serial war criminal Israel Defence Force (IDF).
(17) There is a 10-year gap between Israeli and Palestinian life expectancy.
(18) Theocratic Apartheid Israeli laws prohibit all but religious marriages and marriage between Israelis and Occupied Palestinians is effectively excluded (they are forbidden from co-habiting).
(19) Decent, anti-racist Jewish Israelis, as well as decent, anti-racist Jews worldwide, are grossly and falsely defamed by conflation of Apartheid Israel and its appalling crimes with all Jews, as in the false appellation 'Jewish State'.
(20) There is an ever-present threat expressed by Apartheid Israeli ultra-extremists of a neo-Nazi Final Solution in which the Indigenous Palestinians, who presently constitute 50% of Apartheid Israeli subjects, will all be expelled from Palestine.
Showing posts with label Genocide Convention. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Genocide Convention. Show all posts
Friday, October 27, 2017
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Australia Dumps on Durban 2
Let's first get 'Adolf' Ahmedinejad's speech at Durban II out of the way. Yesterday's Murdoch fishwrapper predictably called the Iranian president's rather unremarkable speech an "anti-Semitic tirade." (UN Integrity Damaged: Australia was right to have no part of Durban II, The Australian, 22/4/09)
Now, whether you love him or loathe him is irrelevant. Is his speech "anti-Semitic" as alleged? Let's take a look at some of the wording:
"Following World War II, [a number of powerful countries/the UN Security Council] resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering and they sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine. And, in fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine."
It would be more accurate to say that such powerful countries as Britain and the United States were instrumental in enabling Zionist forces to ethnically cleanse Palestine in 1948, and that the suffering of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis provided a pretext for same. However, that the ethnic cleansing was motivated by the desire to achieve a Jewish majority in what had been, up to that point, a non-Jewish majority land, and that this makes it an inherently racist endeavour, is incontestable and cannot be smeared as anti-Semitism.
"The Security Council helped stabilize the occupying regime and supported it in the last 60 years, giving them a free hand to commit all sorts of atrocities. It is all the more regrettable that a number of Western governments and the United States have committed themselves to defending those racist perpetrators of genocide while the awakened-conscience and free-minded people of the world condemn aggression, brutalities and the bombardment of civilians in Gaza. The supporters of Israel have always been either supportive or silent against the crimes."
Pointing out that Israel has received disproportionate support from former and current imperial powers is hardly anti-Semitic. Nor can accusing it of genocide* be so described.
[*Article II of the Genocide Convention defines this crime as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group" by "(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part..."]
"World Zionism personifies racism that falsely resorts to religions and abuses religious sentiments to hide its hatred and ugly face."
Israel promotes itself as a Jewish state, representing not simply its own citizens, but Jews the world over. It also works assiduously to conflate the faith of Judaism with its Zionist political program. Recognising this is hardly the stuff of anti-Semitism.
Yet another Zionist beat-up from the self-styled Heart of the Nation.
In today's Durban II beat-up, however, we actually get the drum on the toings & froings of our foreign minister, Stephen Smith. (See my 20/4/09 post Australia Dumps on Durban.) Foreign editor Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan begins his usual Zionist tirade by banging on ludicrously about that "vile and hateful anti-Semitic jamboree" Durban I of 2001: "Israel was demonised not just for its alleged mistreatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories but uniquely as a racist state. The very idea of Zionism - a Jewish state in the Middle East was denounced as racist." (Boycott is a triumph of principle over hate)
For some perspective, here's what Durban I's Declaration & Program of Action (DPA) actually said about the Palestinians: "We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent state" (Article 63); "We call for a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the region" (Article 64). The Palestinians were also included on a list of "Victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerence." Even the Holocaust got a mention. OK, so Sheridan gets it wrong yet again - surprise, surprise. But there is some gold in his propaganda dross:
According to Sheridan, when this fearsome anti-Semitic talk was dropped from Durban II's draft declaration, but not that document's reaffirmation of Durban I's DPA, the Dutch and the Australians got going. Over to you Greg: "A Russian, Uri Boychenko, chaired the overall preparatory effort and laboured mightily to clear up the text. He got most offensive things out, except the first paragraph's ringing declaration that Durban II reaffirmed Durban I. Thus, although there were no obnoxious references to Israel in the final text, the reaffirmation of Durban I meant that its positions were re-endorsed. Boychenko could not get this out because the Organisation of the Islamic Conference said it would boycott the conference if it was removed... Meanwhile the Dutch put in a heroic effort to substitute a shorter, better text that did not contain the reaffirmation. On March 12, Smith... said Australia would not be attending unless the text was fundamentally changed and Canberra was convinced the conference would not be misused as an anti-Semitic hate fest in the way the first conference was. In the following few weeks, the Dutch asked Smith to make a final decision until their efforts on the text were exhausted. Having an important group of countries, including Australia, still up for grabs, as it were, gave the Dutch extra leverage in their ultimately unsuccessful efforts to fix the Durban II declaration and make the conference workable. Smith co-ordinated his actions with the Dutch foreign minister, with Clinton, and with a number of his other counterparts. When it was clear the text was irredeemable, a cascade of nations pulled out. First there was Italy, then the US, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany and Poland... as an Australian I am proud of our actions."
