Why Aren't Australian Journalists Backing Julian Assange? 4

The matter of Julian Assange and Australian msm journalism just got more and more interesting for me today when I stumbled across a change.org petition update, headed 150,000 signatories then Twitter suspends our petitioner's account on Twitter.

The update, of 19/6/19, was written by... a Phillip Adams, Brisbane, Australia. Of course, the author of the update, is emphatically NOT the well-known Radio National broadcaster despite the identical spelling of their names.

The update set me wondering whether or not any of the 150,000 signatories to the original petition signed it thinking the Brisbane Adams was actually the ABC broadcaster. (You can access the former's update at change.org where he gives his suspended twitter account as @PhillipAdams64.)

Now I may be wrong, but my hunch is that few of them referred to in the update even knew who the broadcaster was.

But then a friend dropped in, assuring me that he'd heard the ABC broadcaster discussing Julian Assange, he seemed to think, positively. This, I thought was most unlike our PEP (Progressive Except Palestine) broadcaster, but felt compelled to check it out anyway.

Adams the broadcaster, of course, runs ABC Radio National's Late Night Live (LNL) program, so I headed to the LNL archives, specifically to the entry labelled 'Journalism', and trawled back in time until I found the only discussion in all of the entries listed there on Julian Assange.

It was dated 2/3/11, and headed Robert Manne: The untold story of Julian Assange. (If Robert Manne is unknown to you, just click on the relevant MERC label below.) Note that Adams and Manne are discussing only that period, in the mid-1990s, well before WikiLeaks, when Assange and others like him were collectively known as cypherpunks.

To cut to the chase, here is Adams' guest, Robert Manne, responding to his request to say where Assange stood in relation to the other 1990s cypherpunks. Note that, while a grudging, highly qualified admiration for Assange is the most we get from Manne, we don't even get that from Phillip Adams. Here's Manne's assessment of Assange, the cypherpunk, vis-a-vis other cypherpunks of the time:

"[Assange] is a real extremist on the hardline, electronic libertarian [model/spectrum?] who just would not put up with any state interference to individual liberties. On the other hand, he was from the point of view of left/right economics, more a left-wing libertarian or a left-wing anarchist in that he just didn't believe in the neoliberal philosophy of dual market and capitalism. So he had quite a complicated position which comes from his postings - which are all available if anyone took the trouble to to read them. So he is very hardline on the question of the struggle against the state trying to suborn individuals who want to communicate privately on the one hand. On the other hand, he's not an Ayn Rand type, whereas a lot of [the cypherpunks] were."

Typically, Phillip Adams asked Manne if Assange was "simply anti-American." Manne disagreed, saying:

"He understands the evils of Communism. One of his great heroes is Alexander Solzhenitsyn... One of the ironies is that people like John Pilger are now his great supporters, but in fact - or Michael Moore, the film maker - Assange doesn't respect people like that in reality... He's not a journalist at all, but even if he was to some extent a journalist... He is a revolutionary, not a non-violent revolutionary... He is the first person who has gotten away with threatening the extremely powerful."

Note that line, "He's not a journalist, but even if he were..."! Not to mention Manne's flabbergasting characterisation of Assange as a "violent" revolutionary because he "got away with threatening the extremely powerful."

Finally, I repeat, this was the only LNL program which touched on the subject of Julian Assange in the LNL archive, and was emphatically NOT any kind of endorsement of him. Consider this for the record.

Robert Manne & Murdoch's Australian

How interesting that Robert Manne, who slammed Murdoch's Australian for its multitude of sins (but not its knee-jerk support for Israel) in his 2011 Quarterly Essay, Bad News: Murdoch's Australian & the Shaping of the Nation, is now having his new book, The Mind of the Islamic State promoted by... Murdoch's Australian.

