Conflating the Unconflatable 4

OMG, what fools we Australians are! Why can't we see what those who really know Islam see?

Why, O why, can't we see all Muslims, Arabs, a certain Iranian-Australian psycho, whatever, for the undifferentiated existential threat that they so clearly are?

If only, like Gerard Henderson, we could see them through Israeli eyes:

"I followed the Sydney siege from Jerusalem, the capitol of a nation that does not distinguish much between lone wolf and other acts of terrorism. To most Israelis, Hamas rockets fired indiscriminately from Gaza at Israel's cities and the murder of worshippers and/or light rail travellers are manifestations of the same thing." (If it looks, smells & feels like terrorism... The Australian, 20/12/13)

Gerard Henderson's Syrian Yardstick

Writing in The Australian of July 26, Fairfax>Murdoch pundit Gerard Henderson wrote of the carnage in Gaza:

"Reports indicate that about 650 Palestinians have died... in the current conflict. This is a serious death toll. Yet it is only a fraction of the dead in the civil war in Syria."

The war in Syria, an entirely unrelated issue to events in Gaza, is of course being used here to deflect attention from the enormity of Israel's crimes in Palestine.

To expose this typically Zionist of sleight of hand, I thought it might be interesting to apply what might be termed the Syrian yardstick to the two other reports of murder and mayhem that appear in the same edition. Just imagine Henderson coming out with these gems:

1) The murder of Allison Baden-Clay is a mere drop in the ocean compared to the mass murder in Syria. Why we're even reading about her case is a complete mystery to me.

2) Twenty-seven Australians lost their lives in the downing of a Malaysian Airlines plane over eastern Ukraine recently. What a yawn when you compare it to the death toll in Syria.

What a pain the man is.

The Knives Are Out...

... for Bob Carr in the Murdoch press:

Gerard Henderson: A great read with deeply troubling insights into the mind of Carr and his Israel-lobby obsession, The Australian, 19/4/14:

"Diary of a Foreign Minister indicates that Bob Carr is somewhat unhinged in so far as Israel is concerned."

Whereas Gerard Henderson's columns reveal an always rational and objective approach to everything.

"Carr is ready to bag what he terms the 'Israel lobby' in Australia... But he offers no criticism of of such an entity as a 'Palestinian lobby'..."

Would that be a Palestinian lobby with or without a direct line to the PM's office?

Michael Danby: Throwing the Jews under the bus won't help drive the Labor Party to power, The Australian, 19/4/14:

"Let's look not at some of the anonymous trolls on Twitter empowered by Bob the book-pedlar but at people willing to put their names to their bigotry, who feel empowered by a man of his high rank indulging in a false and disgraceful critique 'of the unhealthy influences', which he was 'shining a spotlight on', of the 'Melbourne-based Israel lobby'. My ears burned. I was sent messages by Carr's biggest fans such as 'you are scum', 'Jew loving arsehole' and even alerted that 'we all know what you people are up to... same old nonsense as last 2000 years'."

Bigotry? Is that all, Michael? Just be thankful you're not a Palestinian! If you were, you'd not only be subjected to Zionist bigotry but Zionist brutality in spades and on a daily basis.

"Of course, all the Jewish individuals who dared advance a view slightly different from Carr's global vision - my colleague Mark Dreyfus, respected community leaders such as Albert Dadon, lawyer Mark Leibler and I - support a two-state solution, Australia's policy since the partition of the British mandate since 1948."

Want to know the shortest book ever written? Our Epic Struggle for a Two-State Solution by Danby, Dreyfus, Dadon and Leibler.

"None of the Australians stereotyped and caricatured by Carr... are the fanatics he pretends they are. Leibler is a mate of Noel Pearson. His firm Arnold Bloch Leibler has a legacy of supporting indigenous communities and leaders..."

Not to mention a legacy of supporting Israel's dispossession, exile and occupation of indigenous Palestinians.

"... and Dadon has taken his career as international jazz musician to new heights."

But of course. Nero only fiddled while Rome burned. Dadon fiddles while an entire country burns.