How revealing is that? I ask again, why is the Australian foreign minister doing Israel's dirty work?
Now, whether you love him or loathe him is irrelevant. Is his speech "anti-Semitic" as alleged? Let's take a look at some of the wording:
"Following World War II, [a number of powerful countries/the UN Security Council] resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering and they sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine. And, in fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine."
It would be more accurate to say that such powerful countries as Britain and the United States were instrumental in enabling Zionist forces to ethnically cleanse Palestine in 1948, and that the suffering of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis provided a pretext for same. However, that the ethnic cleansing was motivated by the desire to achieve a Jewish majority in what had been, up to that point, a non-Jewish majority land, and that this makes it an inherently racist endeavour, is incontestable and cannot be smeared as anti-Semitism.
"The Security Council helped stabilize the occupying regime and supported it in the last 60 years, giving them a free hand to commit all sorts of atrocities. It is all the more regrettable that a number of Western governments and the United States have committed themselves to defending those racist perpetrators of genocide while the awakened-conscience and free-minded people of the world condemn aggression, brutalities and the bombardment of civilians in Gaza. The supporters of Israel have always been either supportive or silent against the crimes."
Pointing out that Israel has received disproportionate support from former and current imperial powers is hardly anti-Semitic. Nor can accusing it of genocide* be so described.
[*Article II of the Genocide Convention defines this crime as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group" by "(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part..."]
"World Zionism personifies racism that falsely resorts to religions and abuses religious sentiments to hide its hatred and ugly face."
Israel promotes itself as a Jewish state, representing not simply its own citizens, but Jews the world over. It also works assiduously to conflate the faith of Judaism with its Zionist political program. Recognising this is hardly the stuff of anti-Semitism.
Yet another Zionist beat-up from the self-styled Heart of the Nation.
In today's Durban II beat-up, however, we actually get the drum on the toings & froings of our foreign minister, Stephen Smith. (See my 20/4/09 post Australia Dumps on Durban.) Foreign editor Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan begins his usual Zionist tirade by banging on ludicrously about that "vile and hateful anti-Semitic jamboree" Durban I of 2001: "Israel was demonised not just for its alleged mistreatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories but uniquely as a racist state. The very idea of Zionism - a Jewish state in the Middle East was denounced as racist." (Boycott is a triumph of principle over hate)
For some perspective, here's what Durban I's Declaration & Program of Action (DPA) actually said about the Palestinians: "We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent state" (Article 63); "We call for a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the region" (Article 64). The Palestinians were also included on a list of "Victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerence." Even the Holocaust got a mention. OK, so Sheridan gets it wrong yet again - surprise, surprise. But there is some gold in his propaganda dross:
According to Sheridan, when this fearsome anti-Semitic talk was dropped from Durban II's draft declaration, but not that document's reaffirmation of Durban I's DPA, the Dutch and the Australians got going. Over to you Greg: "A Russian, Uri Boychenko, chaired the overall preparatory effort and laboured mightily to clear up the text. He got most offensive things out, except the first paragraph's ringing declaration that Durban II reaffirmed Durban I. Thus, although there were no obnoxious references to Israel in the final text, the reaffirmation of Durban I meant that its positions were re-endorsed. Boychenko could not get this out because the Organisation of the Islamic Conference said it would boycott the conference if it was removed... Meanwhile the Dutch put in a heroic effort to substitute a shorter, better text that did not contain the reaffirmation. On March 12, Smith... said Australia would not be attending unless the text was fundamentally changed and Canberra was convinced the conference would not be misused as an anti-Semitic hate fest in the way the first conference was. In the following few weeks, the Dutch asked Smith to make a final decision until their efforts on the text were exhausted. Having an important group of countries, including Australia, still up for grabs, as it were, gave the Dutch extra leverage in their ultimately unsuccessful efforts to fix the Durban II declaration and make the conference workable. Smith co-ordinated his actions with the Dutch foreign minister, with Clinton, and with a number of his other counterparts. When it was clear the text was irredeemable, a cascade of nations pulled out. First there was Italy, then the US, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany and Poland... as an Australian I am proud of our actions."
How revealing is that? I ask again, why is the Australian foreign minister doing Israel's dirty work?