The latest expression of this promotion is Paul Monk's largely favourable review of the book in The Weekend Australian. Monk being Monk, of course, doesn't think Manne has gone quite far enough because he doesn't trace IS's roots all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad and to Islam itself. As he puts it:

"In short, the one God of Islam is not the God of Abraham, of Micah, of Isaiah - or of Jesus. Mohammed's deity is a god of war and conquest and the Sunnah, the example of the prophet, is one of jihad and the killing of one's enemies and critics. Manne does not address this fundamental problem." (5/11/16)

Monk, of course, conveniently omits any reference to the God of Numbers, Deuteronomy and Joshua (presumably the same "the God of Abraham" etc), who urges his people to practice herem warfare, that is, total destruction/ extermination, something which has no parallel in the Qur'an. For example: "When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations... and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy." (Deuteronomy 7:1-2).*

But my interest here is not in Monk or his madness, it's more in Manne and his newfound accommodation with that fountainhead of "bad news," as he called it in 2011, The Australian. Will we be seeing a letter from Manne, distancing himself from the mad Monk in tomorrow's Australian, for example? I, for one, won't be holding my breath.

[Required reading on this business: Philip Jenkins' 2011 book Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses.]

Blowing the Whistle on Murdoch's Australian

An extract from Ideology runs rampant at Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspaper by Jim Buckell, News Corpse escapee:

"Under the editorship of Paul Kelly and then David Armstrong this extremist tendency ['unwavering, often knee-jerk conservative ideology'], while not unknown, was usually kept in check by a range of views. Sadly, in the noughties this position gradually gave way to the thundering of the neoconservatives. The paper began to act like more of a propaganda sheet for the rightwing of the Liberal Party than a broad-based sounding board for big ideas and public policy. This period roughly corresponded with [Chris] Mitchell's ascendancy as editor-in-chief. And therein lies the dilemma. No matter how well written, no matter how well edited, the paper's right-wing bias is overwhelming. The tone is hectoring and unforgiving, making it frustrating to read and tricky to work around as a journalist. As a reporter you learn how to navigate around masthead biases that don't fit in with your own values or approach to news gathering. It's a survival technique you have to master to balance the demands of editors with the fragile trust you build with your sources... I can't read the paper anymore. It's too distressing seeing ideology run rampant because it suits the ideology of Rupert Murdoch and his allies. The influence the Australian and News Corp Australia wield by setting a market-based, small-government agenda is widely understood because it's so blatant. Less well scrutinised is the impact of groupthink on the profession of journalism within Fortress News. When dissent is marginalised and self-censorship is an unquestioned norm, the newsroom culture becomes self-serving. Chris Mitchell may have been a conjuror but we should be under no illusion about the price he extracted." (theguardian.com, 7/12/15)

Buckell's piece, while welcome, is too short on detail. If only he could eventually write an extended analysis of the beast, along the lines of Robert Manne's 2011 Quarterly Essay - but without Manne's selective vision - see my 2 posts, The Silence of the Intellectuals 1 & 2 (6-7/9/11).

A trawl through the hundreds of comments which followed on the Guardian Australia website was an interesting experience given that so few of the commenters actually read The Australian (and, I suspect, are blissfully unaware of its malign hold on our political class). Typically, therefore, only 3 were sufficiently aware of its ferocious Zionism to refer to the fact:

"I've read the Australian since 1980, and the last few years the constant bashing of the ABC, and extreme slant to the right makes it hard to read more than half the paper. Worst of all are the diatribes of Greg Sheridan, sycophant of murderous regimes like China, and an appalling apologist for the crimes of Israel and its occupation of the West Bank. I remember back in the 80s before Timor gained independence his shameful apologia for the murder of Timorese by the Indonesian government."

"The Australian Goebbels. Heil Rupert. But now he prays to the mountain of Zion. The rest is just business."

"The Australian - cheerleader for Israel, relentless Muslim-basher, climate change denier. Try getting a pro-Palestinian letter published - no chance - while some members of the pro-Israel brigade seem to have a season ticket to the letters page."

And, apart from that last comment, no one - not one! - mentioned The Australian's now dominant feature, its rampant Islamophobia.

On the other hand, it was good to see so many Guardian readers taking the opportunity to have a swipe at the Guardian itself, although none mentioned its insidious liberal Zionist line, which emanates from its (relatively) new editor-in-chief Jonathan Freedland, and surfaces in opinion pieces by him and the likes of Nick Cohen, Hadley Freeman and Rafael Behr.

The Australian Fangs Bob Carr

If Murdoch's Australian is really, as it it hypes itself on its masthead, The Heart of the Nation, then I'm afraid it's a black one.  
Robert Manne, in his 2011 Quarterly Essay on the paper, Bad News: Murdoch's Australian & the Shaping of the Nation, correctly described it as "unusually ideological... committed to advancing the causes of neoliberalism in economics and neoconservatism in... foreign policy... a remorseless campaigning paper."

