Scoop: Temple Mount Now Holy to Christians

Now here's a newie:

"The latest wave of violence was sparked last October by unsubstantiated rumours that Israel intended to exert control over the Noble Sanctuary precinct of the Old City, revered by Muslims. Containing the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque, it tops what is known to Jews and Christians as Temple Mount, and is holy to them, too." (Israel's Arab MPs warned of expulsion, Jamie Walker, The Australian, 6/2/16)

So, in addition to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Christans now want a slice of the Haram ash-Sharif.

As I always say: Only in The Australian...

Circumlocution Time

"The Israeli military has been accused of reaching an accommodation to keep the peace with Syrian rebel groups, including al-Qa'ida offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as al-Nusra Front, under which injured fighters have been transferred to Israeli hospitals..." (War knocking on Israel's door, Jamie Walker, The Australian, 2/1/16)

(Accused of) reaching an accommodation? Hello? Run that past me again. To keep the peace with al-Qaida Israel takes in its wounded fighters and gives them free state-of-the-art medical care?

Right... so Israel has no choice in the matter? Al-Qaida's like, look after us or else?

Or is the Australian's Middle East correspondent simply afraid to say straight out that the Israeli military have been collaborating with al-Qaida in Syria?

Innocent Bystander

Notice how Israel is so out-of-the-picture in this sketch of Middle Eastern mayhem:

"Gunmen sworn to al-Qa'ida surge into battle under the noses of Israeli soldiers entrenched on the Golan Heights; in the Sinai, the Egyptians are still mopping up after an Islamic State offshoot killed dozens in an offensive that brushed the southern borders of Israel and Gaza. That troubled enclave, home to a largely Palestinian population of 1.8 million, continues to seethe a year on from the war with Israel that killed nearly 2300 people and left tens of thousands of homes in ruin, few if any of which have been rebuilt. If Bashar al-Assad's ruthless regime in Syria is on its last legs - as the Israeli military believes - the fall of the last Baathist dictator would further destabilise Lebanon, already buckling under the pressure of feeding two million refugees and keeping a lid on its own sectarian tensions. In the eye of the storm that has engulfed the Middle East, Israel commands a unique position to assess the chaos unfolding on each of its terrestrial borders and is warily assessing whether to enter a fight it has avoided so far." (It all comes back to Iran, says Israel, Jamie Walker, The Australian, 11/7/15)

You wouldn't know from reading the above that:

a) the al-Qaida gunmen in southern Syria are supported by Israel;

b) the Golan-Heights is occupied Syrian territory;

c) Gaza isn't "troubled," it's blockaded, starved and periodically savaged by Israel; 

d) the so-called "war" with Israel was just the latest in a series of genocidal Israeli onslaughts against an impoverished and ghettoised refugee population;

e) in the ruthlessness stakes, no Baathist dictator could possibly compete with Israel;

f) Israel's repeated invasions of Lebanon over decades have done more to destabilise that country than any number of Syrian, Iraqi or Palestinian refugees;

g) chaos in the Middle East has Israel's name written all over it.

h) see a)

Still, Walker's 'reportage' has its amusing side:

"Recently, one of Netanyahu's senior advisers talked this correspondent through the Israeli government's view of its volatile neighbourhood... Islamic State was a problem... but not a first-order one for Israel because the IDF would never run like the Iraqi army did last summer, and the jihadis had no illusions about the consequences of a direct confrontation... But Hezbollah was a different matter entirely. The fighters it had blooded in the service of Assad numbered in the thousands and they would end up facing Israel Israel with advanced weaponry and know-how."

So let me get this straight:

Asad's on his "last legs," despite help from Hezbollah.

Obviously, this is because the ferocious, unstoppable jihadis have Asad and Hezbollah on the run, right?

But Israel's more worried about Hezbollah than the jihadis...

I see...

The Price Gazans Pay for Refusing to Kiss Israel's Arse

"The relatively well-paid jobs on the Israeli side of the security fence have long gone, part of the price Gazans pay for being governed by Hamas, the militant group Israel blames for starting the war and for ongoing rocket attacks on the country's south." (Aussie's fears for 'desperate' Gaza, Jamie Walker, The Australian, 22/6/15)

Talk about a loaded sentence!