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
The SMH: Puerile & Pusillanimous
Is the position of letters editor at The Sydney Morning Herald reserved for the especially clueless? Listen to this Postscript from Mike Ticher commenting on letter writers' responses to the carnage in Gaza: "As ever most letters focused on moral rights and wrongs: who did what 40 or 60 years ago, who had or had not broken international law and was or was not justified in certain actions. Those certainly should be debated, but it would make a change to have a more pragmatic debate about what might realistically work to change the situation." (17/1/09)
Ah yes, right and wrong, history, international law - so boring, so yesterday. And yet some letter writers actually took the bait - no doubt allowing Ticher to bin other writers who likely had more of a grasp of the moral, historical, and legal background to the issue. (I do not, of course, include the Fishmans, Lewis's and Burds in this category.)
Don Brown of Narrabeen tried his best to descend to Ticher's challenge, grumbling relevantly that neglecting the history of the conflict was "as difficult as discussing US-Muslim relations without mentioning the twin towers." His letter climaxed with "The power imbalance, both militarily and diplomatically, is so great that Israel believes it is impervious to any criticism, let alone any punitive action. It has developed nuclear weapons, bombed Syria, built walls and settlements and ignored the claims of the Palestinians for all the long years of the occupation." So far, so good, but Ticher's puerile terms of reference reduced Don to this nonsense: "Perhaps if the immense military aid to Israel were to be totally replaced by a program of building schools, clinics and sporting facilities to be shared by the people of both Israel and the occupied territories, some progress could be made." (19/1/09)
Bruce Weatherlake of Bli Bli, Qld wrote relevantly about the need for Israel to allow the Palestinian right of return, but, nobbled by Ticher's terms of reference, plunged into irrelevance with "All Australians... have been heartened to see the great camaraderie among different members of the South African cricket team; something unimaginable 25 years ago," and concluded with this inane Obamarism: "Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game." (19/1/09)
Guys, guys, this is so not a game! Don't allow yourself to be diverted by know-nothings like Ticher. Here are the kinds of things you could have written about, courtesy of Australian academics John Docker & Ned Curthoys' newly formed Committee for the Dismantling of Zionism: Statement of Aims:-
1) In the Ghandhian tradition of non-violence, the committee stands for the peaceful co-existence of Israeli Jews and Palestinians within a unified democratic state where everyone is a full citizen irrespective of religion or ethnicity.
2) The committee supports the view of Sir Isaac Isaacs, a Jewish jurist and former Governor General of Australia in the 1940s, that the very idea of a Jewish state is absurd, unjust, and untimately untenable, since it makes all the non-Jewish citizens necessarily and inevitably second-class citizens.
3) In the Gandhian traditon of non-violence, we support the cultural and economic boycott of Israel.
4) The Jewish Right [sic: Law] of Return is a weapon in the Zionist colonization and occupation of Palestinian lands. Accordingly, we urge that the world wide Jewish diaspora should renounce the Right of Return.
5) We urge support for UN Resolution 194 which declares the unconditional right of the Palestinian refugees expelled from Palestine in 1948 to return to their homes.
6) We observe that Zionist Israel is guilty of genocidal policies as defined in Article II (c) of the Genocide Convention, in that it intends to destroy, in whole or in part, an ethnic group by "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." By "physical destruction" we mean that Zionist Israel transparently seeks to destroy Palestinian society and remove Palestinians from their ancestral lands in order to Judaize those same lands.
7) The world wide Zionist organisations are also guilty, in terms of the Genocide Convention, Article III (e), of "complicity in genocide." (From antony loewenstein.com/blog/ 5/1/09)
To add insult to injury, the SMH (along with its Ziocon rival, The Australian), on the same day as the above letters, failed to cover the third and largest of Sydney's massive anti-Israel demonstrations. Contrast this with the excellent coverage in Melbourne's Age - Thousands march in Melbourne against Gaza war, Andra Jackson, 19/1/09 - a piece, moreover, which actually quoted some of those who spoke at the rally, and, in a revolutionary new journalistic development, even one of the demonstrators!
By turning its back on the thousands of Sydneysiders who flooded the streets of Sydney's CBD for block after block to express their solidarity with the victims of Israeli genocide in Gaza, the SMH reveals itself yet again to be more of a media firewall acting to block and deflect, rather than a serious newspaper in the business of reporting and investigating contemporary trends and developments. Whether this failure to report arises out of cowardice or conviction, the SMH as currently configured, deserves our contempt.
