Kissing Cousins

Australia's first female Muslim MP, Labor's Anne Aly (Cowan, WA), went on a study tour of Israel in March this year. Apparently, so overwhelmed was she that she's only just now gotten around to unburdening herself on the subject at an Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) debriefing in Perth:

"When the opportunity came to visit Israel, I was grateful because I needed to have the experience. I needed to go and see for myself... to actually experience what it was like in Israel rather than fit into some kind of position I should take on any of the issues... I really wanted to formulate my own opinion through my own experience, because nothing replaces the experience of actually being somewhere and having that experience of being there." (WA MP talks of her visit to Israel, jwire.com, 14/9/17)

Ah, the politician's lot. That email/phone call. That knock on the door. What could it portend? Well, blow me down if it isn't an opportunity to visit Israel.

And what a wonderful opportunity that is! Just imagine, you not only get to formulate your own opinion of the Palestine/Israel shindig through your own experience, but have attentive Israel lobbyists on hand to decide where you go and who you speak to, and afterwards whisk you off to all the best eateries in the land. You'd be silly to pass it up, eh?

As it happens, Aly, who had arrived in Australia at the tender age of two, recalled the words of her mother:

"Growing up... my mother always called Jewish people our cousins. Always called Israelis our cousins."

Cousins, eh? Not so much a rambamming as a family visit! (After all, isn't MUM the word?) And, hey, doesn't Mrs Aly's homely maternal wisdom put the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 in a whole new light? Mere family tiffs! And all praise to cuz Anwar for kissing and making up with cuz Menachem at the White House in 1979, cuz since then it's been kissing cousins all the way.

The despair over the Palestine/Israel contretemps that had apparently dogged Ms Aly for all of her 49 years disappeared, I'm pleased to hear, in an instant:

"It's really easy to get caught up in the kind of despair of you know 40 or 50 years of no resolution, but what I saw, what I saw was inspiration. What I saw was people who want to live in peace... "

No, nothing even vaguely resembling a brutal OCCUPATION - just smiling, welcoming Israeli cousins, all apparently cooing 'Shalom ilaykum, cuz' at Ms Aly.

Of course, once blinded by anti-Israel propaganda, she could now see that Mum was right all along:

"The only exposure that I really ever had to the whole Palestine-Israel question was with propaganda. We really need to be vigilant against that, and particularly we need to be vigilant against propagandising the situation to be about Muslim versus Jew. It's not about Muslims versus Jews. Muslims and Jews are cousins."

And the proof in the pudding? Her Israeli cousins tenderly ministering to their fallen-on-hard-times Syrian cousins:

"Dr Aly recalled an emotional encounter at the Ziv hospital in Safed, where Israeli doctors treat victims of the Syrian Civil War. Dr Aly talked about how she became a translator for her fellow MPs [Senator Alex Gallacher, Julian Hill, Steve Georganas, Meryl Swanson and Milton Dick*]. She also reflected on her admiration for the doctors and staff who are treating the injured Syrians."

Now that must've been one, like, almighty emotional encounter for the normally phlegmatic Aly, cuz: "When I was going to the White House people were like, 'Wow you must be so excited to meet Obama' and I was like 'meh'." (Why teenage extremism is personal for Anne Aly, Rachel Olding, Sydney Morning Herald, 12/2/16)

[*I'll deal with these rambammed non-relatives in my next post.]

Ya Yassmin...

As I've wondered before, what other Australian embassy carries on like our embassy in Israel? (For the backstory on this, just click on the Dave Sharma label below.) Anyhow, here's the latest:

"Australia's embassy in Israel has hosted Yassmin Abdel Magied a prominent young Australian voice on gender equality, overcoming unconscious bias, and women's empowerment... Her flying visit included a morning spent at Tel Aviv's Bialik Rogozin School for... students from underprivileged backgrounds... Yassmin lectured to a packed auditorium at the Tel Aviv University on overcoming bias in the workplace..." (Australia embassy hosts prominent young activist, jwire.com.au, 23/11/16)

Yassmin, 25, is described by jwire as being born in Sudan and migrating to Australia at the age of two; "a qualified mechanical engineer with years of working on an oilrig"; a "founder of Youth Without Borders"; "Young Australian Muslim of the Year"; and an "amateur boxer, racing car designer, footballer and motorsport enthusiast."

I'll try to be as charitable as I can here, OK?

Obviously, Yassmin's 25 years on planet earth have been so frenetic that she simply hasn't had the time to put 2+2 together on the subject of Israel. Otherwise, the enormous irony inherent in the prospect of lecturing the beneficiaries of an apartheid regime on the subject of workplace (or any other kind of) bias would have dissuaded her from agreeing to play the useful fool for Israel.

***

Now since writing the above, I notice from Yassmin's tweets that Tel Aviv was just one stop (18/11) on 'Yassmin's Middle East Speaking Tour, and followed an appearance in Ramallah (14-15/11). She's also tweeted (22/11) that she's got a copy of Joe Sacco's wonderful graphic history, Palestine. Perhaps this was presented to her in Ramallah. Let's hope she's now engrossed in reading it, cover to cover, that the proverbial light bulb is growing ever brighter in her head, and that it's the beginning of an intellectual journey.

Cross fingers...

Et Tu, Guardian Australia?

With Fairfax getting sorrier by the day and the Murdoch press up to its usual tricks, I imagine that many news and commentary addicts are falling back on Guardian Australia for their daily fix. But what are they really getting, especially by way of commentary, on Palestine?

Slim pickings, if their last 3 opinion pieces are any indication.

As anyone who follows this site will be aware, I believe that 'getting' Palestine is the litmus test for intellectual and moral courage in our time. Sadly, GA, in its response to the latest Israeli bloodletting in Gaza, fails this test. Here's why:

1) "I understand and feel the suffering of the Israelis who have lost loved ones and are forced to live in fear... Palestinians and Israelis have been angry for a long time but...it has brought death and injustice to ourselves and others... The hope and future safety and freedom of Israel are linked to the security, safety, freedom and future of Palestinians. We are like conjoined twins and any harm induced [?] to one will impact the other. The courageous thing for both sides is to embrace the dignity, grace and strength of the other." (As a father who lost his children in Gaza, I call for an end to this bloodshed, Izzeldin Abuelaish, 18/7/14)

This is truly contemptible stuff. It peddles the nonsensical idea that there is no difference whatever between occupiers and occupied, oppressors and oppressed, colonisers and colonised, ethnic cleansers and their victims. It omits, on the one hand, any mention of Zionist colonisation and apartheid, and, on the other, the legitimate and heroic struggle of generations of Palestinian freedom fighters for fundamental human and political rights. And what is one expected to make of this Palestinian Uncle Tom's talk of his people's need to "embrace the dignity, grace and strength" of the Israelis? Truly obscene.

2) "The moral corruption that comes with any occupation has fused with the collective trauma of the Jewish people. Angela Godfrey-Goldstein is a peace activist in Israel: she tells me that Israel's mentality 'is very easy to understand in a way where people were traumatised over centuries. It bred a sense that people owe us, of 'who are you to tell us what to do?'... The Jewish people faced persecution for milleniums... The all too recent memory of the gas chambers encourages the sense that Israel can never be too strong, and that its people can never be oppressors". (How the occupation of Gaza corrupts the occupier: It's tempting, but futile, to demonise Israelis. To achieve peace, we have to understand the rationales behind the latest offensive, Owen Jones, 21/7/14)

Presenting this kind of nonsense, without challenge, as some kind of mitigating factor in the Zionist long march (1917-?) to wipe Palestine off the map is quite inexcusable. Zionist designs on a Palestine without Palestinians were hatched long before the Nazi genocide, and psychobabble about collective, inter-generational trauma supposedly driving today's Israeli perpetrators merely serves to shift the focus away from the settler-colonial roots of this conflict and the very real trauma of dispossession which the Palestinians have been subjected to now for almost a century. There are no excuses for what we are witnessing today in Gaza. None. (I should add, in Owen Jones' favour, that he deserves to be complimented on his generally critical stance toward Israeli brutality and intransigence. Consider this piece, therefore, an unfortunate lapse.)

3) "How many pictures of dead children do you need to see before you understand that killing children is wrong? [Killing adults, well...] I ask because social media is awash with the blood of innocents. Twitter is full of photos of the murdered children of Gaza... Those who want to say something about the atrocities in the Middle East may indeed be genuinely distraught... They may feel that pictures of the broken bodies of infants trump all talk of the immensely long, complicated nature of the conflict... Binyamin Netanyahu speaks of Hamas actively wanting to 'the telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause'... Pictures of Israelis watching the destruction of Gaza as if it were a fireworks party do the rounds. Again with no context. This was Sderot where children don't play outside but in shelters." (Sharing pictures of corpses on social media isn't the way to bring a ceasefire, Suzanne Moore, 21/7/14)

Eewwww! They're sooo yucky. Take them away! The agony of Palestine has been with us now for almost 100 years but this bovine with bad hair just wants it out of sight and out of mind. Quoting Bibi the butcher's loathsome soundbyte approvingly, and suggesting that the colonial-settler ghouls on the hill outside Sderot, cheering on the slaughter in the Gaza coliseum below, have an equal case tells you all you need to know about Moore. Let me just add this: On 20/7/14 she tweeted: "Cannot stomach anymore Israel/Palestine pieces from people who have not been there and just pumping out simplistic dogma." You want simplistic dogma? Cop this: "At the Erez Crossing we had a picnic and were told of the baddies. Hamas. They are indeed baddies, who do not recognise the existence of Israel..." (Suzanne Moore, Yes, Israel has a right to exist. But so did those blood-soaked Palestinian toddlers on the mortuary slab, The Daily Mail, 11/1/09)

Apart from their content, what really annoys me about these 3 pieces is that they've each occupied a media space that could have gone to weightier and more insightful analyses of the issue.