"He says nothing about the abuse of African Muslims in Darfur or the Turkish Uighur of Xinjiang. Where are he and his Twitter-troll supporters as Bashar al-Assad drops barrel bombs on cities every day? Yes, I suppose he perfunctorily dispensed some Australian aid. Excuse me, but I think any of these issues are more pressing and ought to be the subject of public mobilisations, rather than a young, struggling Jewish family making a life in a new apartment on a hill in East Jerusalem."

... in violation of the Geneva Conventions!

Still Waiting for Kristallnacht

At long last Sydney Morning Herald ranter Gerard Henderson has found his way home... to Murdoch's Australian.*

That leaves the appalling Paul Sheehan, now alone and palely loitering on the Herald's opinion pages. Is he too about to receive the tap? After all, as he's just candidly admitted, he's about as popular with Herald readers as a fart in a crowded lift:

"If you don't like what I write there is no more fertile place to read criticisms than The Sydney Morning Herald. Each year the paper publishes, by my estimate, about 6,000 criticisms of me on its letters page or online comments section. A further 1,000 criticisms, at least, are submitted but not published. I know people who skip my column and go straight to the comments because they like red meat in the mornings." (Time for real steel, not tinkering, 23/12/13)

Frankly, it's time he was put out to pasture... most appropriately on the same blasted heath where Sheridan and now Henderson graze.

And just to remind you how bad Sheehan really is (and while we're at it, just how corrupting is the practice of rambamming), take a look at this snippet from The Australian Jewish News of March 30, 2007:

"The resurgence of Nazism will likely lead to another Kristallnacht, Sydney Morning Herald columnist Paul Sheehan told a Jewish audience last week. Sheehan, who travelled to Israel on a journalists' mission organised by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies late last year, told last Tuesday's Board of Deputies plenum that there is 'no question we will see another Kristallnacht because the Nazis are rising around the world'." (Second Kristallnacht ahead, warns Fairfax columnist)

[*Just in case you're naive enough to think that, in dropping Henderson, the Herald is making way for some fresh new talent, think again. It's apparently replacing him with former Howard government minister Peter (Grim Reaper) Reith.]

Gerard Henderson Spins Prisoner X

Legendary Sydney Morning Herald columnist Gerard Henderson sets out to rebut international law professor Ben Saul's thesis that, re the Prisoner X case, "[t]here comes a point where a Jewish person cannot faithfully be both Australian and Israeli. One has to choose." (Zygier spy case gets ever curiouser, Sydney Morning Herald, 20/2/13)

Now of course, Gerard being Gerard, MERC has no choice but to agree:

"The concept of dual loyalties in Australia has an unpleasant connotation since it invariably implies disloyalty. A century ago, some sectarians labelled Catholics as possessing a dual loyalty. This was cover for an imputation that their real loyalty was to the Pope or to the Irish nation, usually both. Today, the allegation tends to be made against Jewish Australians, whether or not they hold both Australian and Israeli nationalities. The imputation is some Australian Jews put their loyalty to Israel before that to Australia."

Spot on, Gerard! I mean, just because an Australian Jew is indoctrinated in a 'Jewish' school into believing that Palestine/Israel is his birthright and that he can only really feel 'Jewish' if he migrates there, and just because he (or so the scenario runs) is recruited by its intelligence service and returns to Australia to pick up new Australian passports under new names which he then uses to travel to countries periodically reduced to rubble by Israel and gets up to God-knows-what while there, doesn't mean that his primary loyalty to is Israel, right?

Gerard is correct: the "tragic death in custody" of Ben Zygier all boils down to a matter of "available evidence," and "[t]he available evidence suggests that Zygier was a troubled young man who committed suicide following his arrest by Israeli authorities on security-related charges."

So what's all this about a Mossad connection? Where's the "available evidence" for that?

"[T]he [visiting Israeli] journalist Alon Ben-David is reported in The Australian Jewish News as saying Zygier was a young man in distress who revealed state secrets to a foreign element," but hey, is there anything in what Ben-David says to suggest he worked for Mossad? I mean, I've read that sentence a dozen times and haven't come up with a single thing!

