Mike Carlton's 'On Air' 2

A tsunami of hatred, bigotry, racism, insult and abuse...

"I had expected a torrent of abusive emails. The Israel lobby in Australia is well organised, hyperactive and loudly vocal. It wields weight and power beyond its size. Anyone working in the media is aware that any criticism of Israel - the slightest hint of it - stirs much of the Jewish community to the wrath of God. But even prepared for that, I had no idea what was about to descend. For more than a week I was engulfed by a tsunami of hatred, bigotry, racism, insult and abuse beyond anything I have ever experienced.

"It began with emails... The trickle that began early that Saturday morning became a flood over the weekend and beyond. 'Heil Hitler, you ignorant, Jew-hating, anti-Semitic slime,' was one of the first. I was attacked as 'a Hitler lover', 'a Nazi', 'a Palestinian cocksucker', 'a Muslim lover', 'an anti-Semitic motherfucker', 'Palestinian scum' and 'Holocaust denier'. On it rolled, a stream of filth. I lost count of the times I was called a Nazi. 'People like you started World War II,' said one woman. 'You would have gassed my grandmother in Auschwitz,' said another. A nutter named Ziggy, apparently thinking I might be spawn of the SS or similar, helpfully wrote in German: 'Die Nazi-Obst fallt nicht weit vom Stemm.' The Nazi fruit does not fall far from the tree.

"Twitter chimed in. One Alex Ryvchin, the Public Affairs Director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and a leading figure of the Israel lobby, berated me with a slew of ever more creative insults. A travel agent from Sydney's Rose Bay announced I was in cahoots with the corrupt New South Wales politician Eddie Obeid. 'Carlton's business is bankrolled by the Obeids,' she tweeted. Others displayed blatant racism. 'We are the Chosen People. Get over it,' was a jaw-dropper. One man wrote: 'Jews make things. Can't remember the last Palestinian invention.' A woman - apparently professional and well educated - thought my supposed religion might somehow be relevant. 'Catholic, much?' she snapped. I did not know whether to laugh or cry at that one.

"It became obvious that a lot of the attack was coordinated. Some lines were repeated over and over again. 'We gave them Gaza; they gave us rockets,' was a common one. 'Israel takes every care to avoid unnecessary casualties, but Hamas is using children and civilians as human shields,' was another. There were scores of these tweets and emails with identical wording." (pp 506-07)

To be continued...

Mike Carlton's 'On Air' 1

In earlier posts on the subject of Australian political memoirs that tackle the bullying ways of the Israel lobby, I dealt with those of former foreign minister Bob Carr and former prime minister Kevin Rudd, as well as journalist John Lyons' contribution to the genre, if I may call it that. It is now time to focus on the last of the four, journalist Mike Carlton's On Air (2018).

Those of you with long memories will perhaps recall that Carlton first came under attack in 2010 following his criticisms of Israel's Mavi Marmara massacre, prompting him to describe the lobby, in his Sydney Morning Herald column, as "a ferocious beast." (See my 12/6/10 post A Ferocious Beast.)

Then, in 2014, in the hardest-hitting opinion piece in the Australian corporate media on Israel's murderous Operation Protective Edge*, in which he accused the apartheid state of waging "a war of terror on the entire Gaza population," Carlton again came under attack from the aforementioned ferocious beast. (See my 27/7/14 post Carlton & Le Lievre Get Gaza.)

It is this lobby-orchestrated backlash that he deals with in some detail in his memoir.

He begins with the circumstances which led up to Operation Protective Edge and an account of its brutal 50-day course, and describes precisely what it was that led him to write his offending column, Israel's rank and rotten fruit is being called fascism:

"The ABC's Matt Brown reported for 7.30 on the killing of the four boys on the beach, interviewing the bereaved father and an eleven-year-old boy who had been injured by shrapnel but escaped. I watched his 7.30 story shaken to the marrow, choking back tears, achingly conscious of our own little boy peacefully asleep in his bedroom." (pp 504-05)

"With the column," he adds, "was a cartoon by the artist Glen Le Lievre, depicting a Jewish man seated in an armchair marked with a Star of David and operating a TV-style remote control to blow up a Gazan township. It was a pungent spin-off from news photographs - seen worlwide - of Israeli families relaxing with drinks and snacks on a border hillside as they watched Gaza being bombed in the near distance below. The column, its headline and the cartoon touched off a firestorm." (pp 505-06)

[*Sadly, typically, I'm not aware of any other.]

To be continued...

Just Speculating...

Just two foreign policy reasons for consigning the government of Scott Morrison to the dustbin of history come the May election:

Not only has it recognised West Jerusalem as Israel's capital, it has now climbed on the USraeli bandwagon and recognised Trump puppet Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela. (Guaido gets Canberra's backing in Venezuela, Sydney Morning Herald, 29/1/19)

Australia has already involved itself militarily in USraeli wars of regime change in Iraq and Syria. Could Venezuela be next?

After all, Morrison wouldn't be the first political leader in history to try to stave off political oblivion with an overseas military adventure, featuring, of course, 'our best and bravest'.