Another indication of the strength of popular feeling against Israeli war crimes emerged in The Sun-Herald of 18/1/09. In response to that publication's airing of the views of federal Labor MP Julia Irwin (one of the tiny minority of Australian politicians with the courage to speak up for the Palestinians) the week before, columnist Kerry-Anne Walsh wrote as follows: "Ms Irwin's article generated a greater flood of correspondence in The Sun-Herald than any issue in recent years, the overwhelming majority in support. What emerged - strongly - in their views was a yearning for politicians to break ranks and voice opinions." (Toe the line, don't step on any) Walsh followed this with a selection of these emails. Needless to say, the Israel lobby, in the person this time of Robert Goot of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), had obtained a right of reply - Just defence despite death toll. What a pity that his space on the paper's Comment page wasn't given over entirely to that "flood of correspondence."
World public opinion is turning decisively against the rogue state of Israel, and rightly so. The bulk of the Australian corporate media (with the possible exception of The Age), however, still hasn't got it.
Ah yes, right and wrong, history, international law - so boring, so yesterday. And yet some letter writers actually took the bait - no doubt allowing Ticher to bin other writers who likely had more of a grasp of the moral, historical, and legal background to the issue. (I do not, of course, include the Fishmans, Lewis's and Burds in this category.)
Don Brown of Narrabeen tried his best to descend to Ticher's challenge, grumbling relevantly that neglecting the history of the conflict was "as difficult as discussing US-Muslim relations without mentioning the twin towers." His letter climaxed with "The power imbalance, both militarily and diplomatically, is so great that Israel believes it is impervious to any criticism, let alone any punitive action. It has developed nuclear weapons, bombed Syria, built walls and settlements and ignored the claims of the Palestinians for all the long years of the occupation." So far, so good, but Ticher's puerile terms of reference reduced Don to this nonsense: "Perhaps if the immense military aid to Israel were to be totally replaced by a program of building schools, clinics and sporting facilities to be shared by the people of both Israel and the occupied territories, some progress could be made." (19/1/09)
Bruce Weatherlake of Bli Bli, Qld wrote relevantly about the need for Israel to allow the Palestinian right of return, but, nobbled by Ticher's terms of reference, plunged into irrelevance with "All Australians... have been heartened to see the great camaraderie among different members of the South African cricket team; something unimaginable 25 years ago," and concluded with this inane Obamarism: "Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game." (19/1/09)
Guys, guys, this is so not a game! Don't allow yourself to be diverted by know-nothings like Ticher. Here are the kinds of things you could have written about, courtesy of Australian academics John Docker & Ned Curthoys' newly formed Committee for the Dismantling of Zionism: Statement of Aims:-
1) In the Ghandhian tradition of non-violence, the committee stands for the peaceful co-existence of Israeli Jews and Palestinians within a unified democratic state where everyone is a full citizen irrespective of religion or ethnicity.
2) The committee supports the view of Sir Isaac Isaacs, a Jewish jurist and former Governor General of Australia in the 1940s, that the very idea of a Jewish state is absurd, unjust, and untimately untenable, since it makes all the non-Jewish citizens necessarily and inevitably second-class citizens.
3) In the Gandhian traditon of non-violence, we support the cultural and economic boycott of Israel.
4) The Jewish Right [sic: Law] of Return is a weapon in the Zionist colonization and occupation of Palestinian lands. Accordingly, we urge that the world wide Jewish diaspora should renounce the Right of Return.
5) We urge support for UN Resolution 194 which declares the unconditional right of the Palestinian refugees expelled from Palestine in 1948 to return to their homes.
6) We observe that Zionist Israel is guilty of genocidal policies as defined in Article II (c) of the Genocide Convention, in that it intends to destroy, in whole or in part, an ethnic group by "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." By "physical destruction" we mean that Zionist Israel transparently seeks to destroy Palestinian society and remove Palestinians from their ancestral lands in order to Judaize those same lands.
7) The world wide Zionist organisations are also guilty, in terms of the Genocide Convention, Article III (e), of "complicity in genocide." (From antony loewenstein.com/blog/ 5/1/09)
To add insult to injury, the SMH (along with its Ziocon rival, The Australian), on the same day as the above letters, failed to cover the third and largest of Sydney's massive anti-Israel demonstrations. Contrast this with the excellent coverage in Melbourne's Age - Thousands march in Melbourne against Gaza war, Andra Jackson, 19/1/09 - a piece, moreover, which actually quoted some of those who spoke at the rally, and, in a revolutionary new journalistic development, even one of the demonstrators!
By turning its back on the thousands of Sydneysiders who flooded the streets of Sydney's CBD for block after block to express their solidarity with the victims of Israeli genocide in Gaza, the SMH reveals itself yet again to be more of a media firewall acting to block and deflect, rather than a serious newspaper in the business of reporting and investigating contemporary trends and developments. Whether this failure to report arises out of cowardice or conviction, the SMH as currently configured, deserves our contempt.