Maybe Zygier just found the aforementioned "state secrets" by the side of the road, and thinking they must've accidentally fallen out of the pocket of a passing "foreign element," polite and all as he was, set about returning them to their owner. To put it another way, just because he walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, doesn't mean he was one, right?

"Australia is a remarkably tolerant and accepting society."

Absolutely! I mean, what other country would provide refugees with free accommodation on a tropical island?

"Yet there has always been a degree of anti-Semitism within it. An accusation of dual loyalties against Jewish Australians from an anti-Semite is regrettable but not unexpected. When such claims are made by those who should know better, it is a matter for genuine concern."

Now I'm so glad Gerard mentioned that. After all, anti-Semitism is the only form of racism that really matters, right? And yes, Ben Saul, he's talking about you!

As Gerard correctly concludes:

"The Jewish community spends considerable funds guarding its synagogues and schools from attack... In such an environment, it is irresponsible in the extreme for prominent Australians to imply some of their fellow citizens are disloyal."

How true! Since synagogues and Jewish schools are about as secure as the Alamo was with Santa Anna's forces scaling its walls, it's perfectly understandable that some Australian Jews should feel the need to become Israeli agents or soldiers and off a few Palestinians. Perfectly understandable.

Now no one, of course, would suggest - least of all me - that that might have something to do with Zionism's insistence that there's absolutely no daylight between Judaism and itself, or that Israel promotes itself as a Jewish state belonging to all Jews everywhere, including those down under. I mean, where's the "available evidence" for that?

Gerard Henderson: Greenhorn on the Green Line

My God the Sydney Morning Herald is a sad case these days. Having had nothing to say, apart from its news reports, on the latest bloody Israeli rampage in Gaza (not even an editorial - but then, judging by the Herald's editorial record on the Middle East conflict, that's probably a blessing) since hostilities commenced, it wasn't until November 20 that it finally chose to publish an opinion piece on the issue.

Better late than never, you might say, but what if I tell you it's by Gerard Henderson?

The very title of the piece, Hamas will never achieve a Palestinian state while killing Israeli civilians, indicates the epic scale of Henderson's historical amnesia, managing as it does to completely overlook the monumental fact that Israel's creation was based on the mass murder and expulsion of the majority of Palestine's indigenous Arab population and the wholesale theft of their homes and ancestral lands.

That elephant-in-the-room aside, however, I intend to concentrate on just the following paragraph as evidence of the man's utter unfitness to be allowed anywhere near this subject:

"Around this time last year, I visited Sderot in south-west Israel, not far from the Israel/Gaza border. Sderot is within the Green Line. That is, it is part of the state of Israel that was created by the United Nations in 1948."

First things first: Is this a first ever admission by Henderson that he's been rambammed? I ask this because, despite, as you know, always being on the alert for instances of this corrupting practice, he hasn't until now come to my attention.

However, it's to the heart of the paragraph - Henderson's tender concern for the integrity of the so-called 'Green Line' - that I wish to address. Not that this concern is anything new for this pompous pundit, having once complained that one of the problems of the BDS campaign is that it doesn't "distinguish between Israel's pre- and post-1967 borders..."*

The implication seems to be that the occupied, blockaded and undernourished Palestinians of the Gaza Ghetto (some of whom, incidentally, are the descendants of parents/grandparents ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces in 1948 from the village of Najd, on whose lands the Israeli town of Sderot has been built) have neither right nor reason to hit back at their oppressor because, extrapolating from what he's written, the UN decreed, in 1948, that something called the 'Green Line', situated between the Gaza Strip and Sderot, has the imprimatur of international law and the same status as, say, the border between Canada and the United States.

This is, of course, bunkum.

The state of Israel was not created by the United Nations in 1948. It was declared by David Ben-Gurion on behalf of the Jewish Agency on 14 May 1948 as Zionist forces were busy overrunning and establishing control over as much Palestinian territory (whilst expelling as many of its inhabitants as they could in the process) prior to various armistice agreements with the Arab states coming into force in early 1949.