He went on in his essay to discuss The Australian's various ideological campaigns, whether against 'the Left', black armband historians, The Greens, the ABC, the Rudd government, those opposed to Australian involvement in Iraq, and what it has lately taken to calling, in the area of climate science, 'warmists'. But (for reasons best known to himself) Manne devoted no space whatever to The Australian's wholly uncritical and unrelenting editorial support for the state of Israel, something that renders it indistinguishable from the Likudnik Australian Jewish News.

The latest example, its editorial of November 11, targets former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr, a relatively recent, but quite blessedly public, defector from the ranks of those who can be relied on to toe the line on Israel at every turn.

More venomous than the taipan, more mendacious than Pinocchio, more furious than the proverbial woman scorned, a mere extract suffices:

"If this were only a random display of relevance deprivation syndrome by Mr Carr in his dotage it would be sad. But the one-time premier of NSW is a consummate operator with an eye for a headline and a nose for mischief. We cannot say what is in his heart, but his analysis is deeply flawed and deserves to be exposed. In some ways Mr Carr is falling into the Left's posture trap of late that has seen Labor MP Melissa Parke in lock step with the ratbags of the sorry boycott, divestment and sanctions cavalcade that lays the blame for the ills of the Middle East on Israel. On the other hand, of course, are the rabid Holocaust deniers. It's an ugly pincer movement that is trying to assault not just a vibrant democracy but the only functioning one in that troubled region. Far from being a polity of fanatics, Israel is a pluralist, if sometimes rowdy and passionate, state that does not discriminate against Palestinians; its laws are ethnically blind. An incendiary term such as apartheid does Mr Carr no credit, drawing a parallel between two systems, histories and struggles that are unrelated. Palestinians have lived well in Israel and have enjoyed all the rights of normal citizenship. Some have pointed to the dividing wall on the West Bank as an act of hostility, but Israel has an obligation to protect its children from the clear and present threat of attack. No one wants to see atrocities such as car bombs at school bus stops, but this is the grim reality for Israelis." (Bob Carr's ludicrous epiphany: Israel is a beacon for democracy in a hostile region)

The Saturday Paper

Is Melbourne publisher (The Monthly, Quarterly Essay) Morry Schwartz's TSP a brave new venture in fearless, investigative journalism? Or just another exercise in Zionist gatekeeping?

"[Peter] Craven [editor of Quarterly Essay 2001-04] is on friendly terms with Schwartz but acknowledges the publisher's heart 'will always belong to Robert [Manne*, La Trobe University academic, author and member of QE's editorial board]. He says Schwartz was always keen for robust editorial debates, becoming noticeably 'toey' on discussions of Israel. Everyone says Schwartz responds viscerally to this question. 'Loyalty to the idea of a Jewish homeland is very important to him,' argues Manne. Says Craven: 'He's very one-eyed on these sort of things. I once said to [his wife] Anna I was going to see [the opera] Tristan und Isolde and she said, 'Peter, I won't even buy German goods.' In 1982, Schwartz published Blanche D'Alpuget's biography of Bob Hawke after Penquin and Melbourne University Press turned it down. 'Morry was very influenced by the fact that Bob was a huge supporter of Israel,' D'Alpuget tells me. 'It was really Bob's connection to Israel that he leapt at.' (Schwartz disputes this; he says he sensed the public was hungry for political biography...) Critics wonder how TSP will cover the Middle East. Schwartz says: 'I think Israel is over-tackled. The media are too obsessed with it; but a balanced view, sure.' He imposed upon Craven his preference for Australian-centric content but concedes a newspaper can't ignore world crises..." (Paper tiger: Morry Schwartz's gamble, Kate Legge, The Australian, 14/12/13)

[*For Robert Manne and QE, see my three posts: Who Speaks for Palestine? (2/9/11); The Silence of the Intellectual 1 (6/9/11) and 2 (7/9/11).]

Something About 'The Australian'

For sheer venomous, strident, pro-Israel zealotry, Murdoch's Australian is hard to beat.