Another indication of the strength of popular feeling against Israeli war crimes emerged in The Sun-Herald of 18/1/09. In response to that publication's airing of the views of federal Labor MP Julia Irwin (one of the tiny minority of Australian politicians with the courage to speak up for the Palestinians) the week before, columnist Kerry-Anne Walsh wrote as follows: "Ms Irwin's article generated a greater flood of correspondence in The Sun-Herald than any issue in recent years, the overwhelming majority in support. What emerged - strongly - in their views was a yearning for politicians to break ranks and voice opinions." (Toe the line, don't step on any) Walsh followed this with a selection of these emails. Needless to say, the Israel lobby, in the person this time of Robert Goot of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), had obtained a right of reply - Just defence despite death toll. What a pity that his space on the paper's Comment page wasn't given over entirely to that "flood of correspondence."
World public opinion is turning decisively against the rogue state of Israel, and rightly so. The bulk of the Australian corporate media (with the possible exception of The Age), however, still hasn't got it.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Ahmadinejad: Our Part in His Downfall
In December last year I drew attention to what must surely have been the loopiest of pre-election promises by any Australian politician: then Oppostion Leader, Kevin Rudd's promise to charge Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention." (See my post, Testing Time for Rudd)
This bizarre promise surfaced in the context of electioneering in the Sydney seat of Wentworth, held by Howard Government minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Wentworth has the largest number of Jewish voters in Australia, and Turnbull, although not Jewish, was as reflexively supportive of Israel as any of Howard's ministers. How was Rudd to get around this? Maybe it's not enough to have your candidate (George Newhouse) both Jewish and Zionist, so why not outbid Turnbull for the Israel vote by...targeting Israel's current bete noire, Ahmadinijad? At least, that is what I imagine happened. Prior to uttering The Promise, however, it was all pretty much shadow boxing:-
The Australian Jewish News had informed its readers back in December 2006: "Likud leader [and former Israeli PM] Binyamin Netanyahu and a group of top American and Canadian lawyers are spearheading an international bid to indict Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for genocide at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. 'We must cry 'gevalt' before the entire world', Netanyahu said. 'In 1938, Hitler didn't say he wanted to destroy [the Jews]; Ahmadinejad is saying clearly that this is his intention, and we aren't even shouting. At least call it a crime against humanity. We must make the world see that the issue here is a program for genocide'. Concurrently - and in coordination with Netanyahu - a group of top legal experts met in New York to claim that Ahmadinejad's incitement against Jews violates the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, speakers said...'We will try the law. We will try politics. We will try everything', said Alan Dershowitz, a prominent attorney and professor at Harvard Law School [& defender of OJ Simpson & Zionist propagandist extraordinaire (The Case for Israel) & torture advocate]. 'But if they fail, we will use self-defence'. In addition to seeking an indictment of Ahmadinejad in the International Criminal Court, Professor Dershowitz disclosed that he and Irwin Cotler, a Canadian legislator and prominent human-rights lawyer [& Chief Council of the Canadian Jewish Congress, aka Canada's Israel lobby], were preparing a brief to justify military pre-emption if legal efforts don't work." ('Indict Ahmadinejad for genocide', 22/12/06)
Then, quite coincidentally and entirely off his own bat, Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister (now attorney general) Robert McClelland told the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) that: "Labor wants Australia to lead a push to have the United Nations Security Council refer the Iranian leader to the International Court of Justice over his statements about 'wiping Israel off the map' and denying the Holocaust. He said a charge of incitement against Ahmadinejad would 'move the international legal system from punishing genocide post-facto to preventing it before it occurs'. Secondly, it would seriously undermine Ahmadinejad's international legitimacy and his standing at home. The preparation of formal changes [sic] and the process of hearing would require Ahmadinejad to justify his inflammatory and destabilising posturing and rhetoric', he said." (Charge Iranian president with inciting genocide - Labor minister, The Australian Jewish News, 9/3/07)
That same month, Melbourne Ports Labor MP Michael Danby tried to table a motion calling on the Howard Government "to bring Ahmadinejad to account through the United Nations and International Court of Justice over his calls for the destruction of the Jewish State," but alas "another motion criticising the recent political violence in Zimbabwe got the nod ahead of Iran on the agenda." (Danby's Iran motion stalled, AJN, 30/3/07) Danby was no more successful in September "because a full schedule meant that Indi MP Sophie Mirabella's motion calling for the release of 3 Israeli hostages took precedence..." Talk about in on the act! Way to go, Sophie! And then, rain, in form of the federal election of 07, stopped play.