It is these armistice lines - referred to collectively as the Green Line - that constitute Israel's de facto borders. Nor has Israel, following Ben-Gurion's refusal to spell out Israel's borders in his May 14 declaration of independence, ever been interested in any other than de facto borders. This is because, for Israel, borders have always been a moveable feast. The hoot here is that while Henderson may take the Green Line seriously, no Israeli government ever has. Does the word lebensraum mean anything to you, Gerard?

Where the United Nations came in was to pass a resolution on November 29, 1947, partitioning Palestine into a Jewish (56%) and an Arab (44%) state. During the fighting which followed, Zionist forces, ignoring the UN-proposed borders, despite the Provisional Government of Israel, in a letter to US President Truman, describing the new state as "an independent republic within frontiers approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its Resolution of November 29, 1947,"** and the US recognising Israel 11 minutes after it was declared "[w]ithin frontiers approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its Resolution of November 29, 1947," went on to take significant areas of land allotted to the Arab state, giving them final control over a whopping 78% of historic Palestine.

Needless to say, having ethnically cleansed and occupied by force a further 22% of Palestine, Israel went on to claim that the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947 had no legal force because of its rejection by the Palestinians.

The clueless Henderson has clearly confused the UN partition resolution of 1947 with Ben-Gurion's declaration of Israeli statehood in 1948.

Quite apart from his errors of fact, and in view of his reverence for the Green Line, both with regard to Sderot and, presumably, throughout Israel, it is interesting to note that nowhere, to my knowledge, has Henderson ever spoken out against either Israel's Apartheid Wall or its West Bank settlements, both of which lie beyond the Green Line.

Having cleared that up we are left to reflect on just why it is that the Herald has seen fit to publish, as its sole commentary thus far on the current flare-up of the world's longest-running (1917-?) foreign policy saga, the views of someone who is clearly not on top of the subject and whose only acquaintance with it would seem to come from trips to Palestine/Israel sponsored by Israel lobby organisations.

[*See my 23/2/11 post A Day in the Life of the Herald; **See Letter from the Agent of the Provisional Government of Israel to the President of the United States, May 15, 1948, avalon.law.yale.edu]

There But for Fortune...

Last weekend, whilst walking down the street, I noticed a stooped and wizened old codger unfortunate enough to bear a striking resemblance to Sydney Morning Herald pundit Gerard Henderson.

He was standing at a bus stop and reading a copy of the Herald, his face hideously contorted as might his presumed doppelganger's be after reading of a newly elected Rhiannon government. I involuntarily muttered to myself (for I am nothing if not attuned to the plight of those less fortunate than myself), 'You poor old bugger. There but for Fortune go I'. And then, as I drew near, oblivious of all around him, in the grip of some intense inner torment he could not control, the wretched creature crumpled the paper he'd been reading and ejaculated in a mighty rage, 'Typical! Just typical!'.

After initially wondering what it was in the paper that had awakened his inner Basil Fawlty, I thought little more of the incident - until yesterday, that is, when I opened the opinion page of the Herald to see the ancient nutter's lugubrious visage staring back at me, with the name Gerard Henderson emblazoned in red beneath.

OMG, exclaimed I, it was Gerard Henderson!

And then, after a quick glance at the headline - Threat from enemy within makes anti-terrorism laws indispensible - I knew exactly what it was that had loosed the bee in the old bugger's bonnet: Herald journalist Debra Jopson's expose Australian terrorists now bred at home.

I gritted my teeth and read on.

Henderson began by noting that a "large number" of "the 21 men who have been convicted of terrorism-related charges following Operation Pendennis in Sydney and Melbourne and Operation Neath in Melbourne" were "of Lebanese descent." This then was the reason for the very public ejaculation which I had witnessed - sorry - heard on the weekend.

He went on to quote from a certain Monash University academic before fingering Malcolm Fraser for letting the grandparents of these terrorist scum into the pristine paradise which was 70s Australia. And then, in one almighty leap, concluded: "Some Muslim Lebanese-Australians have done well. Many have not. Too many are involved... in criminal gangs in Sydney's south-west."

This could, of course, have been phrased - by way of stating the bleeding obvious - as follows: 'Most Lebanese-Australians have done well. Some have not. And a few are involved in criminal gangs...' But then that would hardly have served his redneck, Muslim-bashing agenda.