Its January 25 editorial on the occasion of the Malaysian prime ministers's visit to the Gaza Strip, An unwise Hamas dalliance, is a case in point. Hamas is variously pilloried as:

* "an avowedly terrorist organisation that is denounced and ostracised by much of the world";
* "an unashamedly terrorist organisation";
* "a creature of Egypt's extremist Muslim Brotherhood";
* "a cat's paw for Iran's desire to obliterate Israel";
* "an odious outfit."

Then, in its February 2 editorial, Israeli airstrike necessary, on Israel's latest act of unprovoked aggression against Syria, allegedly because anti-aircraft missiles were being transferred to Hezbollah in Lebanon, no effort is spared to justify the attack :

* "Israel had no alternative";
* "No nation anywhere could stand by and watch such provocative transfers under its nose";
* "[Israel] has a clear duty to its citizens to stop the anarchy in Syria spilling into Lebanon."

Which brings be back to one of life's little mysteries. Why is it that, in all of Robert Manne's 140-page essay, Bad News: Murdoch's Australian & The Shaping of the Nation (Quarterly Essay 43, 2011), devoted to an analysis of the paper's various crusades, there is no analysis of the paper's relentless, head-kicking Zionism? (See my 7/9/11 post The Silence of the Intellectual 2.)

Who's Afraid of Tony Judt?

This post is prompted by Phillip Adams' Late Night Live discussion with US historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands) and prominent Australian author and academic (politics) Robert Manne on April 10. The topic: Thinking the 20th Century: the life & work of Tony Judt.

Born in the UK of Jewish parents, Judt was a highly acclaimed historian and essayist who died in tragic circumstances in 2010. (See my 7/8/10 post Tony Judt (1948-2010) RIP.)

As it happened, much of the discussion that night focused on Judt's controversial essay, Israel: The Alternative, published in The New York Times Review of Books in 2003.

What particularly struck me was the extent to which both Snyder, who had helped the stricken Judt put together his last book, Thinking the 20th Century, and Manne, who stated that Judt was "by far the contemporary intellectual I feel most connected with," sought to distance themselves from that essay. It had me thinking: here it is 2012, and two highly educated men, professing nothing but the highest regard for Judt and his example, still found the content of that essay (I presume alone of all Judt's writings) too hot to handle, such is the baneful and chilling influence still of the Zionist thought police on Western liberal intellectuals.

Because neither Snyder nor Manne could bring themselves to grapple seriously with what Judt had to say in his Israel essay, most of which, I hasten to predict, they would have accepted without demur if the subject had been South African apartheid, I intend to address the essay (including its flaws) before moving on to our two intellectuals' instructive reaction to it.

Judt correctly put his finger on George W Bush's reduction to the role of "a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli [Sharon] cabinet line: 'It's all Arafat's fault'."

He correctly described the Palestinians as being "corralled into shrinking Bantustans."

He correctly located the Zionist movement in the wave of ethnographic nationalist movements which sprang up following the collapse of the Habsburg and Romanov empires and which sought to carve out ethnically homogenous states from the rubble of those empires, often at the expense of "inconvenient local minorities, who were consigned to second-class status." It is in this context that Judt famously observed: "The very idea of a 'Jewish state' - a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded - is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism."

So far so good. It is in his discussion of Israel's 'democracy', however, that Judt stumbled. Failing to note that Israel can only claim to be both Jewish and (at least formally) democratic because the vast majority of Palestinians were expelled beyond its 'borders' in the period from 1947-1950, he concluded that, given the rising Palestinian birthrate in the occupied territories and among its own remnant Palestinian population, Israel would eventually end up with a de facto Arab majority and can therefore only remain Jewish and democratic if it becomes "the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project."

Unfortunately, at this point, Judt completely overlooked the full-scale Zionist ethnic cleansing of the late forties which enabled Israel to claim that it was both Jewish and democratic in the first place. To omit this (probably not deliberately) was a cardinal error indeed and constitutes the real problem with Judt's essay. His failure to further factor in the legal right of all ethnically-cleansed Palestinians to return to their homeland within pre-1967 Israel only makes the earler omission worse.

Judt's argument that the time has passed for a two-state solution - "there are too many settlements, too many Jewish settlers, and too many Palestinians, and they all live together, albeit separated by barbed wire and pass laws" - has only grown in credence since he made it almost 12 years ago.