The Australian House of Representatives may have given Danby the brushoff, but its US counterpart was taking the matter much more seriously, voting in June 2007 by 411-2 votes to "implore" the UNSC to charge Ahmadinejad with violating the Genocide Convention. A piece by former Israeli ambassador to the UN and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dore Gold in The Jerusalem Post (21/6/07) describes how the campaign to get Ahmadinejad was hatched by Dershowitz, Cotler, John Bolton (outgoing US ambassador to the UN, and American Enterprise Institute neoconman), and an Israeli legal team at a December 14, 2006 meeting sponsored by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs at the offices of the New York Bar Association. Gold also tells how two British MPs invited Netanyahu, Dershowitz, Cotler and the aforementioned Israeli legal team to address the House of Commons; how, by June 2007 69 British MPs had signed up to "urge" the Blair Government to table a resolution at the UNSC demanding Ahmadinejad be tried for incitement to commit genocide; how, on March 5 2007, shadow minister McClelland, even quicker off the mark than the Brits, had called on the UNSC to do the same; how, in April 2007, the Canadian Parliament's Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Rights adopted the same motion; and how half a dozen US states were divesting from companies doing business in Iran.
Gold's final paragraph is most revealing: "For years, Iran and its allies have tried to systematically delegitimize the State of Israel through fictitious charges about 'Israeli war crimes'. The time has come for Israel to counter with a campaign of its own, which unlike the accusations of its adversaries, is firmly grounded in international law and a growing consensus of increasingly significant international opinion." There you have it: Israel has never committed war crimes, all allegations of same are pure fiction authored by "Iran and its allies" (including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'tselem?), we're not gonna take it no more, and we're hitting back with one helluva PR campaign against the current Hitlerian scourge (no, worse!), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Even though Rudd had foolishly turned the Netanyahu/Dershowitz/ Cotler/Bolton/McClelland/ Danby folie a six into an election promise, I concluded my earlier post thus: "Sheer madness of course, but will Rudd have the ticker to buck a promise to the Israel lobby he should never have made in the first place?"
Newspaper says...'No' - if the Sydney Morning Herald report, Caution at Iranian overtures (Jonathan Pearlman, 27/2/08), is anything to go by: "The Rudd Government is proceeding with a plan to charge Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with inciting genocide and has rejected a call by the Iranian ambassador to split from a United States-led push for harsher sanctions. The office of the [now] Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith, said yesterday the Government was pursuing its election commitment to bring international criminal charges against Mr Ahmadinejad over his Holocaust revisionism and his calls to wipe Israel off the map...'On the possibility of taking legal action against the Iranian president, the Australian Government is currently taking legal and other advice on this matter', said Mr Smith's spokeswoman, Courtney Hoogan." Maybe, just maybe, that's code for 'We're currently working on the legalese necessary to drop this hot potato'. One can dream...
Beyond the obvious questions - Is this in Australia's interest? Is it even in Israel's interest? Haven't Smith and his staff got anything more important to do? Isn't the Genocide Convention designed to tackle actual cases of genocide, rather than alleged intentions to commit same? What are we doing in bed with the likes of Netanyahu, Dershowitz, et al? Why are we reading from Israel's delusional PR script? - could it possibly be that, despite an army of bureaucrats, minister Smith is still unaware that Ahmadinejad's alleged call to wipe Israel off the map is a hoax? Let us review the matter:-
Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo is always a reliable guide in these matters. Of the abovementioned congressional vote, he wrote: "Now, I hold no brief for the Iranian ranter - whose jeremiads against the West are in the category of Borat-like humour - but this seems [only seems, Justin?] like yet another example of political pandering and congressional grandstanding that bears little, if any, relationship to reality. To begin with, the resolution is motivated by a mistranslation of a speech given by Senor Ahmadinejad, in which he cited the Ayatollah Khomeini and seemed to call for Israel to be 'wiped off the map'. Yet, as Jonathan Steele, and Farsi-speaker and Middle East expert Prof. Juan Cole make very clear, that is not what the Iranian President said, or intended to say. Ahmadinejad...said the current regime in Tel Aviv will be 'wiped off the page of time'. It was a call for 'regime change' not genocide - but, never mind. Like most war propaganda, which is almost never related to reality except in the most tenuous sense, the point is not to tell the truth but to characterize the enemy in a particular way. With Israeli Prime minister Ehud Olmert in Washington to ramp up the Lobby's ferocious campaign to get the US to attack Iran - or at least credibly threaten to - the pro-Israel forces on Capitol Hill were out in full force, herding their congressional supporters into a massive display of obedience with a whopping 411-2 vote." (The End of Dissent? 22/6/07)
If minister Smith and his department are aware that the allegation is groundless, then an entirely reasonable and unsurprising surmise would be that, like the Howard Government before them (although to give Alexander Downer credit, he was never prepared to go where Smith is now proposing), the Ruddies are mere putty in the hands of the Israel lobby. After all, Rudd has been rambammed twice (2003 & 2005); has rhetorically gone where no American politician has and declared that his support for Israel is "in my DNA"; has been personally congratulated by Israeli PM Olmert on his election victory; and has pledged to undergo a third rambamming in his first term of office.