But why get all hot and bothered? He's obviously past it, thought I, recalling the pathetic figure I'd seen at the bus stop. The Age long ago gave up on him, I told myself, and the Herald only keeps him on because, for reasons best known to itself, it simply cannot bear the thought of terminating the dubious services of those who've so patently had their day. I mean how else does one explain the continued presence on its opinion page of Paul Sheehan? But that's another story. At any rate, I consoled myself, who but I actually reads the gripes of this garrulous old grump?

But I was wrong about that. Someone other than I had read The enemy within..., for there, among the letters in today's Herald, was a corrective from the very Monash University academic he'd quoted, Andrew Zammit of the Global Terrorism Research Centre. Titled Flaws in arguments over Muslim terrorism, Zammit had written:

"First, Henderson cites me as referring to 33 terrorism convictions. My paper actually referred to 33 prosecutions, not convictions. There were some acquittals, and the 33 did not include non-jihadism-related terrorism charges, such as the 3 Tamil Tiger supporters charged in Victoria.

"Secondly, he accurately quotes me as saying 'while Lebanese-Australian Muslims make up 60% of those charged over alleged jihadist activity, they constitute only 20% of all Australian Muslims'. However, I pointed out we should be hesitant to draw firm conclusions from this sample given how small it is, and that further research was needed. I also stressed that the activities of such few people can't be used to justify generalisations about Lebanese-Australian Muslims as a whole.

"Also, Henderson is correct to point out that the 'Lebanese concession' - the Fraser government's expanded intake of Lebanese civil war refugees in 1976 - was poorly implemented and that Lebanese Muslims often had little support on arrival. However, the findings in my paper do not support Henderson's argument that the 'Lebanon concession' was wrong altogether. The paper did examine Lebanese immigration during the civil war period and consequent social disadvantage; it did not state that convicted terrorists were necessarily children of those who arrived during the 'concession' which was only a short-lived episode in a large-scale immigration intake. In any case, it's a stretch to argue that Australia should not have given refuge to thousands of people fleeing a brutal civil war because of a couple of failed terrorism attempts decades later."

As Zammit's letter may actually prove the last straw for the Herald, and because, as I've said, I'm basically a softie, I for one will be pleading Henderson's case before the paper's editor-in-chief. There but for Fortune go you or I, I'll be reminding him.

Smearing BDS

"Only blind dogmatism could present Israel as something positive for the Jewish people. Established as a so-called refuge, it has, unfailingly, over the past 5 decades, been the most dangerous place on the face of the earth for a Jew. It has been the cause of tens of thousands of Jewish deaths, of families torn apart; it has left in its wake a trail of mourning widows, orphans and friends... And let us not forget that to this account of the physical suffering of the Jews must be added those of the Palestinian people, a nation condemned to indigence, persecution, to life without shelter, to overwhelming despair, and all too often to premature death." Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, quoted in A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, Yakov M. Rabkin, 2006, p 199)

Amazing what you can do with words, isn't it?

Take the word 'Jew' for example. For Zionists, 'Jew' and 'Zionist' are synonymous. Judaism, the faith, and Zionism, the political ideology, are one and the same. And so they use either as it suits them.

In the past, it suited the faithless, secular Zionists, the advocates of a 'Jewish' state in Palestine, to call themselves Zionists, by way of distinguishing themselves from religious Jews, the bulk of whom were anti-Zionist. Now, however, whenever the crimes of their so-called 'Jewish' state become too obvious to ignore, they invariably reach for the 'J' word, playing expertly on its historical associations of anti-Semitic discrimination and persecution.

Works a treat by sowing confusion and deflecting justified criticism of their genocidal colonial-settler project in Palestine.

This deliberate and dishonest obfuscation is now finding its way into the gibberings of certain ms media pundits in this country who, for reasons best known to themselves, have begun to take up the cudgels for Israel against the global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign directed against it.