As has the relevance of the following statement: "The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians."

And this: "But what if there were no place in the world today for a 'Jewish state'? What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome? It is not such a very odd thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural."

That is not to say that Judt sees a one-state solution to the conflict as a cakewalk, as he made clear in his conclusion: "To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim. In any case, no one I know of has a better idea."

Now observe how first Timothy Snyder and then Robert Manne duck and weave when reminded by Phillip Adams of Judt's argument for a one-state solution and his assessment of Israel as an anachronism:

"There you're onto an important thing in this book about the way Thinking the 20th Century works. It doesn't work by way of me telling Tony how smart he is and how I agree with him about everything and how wonderful Tony Judt might be. It works as a long argument between him and me which I think... [Adams, interrupting: But that's what makes it work. If it wasn't that it could have become an exercise in being sychophantic.] Yeah, frankly it would have been disrespectful to the way Tony and my relationship always was and the way he was in the wider world. But that's just all by way of saying I didn't particularly think that that was intellectually Tony's most impressive achievement. I mean he published it right around the same time he published an essay about Belgium where he thought the one-state solution that is Belgium will not work. So the suggestion that a one-state solution in Israel is plausible when it's not plausible in Belgium, which is after all a much nicer neighborhood, struck me as not particularly convincing. But it really goes back to your previous question because what I think he was doing was not so much criticising Israel - you know the debate about the one-state/two-state in Israel is sort of old hat - what he was trying to do I think was to begin a serious conversation in the US about what Israel is, might be, should be, and that he failed in that I think speaks badly about us [ie the Americans]. But that he tried to do it and that he had the optimism about us that you could just talk about these things in principle as opposed to ad hominem, that's the kind of optimism you have to have if you want to be an intellectual in politics."

OMG! Is Belgium still standing? Thank God for nicer neighborhoods. Hm, I wonder what made Palestine a not-so-nice neighborhood?

"[Adams: Robert, your view on this issue?] I was hoping you'd ask. Look, I don't think he was right about the one-state solution. I think it's one of the moments of political naivety which is very rare for Tony Judt. On the other hand... it seems to me that his understanding of what went wrong with Israel was profoundly important and he's asked by Timothy in the book whether he thinks he's courageous for having been a lone voice in the mainstream, deeply critical of the drift of Israel and he says 'No, not at all. I might've been a bit more honest than other people but I wasn't particularly courageous in that'. But what he saw and the central truth of all this is that when Israel made the decision in 1967 to hold on to the West Bank and Gaza it made a catastrophic decision for its future, and that everything that one could've thought from then about what would happen has happened, and I think he's a very important intellectual for the fact that he saw how deeply wrong that decision was and what flowed from it, and even though I don't think in any way it's his most distinguished writing, it's very important writing because I think it shows hard-headedness and courage. I think he was wrong to say he wasn't courageous. In Australia it's easy to say certain things and you only get a little bit knocked about. He was, as I understand it, severely taken apart by his own peer group, the liberal Jewish intellectuals and I think history will show him to have been absolutely right in his fundamental judgment on what had gone wrong with Israel from 1967 onwards in particular."

In his essay, Judt's focus is not on how Israel supposedly 'lost its way' only after the 1967 conquest and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. There is no suggestion in it, as Manne would have us believe, of the soft-Zionist conceit whereby Israel's fabled 'soul' was doing just fine until sullied by the fateful decision to remain in occupation of the Palestinian territories it had conquered in 1967. But by leading us down this particular garden path, Manne conveniently sidesteps Judt's two key arguments: that, in a multiethnic and multicultural world, the blatantly ethnographic Israel is an anachronism; and that, however difficult the transition to a binational state in Palestine/Israel, it is still the least traumatic and most desirable outcome.

Despite Manne's stated admiration for Judt's intellectual courage, he has always shied away from dealing with the core issue of the Middle East conflict - the morality of establishing an ethnographic, apartheid state in the land of another people. There's no way, it seems, he's prepared to risk being severely taken apart by his own peer group by going there.

Clearly, he's no Tony Judt.

[See also my 2/9/11 post on Manne, Who Speaks for Palestine?]