First there's the uncritical use of the Israeli euphemism, 'security fence', to describe a structure designed to keep ghetto dwellers, ethnically cleansed from their homes and lands in 1948, from ever returning to same.

Then there's this: "the price Gazans pay for being governed by Hamas."

There's a take-home message in those 11 words. It is this:

All the people of Gaza have to do is get off their bums; cast out the evil death-cult known as Hamas; officially apologise to their neighbours for ever having had the temerity to think that Eretz Israel is in fact occupied Palestine; acknowledge that it really belongs exclusively to 'the Jewish people' (which could mean anyone from Woody Allen to Harry Triguboff to the latest lost tribe only just discovered in the wilds of wherever); and declare that they'd love nothing more than to commute to Eretz Israel daily for "relatively well-paid jobs" as hewers of wood and drawers of water, pretty please.

Now if factual reporting, as opposed to Israeli spin, is really what matters, here's how the line could have been written: the price Gazans pay for having exercised their democratic choice in 2006, and voting, in a two-horse race, for the party of probity and resistance to Israeli diktats and faits accomplis rather than the party of venality and collusion with Israeli apartheid.

A bit too long? Well, how about this: the price Gazans pay for refusing to kiss Israel's arse?

Fudging the Palestinian Nakba at The Australian

I'm afraid the Australian's new Middle East correspondent Jamie Walker has blotted his copybook again.

In yesterday's report on the Islamic State takeover of Damascus' Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, we get a gratuitous, unattributed factoid like this:

"Assad is said to have sponsored the rise of Islamic State in Syria in a cynical double play to persuade the West that his war was with the Islamists, not his own people." (Call for blood donations echoes from camp minarets, 6/4/15)

Is said to have? How authoritative is that? So USrael, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Jordan, and Turkey have nothing whatever to do with sponsoring the rise of IS? It's all Asad's doing? Seriously?

On the other hand, when it comes to the fact of Palestine's ethnic-cleansing by Jewish State in 1948, he manages to pull not one, but two punches:

*"Yarmouk used to be a byword for the tragedy that had overtaken Palestinians displaced by war with Israel."

*"The descendants of Palestinian refugees from Israel's 1948 war of independence..."

Applying the expression displaced by war to the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 is a fudge for the deliberate and systematic uprooting and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians by Zionist terror gangs, one of the 20th century's most heinous, but consistently denied, crimes against humanity. 

And as for referring to the nakba as Israel's war of independence (against whom exactly?), that's just deploying grandiloquent Zionist hype, an appropriation of America's war of independence. Just imagine white, settler-colonial America referring to its genocide of Native Americans as its 'war of independence' and you'll get the idea.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

"If you're not careful newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X

Not hanging offences, I know, but...

Case 1:

"... so-called Arab Israelis - mostly ethnic Palestinians who complain of being treated as second-class citizens..." (Arab parties hold key to Israeli poll, Jamie Walker*, The Australian, 16/3/15)

Instead of "so-called Arab Israelis - mostly ethnic Palestinians" why not simply refer to them as what they are, namely 'Palestinian Israelis'?

Better still: 'Palestinian Israelis whose ancestors somehow managed to escape the great ethnic cleansing of 1948, known to Palestinians as 'the Nakba (catastrophe)'.

And what's with "who complain of being treated as second-class citizens"?

Maybe it's because they are second-class citizens, Jamie.

And that's simply because they're not Jews. It's called apartheid, actually, as your predecessor, John Lyons, once acknowledged: see my 2/5/12 post Consensus at Last.

Case 2:

"... Hartley, a strident political advocate for Palestine..." (The secret Murdoch file kept hidden by British government, Philip Dorling, Sydney Morning Herald, 16/3/15)

Oh, FFS!

Hands up anyone who's ever heard an Israel lobbyist/propagandist described as "strident" in the ms press?

Just as I thought... not a hand in sight!

[*So Murdoch's Australian has a new Middle East correspondent, replacing John Lyons. It's too early to say whether he can fill Lyons' shoes - or better! - let's hope the above infelicities are just a matter of finding his feet.]