Pray that sanity prevails and the tried and true Australian politician's distinction between core and non-core promises comes to our rescue.
Postscript: Speaking of jeremiads, cop this from Senor Sheridan: "The odds are against a US strike on Iran under any circumstances, and I would say the odds are even against an Israeli strike. But either or both are much more likely if it looks like Obama will win." (This is no time for a celebrity in the Oval Office, The Australian, 28/2/08)
This bizarre promise surfaced in the context of electioneering in the Sydney seat of Wentworth, held by Howard Government minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Wentworth has the largest number of Jewish voters in Australia, and Turnbull, although not Jewish, was as reflexively supportive of Israel as any of Howard's ministers. How was Rudd to get around this? Maybe it's not enough to have your candidate (George Newhouse) both Jewish and Zionist, so why not outbid Turnbull for the Israel vote by...targeting Israel's current bete noire, Ahmadinijad? At least, that is what I imagine happened. Prior to uttering The Promise, however, it was all pretty much shadow boxing:-
The Australian Jewish News had informed its readers back in December 2006: "Likud leader [and former Israeli PM] Binyamin Netanyahu and a group of top American and Canadian lawyers are spearheading an international bid to indict Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for genocide at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. 'We must cry 'gevalt' before the entire world', Netanyahu said. 'In 1938, Hitler didn't say he wanted to destroy [the Jews]; Ahmadinejad is saying clearly that this is his intention, and we aren't even shouting. At least call it a crime against humanity. We must make the world see that the issue here is a program for genocide'. Concurrently - and in coordination with Netanyahu - a group of top legal experts met in New York to claim that Ahmadinejad's incitement against Jews violates the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, speakers said...'We will try the law. We will try politics. We will try everything', said Alan Dershowitz, a prominent attorney and professor at Harvard Law School [& defender of OJ Simpson & Zionist propagandist extraordinaire (The Case for Israel) & torture advocate]. 'But if they fail, we will use self-defence'. In addition to seeking an indictment of Ahmadinejad in the International Criminal Court, Professor Dershowitz disclosed that he and Irwin Cotler, a Canadian legislator and prominent human-rights lawyer [& Chief Council of the Canadian Jewish Congress, aka Canada's Israel lobby], were preparing a brief to justify military pre-emption if legal efforts don't work." ('Indict Ahmadinejad for genocide', 22/12/06)
Then, quite coincidentally and entirely off his own bat, Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister (now attorney general) Robert McClelland told the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) that: "Labor wants Australia to lead a push to have the United Nations Security Council refer the Iranian leader to the International Court of Justice over his statements about 'wiping Israel off the map' and denying the Holocaust. He said a charge of incitement against Ahmadinejad would 'move the international legal system from punishing genocide post-facto to preventing it before it occurs'. Secondly, it would seriously undermine Ahmadinejad's international legitimacy and his standing at home. The preparation of formal changes [sic] and the process of hearing would require Ahmadinejad to justify his inflammatory and destabilising posturing and rhetoric', he said." (Charge Iranian president with inciting genocide - Labor minister, The Australian Jewish News, 9/3/07)
That same month, Melbourne Ports Labor MP Michael Danby tried to table a motion calling on the Howard Government "to bring Ahmadinejad to account through the United Nations and International Court of Justice over his calls for the destruction of the Jewish State," but alas "another motion criticising the recent political violence in Zimbabwe got the nod ahead of Iran on the agenda." (Danby's Iran motion stalled, AJN, 30/3/07) Danby was no more successful in September "because a full schedule meant that Indi MP Sophie Mirabella's motion calling for the release of 3 Israeli hostages took precedence..." Talk about in on the act! Way to go, Sophie! And then, rain, in form of the federal election of 07, stopped play.
The Australian House of Representatives may have given Danby the brushoff, but its US counterpart was taking the matter much more seriously, voting in June 2007 by 411-2 votes to "implore" the UNSC to charge Ahmadinejad with violating the Genocide Convention. A piece by former Israeli ambassador to the UN and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dore Gold in The Jerusalem Post (21/6/07) describes how the campaign to get Ahmadinejad was hatched by Dershowitz, Cotler, John Bolton (outgoing US ambassador to the UN, and American Enterprise Institute neoconman), and an Israeli legal team at a December 14, 2006 meeting sponsored by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs at the offices of the New York Bar Association. Gold also tells how two British MPs invited Netanyahu, Dershowitz, Cotler and the aforementioned Israeli legal team to address the House of Commons; how, by June 2007 69 British MPs had signed up to "urge" the Blair Government to table a resolution at the UNSC demanding Ahmadinejad be tried for incitement to commit genocide; how, on March 5 2007, shadow minister McClelland, even quicker off the mark than the Brits, had called on the UNSC to do the same; how, in April 2007, the Canadian Parliament's Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Rights adopted the same motion; and how half a dozen US states were divesting from companies doing business in Iran.