Lyons Contradicts Van Onselen at The Australian

Peter Van Onselen, The Australian's rambammed contributing editor writing on Robert Manne's Quarterly Essay critique of his paper in last Saturday's edition:

"Manne's conspiracy that at The Australian the tail wags the dog - editorial policy shaping news gathering - is overstated." (Manne allows ideology to cloud his judgments)

John Lyons, The Australian's Middle East correspondent, toes the paper's pro-Israel editorial line while 'reporting' Abbas' and Netanyahu's recent UN speeches in the same edition:

"Since the barbaric Palestinian campaign of killing civilians in the second intifada... only 8 years ago, Israelis distrust Palestinians." (Netanyahu, Abbas hail wins but victories Pyrrhic at best)

"'I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) and the birthplace of Jesus (peace be upon him), to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people'. To an Israeli audience, this was devastating. Obviously Jews, Christians and Muslims all have a historical connection to parts of Israel and the West Bank, but to try to expunge the Jewish connection as if they had no claim was provocative and self-defeating." (ibid)

The Silence of the Intellectual 2

Further to my previous post on Robert Manne's Quarterly Essay critique of The Australian, here's an interesting exchange between another Israel indulgent, Phillip Adams, and Manne:

Adams: Explain to me why The Greens are in the [Australian's] crosshairs. What's going on there?
Manne:Well, I think the paper was extremely opposed to Gillard's decision to work with The Greens... I think that they see The Greens as economically mad. I think that they have a hostility to what they see as the inner-city late set which they think to be the voting power of The Greens. I think they oppose what they think is the radicalism of the climate change attitude of The Greens, and there's also a pocket of Greens in NSW that are very hostile to Israel, and that again is one of the things that they really exaggerate...
Adams: I think it causes Bob Brown some problems.
Manne: And causes Bob Brown some problems. To put it simply, both sides of politics, Liberal and Labor, are so pro-Israel that the fact that there is a faction of The Greens in NSW that are hostile to Israeli policy is not that important...
Adams: Well, it might even be healthy.
Manne: Might even be healthy, but it's certainly not important in the way that the paper made a huge amount, during the NSW state election, of that issue. ('Bad News': Quarterly Essay, Late Night Live, 5/9/11)

What Manne (and Adams) show no interest in exploring is just why this unimportant spot of BDS ferment among the NSW Greens should put The Australian into such a towering rage. And that is because he doesn't seem prepared to admit that toeing and promoting the Israeli line is absolutely central to The Australian, let alone canvass the implications of same.

The Silence of the Intellectual 1

As predicted, Robert Manne's critique of The Australian in the latest edition of The Quarterly Essay, Bad News: Murdoch's Australian & the Shaping of the Nation, shies away from one of the salient features of the paper - its zealous, no-holds-barred defence of Israel and related promotion of Islamophobia.

Not that Manne is not aware of it, as this solitary reference (on page 3) indicates: "The Australian is ruthless in pursuit of those who oppose its worldview - market fundamentalism, minimal action on climate change, the federal Intervention in indigenous affairs, uncritical support for the American alliance and for Israel, opposition to what it calls political correctness and moral relativism." (Interestingly, this was missing from the "edited extract" published in Friday's Fairfax press that sparked my first post on the subject of Robert Manne and his 'Don't mention Israel' blindspot.)

The question of why, in a 119-page essay, Manne chose not to go there (even in his chapter on The Greens, who have been more pilloried by The Australian over their support for BDS than anything else) was raised in my earlier post*, so I'll leave it there. It suffices to note that it is precisely the choice of prominent liberal intellectuals (particularly those who identify as Jews) such as Manne not to go there, not to speak out against Zionism and its crimes, that prolongs the agony quaintly known as the Middle East conflict. [* Who Speaks for Palestine, 2/9/11]

Ozrael Philharmonic Play Max Brenner's Violin Concerto No 1 in G Minor

Further to my post on Robert Manne's coming TQE critique of Murdoch's Australian (Who Speaks for Palestine, 2/9/11), in which I said, in effect, that if he didn't broach the subject of that rag's ferocious Zionism, then his critique could well reveal as much about Manne himself as the object of his analysis.