And another thing: two of the three writers are British. Neither, though, displays any awareness of Britain's historical role in the launching and consolidation of the Zionist colonial project and Britain's concomitant betrayal of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination. Nor, I'd wager, is either aware of the key role of C.P. Scott (editor of the Manchester Guardian - as it was then known - from 1905 to 1929) in introducing the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann to Lord Balfour and Lloyd George, a fateful conclave if ever there was one, and one which led to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which paved the way for all that has befallen the Palestinian people, including the carnage we are witnessing today in Gaza. (See my 2/1/12 post The Language Spotter.)

Iraq & Syria Sorted by Waleed Aly

Thank God we've got Sydney Morning Herald columnist Waleed Aly around to explain where we went wrong in Iraq and Syria. We'd be all so confused otherwise:

If only Bush hadn't intervened in Iraq:

"Over 11 years ago we entered a war of choice on a pretext that was always dubious and proved ultimately false... the invasion has unleashed forces we simply cannot pretend to have under control."  (Middle East meltdown: Blowback from invasion of Iraq unfolds to haunt the West, Waleed Aly, 13/6/14)

If only Obama had intervened in Syria:

"... in Syria, where a ruler every bit as brutal as Saddam Hussein is in the process of enacting mass violence against his own people. This is a ruler who has merrily danced across what Barack Obama declared to be his 'red line' by using chemical weapons* against them. Obama ran an anaemic campaign for military intervention in Syria that went nowhere. These days he regards Syria merely as 'somebody else's civil war'.** We will never know what would have happened had America intervened. But we do know that Bashar al-Assad had free rein to unleash brutal force, thereby radicalising the environment and laying down a magnet for Sunni terrorist groups.**"

Wait a minute!

"Mosul is in terrorist hands because we blew the lid off Iraq..."

So we shouldn't have squished Saddam, right?

"... then refused to help put it back on Syria."

But we should have squished Bashar, yeah?

Hang on!

[*Wrong! See my 8/4/14 post About That Gas Attack in Syria...;** So the Americans, the Turks, the Saudis and the Gulf monarchs had absolutely no hand in "unleash[ing] brutal force, thereby radicalising the environment and laying down a magnet for Sunni terrorist groups," just Bashar?]

Joe Hockey: From the Gaza Strip to the Grand Hyatt

BEFORE last September's federal election, the then shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, was touting his 'Arab heritage' at Sydney's Lakemba Mosque:

"If there is a change of government on the 7th of September it will be the very first time in Australian history that someone of Arab heritage has taken a leadership position in Australia." (The politics of Palestine, Jonathan Swan, Sydney Morning Herald, 26/12/13)

Or was it his Palestinian heritage?

"Joe Hockey, appearing at Sydney's Lakemba Mosque this morning for an end of Ramadan ceremony, says he will be the first person of Palestinian heritage to take a leadership role in Australia if the Coalition wins the election." (Day Four - The Australian - Election 2013 Live Coverage, livenews.theaustralian.com.au, 8/8/13)

Hockey's paternal grandmother, you see, was a Palestinian, and his father a refugee from the Nakba of 1948.

Of a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in 1998 with his father, Hockey is reported to have said:

"We walked through the refugee camp where you'd had 3 generations living in a room 2m x 2m. It was very emotional because there I was with my father, and there but for the grace of God I could've been." (See my 30/7/13 post Joe Hockey: My Palestinianity is Firmly Under Control.)

Did he, I wonder, ask how it was that those refugees came to be penned up - grandparents, parents, and kids - in their 2x2 shacks? Did the fact that most Palestinians were stateless refugees set him thinking? Did the sight of armed Israeli thugs lording it over them stir him to anger?

Apparently not, because here he is AFTER the election, buttering up Jewish punters at a May 2 Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the Grand Hyatt, in a bid to sell them on the upcoming budget with its whizzbang work-till-you-drop-at-70 and upfront-payments-to-the-doctor provisions :

"I wanted to be here today because I want to express my immense admiration for the Jewish community in Australia. In general terms I can think of no other single community that has a greater love for its children and no other community that has a greater devotion to its future, no matter how great the sacrifices of the past. Your love and protection of family and your focus on legacy and prosperity are what I strive for daily with my own family and they are firmly among the principles that brought me into public life. So I really wanted to properly, for the first time, at a public forum like this, acknowledge and thank you for your leadership in the community." (Hockey hails community, The Australian Jewish News, 9/5/14)

No other single community has a greater love for its children. And no other community primes its children with the outrageous belief that the land from which those Palestinian refugees in Gaza were expelled by Zionist terror gangs in 1948 is really theirs.

And this is the same Sloppy Joe who tells the rest of us - we who love our children less - that the Age of Entitlement is over.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

Q&A Flakes

Tim Wilson, Human Rights Commissioner:

"My view is that whenever Australia is siding up with only China and Iran when we are voting on things [at the UN], it is probably not a good sign."

Hello? This effusion hardly reflects the reality of our voting pattern in the UN General Assembly. Reality would dictate something more along these lines:

'My view is that whenever Australia is siding up with only the United States and Israel when we are voting on things, it is most definitely not a good sign.'

But then, reality (or even human rights) is not really Wilson's thing. Certainly not since he was rambammed - see my 23/2/14 post I Want My Money Back.

Mona Eltahawy, Egyptian activist and commentator:

- Well, you're talking to someone who got arrested for spray-painting over a racist and bigoted ad in the New York subway and I'm going to stand trial very soon in New York for this...

TJ: What did it say? Are you allowed to tell us?

- I can tell you because it - I mean it's outrageous. It said: 'In the war between the civilised man and the savage, always choose the civilised man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.' And I thought: are you fucking kidding me? In my subway? How can you put this up?

I don't get it. I always thought Eltahawy had the hots for Israel.

After all, she too was rambammed; wrote for the Jerusalem Post; declared that "Israel was the opium of the Arabs"; and (with exquisite timing, after Israel had just bombed the crap out of Gaza in 2008-09) described herself as a "self-hating Arab," pontificating that "the real challenge when it comes to the Middle East [conflict] is to sit on the fence."

But now she's not only off the fence, she's running around defacing pro-Israel posters! From Self-hating Arab to Existential Threat in 5 seconds flat! WTF?

[For more on Mona, see my 31/1/11 post Homely Mona.]

Reap & Sow

Shallow and misleading opinion pieces such as Waleed Aly's on Lebanon in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald, which merely skate around issues and tell us more about the ignorance of the writer and the red lines he's afraid to cross, do nothing to enlighten readers on the issue at hand.

How do I know? Well, just take a look at the following selection of the 9 comments (now closed) in the thread which follow his piece online:

There's Rex:

"'Only recently has this sectarianism become so radioactive.' Sorry, Waleed, this is pure wishful thinking! Look at the power that religious leaders have in places like Iran, and it is obvious that 'political' has religious fanaticism at its core: there are no deeper reasons for intolerance and for more than half the Middle East's problems."

For Rex, the Middle East is just one big blur - Lebanon=Iran; the overriding problem is political Islam; and USrael is nowhere in view.

There's Don:

"This is what the money for nothing that is crude oil will buy you. A pity it poured into arming militias and stirring up trouble but there you are."

For Don, the problem is that your Ayrabs won the oil lotto, and Ayrabs being Ayrabs, they just can't handle their winnings, know what I mean? Nothing to do with things like imperialism or colonialism or that spoilt Israeli brat and his permissive US dad.

There's Andy:

"It reminds me of the thirty years war in Europe in the 1600s. Protestants v Catholics. Sunnis v Shiites. History repeats itself with bigger guns. Now we have a milder form of Christianity. Hopefully something similar will happen [to] Islam."

For Andy, religion's the root of all evil. And the beast can rear its ugly head anywhere, anytime, though thanks to Western Genius it's under control here. (Although, after listening to Christopher Pyne recently, I'm wondering what rough Judeo-Christian beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.) Don't, whatever you do, confuse Andy by mentioning those besties, the US-backed, sectarian, Jews-only state of Israel and the US-backed, sectarian, Sunni Muslim-only state of Saudi Arabia.

Here's Mark:

"Yes Andy we got it out of our system a few hundred years ago. Hopefully the Muslim world will get their act together one day."

Yeah, like we've really got our act together, right Marky?

Here's Lazy Jesus:

"'The National Museum of Beirut houses one of the greatest prehistoric collections in the world.' Presumably this is where the Muslim guidelines for the treatment of women are kept."

Oh Jesus! But wait, what's this?

Julian:

"If you go a bit deeper you'll find Israel's involvement in this mess."

Right on, Julian, at last the elephant-who-occupies-the-room! Bet he's going to list Israel's serial aggressions against Lebanon, something like this, to name but a few:

1968: 13 passenger planes destroyed at Beirut airport;
1973: raid on Beirut, killing 3 PLO officials;
1978, Operation Litani River, installing Lebanese puppet force (South Lebanon Army) before withdrawing;
1979 car bomb attack on PLO official;
1982 Operation Peace for Galilee > occupation of West Beirut > Sabra & Shatila massacre > Israeli/SLA occupation of South Lebanon until 2000;
1992 assassinates Hezbollah leader Sheikh Abbas Musawi;
1993 Operation Accountability launched against Lebanon;
1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath launched against Lebanon;
2006 Operation Just Reward launched against Lebanon.

Let's see:

"Lebanon should already be a serious cultural, economic and financial (albeit peaceful) competitor to Israel with a geographic advantage. While the world's best and brightest Jews moved into Israel, the best and brightest Lebanese went into exile."

Jeeeesus!

Finally, there's Thepres:

"Julian, If a country like Lebanon thinks nothing of killing it's [sic] own people with car bombs, it cannot be taken seriously by the rest of the world. Perhaps if the best and brightest Lebanese would return from exile they could change things. The answer of course is that they will not be returning to be killed by their own people urged on by the clergy."

Fair dinkum... where do you even begin? Certainly not with Waleed Aly's rubbish that's for sure.

The Phenomenon of Waleed Aly

Reading Waleed Aly's opinion piece on Lebanon in today's Sydney Morning Herald (Nation with no real unity stuck as proxy for region's conflict) helps one understand the phenomenon of how an Australian of 'Middle Eastern appearance' and Arab name can find a prominent place in the mainstream Australian media - in Aly's case, the ABC (Radio National) and Fairfax press: offer plausible-sounding, but lame and simplistic, comment with little or no real historical context, and... shhhhh... no mention whatever of USrael.

