Hypocrisy Overload

There is something really quite nauseating about a wet-behind-the-ears supporter of the failed fascist/apartheid state of Israel, which has been ethnically cleansing, occupying and colonising Arab Palestine since 1948, and subsists on US aid and weapons, lashing Venezuela as "a failing socialist state"; complaining that "the Australian government is rejecting temporary visa applications from [Venezuelan] students, and parents coming to visit their children who live here - because of the volatile situation"; and bemoaning Australia's failure to stand up for "freedom, democracy and the rule of law... abroad as well as at home." (Punching below our weight, we've not even stood up for our values, Matthew Lesh, The Australian, 29/8/17)

Lesh is a former official of the pro-Israel Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) and currently, according to his appended bio, "a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs."

John Lyons Jumps Ship

August 14 tweet from John Lyons:

Delighted to announce am joining ABC News as Head, Investigative & in-depth journalism. Tks Oz for 10 great years. Thanks ABC for the opportunity!

I'm very pleased for you, John. Now will Palestine finally get an airing on the ABC?

WA Labor Votes to Recognise a Palestinian State

Bob Carr tweet of the day: WA Labor joins 4 other states and ACT branch backing unqualified recognition of Palestine. Response to settlements & Israeli hardliners.

Under the Heel

You can learn a lot from the Australian's editorials. (Fortunately, so in need are we of enlightenment in these dark times, their always industrious editorialist churns out around three per day.) As it happens I found two of today's particularly enlightening.

Spain confronts jihadi menace, for example, informed me that between 711 and 1492 "most of what is now Spain and Portugal was under the heel of Muslim Moors."

I got from this that Muslims had heels and that to find oneself under one of these was indeed most unfortunate.

As for the second, Patriots should close ranks informed me that "the defacement of statues of Captain Cook, Queen Victoria and Governor Macquarie in Sydney" was a huge NO-NO.

This got me wondering. Was I safe in concluding that the editorialist believed that, unlike your Muslim Moors, Christian Brits lacked this particular anatomical feature?

I believed I was - which led me to speculate:

Are heels an exclusively Muslim thing? Is this because of Islam? Is it in the Muslim DNA, so to speak, to grind non-Muslims underfoot?

Conversely, are Christians (and Jews for that matter), by virtue of their heel-lessness, therefore incapable of such dreadful behaviour?

Yes, that must be it! And so, with the editorialist's assistance, I could not but reflect on just how lucky Australia's first peoples were to make the acquaintance of James, Victoria, Lachlan and their ilk!

My God, if it'd been those bloody Muslims and their bloody heels, they'd have been in real trouble.

One to Avoid

Paul Monk's review of Douglas Murray's book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam tells us more about the Islamophobia of the Monks and Murrays of this world than it does about either contemporary Europe, the Middle East or Islam. (Murray, BTW, is an associate editor of the Spectator.)

Here's Monk's hilarious opening paragraph:

"Douglas Murray was born in London in July 1979, putting him midpoint between Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's January flight from Paris to Tehran to lead the Shia Muslim revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December, which triggered a global Sunni Muslim jihadist reaction." (Resisting Europe's Muslim tide, The Australian, 26/8/17)

No hint here that the Iranian revolution was a popular revolt against the repressive US client regime of the Shah, which emerged as the result of a CIA-engineered coup against the democratically-elected  government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. Just a "Shia" brainsnap on Khomeini's part, apparently.

Likewise, there's no hint that Monk's grand "global Sunni Muslim jihadist reaction" was kicked off in Afghanistan by the US, which funded, trained and armed Sunni Arab jihadis such as bin Laden for use against the Russian-backed secular government of Afghanistan.

IOW, poor old Murray had the terrible misfortune to be born at a time when those fiendish Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, experienced a sudden rush of blood to the head, which caused them to drop everything, and plot the forced Islamification of Europe, while the imperialist West, both the US and its European clients, was just innocently standing by, minding its own business as usual.

"In short, this journalist, author and political commentator has lived all his life against a background of Muslim insurgency and terrorism, as well as massive and now all-but-unrestricted Muslim immigration into Europe."

Of course, what prompted said "massive" Muslim immigration into Europe just may have had something to do with US/US client regime-change wars in Libya and Syria, but hush, we don't want to go there, it might spoil the story.

"Against that background, he reflects on the angry last writings of the great Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, denouncing what she saw as the betrayal of the West and the capitulation of its leaders to Iranian and Sunni jihadist intimidation."

"Great"? Totally unhinged, actually.

Monk concludes his review with his own (and - what a coincidence! - Murray's) "uncomfortable" reflection on "the Gothic and other Germanic migrations into the Roman Empire," and "the Arab migrations of the 7th and 8th centuries that swamped the southern and eastern littorals of the Roman world and overran the Persian and Turkish worlds."

So the Arabs are the new Goths and Vandals, and the Turks, who did not appear on the scene until the 11th (Seljuqs) and 13th (Othmanlis) centuries were rolled (swamped!) by the Arabs in the 7th and 8th centuries? Right...

Fact Checking Zionist Trolls

Comment threads following items on Palestine/Israel posted on the Internet invariably contain contributions originating from cogs in one or another part of Israel's vast propaganda mill. These contributions, of course, are designed merely to sow confusion and muddy the waters.

Here, for example, are 3 examples taken from the comment thread following the article Canadian 'crusader' sparks outrage with Bethlehem anti-Muslim video (middleeasteye.net, 13/3/17). They are consecutive and the orchestration is clear:

Fasdunkle:

PLO isn't secular. Read the Constitution of Palestine

Lloyd Kennedy/ Fasdunkle:

Article 4 of the constitution states that
1: Islam is the official religion in Palestine. Respect and sanctity of all other heavenly religions shall be maintained.
2: The principles of Islamic Shari'a shall be the main source of legislation.
3: Arabic shall be the official language.
It doesn't state that the ruling authorities are not secular.

Nan/ Lloyd Kennedy:

Sharia is Islamic religious law, so yes, it does say the authorities are not secular. They must follow Islamic religious law.

***

Total bullshit, of course.

Here is Article 4 of the Palestinian National Charter (1968)*:

"The Palestinian identity is a genuine, essential and inherent characteristic; it is transmitted from parents to children. The Zionist occupation and the dispersal of the Palestinian Arab people, through the disasters which befell them, do not make them lose their Palestinian identity and their membership of the Palestinian community, nor do they negate them."

Article 16, the only one that refers to religion, reads as follows:

"The liberation of Palestine, from a spiritual point of view, will provide the Holy Land with an atmosphere of safety and tranquility, which in turn will safeguard the country's religious sanctuaries and guarantee freedom of worship and of visit to all, without discrimination of race, color, language, or religion. Accordingly, the people of Palestine look to all spiritual forces in the world for support."

[*Basic Political Documents of the Armed Palestinian Resistance Movement, Leila S. Kadi, PLO Research Center, 1969, pp 137 & 139]

A Woman Who Can't Say No

"Julie Bishop... has produced not a single sentence of substance or originality while in the portfolio." (Greg Sheridan, Bishop's errors of judgment compound the Coalition's woes, The Australian, 14/2/11)

Damn right, Greg!

In evidence:

When asked by the immediate past president of Zionism Victoria, Sam Tatarka, if Australia would open a consulate or high commission in West Jerusalem, Australia's foreign minister, Julie Bishop responded that "if she could overcome the cost and security issues," she would "consider" it. ('A significant step', The Australian Jewish News, 24/8/17)

A simple 'No' (preferably with a roll of the eyes) would have been quite sufficient.