The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 6

The Istralian (formerly The Australian) was still partying hard on the weekend of March 15-16, 3 days after the Big Bash in Federal Parliament on March 12. The evidence was there in its editorial under the hyperbolic banner : AN ISLAND OF HOPE IN A SEA OF DARKNESS: Australia cannot be bullied out of backing Israel. Despite the extraordinary suggestion that a few signatories, exercising their democratic right to pay News Ltd big bucks to voice their deviation from the party line, are 'bullies', it was the 'island of hope' hoopla that really took me back...to 1907 actually.

To explain: as a sucker for books, I had many years ago acquired an ancient tome, published in that very year. It just sat there for years on one of my sagging bookshelves, gathering dust, half forgotten. Until, that is, the morning of March 15, 2008, when I opened my copy of The Istralian and read the above headline. I had seen such steaming, streaming bat's piss somewhere before (See my 4th post in this series). Other than in The Istralian that is. But where? A dim memory stirred. I found the relevant shelf, pulled out the ancient tome, dusted it off and surveyed the cover. Dark brown it was, illuminated by a painting depicting a timeless Victorian/Biblical scene. In the gathering dusk, having just made her way through a grove of stately date palms in the company of a flock of sheep, stood a woman dressed in grey-blue robe and head covering, balancing a water pitcher on her head. Above this ethereal scene, I noted the book's title: Our Moslem Sisters. And below it, the sub-title: A CRY OF NEED FROM LANDS OF DARKNESS.

The dusty tome was an anthology of stories on the 'dreadful' plight of Muslim women (referred to as "Hagar and Her Sisters") from Morocco to Malaysia. It was edited by two Christian missionary ladies who urged "an army of those with love in their hearts to seek and save the lost," and to "take up this burden, so long neglected, for the salvation of Mohammedan women, even though it may prove a very cross of Calvary to some of us." Much like reading The Istralian is for me.

1907 or 2008? Time stands still in The Istralian. Forget the white picket fence, nothing has changed from the good old (colonial) days of 1907 to the good neo (colonial) times of today. Anyways, to return to my current cross of Calvary, the editorial...

Did you know, for example, that "The PM's statement...split many pro-Palestinians - forcing them to confront the legitimacy of Israel's existence and the need for a two-state solution as envisaged from Israel's inception"? Don't worry, I don't know what it means either.

Did you know that "[c]orrespondence to The Weekend Australian has been further proof that deep divisions continue," and that "[m]any of the letters have mirrored the hostility and press council complaints provoked by Greg Sheridan's Israeli travelogue, published on January 19..." Mm, not only taking out ads and writing letters, but taking Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan to the Australian Press Council! The gall of these bullies!

Did you know that "Israel's success also explains why many academics have chosen to blame Tel Aviv for the continuing conflict rather than the zealots on the other side who have no interest in any settlement that recognises Israel's right to exist [as an apartheid state and occupying power]."

Did you know that "Israel was once widely admired in Left circles for its...Kibbutz movement and its ability to establish vibrant [Ever noticed how Israel is always "vibrant" while the other side is "virulent"?] agriculture in what had formerly been barren, arid areas [The old 'blooming desert' propaganda line]. But many left-wing thinkers have since turned on Israel as a symbol of colonial power, [ignoring] the UN process that established the state of Israel, as outlined by Mr Rudd in his statement to parliament this week." [See my 3rd post in the series.]

And here's a hoot: "The resolution that the UN adopted in November 1947 reflected that Australia was the first to cast its vote in support of the state of Israel." Maybe they just vote alphabetically in the UN.

Bat's piss beginning, bat's piss ending: "As Brendon Nelson told parliament, in a region of the world that is characterised by theocracies and autocracies, the state of Israel is the custodian of the most fragile yet powerful of human emotions, and that is hopeful belief in the freedom of man, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly."

And then there were some revelling Zionist letter writers. Dr Bill Anderson, School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne, had first contributed a spray in The Istralian of 13/3/08 (See my 4th post in this series). That was bad enough, but his latest effort could only have emerged from a school of hysterical studies. In response to an earlier letter from one who had the audacity to ask why it was that the Palestinians should be paying the price for the Nazi Holocaust, Dr Bill thought he'd aquaint us with Adolf Hitler's Palestinian bro'. That's right folks, the exact same anti-Semitic DNA! My comments, as usual, in bold:-