The Simple Truth

In response to this tweet of Bernie Sanders@SenSanders...

The Maduro government has waged a violent crackdown on Venezuelan civil society, violated the constitution by dissolving the National Assembly and was re-elected last year in an election many observers said was fraudulent. The economy is a disaster and millions are migrating. 1/3 (24/1/19)

Asad Abukhalil@asadabukhalil tweeted...

Those who disappoint you on Palestine will disappoint you on Venezuela, and vice versa.

How true.

Australia Day BBQ Stopper

"One afternoon in 1964 I was drinking coffee in the University of New England cafeteria with a bunch of young men from well-to-do grazing properties. They were rowdy and effortlessly good-natured. In those days Australia still rode on the sheep's back; they took for granted that they were the natural aristocrats of the campus and of the nation. We were laughing a lot that day. The conversation had turned to old family eccentrics; we'd been vying to cap each other's wacky stories.

"Then, a wealthy landowner's son took a turn. Sunday afternoons had been the fun time for his family, he announced. Presumably after church, and a good heavy Sunday dinner, his grandfather would go hunting on horseback with dogs and a posse of mates. Whooping. All armed with whips and guns. The quarry was Aborigines. They would be chased through the bush, cornered, then shot. Or driven over a mighty precipice to their death.

"Stunned silence fell around the table. The brutal declaration, so breezy and lighthearted, so shockingly new to my ears, threw us completely. I stared down into my coffee. Someone guffawed uneasily. I've often wondered why the young man blurted out those words. I remember he laughed as he spoke. Was it bravado to cover shame?

"The chilling thing was that, despite our shock, in the end the social niceties prevailed. We would ignore the faux pas. Besides, how many others among those young grandsons of squatters sitting around the table had similar secrets walled up behind their homestead facades?" (Who are we, really? Time to face the truth of the massacres of Aborigines, Frances Letters, Sydney Morning Herald, 7/7/17)

***

"Concerning Frances Letters' commentary, in the 1960s a family member born in the 1890s told me a similar story. I was about 14 at the time and I think the discussion touched on the Aboriginal referendum. He mentioned matter of factly that when he was a boy it was not uncommon for landowners to go on Aborigine shoots. I thought I had distorted my recollection, but after reading Frances's comments I now know it was true." (Letter to the SMH, 8/7/17)

Magic Happens, even in The New York Times

Pence backs anti-Maduro moves was the header for The New York Times report recycled in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald.

"US Vice-President Mike Pence," it began, "has declared the United States' 'unwavering support' for planned mass protests in Venezuela against president Nicolas Maduro, the most explicit backing yet by the Trump administration as opposition leaders try to unseat Maduro... 'We are with you,' Pence wrote on Twitter on Tuesday in both Spanish and English, adding, 'We stand with you, and we will stay with you until Democracy is restored and you reclaim your birthright of Libertad'."

The report went on to cover the ins and outs of the matter. These included the emergence of the president of Venezuela's National Assembly as a touted replacement for Maduro, and Trump's "all options are on the table" speech at the UN last September. All pretty standard fare for the average news junkie.

But then, magic, as the saying goes, happened, and lo and behold, came this truly prophetic, utterly subversive utterance, the third last paragraph:

"Many citizens of Latin America recall a long history of the US supporting coups in the region by right-wing military leaders who then quashed democratic processes and rule of law to maintain power for years and sometimes decades."

Was the nameless journalist - there was no byline - who secreted these timeless words of contextual wisdom in his report trying to tell us something? Something to do with the future of Venezuela if Pence and his cronies have their way?

Was he what!

I Read the Guardian Today, Oh Boy

The latest dollop of liberal Zionist claptrap in that media repository of liberal Zionist claptrap, the Guardian, is a little homily by a certain Simon Baron-Cohen, director of Cambridge University's Autism Research Centre, author of Zero Degrees of Empathy, and yes, brother of Sacha. It is based on the following premise:

"Empathy is all about imagining other minds, appreciating that different people have different perspectives, and responding to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. After a career studying autism and the nature of empathy, I see empathy as one of our most valuable natural resources. It has particular promise as an approach to conflict resolution... We can see this if we look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, where both communities have different views of the same historic period, both claim the same piece of land and both have valid emotional reactions to the conflict that must be acknowledged." (22/1/19)

Now one might reasonably expect that anyone who is serious about the need to "imagine other minds" and "appreciate different perspectives" as a means to resolving conflict would draw on considered accounts of same by both parties. But this is not what Baron-Cohen does. He only cites Israeli views, specifically those of novelist Amoz Oz and journalist Ari Shavit, author of My Promised Land: The Triumph & Tragedy of Israel.

No Palestinian voice gets a look in - unless one excepts what "one Palestinian friend said to me: 'It's hard to empathise with someone when you are looking up the barrel of their gun'." (Indeed!)