His contention is that Lebanon has no 'real' national identity. He quotes Ataturk thus: "Nations which don't find their national identities are doomed to be the prey of other nations," concluding: "It's hard to imagine a more penetrating description of Lebanon."

Tellingly, however, he advances no historical reason for this state of affairs. The reader is left to presume that the Lebanese, unlike the Turks, simply don't have what it takes to create a genuine nation. The fact of the matter is that the modern state of Lebanon cannot be understood without clear reference to Anglo-French imperialist machinations prior to and during World War 1.

In 1916, after decades of interference in the Ottoman Turkish provinces of the Eastern Mediterranean region, Britain and France secretly decided, via the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, that once the Turks had been ousted from the 'Greater Syria' area, they'd divide the spoils, with the French taking the northern, and the British the southern, part. The French then set about dividing the 'Mt Lebanon' area from its 'Syrian' hinterland, and enlarging it in the process, to create the highly artificial colonial construct known today as Lebanon. 

Why then, with French imperialism calling the shots in the area and laying the foundations for Lebanon's current 'confessional' democracy, is it any wonder that Lebanon lacks the kind of national identity referred to by Ataturk?

It is only at the very end of his piece that Aly refers vaguely to the Middle East being "crammed with countries whose national identities have never truly been resolved; whose borders have been horrifically drawn to capture almost nothing coherent." You'd almost think the Arabs had scored an own goal here.

Now look at this:

"[T]he Shiites - most actively represented by Hezbollah - take orders from Iran and the Assad regime in Syria, while Sunnis seek support from Saudi Arabia and embrace Syria's increasingly radical rebels."

So Lebanese Shiites are the mindless puppets of Iran and Syria, while Lebanese Sunnis, who are presumably capable of thinking for themselves, merely "seek support from Saudi Arabia"?

And this:

"The assassination [of "a former [Sunni] finance minister"] is most likely an order from Syria, reasserting Assad's will in Lebanon."

So "an order" from Israel is less likely? And Assad is secure enough in Syria to focus on "reasserting [his] will in Lebanon"? I guess the uncivil war in Syria must be all but over then.

Finally, there is also the assertion that Hezbollah's involvement in Syria "has merely encouraged the same international terrorist groups fighting Assad to start terrorising Lebanon, thereby exposing Hezbollah's claim to be 'resisting' foreign aggression on behalf of Lebanon as a sham..."

Why is there no acknowledgment here that LEBANESE Sunni jihadists were involving themselves in the war in Syria long before Hezbollah's intervention? And why is Hezbollah's highly successful role in RESISTING ISRAELI AGGRESSION in Lebanon from the 80s on written off merely as "Hezbollah's claim to be 'resisting' foreign aggression..."

The Mysterious Abu Joe 1

The following terribly sad exchange with shadow treasurer Joe Hockey took place on Channel 7's Sunrise program on November 16 last year:

Presenter: OK. Next topic... Israel and Hamas are on the brink of war. Pro-Palestinian activists held a rally and a march in Western Sydney overnight. They are calling for a boycott of the pro-Israeli chocolate cafe chain Max Brenner. Joe, your perspective on this? Your Dad - as we know - came here as a Palestinian refugee. Do you think there is a need to see this here, over what is happening in the Middle East?

Hockey: No. Emphatically not. Leave the politics to the countries that are playing the politics. Don't bring the politics here. That is why people come to Australia - not to revisit all of the woes of another nation.

Presenter: What does your Dad think seeing all of this?

Hockey: Well, Dad's just so unbelievably grateful that in 1947* Australia welcomed him and he sees himself as an Australian. Full stop. He looks at it and he just thinks it will never be resolved over there. When you look at these sorts of events, how does it stop? But Israel does have, entirely, a right to protect its citizens.

Presenter: Oh, not to this extent.

Hockey: But hang on, understand this. There have been random bombings from Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist group. It is not a Government. It has taken over the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority. It has launched terrorist attacks into Israel. Israel has got a right to defend itself. Hamas is part of a wider terrorism network. The people of Gaza are not particularly embracing Hamas, and they are using it as a staging post to attack Israel. (joehockey.com)

The real story here is not the boof-headed son. It's obvious from his answers that he's completely clueless when it comes to the Middle East, and that he'd repeat any fool thing put into his head by the usual suspects, just to blend in.

No, the real story, if our journalists but knew it - but of course they don't - is Hokeidonian the elder, described elsewhere as "dropping the 'donian' part of his name when he migrated to Australia in 1948 to get away from the turmoil of the Middle East." (See my 30/7/13 post Joe Hockey: My Palestinianity is Firmly Under Control.)

[*So which is it? '47 or '48?]

Joe Hockey: My Palestinianity is Firmly Under Control

Seriously head-shaking stuff:

"The Hockey* life story is one of the more textured of an Australian public figure and bears re-telling for what it reveals about a more complex individual than might seem to be the case on an affable surface. Of Palestinian-Armenian origin (his paternal grandmother was Palestinian); grandfather, who deserted the family, was Armenian) Hockey is the product of a marriage between Richard Hokeidonian and Beverly Little... Richard had dropped the 'donian' part of his name when he migrated to Australia in 1948 to get away from turmoil in the Middle East. He named his youngest child Joseph Benedict out of gratitude to former Labor Prime Minister Joseph Benedict Chifley. Hockey's Palestinian connection has been tricky for him over the years, given his own party's tilt towards Israel. He does not deny his heritage. He has Palestinian and Armenian friends, but Hockey's Sydney and Canberra milieu is far removed from a conflict on the other side of the world. 'It's my culture. It's my heritage. It helps to define me. But it doesn't control me,' he says. He describes, nevertheless, an emotional reaction after visiting a Palestinian refugee camp in Gaza in 1998 with his father. 'We walked through the refugee camp where you'd had 3 generations living in a room 2 metres by 2 metres. It was very emotional because there I was with my father, and there but for the grace of God I could've been.' Could it be the Palestinian loss of patrimony has something to do with Hockey's desire to own a piece of Australian countryside? He describes his 200-hectare cattle property in the Atherton Tablelands behind Cairns... as his reality check." (No more Mr Sunrise, Tony Walker, Financial Review Magazine, August 2013)

Don't you just love the sentence: "Richard... migrated to Australia in 1948 to get away from the turmoil in the Middle East."

Shhh... don't mention the NAKBA!

And don't you just love how, while your Danbys and Frydenbergs have no qualms about flaunting their Zionism, Joe Hockey keeps his Palestinianity firmly under control?

[*For my readers overseas, Joe Hockey is Australia's shadow treasurer.]

Flickable

Hm...

"Israel continues to produce an impressive range of high-quality films and this years Sydney Film Festival (SFF) includes a fascinating selection among the 190 movies from more than 50 countries. Among the highlights is The Attack, where an Arab doctor living comfortably in Tel Aviv has his life turned upside down when his wife becomes a suicide bomber." (Focus on the Jewish-Arab divide, The Australian Jewish News, 31/5/13)

The first thing that struck me when I read this was the preposterous nature of the film's underlying premise. First that the main character is an 'Arab' "living comfortably in Tel Aviv." (OK, hands up out there all you Arabs who are living comfortably in Tel Aviv.) Then, as if that were not absurd enough, his missus turns suicide bomber!

*Sigh*

Googling its title produced the following blurb by the film's distributor (Cohen Media), which annoyed me even more:

"Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman, Paradise Now) is an Israeli-Palestinian surgeon, fully assimilated into Tel Aviv society. He has a loving wife, an exemplary career, and many Jewish friends. But his picture perfect life is turned upside down after a suicide bombing in a restaurant leaves 19 dead, and the Israeli police inform him that his wife, Sihem (Reymonde Amsellem, Lebanon) who also died in the explosion, was responsible. Convinced of her innocence, Amin abandons the relative security of his adopted homeland and enters the Palestinian territories in pursuit of the truth. Once there, he finds himself in ever more dangerous places and situations. Determined, he presses on seeking answers to questions he never thought he would be asking."

Amin abandons the relative security of his adopted homeland? Hello? So Amin's an Israeli-Palestinian, but Palestine's not his real homeland - as it is, say, for his Jewish friends, despite the fact that they or their parents could've originated anywhere on the planet.

And that bit about the Israeli police informing him that his wife's a suicide bomber. Seriously now, our fully assimilated but nonetheless 'Arab' doctor, would more likely have had his door smashed in at 2 in the morning by the Shin Bet, and been dragged off for interrogation or worse as a presumed accomplice.  But no, not Amin, he gets to traipse off to the wild West Bank in search of answers.

Now as if all this nonsense were not vexing enough, I also learnt that the film's director was actually Lebanese - Ziad Doueiri - and not just any Lebanese either, but one who wasn't going to let any old Arab boycott get in the way making his film in Israel.

*SIGH*

The following extracts from an interview Doueiri did with (Saudi-owned) Al-Arabiya TV last month were obviously music to Israeli ears and help explain both why he had no trouble whatever getting into Israel and filming there, and why Israeli propaganda shop, MEMRI, latched onto his words and made them available on its website:

Interviewer: Your movie was filmed in Israel, in Hebrew, with an Israeli actress. Doesn't this contravene Lebanese law?

Doueiri: Technically it's not against the law to make a film in Hebrew. What was against the law was my going to Israel... [so] I went [there] as a US citizen... The insane committee [for boycotting Israel] talks about 'normalization'. They commercialise the Palestinian cause. We accuse anybody who is against us of supporting normalization, and this is a mistake... the committee for boycotting Israel harms Lebanese artists, not Israel. It harms the spreading of our ideas, our narrative, abroad. They want to remain boxed in within the tiny Lebanese shack, which is managed by 4 or 5 people. They think they are punishing Israel, but they are punishing people like me.