First came bovver boy Andrew Bolt in the Murdoch tabloid, The Daily Telegraph:

"Here are some things I never thought I'd see in this country I love. I never thought I'd see people picketing shops because their owners were Jews. But in Melbourne last Friday, 19 protesters were arrested as they tried to stop people from shopping at the Max Brenner chocolate and coffeee store in Melbourne's QV. In Sydney last month, leftist and Muslim protesters did the same to a Max Brenner shop in Sydney, claiming the Jewish-owned franchise company supported the Israeli Army. I've seen pictures of Jewish shops being attacked before, of course, but they were in black and white, in another country at another, ghastly time." (Something is rotten in the land I love, 6/7/11)

There you are, 1930's Germany all over again! Blink, and you would have missed the only reference to Israel.

Today, we have Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald following suit:

"A century ago, Australia was a relatively tolerant society. Even so, Jews and Catholics were banned from Protestant-dominated gentleman's clubs in Sydney, Melbourne and elsewhere. In other words, discrimination against certain minorities became acceptable and fashionable. Consequently, it was rarely commented on or even noticed. Today Australia is an accepting society which formally outlaws discrimination on the basis of race or gender and disapproves of intolerance towards minorities. Except, it seems, Jews and Catholics."

What?! Anti-Semitism rearing its ugly ahead again?

"On the evening of Friday, July 1 - at the commencement of the Jewish Sabbath - there was a demonstration outside the Max Brenner chocolate shop in Melbourne. This was part of the BDS campaign against Israel. Demonstrators prevented customers from entering the premises. The reason? The Strauss Group, the parent company of Max Brenner, supplies confectionary goods to the Israeli Defence Force."

What?! Max was trading on the... Sabbath! Oh well, at least the Israeli connection is made somewhat clearer.

"There's not much connection between buying hot chocolate on a cold winter night in Melbourne and the events in the Middle East - where Israel remains, with the possible exception of Iraq, the only democracy*."

Well, yes there is, if most of your dollar flows back to the parent company which boasts on its website about aiding and abetting the IDF. (See my 12/7/09 post How Sweet It Is)

"Yet this was a violent demonstration. Victorian police suffered three injuries and 19 protesters were arrested. Demonstrators called for the destruction of Israel and chanted: 'From the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free'. The protest was reported in the Herald-Sun but all but ignored in The Age and the ABC."

Police injuries? Really? I mean, really? And the protesters called for the destruction of Israel by chanting From the river to the sea/ Palestine shall be free? Yes, much too violent. Maybe they should have chanted 'Between the Apartheid Wall and the Settlements/ Palestine shall be free' instead?

"Michael Danby, the Labor MP for Melbourne Ports, put the matter in perspective when he commented: 'These people are prejudiced fanatics who should look into their soul. While 1500 people are murdered in Syria, they launch their own sad little attack on a chocolate shop because it also has stores in Israel'. "

Because it also has stores in Israel!

"Danby's point about double standards is well taken. There is little doubt that most ABC and Age journalists would regard a violent boycott of a kebab shop in opposition to Hamas rocket attacks on Israel, as both a provocation and newsworthy."

So the kebab shop is putting a few on the side and sending them off to sustain the footsoldiers of Hamas? What? First to the other side of the planet, and then through the tunnels? Good one, Gerard!

Now to the point of this grubby little exercise - the smear of anti-Semitism:

"Then there are the historical parallels. In the mid-1930s, Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists used to go on rampages outside Jewish-owned shops in London's East End - some were boycotted, others smashed up. The British government responded by implementing the Public Order Act. Mosley targeted Jewish traders because they were Jews. The BDS protesters targeted the Max Brenner chocolate shop because its parent company does business in the Jewish state of Israel."

Are you sure its parent company just happens to do business in Israel? That is, as opposed to being Israeli.

Not even a Max Brenner chocolate would melt in this bloke's mouth.