Baron-Cohen's way out of this dilemma - "Israelis should take the initiative, because they are the stronger party" - is pure ivory tower, and flies in the face of the logic of colonialism which rules out equality between coloniser and colonised. I've dealt with this issue before in my 16/11/19 post Dialogue of the Colonizer and the Colonized (just click on the colonialism label below) where I highlighted the words of a Palestinian prisoner, Ta'er Hamad, who had been approached by the mother of one of his Israeli victims: "I cannot hold a dialogue with someone who insists on equating the occupation with its victims."

The problem with reading this kind of liberal Zionist claptrap - and the Guardian is full of it - is that it wastes the reader's time, time better spent understanding, and calling out, the worse-than-apartheid reality of the colonial-settler Zionist project (projectile?) in Palestine.

To home in on just one of Baron-Cohen's fairy tales, aka the "Israeli perspective":

"If you ask Jewish Israelis why their families came to Palestine before 1948, they'll likely refer to two major waves of antisemitism. The first included the horrific pogroms of eastern Europe in the 1880s and 90s. In the second wave in the 1930s and 40s, two out of every three European Jews were killed by the Nazis... the Jews were drowning, looking for a piece of wood they could cling on to. Palestine, which for two millennia they had thought of as their ancient homeland, was that piece of wood."

The problem here is the colossal conceit that the Zionist movement was primarily a rescue mission. The reality, of course, is that it was a colonial settler movement from its inception. One only has to read the Basel Program, which emerged from the First Zionist Congress of 1897 to see this. As for the aforementioned Tsarist pogroms of the 1880s and 90s, only a minority of Russian Jews ever headed for Palestine, and most of them were not political Zionists. Many more emigrated to Western Europe, or the United States, while others joined Russian revolutionary currents.

As for "the second wave," Western Europe and the United States were again the preferred destination for European Jews impacted by the Nazi era.

Yosef Grodzinzky's 2004 book In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews & Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II is well worth a read on this matter:

"Post-Holocaust Displaced Persons, who lived in miserable conditions, became a human reserve of great migration potential, hence a prime target for the Zionists, who planned to transfer the entire DP population to Palestine. On the face of it, this task was easy: Mostly Holocaust survivors, the DPs were supposedly convinced by now that a Jewish state was the only viable solution. All it should have taken was thus immigration permits - as Palestine was still in British hands - and a sufficient number of boats that would ship the DPs to the safe haven. This, indeed, has been the official line. It has been said that with few exceptions, the shadow of the Holocaust made almost all the DPs want to go to Palestine; as immigration quotas were extremely limited while the British were in control, only few could enter; yet on May 15th 1948, the British left and with them went the quotas. An independent Jewish state was declared, and its doors were immediately opened; previously unable to immigrate to Palestine, the rest of the DPs now rushed to make 'aliyah (immigration) to Israel, and became proud citizens of the Jewish state. This is what I learned in school.

"Yet the documentary record I found in archives helped me discover two numerical discrepancies which call for an explanation. a. Polls taken in the camps at different times indicate that the vast majority of Jewish DPs (80-96.8 percent) stated their intention to immigrate to Palestine. If not to Palestine, they said, they would rather go back to the crematoria of the death camps. Yet, of the hundreds of thousands, only 40 percent (at most) actually went to Palestine/Israel, despite the fact that other migration routes were more difficult to follow at any point in time. b. A voluntary draft drive in the camps for the Israel Defense Force (IDF), then in formation, drew only 700 volunteers in the spring of 1948 (0.3 percent of the 250,000 Jewish camp dwellers then)... The failed attempt to mobilize volunteers led the Zionists to enact forced conscription of DPs in Germany and Austria to the IDF. Just months later, the headcount of camp draftees who fulfilled their 'national duty' went up eleven fold to 7,800...

"What happened? Why did so many say they wanted to go to Palestine, when only a minority actually did so? What justified forced conscription of survivors to fight for a cause they did not necessarily support, in a land they had never seen, and whose language they did not speak? How was a non-sovereign body able to force conscripts on German and Austrian soil to embark on boats that took them to the battlefield in Palestine?

"To forecast, the Zionists successfully took control of the Jewish DP camps early on, which later enabled them to enforce a draft... Zionist planners and organizers followed a clear line of reasoning: To them, a Jew not wanting to go to Palestine adversely affected the struggle for the establishment of an independent state in two ways. First,  it was a net loss to the effort to populate Palestine... Secondly, reluctance to make 'aliyah weakened the Zionist pressure to open the gates of Palestine for unlimited Jewish immigration. As the suffering of the DPs was used as a bargaining chip in the struggle against immigration quotas imposed by the British, who controlled Palestine until the state was established, a Jew immigrating to the West was one less suffering Jew knocking on Palestine's doors. The migration of Jews to places other than Palestine was thus discouraged, sometimes even blocked by force. Attempts to evacuate child survivors to England and France immediately after Liberation in 1945 were thus thwarted, on Ben-Gurion's explicit instructions." (pp 9-12)

So much for Baron-Cohen's "drowning" Jews, just itching to reach Palestine after "two millennia" of longing. Boilerplate Zionist dogma, of course. But, where the issue of Palestine/Israel is concerned, Zionist dogma, framing, bias, and embroidery, in one form or another, is invariably what you get at the Guardian.