Doueiri went on to explain that because Israel doesn't give a damn what the rest of the world thinks, least of all Lebanon's boycott committee, blokes like him, just itching to tell "our narrative," have got to go there and change it from within:

"In my opinion, when you work together with these outstanding people, who have [an] entirely proper attitude toward the Palestinians... They are constantly writing about the harm Israel inflicts upon the Palestinians. We need to lend them a hand [because] they can change the Israeli mindset much more than all those around them."

Moreover, he adds, because "half the pharmacists in Tel Aviv are Palestinian Arabs," and because he met an Israeli Palestinian doctor there, although "[t]o a certain extent [Palestinians] are second-class citizens and suffer from racism... their situation is not so bad."

*GROAN*

Oh, and The Attack is based on a novel of the same name by an Algerian living in France who goes by the name of Yasmin Khadra, except that she, Yasmin, is actually a he... but really, I don't want to go there. How much more can a koala bear?

Tickled Pink

The Australian's Christian Kerr is tickled pink to report that:

"Sydney University students are expected to move to overturn support for the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement when their representative council meets this week."* (Student body rethinks anti-Israel boycott, 6/5/13)

Note how it's always the "anti-Israel BDS", suggestive of party-pooping negativity at best, vile anti-Semitism at worst?

No reader would ever guess, from a 'report' by Kerr and friends that BDS is actually pro-Palestinian rights and pro-international law, IOW a mechanism to help bring about 3 fundamental, long overdue and incredibly positive changes:

1) ending Israel's ILLEGAL occupation and colonization of all Arab lands [occupied in 1967] and dismantling the ILLEGAL West Bank wall;

2) recognizing the fundamental rights of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and

3) respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

"BDS supporters... claim the Technion works closely with the Israeli government and military, and weapons manufacturers in Israel."  (ibid)

Note the sly, mendacious use of the word 'claim', with its connotation of still-to-be-proved.

So what does the Technion's website says:

"[I]ts graduates are cited to have provided the skills and education behind the creation and protection of the State of Israel." (About Technion)

The very creation and protection of the State of Israel! Couldn't be clearer really, but just to ice the cake:

"Technion's workshops supplied vital weapons and equipment for the Jewish self-defense [!!!] fighters of the Haganah - everything from cartridge clips and gun parts to signaling keys for lamps and wireless radios. Through the 1930s and 1940s, almost every student at Technion played a role in clandestine military efforts. Students descended into the 100-meter well in the school's courtyard to test weapons out of hearing range of British authorities; they practiced firing pistols in a basement corridor where the sound would be drowned out by the clamor of industrial machinery. During the 1948 War of Independence, Israeli fighters relied on 'Ilioff cocktails' - mass-produced, hand-thrown bottle bombs invented by Technion's Professor Alexander Ilioff. This was just the start of a long, productive partnership between Technion and the Israeli Defense Forces that would provide the young state with everything from night vision goggles to an entire aerospace industry." (Technion Nation: Technion's Contribution to Israel & the World, Amnon Frenkel & Shlomo Maital, 2012, p 42)

"Opponents say the Technion works regularly with Arab institutions... In an open letter to the SRC last week, the Technion student union said nearly a fifth of its numbers were Arabs."  (ibid)

Funny though, you can trawl the Technion's website till the cows come home but nowhere are these assertions corroborated, let alone adduced as a selling point.

Nor is any of the following highly relevant data likely to find its way into the pages of the Australian:

"Under the anodyne classification of 'applied sciences', Technion's research accomplishments read like a what's what of science fiction, full of unmanned drones, pilotless surveillance gizmos and driverless bulldozers. The Jerusalem Post reports that Technion's D9 unmanned armored tank performed so magnificently during Israel's massacre of 1,400 Gazans in the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead that the IDF doubled its order. Journalist Max Blumenthal reported about the drone plane based on the dragonfly, with a 9-inch wingspan and 8-inch body. According to a quote Blumenthal cited from the American Technion Society website, 'The plane's relatively low speed enables it to easily enter rooms through small windows and to send back photos from a miniature camera.' Technion personnel have worked on means to track human eye movements in collaboration with Elbit, a key developer of Israel's apartheid wall, illegal under international law, that slices through the occupied West Bank. Technion is also a global expert in developing mini-robots capable of traversing rubble and planting bombs, as well as building 'surveillance snakes' whose goal is to explore tunnels that are crucial for transporting desperately needed banned goods into blockaded Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians barely scrape by. In this era of neoliberalism, Technion's invention of clever military gadgets that require minimal labor is a budget-cutter's dream come true. Not surprisingly, Palestinians aren't the only victims of Technion's 'applied sciences'. North America's own apartheid wall along the US-Mexico border uses surveillance technology developed by Technion. And stealth drones that the US has used to such deadly effect in Pakistan are also developed by Technion." (NYC's deadly deal with Israeli apartheid, Sherry Wolf, indypendent.org, 20/1/12)

Sounds like the road to Orwell's 1984 could be paved with Technion inventions. But then, would Rupert Murdoch want it any other way?

Now, as it happens, the Australian's mini-me, the Australian Jewish News is also tickled pink to report that:

"A Jew and a Palestinian are working together to counteract 'damage' done by the University of Sydney's SRC's recent decision to boycott the Technion... SRC representatives Palestinian-Australian Fahad Ali and Jewish-Australian Joel Einstein have moved to counter the recent motion to sever all ties with the [Technion] as part of the international BDS movement. Ali and Einstein's counter-motion asserts a two-state solution is 'the ultimate goal', and 'argument and vilification of either side' is disruptive to peace and 'contribute[s] nothing'... Ali approached Einstein about drafting a counter-motion... 'I wasn't comfortable with continuing the motion when its flaws became evident... I was really unhappy the motion passed and wanted to reverse the damage. The counter-motion will reaffirm the SRC's commitment to supporting both Israeli and Palestinian students. There's no sense of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians on campus. We're good friends. People who aren't invested want to impose their views on us'." (Palestinian, Jew unite to reverse student BDS motion, 26/4/13)

WTF?!

Where's this Ali bloke coming from? What's this 'damage' he keeps referring to? What are these mysterious 'flaws' he's so uncomfortable with? And what's all this banging on about 'Israeli students' and 'Israelis on campus'? Is Sydney University under Israeli occupation or what?

Is Comical Ali for real or is he just taking the piss?

Could he perhaps - and I admit to standing on the wilder shores of speculation here - be yet another of the Technion's sinister creations, a BDS-busting 'Palestinian' robot, remotely controlled by some Dr Frankenstein from a secret room deep within the bowels of that institution?

Watch this space...

[*See my 17/4/13 post If They're Good Enough for the Technion...]

Doing the Donkey* in the NSW Knesset 3

On the speech of The Hon. Fred Nile, Christian Democrats, in the NSW Legislative Council, arising out of the NSW Parliamentary Friends of Israel (PFoI) "study mission" 'debate' of February 28:

Now Fred's a real Israel junkie. As he says, "I spent nearly 3 weeks in Israel in January and visited many of the pilgrim sites following the official tour." What's more, "I have been to Israel on 3 other occasions and have a good association with Israel."

So much for that bit of the motion which says that "the purpose of this study mission was to build an understanding amongst the delegates of the complex and various issues... etc, etc."

Or as Fred put it, "I did not have to go on this study tour to be convinced to give Israel support. I have always been on the record as strongly supporting the... state of Israel."

So there!

Not that we're surprised. After all, Fred has his Zionist talking points down to a fine art:

"I know there are a lot of statements made that Israel has to give up land for peace. Sadly, when Israel gives up land for peace, at it did with Gaza [?!], it gets rockets in return from both Hamas... and Hezbollah..."

"We saw the huge wall that had been built by Israel between Israel and Palestinian territory to protect Israel's security from suicide bombers."

Between Israel and Palestinian territory?!!!

Also, we have it on good authority from Fred that despite everything we've heard about those notorious Israeli checkpoints (chokepoints?) "there is tremendous movement from Palestinian territory into and out of Israel."

And ditto for Gaza, which is "not a concentration camp" because "every day, trucks are carrying in food, construction materials and so on, so that the community gets everything it needs."

Now that visit to the Knesset was certainly a buzz for Fred: "It has 120 members. The deputation learnt that this was based on the historical biblical Jewish Sanhedrin, which had 120 members." Why, he even discovered that "[t]here are some small religious parties that have some similarities to the Christian Democrats..."! (And you - some of you at any rate - think I'm just being satirical when I talk about the NSW Knesset.)

As you'd expect, Fred found Bethlehem "very interesting,"  although it must have come as a bit of a blow because "[i]t was previously a Christian city; now it is Muslim." And, sure enough, Fred being Fred, it was the Mooslims wot done it: "Sadly, a lot of the Christians have experienced persecution and discrimination, and that is why the majority have left..."

And this despite having been briefed by what he calls the "PLO Governor of Jerusalem" (no names of course). But what, one wonders, did Guv have to say? All we get from Fred is that he "shared some of the problems they were facing regarding finance and water."

Now if Fred's any guide here, the PA appears to have something of a PR problem. While  Israel's drama queens are banging on about Palestinian 'terrorism' and getting all the attention with 'Woe is us! We have only 15 seconds before being incinerated by a Hamas/Hezbollah/Iranian rocket', the PA dude just drones  on about money and water. Boooring!

Just to show what a handle the Israelis have on laying these foreign fools in the aisle, check this one out:

We're at Israel's Supreme Court in the awesome presence of one of Israel's "most experienced judges," Justice Dalia Dorner, right?

As Fred tells it: "During her presentation, one of the first things she mentioned was Australia's rejection of Jewish refugees prior to World War II."

Jewish refugees? Remember this is Zionist aristocracy speaking, the representative of a movement that in the 30s and 40s was only interested in importing the right kind of Jews into Palestine, the kind who would later go on to create their own non-Jewish refugees in 1948.

And here's Fred, whose Islamophobic Christian Democrats call for a "moratorium on Islamic [sic] immigration... while monitoring the willingness of the existing Islamic community to abandon support for terrorism...," so overcome with guilt that he tells us: "[E]ven though I was not the delegation leader, I did in my remarks apologise for that rejection - hopefully it will never occur again."