[* Some democracy: "The Israeli Parliament has passed contentious legislation that effectively bans any citizens calling for academic, consumer or cultural boycotts of Israel in a move that has been denounced by its opponents as anti-democratic." (Critics damn Israel boycott law as blow to democracy, Isabel Kershner, Agencies/The Age, 13/7/11)]

A Myth Is Born 2

Here are some of its baby steps:

"Nor can the Greens continue to indulge their private fantasy that destiny has chosen them as Labor's natural replacement - not even in the post-material Shangri-La of Sydney's inner city (since even there people have mortgages, and perhaps Jewish friends)." (Labor was seriously wounded, but it will not die, David Burchell, The Australian, 28/3/11)

"It appears that Byrne's middle class radicalism, symbolised by her advocacy of a boycott of Israel, was too much even for the inner-city left." (Credit where it's due - they just didn't see him coming, Gerard Henderson, Sydney Morning Herald, 29/3/11)

"There is nothing peaceful about the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel... Attempts to isolate Israel in order to facilitate its destruction are not peaceful. The people of NSW saw this violent and racist movement for what it really is and rejected the NSW Greens who advocate this cultural, economic and academic isolation." Navit Shchigel, Noranda, W (Letter, The Australian, 29/3/11)

I wonder how long before it becomes received wisdom.

A Day In the Life of The Herald

February 22, 2011

In one and the same editorial, Democracy genie out of the bottle (22/2/11), the Sydney Morning Herald refers to "Gulf fiefdoms," some of which, like Bahrain, are "home to large numbers of Shiites under Iran's influence," while agreeing with foreign minister Rudd that "blaming protest on external interference is a 'tried but predictable script' in the Middle East."

In fact, as the Herald itself had reported only days earlier: "The US has repeatedly dismissed claims by the Bahraini government that Shiite unrest in the Persian Gulf island state is backed by Iran. Us diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show the accusation made by the government - which is facing street protests demanding political reforms from an opposition inspired by the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings - is not backed by hard evidence." (Cables show no sign of Iranian meddling, 17/2/11)

And how's this for an anodyne description of the entirely dependent (for arms, money and diplomatic backing) relationship between the dominant imperial power and its client collaborator regimes, as James petras calls them: "America has relied on regimes now facing popular uprisings." (Democracy genie)

Was 'propped up' deemed too harsh or is the author just plain clueless?

Then there's stuff and nonsense from Herald pundit Gerard Henderson who complains that "[t]he [global BDS] campaign does not distinguish between Israel's pre- and post-1967 borders..." (Don won't, but Libs can stop left)

For Christ's sake, does Israel? Give us a break!

Still, the cake must surely go to yesterday's Herald for an op-ed by Mirko Bagaric, Not having a whale of a time behind farm fence. Introduced in a footnote as "the author of a coming book Humanising Animals - Civilising People, funded by a grant from Voiceless, the animal protection institute," Bagaric wrote:

"Suffering is suffering. It is always ugly. It is always unwelcome. It always needs to be stopped. There are no exceptions. A person with the capacity but not the inclination to cease suffering is morally incomplete... Mahatma Gandi noted: 'The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated'. What he did not observe was that there is normally a direct correlation between human prosperity and animal welfare."

Fine words! And who could possibly disagree?

Except that the same Mirko Bagaric, footnoted as "professor of law and head of the Deakin Law School," wrote a piece for The Age back in 2005 called A case for torture. In it he wrote:

"The belief that torture is always wrong is... misguided and symptomatic of the alarmist and reflexive responses typically emanating from social commentators... Torture is permissable where the evidence suggests that this is the only means, due to the immediacy of the situation, to save the life of an innocent person." (17/5/05)

That kind of doo-doo, of course, was what was circulating in the heyday of Dubya's so-called War on Terror, and provided the rationale for what was going on in Mubarak's prisons, to cite but one example. It might've helped if Bagaric had sorted this contradiction out in the first few paragraphs of his piece, but maybe he just assumed readers had forgotten. Not only, therefore, is his credibility in question, but so too is that of the opinion editor for failing to host a more deserving voice.

Bush's Taxi to the Dark Side

After winning an OSCAR for her documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, a film about the US Government's use of torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Australian filmaker, Eva Orner branded the Bush administration "a bunch of war criminals, " who "needed to be stopped." (Oscar winner Eva Orner: US are war criminals, Herald Sun, 26/2/08)

Earlier still, on 14/2/08, Australia's Defence minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, "denounced the handling of the war in Afghanistan and [said] the allies are disunited, lack a clear plan and have failed to deal with the drug trade." He went on to warn that "a new strategy was required to ensure the Australian contribution was not for 'nil'." (Afghan war being botched: minister, Jonathan Pearlman, SMH, 15/2/08)

A look at the machinations leading up to the US (and Australian) attack on Afghanistan in 2001, bears out the truth of Orner's remarks and raises the question that Fitzgibbon really needs to be asking: Why are we aiding and abetting?