Ferocious Zionism? Think I'm being hyperbolic? Well then, look no further than Saturday's editorial, Philistines for Palestine. The level of venom, mendacity, and hypocrisy on display is positively pathological:

"A few weeks ago it was a chocolate shop in Melbourne, targeted by pro-Palestinian activists because it is part of an Israeli chain. On Thursday night it was the Royal Albert Hall in London, where about 30 demonstrators disrupted a Proms concert by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. So noisy were they that the BBC had to interrupt its coverage twice, although the orchestra, under the baton of one of the world's leading conductors, Zubin Mehta, kept on and managed to play all 4 pieces, including Max Bruch's violin concerto No 1 in G Minor."

The BBC had to interrupt its coverage! Oh dear! Funny, I don't remember The Australian ever doing a song and dance over "IAF warplanes [which] set off sonic booms over Gaza all hours of the day and night." (Human rights groups sue to stop Israeli sonic booms over Gaza, AP/Haaretz, 2/11/05)

"It may be that music soothes the savage beast, but some of the most sublime music in the civilised world..."

As opposed to the uncivilised world.

"... could not tame the brutish, selfish arrogance of an ill-mannered, unrepresentative minority."

Gee, didn't do much to tame that "charming raconteur and gentleman farmer with a love of classical music,"* Ariel Sharon, either.

"Their action represents a dark moment in public culture and civility and does nothing to further their cause. We have said before that, given the history of Nazi Germany, there is something deeply offensive about targeting Jewish businesses. That is equally the case for these latest attacks on an Israeli orchestra that adds to the extraordinary contribution Jewish musicians and composers have made to classical music. The terrible events of May 1933, when more than 25,000 books were burnt on huge public bonfires in Berlin, were directed at Jewish intellectuals and the culture they had helped build in Germany. That night, and the cultural 'cleansing' that followed, remains a deeply distressing reminder of the collapse of the basic values that must underpin a civilised society."

Oh, I see! Max Brenner is no longer an "Israeli chain" but a "Jewish business," back in 30s Germany. And the "ill-mannered, unrepresentative minority"? Why, they're all of a sudden a book-burning Nazi mob.

"To see culture, which should be above partisan politics, attacked as it was in London is alarming. That it should happen at the Proms, perhaps the world's best-known classical music festival, dating back to 1895 and with broad appeal, is doubly upsetting. The Proms represent the tolerance and inclusion that are the best hope for peace."

So the IPO, described by the IPO Foundation as "Israel's musical ambassador,"** and by the American Friends of the IPO as "at the forefront of cultural diplomacy," is "above partisan politics"? What, like Wilhelm Furtwangler's Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was "above partisan politics"?

"If we were a British newspaper, we would be urging readers to patronise the Albert Hall at every opportunity. Instead, we suggest you frequent the Max Brenner chocolate shop chain and take a stand against the appalling campaign being waged against Israel. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is misguided and counterproductive. The protesters have a right to express their views on Israel, but they lose respect and influence when they engage in such crude and uncivilised action."

Run that past me again: waging a BDS campaign against Israel is "crude and uncivilised," (not to mention closet Nazi), but Israel's violent dispossession of another people, muffled in the West by the strains of the IPO, is not. Right.

[* The Sharon victory, nytimes.com, 7/2/01;** BBC Proms: cancel IPO invitation, pacbi.org, 18/7/11]

Who Speaks for Palestine?

Ex-Labor leader Mark Latham had its number*, and it's certainly one of the major targets of this blog. Now Robert Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, has taken it on in the next issue of The Quarterly Essay (out Monday).

[* See my 7/1/11 post Running Amok...]

'It', of course, is Rupert Murdoch's 'flagship', The Australian.

An extract from Manne's essay was published in today's Fairfax papers under the header Fair, balanced reporting not on Murdoch's agenda. What follows is an extract from that extract:

"Under Chris Mitchell's editorship, the paper has played the role not so much of reporter or interpreter but of national enforcer of those values that lie at the heart of the Murdoch empire: market fundamentalism and the beneficence of American global hegemony. Unquestioning support for American foreign policy led the paper to conduct an extraordinarily strident campaign in favour of an invasion of Iraq - launched on the basis of false intelligence - which was responsible for perhaps 400,000 deaths, and for which it has never uttered an apology. The Australian has conducted a prolonged campaign against action on climate change and undermined the hold in public life of the central values of the Enlightenment: science and reason. This has helped make action by any Australian government on the most serious question of contemporary times for more difficult than it ought to have been. The paper has led a series of high-volume and unbalanced campaigns against Labor governments, in which its reporters, rather than investigating a problem with an open mind, often sought out evidence in support of a pre-determined conclusion. It has sought systematically to undermine the credibility of its only broadsheet rivals - the Herald and The Age - and, in a relentless campaign, to intimidate and drive towards the right the only other mainstream source of analysis and opinion in this country, the ABC. It has conducted a kind of jihad against the Greens, a party supported by 1.5 million. By its own admission it has devoted itself to the task of trying to have that party destroyed at the ballot box, a statement which in itself undermines any claim to balance. The Australian has turned itself into a player in national politics without there being any means by which its actions can be held to account."

Whilst I agree with everything Manne says here, I note that he has omitted from his account one of The Australian's most salient features - its unremitting support for Israel, particularly in its editorials, the columns of its foreign editor, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, and the plethora of Zionist apologetics on its opinion pages (under the editorship of Rebecca Weisser).*

[* To cite but 2 examples: In today's Australian we have this from Micah Halpern on 9/11: "Terror would have been one of those unfortunate world events the Israelis deal with on a regular basis and the Europeans deal with every once in a while. But 9/11 changed us all. It awakened Westerners to a new reality." (The wake-up call no one wanted) In Tuesday's edition we had Efraim Inbar telling us that "Palestine needs more than a UN resolution to become a stable, viable nation." (Still far from ready for statehood)]

Nor does Manne tackle a related feature of the paper - its rampant Islamophobia, unleashed in waves of Muslim-bashing beat-ups over years. (See my 20/1/11 post Get the Sheik! for an example.)

Whence this blindspot?

The problem, I believe, is that despite his claim to the contrary, Manne is a Zionist - by which I mean one who believes in the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish state in Palestine. A reluctant Zionist to be sure, but a Zionist nonetheless. And it's precisely Manne's Zionism, as it is with Phillip Adams', that results in his failure to see and expose the bleeding obvious. (I should add, of course, that it's just possible that he's taken up the issues of Israel and Islamophobia in his forthcoming essay, in which case it will be a welcome breakthrough, but I'm not holding my breath.)

While generally avoiding the issue, Manne made his position clear in 2004 when he wrote that "[A]lthough I am not a Zionist, I have been throughout my life a supporter of the idea of Israel. As a result of the Holocaust, in 1947 the international community decided to establish a Jewish state. That decision seems to me to have been just and, as importantly, irrevocable." (When Jewish loyalty meets the brutality of Israel, Sydney Morning Herald, 6/12/04)

Given his prominence and renown as a liberal commentator, Manne's failure to tackle the ferocious pro-Israel (and related Islamophobic) content of The Australian can only detract from the scope and relevance of his critique.

Manne also refers in the above extract to "[t]he strange passivity of [The Australian's] two mainstream rivals, Fairfax Media and the ABC - even in the face of a constant barrage of criticism and lampooning..." Again, he's dead right, but I won't be holding my breath for a recognition in his essay that a key component of that "strange passivity" extends to accomodating the very same Zionist propaganda that rules the roost at The Australian.

In a Crikey.com blog on a 2009 panel discussion called Gaza: Morality, Law & Politics (See my 22/8/11 post What's Eating Raimond Gaita), which was chaired by Manne and included Ghassan Hage, Mark Baker and Raimond Gaita, the blogger, W H Chong, writes tellingly: "Midway in the discussion Baker was responding to Hage and making a remark about the survival of the Jewish culture. Whereupon, Hage in mock exasperation beckoned the hand mike back from Baker and nuanced: This is not about Jewish culture. Jewish culture has produced some of the great thinkers. I can't think without Jewish culture. I'm talking about Israeli culture'. Just in front of me was this young man. Before the discussion began he was already in a state of high nervous energy, talking to his companions about question time. At last the panelists yielded the floor, and the young fellow - arm waving vigorously - shot up and as requested, identified himself thus: 'Who speaks for me? I am Palestinian. Who is speaking for me?'" (Gaza, not Gazza: Men behaving intellectually, 27/7/09)

In his much anticipated Quarterly Essay will Manne even mention Palestine?