I reckon Justice Dorner's still dining out on that one.
  
Like his colleague Rick Colless, who thought the Israeli colonization of the West Bank was a process of "Palestinian people," "Muslim people," and "Jewish people" all "work[ing] together towards a peaceful solution," when it comes to the settlements Fred can see naught but peace and light:

"We visited [the] remarkable Israeli town of Efrat, in the region of Gush Etzion. We were beriefed by the energetic mayor... Oded Revevi, concerning the remarkable progress by the citizens of Efrat... What impressed me was the way that Jewish families are working in harmony with their Arab neighbours, who farm land right on the borders of Efrat and even within the town council boundaries - without any conflict or violence, but in a peaceful manner."

Apparently, no one told him that those same Arab "neighbours" are currently involved in trying to fend off yet another Israeli land grab in Israel's High Court of Justice.**

Finally, lest the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (listening in with rapt attention, in the form of its omnipresent CEO Vic Alhadeff, to the 'debate') be accused of not lining up a few Arab locals for our 'study' tourists to chat with, Fred cites two.

Although he describes Issa Jaber Abu Ghosh as a "Palestinian leader in [his] own village" of Abu Ghosh, it should be pointed out that he's actually an Israeli citizen and that Abu Ghosh, near Jerusalem, is in Israel (im)proper.

Typically, Fred doesn't refer to the content of Abu Ghosh's "briefing," except to describe it as "quite remarkable." (Still, if you're interested, you can check out a Radio National interview*** Abu Ghosh did with Rachael Kohn in 2008, where he's grandly described as "Chairman of the Interreligious Co-ordinating Council in Israel," and one who "takes his role very seriously as a promoter of peace and inter-religious co-operation.") Suffice it to say that the village of Abu Ghosh, which has a history of collaboration with the Zionist movement dating back to 1912****, was one of only 3 Palestinian villages to survive the Zionist ethnic cleansing of central Palestine in 1948. Any wonder then that Fred found the man "quite remarkable"?

The other Arab local was "Arabic Christian pastor Steven Khoury of the Arabic Calvary Church," whose presentation Fred describes as "very interesting." Just how "interesting" becomes apparent when you read, in a September 25, 2009 article in Israel's Haaretz newspaper, that Khoury - and here my flabber is well and truly gasted - is a PALESTINIAN CHRISTIAN ZIONIST who believes that "it's the job of the Jews to return to the land and convert to Christianity, while it's the job of Christians to help bring that about."*****

There you go. Just when you'd thought you'd heard it all with Khaled Abu Toameh being a Zionist and all, now you've discovered a Palestinian Christian Zionist. Top that!

Next in the Doing the Donkey in the NSW Knesset series: Walt (I get around) Secord, MLC.

[*See my 2/3/13 post Doing the Donkey; **See Palestinians argue in court against Efrat expansion, Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, 14/3/13;***The Spirit of Things, 22/6/08; ****Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, Hillel Cohen, 2008, p 78; *****Bible politics and Palestinian Zionists, Tristan Sturm]

War With Iran? What War?

John Hallam's highly relevant question on Q&A on Monday night sparked a range of interesting reactions which typically threw more light on the ignorance, the prejudices and the astonishing myopia of the panellists than on the issue Hallam's question raised - the fact that, earlier illegal and monstrous aggressions against Afghanistan and Iraq notwithstanding, we are in the process of being softened up for yet another such crime against humanity, this time involving Iran.

Hallam (an anti-nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth BTW) asked:

"Israel has approximately 200 nuclear weapons. Iran has a fatwa saying that nuclear weapons are unIslamic. Why are fingers being pointed at Iran and Gunter Grass? Whatever we think of the Iranian regime, and if I was Iranian, I would probably be in jail or dead, is there not a hint of bias in our perception?"

Just on that question itself. On the one hand it usefully highlights the rampant hypocrisy behind pointing the finger at an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program while remaining silent about Israel's actual and massive nuclear arsenal, a stance so typical of the corporate media. On the other, with its completely gratuitous insertion of "if I were Iranian, I'd probably be in jail or dead," Hallam unfortunately and unwittingly panders to the kind of demonisation of Iran employed by Israeli propagandists as part of their campaign to prepare Western opinion for a war on Iran.

First cab off the rank in response was celebrity UK philosopher AC Grayling, who blithely ignored the Israeli war drums to focus exclusively on Israel's banning of German writer Gunter Grass, whose offending poem, What Must Be Said, focused on those very drumbeats.

In accusing Israel, "which has objected very strongly to other countries not wanting to have Israeli orchestras or academics visit them and placing a boycott on them," of an "act of hypocrisy," Grayling revealed his ignorance of the global BDS campaign against the apartheid state. If only governments were orchestrating boycotts of Israeli orchestras, academics and the rest! Alas, at least at this stage, the boycotts are solely the work of dedicated and hardworking people of conscience, anti-apartheid activists, who do what they do often in the teeth of opposition by Western governments more than eager to cater to Israel's every wish and whim.

Ah well, be thankful for small mercies. At least Grayling managed to link the words 'hypocrisy' and 'Israel' in the same comment. But that was about as good as the panellists got.

Next came counter-terrorism 'expert' and House Arab Lydia Khalil, who also focused only on Gunter Grass. But before coming to that, I wish to vent first. It surely speaks volumes about Khalil that this individual - of Coptic Egyptian background - can be so utterly ignorant of Israel's serial aggressions against Egypt as to out herself on Q&A as a "supporter of Israel."

Now let's be charitable here. It may well be that Khalil's declaration of support for Israel is little more than the rhetorical device required for permission, as it were, to criticise Israel, given that ritual declarations of support for Israel are probably de rigueur in the security circles she inhabited back in the US. But somehow I don't think so. Still, even supposing she's just going through the motions on this, is it not an incredible state of affairs that, at least among Western elites, nothing can be said about the genocidal, warmongering apartheid state of Israel unless first hedged with qualifications, excuses, terms of endearment, and even expressions of undying love a la Barack Obama?

Anyway, back to Gunter Grass. Khalil declares his poem "facile" because the Israelis are not (excuse Madam's English) "going to nuclearly strike Iran first."

Apparently, she hasn't heard of the US Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) whose simulation using "the Esfahan nuclear facility in Iran, using the software developed for the Pentagon, showed that 3 million people would be killed by radiation within 2 weeks of the explosion, and 35 million people in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India would be exposed to increased levels of cancer-causing radiation" (The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, ucsusa.org, May 2005).

Or of the January 2007 Sunday Times report that that Israel (denied of course) was planning a nuclear bunker buster strike against Iran's nuclear program (Thinking the unthinkable: Iran, Israel, Afghanistan, William Bradley, Huffington Post, 29/2/12).

Or of Israel's previous ponderings (1973, 1991) on the use of nuclear weapons against its opponents (Did Israel ever consider using nuclear weapons? Yossi Melman, Haaretz, 7/10/10).

Then she had the gall to talk of Israel "outing" Grass as a "former Nazi," when, as a simple glance at his Wikipedia entry reveals, he "disclosed in an interview and a book that he had been conscripted into the Waffen-SS as a teenager in late 1944."

Finally, we had celebrity QC and human rights campaigner Geoffrey Robertson, whose hysterical rant demands to be quoted in full:

"It was a stupid move and it has been condemned by sensible opinion in Israel. Gunter Grass is is a kind of Harold Pinter figure, and we campaigned together against the Iranian fatwa on Salman Rushdie. But, listen, I don't entirely agree with you. Israel certainly has a hidden number, up to 200 nuclear weapons, they can deliver them by submarine. But Iran's record of lying through its teeth about its nuclear installations makes us disbelieve anything its supreme leader says, especially as its supreme leader was involved in the mass murder of 7,000 political prisoners, most of them atheists or enemies of God. And because their prime minister or their president wants to wipe Israel off the map and because their supreme leader believes that a state of nuclear-like chaos will trigger the return of the 12th Imam who is going to kill all us non-believers and set down Sharia law for the rest of the world."

Notice again that Robertson's as deaf as the others to Israel's war drums as they build to a crescendo? It's Gunter Grass front and centre again, but even on that score, so long as - wait for the exercise in ritual absolution - "sensible opinion in Israel" has "condemned" the fatwa on Grass, everything's just hunky dory.

Where would we be without "sensible opinion in Israel" now? Without it we'd have endless wars, relentless colonization, and the ongoing dispossession and exile of an entire people, wouldn't we? But wait, that's what we've got now! Oh, I'm so terribly confused.

Of course, it goes without saying that no such entity as "sensible opinion" exists in Iran. Or anywhere else in the region for that matter. No, Israel has cornered the market on "sensible opinion" in the Middle East, just as it has on democracy. Two cheers for Israel!!

No, for Robbo the issue isn't the coming war, or even Gunter Grass. It's Iran's alleged record of lying "through its teeth." You see, sensible Israel doesn't lie, and if Britain or the US do, well it's certainly not through their teeth, is it? That's far and away the worst kind of lying there is. And it's that kind of lying that means that Iranians probably deserve what Israel's cooking up for them, right. So what's the big deal?

And Iran massacres its people - unlike Israel, of course, which is too busy massacring Palestinians to bother, at least at this stage, with its own. And then of course there's the UK and US. No massacres there, right? Well, maybe occasionally.

Now as if all that weren't enough, our sharp-as-a-tack, legal eagle, who can parse words in a sentence faster than an IDF officer can ram his M16 into someone's face, trots out the Zionist propaganda trope of the decade: "Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map"! But that's only the half of it: if he's dumb enough to swallow that one unexamined*, he's dumb enough to go for lashings of Islamophobic tripe as well. Sounding like a denizen of some Muslim-bashing hate site, Robertson comes out with: "[Iran's] supreme leader believes that a state of nuclear-like chaos will trigger the return of the 12th Imam who is going to kill all us non-believers and set down Sharia law for the rest of the world."

[With counsel like this, Julian... ]

So "would you," asked compere Tony Jones, "condone a military action by Israel or the US to end that threat?"