Gold's final paragraph is most revealing: "For years, Iran and its allies have tried to systematically delegitimize the State of Israel through fictitious charges about 'Israeli war crimes'. The time has come for Israel to counter with a campaign of its own, which unlike the accusations of its adversaries, is firmly grounded in international law and a growing consensus of increasingly significant international opinion." There you have it: Israel has never committed war crimes, all allegations of same are pure fiction authored by "Iran and its allies" (including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'tselem?), we're not gonna take it no more, and we're hitting back with one helluva PR campaign against the current Hitlerian scourge (no, worse!), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Even though Rudd had foolishly turned the Netanyahu/Dershowitz/ Cotler/Bolton/McClelland/ Danby folie a six into an election promise, I concluded my earlier post thus: "Sheer madness of course, but will Rudd have the ticker to buck a promise to the Israel lobby he should never have made in the first place?"
Newspaper says...'No' - if the Sydney Morning Herald report, Caution at Iranian overtures (Jonathan Pearlman, 27/2/08), is anything to go by: "The Rudd Government is proceeding with a plan to charge Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with inciting genocide and has rejected a call by the Iranian ambassador to split from a United States-led push for harsher sanctions. The office of the [now] Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith, said yesterday the Government was pursuing its election commitment to bring international criminal charges against Mr Ahmadinejad over his Holocaust revisionism and his calls to wipe Israel off the map...'On the possibility of taking legal action against the Iranian president, the Australian Government is currently taking legal and other advice on this matter', said Mr Smith's spokeswoman, Courtney Hoogan." Maybe, just maybe, that's code for 'We're currently working on the legalese necessary to drop this hot potato'. One can dream...
Beyond the obvious questions - Is this in Australia's interest? Is it even in Israel's interest? Haven't Smith and his staff got anything more important to do? Isn't the Genocide Convention designed to tackle actual cases of genocide, rather than alleged intentions to commit same? What are we doing in bed with the likes of Netanyahu, Dershowitz, et al? Why are we reading from Israel's delusional PR script? - could it possibly be that, despite an army of bureaucrats, minister Smith is still unaware that Ahmadinejad's alleged call to wipe Israel off the map is a hoax? Let us review the matter:-
Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo is always a reliable guide in these matters. Of the abovementioned congressional vote, he wrote: "Now, I hold no brief for the Iranian ranter - whose jeremiads against the West are in the category of Borat-like humour - but this seems [only seems, Justin?] like yet another example of political pandering and congressional grandstanding that bears little, if any, relationship to reality. To begin with, the resolution is motivated by a mistranslation of a speech given by Senor Ahmadinejad, in which he cited the Ayatollah Khomeini and seemed to call for Israel to be 'wiped off the map'. Yet, as Jonathan Steele, and Farsi-speaker and Middle East expert Prof. Juan Cole make very clear, that is not what the Iranian President said, or intended to say. Ahmadinejad...said the current regime in Tel Aviv will be 'wiped off the page of time'. It was a call for 'regime change' not genocide - but, never mind. Like most war propaganda, which is almost never related to reality except in the most tenuous sense, the point is not to tell the truth but to characterize the enemy in a particular way. With Israeli Prime minister Ehud Olmert in Washington to ramp up the Lobby's ferocious campaign to get the US to attack Iran - or at least credibly threaten to - the pro-Israel forces on Capitol Hill were out in full force, herding their congressional supporters into a massive display of obedience with a whopping 411-2 vote." (The End of Dissent? 22/6/07)
If minister Smith and his department are aware that the allegation is groundless, then an entirely reasonable and unsurprising surmise would be that, like the Howard Government before them (although to give Alexander Downer credit, he was never prepared to go where Smith is now proposing), the Ruddies are mere putty in the hands of the Israel lobby. After all, Rudd has been rambammed twice (2003 & 2005); has rhetorically gone where no American politician has and declared that his support for Israel is "in my DNA"; has been personally congratulated by Israeli PM Olmert on his election victory; and has pledged to undergo a third rambamming in his first term of office.
Pray that sanity prevails and the tried and true Australian politician's distinction between core and non-core promises comes to our rescue.
Postscript: Speaking of jeremiads, cop this from Senor Sheridan: "The odds are against a US strike on Iran under any circumstances, and I would say the odds are even against an Israeli strike. But either or both are much more likely if it looks like Obama will win." (This is no time for a celebrity in the Oval Office, The Australian, 28/2/08)
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