"Muhammad Amin al-Husseini was a violent anti-Zionist [He obviously had a good understanding that Zionism was all about downsizing the neighbours] jailed [Wrong: the Brits sentenced him to 10 years imprisonment in absentia, since he had already fled to Transjordan] by the British in 1920 for an Arab attack against Jews praying in Jerusalem [Hm. Maybe if the British hadn't announced just before the attacks that they were going to carry out the provisions of the Balfour Declaration...]. Pardoned in...1922 he was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and president of a new Supreme Muslim Council. Al-Husseini was the religious and political leader of the Palestinian Arabs. Devoted to driving Jews out of Palestine, he instituted a campaign of terror and intimidation against anyone opposed to his rule and policies. He killed Jews at every opportunity and eliminated Arabs who did not support his campaign of violence. In 1937 he expressed his solidarity with Germany, asking the Nazis to oppose establishment of a Jewish state [Well, if the British were in the business of facilitating your steamrolling, who ya gonna call?]. Evidence at the Nuremberg trials showed that Nazi Germany helped finance al-Husseini's efforts in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann visited Palestine and met al-Husseini at that time and thereafter maintained regular contact with him. In 1940 al-Husseini asked the Axis powers to acknowledge the Arab right 'to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy'. He spent the rest of the war as Hitler's guest in Berlin - advocating the extermination of Jews in radio broadcasts. At Nuremberg, Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified that the mufti 'was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of the plan...I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz' [Al-Husseini has denied knowledge of the Holocaust. Hanah Arendt, in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, wrote: 'The trial revealed only that all rumours about Eichmann's connection with al-Husseini...were unfounded.' Rafael Medoff concluded that, 'there is no evidence that the Mufti's presence was a factor at all; the Wisliceny hearsay is not merely uncorroborated, but conflicts with everything else that is known about the origins of the Final Solution'. And Bernard Lewis wrote that 'there is no independent documentary confirmation of Wisliceny's statements, and it seems unlikely that the Nazis needed any such additional encouragement from the outside'. (See Wikipedia) With the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, he moved to Egypt where he was received as a national hero. He was among the sponsors of the 1948 war against Israel."

Despite Anderson's highly partisan account of al-Husseini's career, there can be no glossing over the man's collaboration with the Nazis. But it was not simply the product of some eternal, a-historical, motiveless, anti-semitic malignancy as Anderson would have us believe, and can easily be explained in terms of the old principle: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Historian Lenni Brenner put it well: "The Mufti was an incompetant reactionary who was driven into his anti-Semitism by the Zionists. It was Zionism itself, in its blatant attempt to turn Palestine from an Arab land into a Jewish state, and then use it for the yet further exploitation of the Arab nation, that generated Palestinian Jew-hatred. Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner of Aguda Yisrael gave a perceptive explanation for the Palestinian's career. 'It should be manifest, however, that until the great public pressures for a Jewish state, the Mufti had no interest in the Jews of Warsaw, Budapest or Vilna. Once the Jews of Europe became a threat to the Mufti because of their imminent influx into the Holy Land, the Mufti in turn became for them the...incarnation of the Angel of Death. Years ago, it was still easy to find old residents of Yerushalayim who remembered the cordial relations they had maintained with the Mufti in the years before the impending creation of a Jewish State. Once the looming reality of the State of Israel was before him, the Mufti spared no effort at influencing Hitler to murder as many Jews as possible in the shortest amount of time. This shameful episode, where the founders and early leaders of the State were clearly a factor in the destruction of many Jews, has been completely suppressed and expunged from the record'." (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, 1983, p 102)

In addition to Anderson's factual errors and omissions, and his a-historical, agenda-driven account of the Mufti, he has hypocritically ignored the story of Zionism's own flirtation with the Nazis, amply chronicled in Brenner's book (See my 3rd post in this series). Here are the words of pro-Israel historian, Martin Gilbert: "Avraham Stern who had formed a breakaway 'Irgun in Israel' movement (also known as the Stern Gang), tried to make contact with Fascist Italy in the hope that, if Mussolini were to conquer the Middle East, he would allow a Jewish State to be set up in Palestine. When Mussolini's troops were defeated in North Africa, Stern tried to make contacts with Nazi Germany, hoping to sign a pact with Hitler which would lead to a Jewish State once Hitler had defeated Britain. " (Israel: A History pp 111-112)

Above and beyond Anderson's above-cited failings, there is a massive failure of logic: why should the mistakes/crimes of one Palestinian reflect on Palestinians as a whole? But the concern of all legitimate historians, what really happened back when, is entirely beside the point here. Anderson's object, like that of all pro-Israel propagandists, is merely to sling mud at the Palestinians and hope that nobody has sufficient command of the actual history to hose it down. In the hands of such demonologists, the Mufti is merely the first in a line of Middle Eastern Hitlers, which include Nasser, Arafat, Hussein and now Ahmadinejad. The absurdity of such anti-Palestinian demonisation is perhaps best seen in the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust where, according to historian Peter Novick "The article on the Mufti is more than twice as long as the articles on Goebbels and Goering, longer than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined, longer than the article on Eichmann, of all the biographical articles, it is exceeded in length, but only slightly, by the entry for Hitler." (From The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy, ed by Qureshi & Sells, 2003, p 117)