And the answer? Are you ready for it? "No, not at this stage."

What a wimp!

[*See my 29/2/08 post Ahmadinejad: Our Part in His Downfall; for the full story, read Arash Norouzi's 'Wiped off the map' - the rumour of the century, antiwar.com]

Witches Brew 9

This post, the latest in my Witches Brew series on the anti-BDS 'debate' in the NSW Legislative Council on September 30, features the 'contribution' of one of the LC's 'Arab' contingent, namely the Liberal's John Ajaka. It makes for very sad reading indeed.

During the course of his speech, Ajaka confessed:

"My father was born in Lebanon and my mother was born in Palestine-Jerusalem. I say that because she has two birth certificates: one says that she was born in Palestine and the other says she was born in Jerusalem."

I find this statement quite puzzling. What's with this Palestine-Jerusalem business? Does the Australian-born (1956) Ajaka not know that Jerusalem is in Palestine? That it has always been in Palestine? Why this beating around the bush?

According to his 2007 Inaugural Speech (hereinafter IS), Ajaka's parents "travelled to Australia from Lebanon in the early 1950s." Could his mother then, have been a Palestinian refugee? In any case, didn't the woman whom he described as "the one who believed in me, who encouraged me, who pushed me," (IS) pass on something - anything - about the nakba which had overtaken her or her people? If so, there is nothing whatever in either Ajaka's IS or his September 15 LC speech to indicate this.

I find this a most curious matter. Certainly, I can't imagine the two beaming gents in the gallery, on whose behalf our motley crew of MLCs were strutting their stuff on that day (exclusive, I need hardly remind you, of the Greens' John Kaye and David Shoebridge), being at all backward in coming forward about some imaginery direct descent from the Kings David and Solomon, if not Abraham himself.

Anyhow, returning to our Lebanese-Palestinian-Australian's LC speech, just wrap your head around this load of old cobblers:

"This form of boycott as pushed by the boycott, disinvestment [sic] and sanctions is nothing more than prejudice and racism... directed at one part of our community... If this type of boycott were directed at an Islamic, Catholic or Jewish community or any other religious or cultural community it would not be acceptable... We in this country welcome people who want to do business here, because they provide jobs and resources. I must admit that I have had a few Brenner waffles - perhaps too many. It is unacceptable that such a business is being subjected to this dreadful boycott."

This is truly jaw-dropping stuff. There's a hint in sentence two that Ajaka doesn't even connect Max Brenner with Jews, let alone Israel, seeing it merely as a business, but I'll charitably assume that his words didn't quite come out as intended. That said, we seem to be dealing here with a guy who, though admitting to having a Palestinian mother, has so little awareness of the Palestine problem or BDS that he misconstrues it as attack on multiculturalism or a case of sectarianism. Clueless. Utterly, utterly clueless.

But it gets worse: "My office library contains the first book that I read, Mein Kampf. I read it as a year 11 student while studying advanced history."

OK... Deep breath... Read that again. Mein Kampf was the first book I read. The first book I read. The first. And that wasn't until he was in Year 11 at Marist Brothers in Kogarah (IS)! Ach mein Gott! Ajaka got all the way to senior high school without opening a book? And this is one of the blokes currently running the show in NSW?! Gott help us!

He continues, invoking the by now familiar anti-BDS Nazi slur:

"I still have it, but not because I respect it; in fact, I detest it and its message. I have kept it as a reminder of the potential outcome of a protest such as the one we are witnessing against one religious or ethnic community. It is a reminder that that should never happen in Australia. We cannot allow this type of prejudice and racism to fester and spread. It is not a protest; it is the dreadful beginning of a movement targeting one culture and one religion. I cannot accept that and I will not allow it to happen: I will do everything I can to prevent it... For those reasons, I reject the BDS movement and everything it represents."

What to make of this guy? In his IS he laments that in his youth he had "always been aware of my ethnic background; it was hard not to be, with the ever-present taunts and jeers thrown by other children," and that "still, even now, a latent prejudice runs through our community like an underground stream - a stream that bubbles to the surface in times and in places unexpected, as with the emergence of the stench and stain of One Nation."

And yet, he can laud former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, the man who pinched Pauline Hanson's policies and made them his own, as "a great leader of our country, whom I am proud to have always supported..."

Ajaka's rage against those who've messed up his childhood is palpable:

"When I was a child some of my peers sadly constructed my entire identity solely on my ethnic background. They isolated, separated and labelled me a wog. This was all I would ever be to them. Well, I do not want my children - any children - growing up with the feelings I had when I was growing up. We have come so far in the past 30 in tearing down the monolith of prejudice. I am here to add my own small contribution to the continuation of this important task. If the first reason for my presence in this place is to fight prejudice, the second is to fight injustice. I believe in the spirit of law."

And yet, Ajaka's seeming obliviousness to the almost century-old, bloody settler-colonial dynamic at play in Palestine/Israel - bizzarely, at no stage in his blessedly short 'contribution' does he even mention the word Israel - renders him blind to the fact that BDS is nothing more than a response to the Zionist project's ongoing isolation, separation, labelling (and worse) of his mother's people, a reaction to the massive monolith of (anti-Arab) prejudice and injustice which is the apartheid state of Israel.

Travelling Freak Show

"People from Oceania, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, the Arctic - people from all over the non-Western world - were brought to the US and soon formed a separate genre of freak show exhibit... Display of non-Westerners in freak shows was not intended as a cross-cultural experience to provide patrons with real knowledge of the ways of life and thinking of a foreign group of people. Rather it was a money-making activity that prospered by embellishing exhibits with exaggerated, bogus presentations emphasizing their strange customs and beliefs. Showmen took people who were culturally and ancestrally non-Western and made them freaks by casting them as bizarre and exotic cannibals, savages, and barbarians." (Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, Robert Bogdan, 1990, p 177)

Shades of Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose!

Just when you thought the highly politically incorrect freak show had gone the way of the dodo, along comes Mosab Hassan Yousef, aka The Green Prince, from deepest, darkest Hamastan, proudly brought to these distant shores by Bank Hapoalim B.M. & the Women's International Zionist Organisation (WIZO):

"'I could have been a hero and made my people proud of me... instead I became a traitor in the eyes of my people'. Mosab Hassan Yousef, Author 'Son of Hamas'."

So runs the caption accompanying the royal visage which stares out at us from WIZO's advertisement in The Australian Jewish News of July 29.

"'The Green Prince' will be WIZO's guest speaker at their major function on 30th August," it continues. "His remarkable and sometimes harrowing account of his transformation from Prince of Hamas to the Shin Bet's most reliable source will guarantee that there will not be an empty seat. Born in 1978 in Ramallah, his childhood was shaped by conflicting realities. His early development catapulted him between the Mosque and its positive attributes to stone throwing Jihadist rhetoric. In 1996 Mosab was arrested by the Israelis for buying weapons. It was then that the Shin Bet approached him. In the following 4 years unbelievable experiences occurred, many of which he will be sharing with us at his only speaking engagement in Sydney. By September 2000 at the outbreak of the second intifada Mosab had made the transition from wanting to take revenge on Israel to fully activated Shin Bet spy. You will be challenged when Mosab reveals his unlikely journey that has taken him 'through dark places and access to extraordinary secrets'. As proud Zionists and WIZO members we have often come together to celebrate our nation's triumphs. This story is a similar celebration of Israel's profound respect for life and democracy."

Those wishing to ooh & aah at the prince's tall tales & true on August 30 will pay a mere $65 for the privilege. All proceeds will no doubt be going to WIZO's favourite (tax-exempt?) Israeli charities, such as the Day Care Centre at Israel's Hatzor Air Base, which allows hardworking Israeli parents to bomb the bejesus out of Palestinian kids in the Gaza Strip while resting assured that their own little darlings are safe and sound in the arms of WIZO.

And the now 'Christian' prince's schtick? No attendee will be disappointed:

"At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist terrorist God... The problem is not in Muslims. The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God." (Although quite how such a sentiment gells with "the Mosque and its positive attributes" in the advertising escapes me.)

But I quibble. Despite being shorn of his bomb belt, Hamas charter, and, indeed, Quran, the princely exotic is guaranteed to send shivers of fear and delight up and down the spines of the WIZO ladies, just as Fijian 'cannibals' once did to their audiences in the freak shows of yesteryear.

So exactly why WIZO needed to gee them up with "If you care about Israel's future, you cannot miss this evening" puzzles me.

Battered Palestinian Syndrome 2

"The white liberal may be a little taken aback to know that from all-Negro audiences I never have had one challenge, never one question that defended the white man. That has been true even when a lot of those 'black bourgeoisie' and 'integration'-mad Negroes were among the blacks. All Negroes, among themselves, admit the white man's criminal record. They may not know as many details as I do, but they know the general picture. But let me tell you something significant: this very same bourgeois Negro who, among Negroes, would never make a fool of himself in trying to defend the white man - watch that same Negro in a mixed black and white audience, knowing he's overheard by his beloved 'Mr Charlie'. Why, you should hear those Negroes attack me, trying to justify, to forgive the white man's crimes! These Negroes are people who bring me nearest to breaking one of my principal rules, which is never to let myself become over-emotional and angry. Why, sometimes I've felt I ought to jump down off that stand and get physical with some of those brainwashed white man's tools, parrots, puppets. At the colleges, I've developed some stock put-downs for them: 'You must be a law student, aren't you?' They have to say either yes, or no. And I say, 'I thought you were. You defend this criminal white man harder than he defends his guilty self!'" (The Autobiography of Malcolm X, p 391)

Izzeldin Abuelaish, the subject of an earlier post by me (Battered Palestinian Syndrome, 24/2/11) is in town for this month's Sydney Writers Festival. Of course, a bit of PR never goes astray when you've come all the way from Canada to flog your wares, and by a process thus far unknown to us, the Herald's Good Weekend mag has come to the rescue with Healing Heart by David Leser.