In his 2004 book, Destroying World Order: US Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11, leading American expert in international law, Francis A Boyle, guides us through these murky waters:-

Boyle portrays the Bush government as a warmongering cabal that shamelessly exploited the 9/11 tragedy to wage "an illegal armed aggression [against Afghanistan] that has created a hunanitarian catastrophe for the 22 million people of [that country] and is promoting terrible regional instability." He points out that "there is not and may never be conclusive proof as to who was behind the terrible bombings in New York and Washington DC, on September 11, 2001," and describes how the Bush administration, "deliberately invoking the rhetoric of Pearl Harbour," misrepresented an act of terrorism against the US as an act of war, which is defined by international law and practice as "a military attack by one nation state upon another nation state." Boyle writes, "The implication was that if this is an act of war, then you do not deal with it by means of international treaties and negotiations: You deal with an act of war by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made...to ignore and abandon the entire framework of international treaties that had been established under the auspices of the United Nations Organization for the past 25 years in order to deal with acts of terrorism and instead go to war against Afghanistan, a UN member state. In order to prevent the momentum towards war from being impeded, Bush Jr issued an impossible ultimatum, refusing all negotiations with the Taliban government, as well as all the extensive due process protections that are required between sovereign states related to extraditions, etc. The Taliban government's requests for proof and offers to surrender bin Laden to a third party, similar to those which ultimately brought the Libyan Lockerbie suspects to trial, were all peremptorily ignored."

Bush failed to get either the UN Security Council or the US Congress to authorize war. Boyle writes that he "went to the US Congress and exploited the raw emotions of this national tragedy to ram through a congressional authorization to use force....[however], Congress failed to give Bush Jr [a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got from Congress after Pearl Harbour] and for a very good reason...it would have made Bush Jr a 'consitutional dictator' insofar as that, basically, Americans would now all be living under martial law. Congress might have just as well closed up and gone home for the rest of the duration of the Bush Jr war against terrorism for all the difference they would have made."

"Instead of a formal declaration of war, the US Congress gave Bush Jr what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization [which] basically gives [him] a blank check to use military force against any individual, organization, or state that he alleges - by means of his own ipse dixit - was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11, or else harboured those who were," despite the fact that the UN Charter expressly forbids an armed agression against a UN member state.

Two further attempts to get the Security Council's authorization to use military force failed, leading to the US invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter and informing the Security Council that "the US reserved its right to use force in self-defense against any state that the Bush Jr administration felt the need to victimize in order to fight their holy war against international terrorism as determined by themselves" - the same defense asserted by the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945.

Boyle's conclusion: "The Bush Jr war against Afghanistan, in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 and the UN Charter of 1945 [both requiring contracting parties to resolve international disputes peacefully], constitutes a Nuremberg Crime Against Peace." Orner knows this. Fitzgibbon & Co don't want to.

Postscript (4/3/08): In his Sydney Morning Herald opinion column, Harry puts the prince in principle (4/3/08), radical neocon pundit (and self-confessed republican) Gerard Henderson, in telling us how impressed he was by "Prince Harry putting his life on the line in Afghanistan" (a bit of palace PR if ever there was one), went on to misrepresent Eva Orner's accusation that the Bush administration were "war criminals" as a "far left" position. It speaks volumes about the kind of world we are now living in, that support for the principles of international law can be dismissed in this way. The sine qua non of the neocon, of course, is a massive contempt for international law and a belief that it should be replaced by the law of the jungle, which Henderson dresses up as (quoting from Andrew Roberts' A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900): "[T]he English-speaking peoples unmistakably demonstrat[ing] to the rest of the world that they still enjoy global hegemony," or, in his own words, "[T]he moral imperative of the West to intervene in the world, sometimes militarily, to help spread democracy."