If my first brush with a piece on Abuelaish had me squirming in my seat, this one's got me coughing and spluttering as well:

"'My God, my God, they killed my daughters. Shlomi, I wanted to save them, but they are dead. They were hit in the head. They died on the spot. Allah, what have we done to them? Oh God'."

What have we done to them?! We?!!

"Abuelaish was trusted and well respected, not just by members of the Israeli media, but by the country's medical fraternity as well. He'd been the first Palestinian obstetrician and gynaecologist to have been given a residency inside an Israeli hospital. He helped scores of infertile Israeli couples realise the joys of childbirth... He'd proven himself a man of peace, someone prepared to condemn his own side's suicide bombings, in private as well as in a public letter to the Jerusalem Post newspaper. 'Israelis are our friends', he would often tell his daughters, 'and we should love them as we love one another'."

The House Arab (see my final paragraph) always has to earn his master's trust. It's not 'Israelis can be our friends once the occupation is over and our rights as human beings have been restored', but Israelis are our friends, full stop. Honestly, if Malcolm X had heard such nonsense, he would've been too busy trying to find a bucket to get physical.

"Abuelaish was born in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza in 1955... [In 1967] Israeli tanks rolled through Abuelaish's street as they sought to secure the territory from Egyptian rule... [In 1970], the streets of the territory were widened so that Israeli tanks could negotiate their way more easily. Hundreds of houses, including Abuelaish's family home, were bulldozed to the ground."

So Abuelaish was a refugee. As Leser explains, "his family's land - located in what is today the northern Negev Desert of Israel - was lost during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (The land is today owned by the now-comatose former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and his family.)." His precarious Gaza refuge was invaded by the Israelis in 1956, about which Leser makes no mention, and again in 1967. And then his family home is bulldozed by none other than Ariel Sharon, the butcher who squats on Abuelaish land in the Negev to this day.

But we are expected to believe that all of this took a back seat to his romance with a kind Jewish family on whose farm (whose farm?) near Ashqelon he worked for just 3 months at the age of 15. Just to clarify, allow me to supplement Leser's sanitised sketch above with an account of what was really going on in the Gaza Strip at this time:

"Between 1967 and 1970, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip's refugee camps engaged in sporadic armed resistance against the Israeli occupation. In August 1970, Sharon began mopping up remnant guerilla cells. He operated systematically and with great brutality, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood and from grove to grove. The army imposed day-long curfews and gathered the entire population of a neighborhood or refugee camp (preferred sites were the Shatti and Jebalia camps), thus enabling the soldiers to make house-to-house searches and ensuring easy access for the military to any part of the Gaza Strip. This meant demolishing thousands of homes [not hundreds as Leser has it] and uprooting large portions of the Gaza Strip's citrus groves, the region's only crops. Orders were given to shoot any suspect without trial or inquiry, and over a thousand people were duly shot dead or executed." (Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians, Baruch Kimmerling, 2003, p 61-62)

"'Izzeldin was a special person, with a balanced point of view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict', Dr Shlomo Usef, the director of Soroka hospital observed. 'He saw it as a conflict with two sides, and himself as the person to bridge the two'."

Just how balanced Abuelaish is may be seen from the inclusion in his book (no, I still don't have a copy) of a 2001 photograph of the good doctor standing, with a broad smile on his face, with Ehud Barak, the war criminal who, as defence minister at the time of Operation Cast Lead directed the murderers of Abuelaish's daughters and hundreds more children just like them. (You can see the photograph at the Youth Against Normalization blog, 13/2/11) The balanced Abuelaish helps perpetuate the pernicious nonsense, referred to again and again on this blog, that the Zionist project of now hot, now cold ethnic cleansing (See my last post), of wiping Palestine and its people literally off the map, is somehow an equal struggle between two right sides which can be bridged if only other Palestinians were more like Abuelaish.

"Now based in Toronto with his 5 remaining children, Abuelaish was last year nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize following the publication of his book 'I Shall Not Hate'... Often a keynote speaker at peace conferences, he is in Spokane to talk at the Second International Conference on Hate Studies, a multidisciplinary forum seeking to combat extremism in all its guises: racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism..."

Hate studies?! My God, you can see this one coming a mile off. Cop this from the Keynote Speech at the First Conference to Establish the Academic Field of Hate Studies by Kenneth S Stern of The American Jewish Committee (AJC):

"But the problem [of anti-Semitism] is also one of definition. A 2002 Anti-Defamation League survey said that while 17% of Americans were anti-Semitic, only 3% of college students were. But during the period when that survey was taken, the ADL and many other Jewish organizations, including the AJC, were spending an inordinate amount of time tackling anti-Semitism on campus... The problems on campus were not coming from those who felt that Jews were greasy or slimy, or who wouldn't live next door to or wouldn't marry a Jew. They were from college students who didn't have a problem with Jews individually, but whose anti-Semitism was manifest in its collective expression, namely in the State of Israel." (The Need for an Interdisciplinary Field of Hate Studies, ajc.org, p 20)

Ah yes, the collective Jew, Israel. What bunkum! But, hey, Stern knows it's a stretch and so he adds the rider, and don't they all?: "This is not to say that criticism of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitism. It clearly is not."

Ah, so we can all go home then? Afraid not, there's a catch, and isn't there always?:

"But to single out only one people on the globe as not having the right to self-determination, or holding their state to a higher standard of behavior than that applied to any other nation, is a form of bigotry that doesn't get picked up in the classic measuring instruments looking at inter-group attitudes."

So this is the agenda Abuelaish is only too happy to lend his name too. Malcolm X has done us all a service in drawing our attention to the phenomenon of the House and the Field Negro*. Now that brown is the new black, if we're incapable of calling a spade a spade here, I'm sorry, but we may as well pack up and go home.

[* See my 21/4/11 post Slavish Devotion]

Slavish Devotion

Can't quite work out why, but these words of Malcolm X just sort of floated into my mind:

"There was 2 kinds of slaves. There was the house negro and the field negro. The house negro, they lived in the house, with the master. They dressed pretty good. They ate good, cause they ate his food, what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near their master, and they loved their master, more than their master loved himself. They would give their life to save their master's house quicker than their master would... If the master's house caught on fire, the house negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would... On that same plantation, there was the field negro. The field negro, those were the masses. There was always more negros in the field as there were negros in the house. The negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house, they ate high up on the hog. The negro in the field didn't get nothing but what was left in the insides of the hog. They call them chit'lins nowaday. In those days, they called them what they were, guts! That's what you were, a guteater. And some of you still are guteaters. The field negro was beaten, from morning til night. He lived in a shack, in a hut. He wore cast-off clothes. He hated his master. I say, he hated his master... When the house caught on fire, he didn't try to put it out, that field negro prayed for a wind. For a breeze. When the master got sick, the field negro prayed that he died... I'm a field negro." The House Negro vs The Field Negro

Now, down to business. ABC Radio National's Fran Kelly interviews Marrickville Council's deputy mayor Sam Iskander - with fascinating results:

FK:... But this wasn't just a Greens boycott. The Labor councillors in Marrickville supported the boycott as well, and I can reveal to you earlier this year Labor's left faction in NSW also voted in favor of the international boycott. The Labor Party deputy mayor of Marrickville is Sam Iskander. He's been interested in these issues long before he was elected to council. In 1977 he fled to Australia from the Lebanon civil war. He joins us now. What will happen tonight when Marrickville Council meets to vote on this issue?:

SI: "We are expecting the whole issue will be buried because we discovered after receiving a report from our staff saying it's gonna be very costly and it can't be in any way benefiting our residents. That's why we will kill it."

Hm, pretty strong language for someone who'd voted for BDS before the deluge.

FK: What about if the mayor... Fiona Byrne puts up a motion that's an in-principle support for the boycott so it doesn't bear any cost? Would you support that?

SI: "Well, we really need to go to the meeting in open mind but I don't see what does it mean in practical. I would really like to go and listen to the debate, but definitely the boycott against Israel is not a goer and since we rule that, and she is ruling that, what principles mean after that? It means nothing clearly. If it's going towards supporting morally the Palestinians to have their rights and to really be supporting for justice in their occupied territories, we all stand for that. Even Israel recognise that the right of the Palestinians to establish their own state it's legitimate. All the issue that really came from the BDS is to support the peace initiatives and the resolution been passed by the UN to establish 2 states and give the Palestinians their rights to live as human beings."

Israel recognises the right of the Palestinians to establish their own state? Oh really? And BDS is all about supporting the so-called peace process?* OH, REALLY? And what UN resolution are you on about, man?

FK: So you say the BDS campaign, which you voted for in December, is a general campaign to support the peace initiatives. Why then would you be backing away from it now?

SI: We are backing off because we can see that it's not something we can do as a council. It's not for us, it's for the federal [government] to decide, and we've been really under a lot of stress from the new-elected premier of NSW which he sent us a letter saying in 28 days we have to respond to his letter asking us to stop the boycott.

What do you know, just what the Israel Lobby and its creatures in the Murdoch press have been saying! And that fiercesome Bazza... oh shit, I've just soiled my pants!

FK: You say it's for the feds to decide. Has your local federal MP, Anthony Albanese, put pressure on the Labor councillors to back down on this?

SI: Not really. We've been communicating and we've been always in support of the 2 states, the Israeli state and the Palestinian state, and, as you know the international community are supporting them so he didn't put any pressure on us, but he always put us on the very clear vision to how can we do it if there is any chance to do it, but there is no chance to do it at all.

No, he didn't put pressure on us, he just sharpened our minds wonderfully.

FK: If there was a motion tonight that expressed solidarity with Palestinians, saying Marrickville Council remains symbolically, though not financially, opposed to the occupation, are you saying you wouldn't support that?

SI: We will definitely oppose the occupation. Definitely we will call for the rights of the Palestinians to establish their own state which the Israelis are working for it. The Jewish community they are very happy to support any peaceful relationship between the 2 sides and to encourage the Israeli government and the Palestinians to achieve the peaceful solution which leads to 2 states. That's what I think the best way to solve all these problems.

The Israelis are working for... whaaat?** The Jewish community are doing... whaaat?

FK: So you agree with Anthony Albanese who said you don't have to be anti-Israel to be pro-Palestine, that's your view. I'm just wondering if you think that will be evident in some kind of motion voted on tonight.

SI: It's not like that really. It's about the BDS, and the BDS to us, it's not a goer, it can't be done in our capacity as Marrickville Council. That's why all of us, we will vote unanimously, that's what I'm expecting, against the BDS. (Marrickville Council Israel boycott under the spotlight, 19/4/11)

Gives the term party animal a whole new meaning now, doesn't it?

[* Iskander clearly has no idea what BDS is all about. To quote from Omar Barghouti's new (2011) book BDS: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights: "The BDS Call, anchored in international law and universal principles of human rights, adopts a comprehensive rights-based approach, underlining the fact that for the Palestinian people to exercise its right to self-determination, Israel must end its 3 forms of injustice that infringe international law and Palestinian rights by: 1. ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands [occupied in 1967] and dismantling the wall 2. recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality 3. respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, as stipulated in UN resolution 194." (p 6)]

[** Those interested in taking a cold, hard look at the reality of the so-called peace process might like to read another new (2011) book, Israeli Rejectionism: A Hidden Agenda in the Middle East Peace Process by Zalman Amit & Daphna Levit: "This book... argues that there is no peace between Israelis and Palestinians after 62 years because Israel never wanted to achieve peace with its Palestinian neighbours. In recognition of political expediencies and political realities, Israel has consistently proclaimed its commitment to peace, but its consistent strategy was to sabotage any real possiblity of peace. It did so because its leadership has always been convinced that peace is not in Israel's interest. We argue that this began even before the establishment of the State of Israel. Indeed, one can detect this conviction even among the early Zionist leaders such as Herzl." (p 11)]

PS 22/4/11: Compare MC's final resolution (passed 8-4) with Barghouthi's 3 'forms of injustice' above: That Council: 1. Resolve not to pursue the GBDS against Israel in any shape or form as called for in the December 14 resolution; and 2. Remains concerned about Palestinian human rights and calls on Israel to end the occupation of all Arab lands and dismantle the Wall; ensure the fundamental rights of Palestinians to full equality; and respect, protect and promote the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties. Supported by Clrs Hanna (Ind), Iskandar (ALP), Macri (Ind), Olive (G), O'Sullivan (ALP), Phillips (G), Tsardoulias (ALP) and Wright (ALP) It's a bastardized version of Barghouthi, lacks teeth (without BDS), and flies in the face of Iskander's nonsense above about the 'peace process'. What a rabble! Only Clrs Byrne, Kontellis, Peters (Greens) and Thanos (Ind) came out of Tuesday night's meeting with any credit.

Homely Mona

Oh my mama told me
'Cause she said she learned the hard way
She say she wanna spare the children
She say don't give or sell your soul away
'Cause all that you have is your soul
So don't be tempted by the shiny apple
Don't you eat of the bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
'Cause all that you have is your soul

(All That You have Is Your Soul, Tracy Chapman)

The Age has finally today managed an opinion piece on Egypt's intifada - by an Egyptian-born "writer and lecturer on Arab issues" no less. Unfortunately, while Mona Eltahawy 's All Egyptians are being liberated from the burden of history promised a fresh, Egyptian perspective, it delivered little more than cliches: "Generation Facebook - kicking aside the burden of history, determined to show us just how easy it is to tell the dictator it's time to go."

I wish that were the worst of it, but it wasn't. Well into her puffery Eltahawy came out with this decidedly peculiar statement:

"Meanwhile, the uprisings are curing the Arab world of its obsession with Israel. Successive Arab dictators have tried to keep dissent at bay by distracting people with the Israeli-Arab conflict. Israel's bombardment of Gaza in 2009 increased global sympathy for Palestinians. Enough with dictators hijacking sympathy for Palestinians and enough with putting our lives on hold for that conflict."

How facile is that? Would that the Arab world were obsessed with the threat posed by Israel!

Is this Egyptian writer seriously telling us that Egyptian dictators, Sadat and Mubarak, were in the business of distracting their people by harping on the Israeli-Arab conflict as she calls it? How? By concluding a peace agreement with Israel and establishing diplomatic relations? Is that what she means by an obsession with Israel? How has Mubarak, USrael's useful tool in keeping Gaza sealed off from the outside world, hijacked sympathy for Palestinians and put poor little Mona's life on hold? Please explain.

OK, so who the hell is Mona Eltahawy anyway, and why, after the above, should we be reading such drivel? Sampling a selection of her earlier pieces reveals a woman seemingly so desperate to fit in with the trendies of her New York* home, that she's effectively become an advocate for Israel, happily sticking it to the Arabs.

In What use are all the wars? (Washington Post, 28/7/07), she casually notes that "Israel's occupation of Palestinian land has caused no end of misery, poverty and frustration for the Palestinians." (Yes, Mona, living under occupation can be sooo frustrating!) But then, as if apologising for her use of the 'o' word, she hastens to add, "It has even scarred the Israeli people's conscience." Ah, but not enough to stop them from voting for one war-mongering, Palestinian-dispossessing, Palestine-colonising governent after another.

Then she's lamenting that, although "Egypt has been at peace with Israel for 28 years," Mubarak "has never visited Israel." It's just not good enough, is it? Mubarak should not only be in bed with Israel, but be seen to be.

So Mona points the way: "I visited Israel for the first time in September 1997... I wanted to see things for myself and not have to rely on the 'official' narrative given by our media." And? And? And what did you find, Mona? The lady doesn't say! How coy is that?

But for sheer anti-Arab venom (and gaping silence about Israel), Israel, opium of the people, written, mind you, during Israel's 2008-2009 wilding in Gaza (The Globe & Mail, 30/12/08), takes the cake. In it, Mona lets fly at those who dared to ask why she wasn't writing about Gaza. Her answer? Writing about Gaza implies "toeing the party line, Hamas is good, Israel is bad," and she'll be buggered if she's going to give in to pressure and say a bad word about Israel.

No, Mona's New York-friendly frame of reference completely obfuscates political Zionism's 100+ year project of swallowing Palestine while simultaneously spitting out its indigenous Palestinian Arab inhabitants by implying an equivalence between Israeli coloniser and Palestinian colonised, Israeli ethnic cleanser and Palestinian ethnically cleansed: "But what to say about a conflict that for more than 60 years now has fed Arab [she can't even bring herself to refer to Palestinians as Palestinians] and Israeli senses of victimhood and their respective demands to stop everything else we're doing and pay attention to their fights because what's the slaughter of anyone else - be they in Darfur, Congo or anyone else - compared to their often avoidable bloodletting." There you go, folks: even while Israel's in the thick of massacring well over a thousand Palestinians in Gaza, wounding and scarring thousands more, and reducing their homes and vital infrastructure to smoking rubble, Mona's hitting us with the old Zionist talking point, Why are you anti-Semites focusing on Gaza when you've got Darfur and the Congo to focus on? And yes, Mona, your mutual bloodletting could have been avoided if only your Israeli friends hadn't broken the ceasefire which had been in place for months beforehand.

But even the above faux balancing of victims is unmasked by Mona's vile ascription of Palestinian blame for the actions of a suicide bomber in the midst of an anti-Israel demonstration in Iraq! Of course, the bigger picture of Zionist Jewish-state sectarianism deliberately exporting its divisive ethno-religious model to the rest of the Middle East via Zio-conservative agenda-setters in the former Bush administration, most lately in Iraq**, is entirely missing in Mona's off-the-top-of-my-head opinion piece.

And then she's off on an Arab-bashing rant in which no reference to Israeli agency is allowed to intrude: "Lebanon keeps generations of Palestinian refugees in camps that serve as virtual jails." (But what are they doing in Lebanon in the first place, and why do they remain there?) Jordan killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in 1970. (But why were they in Jordan in the first place?) Christian Phalangists slaughtered 3,000 Palestinian refugees in Sabra & Shatila in 1982. (But whose allies were they and who allowed them into the camps?) Israeli defense minister, Ariel Sharon, was found guilty of indirect responsibility for that massacre by an Israeli inquiry. (But did that prevent him from later becoming prime minister?)

Finally, after arguing that Mubarak "unleashed state-owned media frenzy at Israel that has fanned a near-hysterical hatred for the country among ordinary Egyptians," Mona trips herself up with "Yes, Israel's occupation of Arab land angers Egyptians," and then proceeds to compound the mess by whining that, alas, "there is absolutely no space in Egyptian media, culture or intellectual circles for discussing Israel as anything but an enemy." But what is Mona saying here if not: Sure the Israelis may be occupying and abusing the Palestinians (who have really only got themselves to blame for that), but why aren't we Egyptians celebrating The Joy of Israel?

The website ikhras.com has appropriately included Mona in a list of 'Housies', which it explains is "short for House Arabs and House Muslims, equivalent to Malcolm X's 'House Negro' and 'Field Negro'," and wonders why she and the other Housies were too busy to attend a protest outside the White House against the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen and in support of WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning. Ikhras even hazards a tongue-in-cheek guess as to what Mona may have been up to at the time: "Mona Eltahawy was addressing the TEDWomen audience. She spoke about everything there is to know about Muslim women in a nutshell except for the fact that they're on the receiving end of US bombs and depleted uranium and bear the brunt of oppression under occupation in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine as widows and mothers of shattered, displaced, tortured families." (Disorganized priorities (as usual), 18/12/10)

Jump to Mona's blog, monaeltahawy.com, for A Jew & a Muslim go upstate (5/9/09), and you find it's even worse than Ikhras could ever have imagined. There you can read all about the interfaith "retreat" where, for three - THREE! - days "we compar[ed] and contrast[ed] the Torah's and Quran's rendition of the Joseph saga." Oh, and you'll be surprised to know that one of Mona's "favorite people" is a "Jewish woman" who argues that "My people were kicked out but it's always been our land. And now we've just returned to our homeland."

[* Talk about being tempted by the shiny apple! ** See my 22/12/08 post Absent-Minded Professors Inadvertently Set Iraq Ablaze]