The Hard Truth About Journalism Today...

... (and earlier) by US investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (2008):

"The problem is that we just don't have a press that really wants to challenge power on issues they consider 'personal.' Speaking at the 1985 Prayer Breakfast, Ronald Reagan said, 'I wish I could say more about it, but it's working precisely because it's private.' That should have been an invitation for investigative reporting. Instead the media, then and now, tends to acquiesce to elite secretiveness, not out of any conspiracy, but due to a culture of reverence for established power, liberal or conservative. Most journalists believe in meritocracy - not merely that it's a good idea, but that it actually exists. They know that some politicians game the system, but they're committed to the idea that the system basically works. And it does, but not in favor of democracy." (Following up on the 'Family': Six questions for Jeff Sharlet, Bill Wasik, harpers.org/blog/2008/06

Need anything more be said about this subject, really? Except, of course, that Julian Assange towers over this knee-bending rabble like a colossus.

Morrison: Business As Usual at the UN

For example:

"The United Nations general assembly has overwhelmingly backed a motion condemning Britain's occupation of the remote Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The 116-6 vote left the UK diplomatically isolated and was also a measure of severely diminished US clout on the world stage. Washington had campaigned vigorously at the UN and directly in talks with national capitals around the world in defence of the UK's continued control over the archipelago, where there is a US military base at Diego Garcia. The vote was in support of a motion setting a six-month deadline for Britain to withdraw from the Chagos island chain and for the islands to be reunified with neighbouring Mauritius. It endorsed an advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in February, calling on the UK to relinquish its hold on the territory in order to complete the process of decolonisation." (UK suffers crushing defeat in UN vote on Chagos Islands, Owen Bowcott/Julian Borger, theguardian.com, 23/5/19)

Right... so who comprised this charmless, colonial gang of six who voted against self-determination for the dispossessed and dispersed Chagossian islanders? Wouldn't you know it:

The US, Hungary, Israel, Australia, UK and the Maldives.

Not, mind you, that, with the Murdoch press trumpeting Morrison as The Messiah from The Shire, you'd expect to see this telling information in the Australian msm.

The Hyping of Hawke

Just prior to election day, former ACTU boss and Labor prime minister Bob Hawke (1929-2019) passed away. The msm, including,  the Murdoch press, rang with his praise, as in the passing of a saint.

Bill Shorten, for example, emailed as follows:

"An Australian at home in Asia, a voice heard and respected in the councils of the world. A country that steps up and plays its part, keeping peace in the Middle East, keeping Antarctica safe for science... As president of the ACTU, Bob was the champion of unpopular causes: *The right of unions to organise and bargain * Opposing French nuclear testing in the Pacific * Opposing the war in Vietnam * Opposing Apartheid and defending Nelson Mandela, when conservatives were branding him a terrorist." (From Bill Shorten's email Remembering Bob Hawke, 17/5/19)

Murdoch's Australian had this to say:

"He was magnificent on Israel. On apartheid. On Antarctica. On French nuclear testing. in the Pacific." (From larrikin to legend, Caroline Overington, 17/5/19)

And, in a feature article by its editor at large, Paul Kelly, this:

"Tensions [between the Whitlam government and the ACTU] were exacerbated by a new development in Hawke's life - his passionate embrace of the cause of Israel. He formed close bonds with many Jewish leaders and campaigned fiercely for the Soviet Union to allow the immigration of Jews to Israel, to end a situation he saw as a grave injustice." (Lover, fighter & peacemaker, 17/5/19)

It's those references to Israel that belie all the warm and fuzzy pre-election media effusions about St Bob, and, whatever his other accomplishments, reveal a dark side wholly forgotten, it seems by a historically illiterate mainstream and social media. We need to go back then to the 70s to see what I mean, and, in particular, the following shocker:

"Relations between Hawke and the Arab community had often been strained. Since Hawke's first visit to Israel in 1971, he had made his pro-Israeli sympathies very public. 'The problem', wrote Blanche d'Alpuget, Hawke's biographer, 'is that in his speeches on the Middle East, Hawke has devoted only a small percentage, if any... to the plight of the Palestinians, while highlighting the violent physical and verbal assaults upon Israel by her neighbours. He thus projected the impression that, for him, the Palestinians were irrelevant'. reports such as the one in the Daily Telegraph in 1974 that 'I'd A-Bomb Arabs, says Hawke' did not endear him to the community. His personal identification with Israel was so strong that he had once declared: 'If I were to have my life again, I would want to be born a Jew', and 'I'm an Israeli'." (Christine Asmar, The Arab-Australian Experience, in Australia's Gulf War, Edited by Murray Goot & Rodney Tiffen, 1992, p 72)

There's no getting around this indecent colonial obsession of Hawke's, and what it led to in the 80s and early 90s, a subject I'll return to in my next post.

Offensive vs Defensive Wars...

... your msm guide:

OFFENSIVE WAR

"Syrian government and allied Russian warplanes have intensified a week-long bombardment of Syria's Idlib province, targeting hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure as tens of thousands of residents fled toward the border with Turkey, activists and monitors in the rebel-held region said. The serial campaign has killed about 100 civilians and put at least 10 hospitals out of service." (Air strikes shatter Idlib truce, Zakaria Zakaria, Washington Post/Reuters/Sydney Morning Herald, 8/5/19)

"Waves of Russian and regime jets and helicopters have poured missiles and barrel bombs onto the enclave in the past week, destroying hospitals and killing scores of civilians." (Civilians, hospitals target of new Assad blitz, Richard Spencer, The Times/The Australian, 8/5/19)

defensive war

"In the course of [Operation] Cast Lead [2008-09], Israel had damaged or destroyed 'everything in its way,' and not in its way, including 58,000 homes, 1,500 factories and workshops, 280 schools and kindergartens, electrical, water, and sewage installations, 190 greenhouse complexes, 80% of agricultural crops, and nearly one-fifth of cultivated land. Whole neighborhoods were laid waste. It also damaged and destroyed 29 ambulances, almost half of Gaza's 122 health facilities (including 15 hospitals), and 45 mosques. By the time it withdrew, the IDF had left behind fully 600,000 tons of rubble and 1,400 corpses, 350 of them children." (Gaza: An Inquest into It's Martyrdom, Norman Finkelstein, 2018, p 127)

More Zionist Hypnosis in Australian MS Press

Whether it's the Nine Entertainment Co press, or the Murdoch, both rags are adamant that Israel and Hamas have fought THREE WARS since 2008:

"... the two sides, we have fought three wars... over the last decade." (Toll rises as Gaza violence flares, Nidal al-Mughrabi, AP, Reuters, Sydney Morning Herald, 6/5/19)

"Israel and Hamas... have fought three wars... since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007." (Rockets, missiles shatter Gaza truce, Fares Akram, AP/The Australian, 6/5/19)

"Israel says its blockade is necessary to stop weapons reaching Hamas, with which it has fought three wars since the group seized control of Gaza in 2007... " (Ceasefire claimed as attacks ebb, Nidal al-Mughrabi/Jeffrey Heller, Reuters/Sydney Morning Herald, 7/5/19)

"Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza have fought three wars since 2008 and the escalation brought them to the brink of another." (Israel, Palestinians pull back from brink, AFP/The Australian, 7/5/19)

But were they really WARS, or more akin to just shooting fish in a barrel?

Here is the incomparable Norman Finkelstein once again on the first of these alleged 'wars', Israel's Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), in which he irrefutably testifies to the latter characterisation:

"To justify the magnitude of the devastation it wreaked, Israel endeavored to depict the Gaza invasion as a genuine military contest. [US analyst Anthony] Cordesman* delineated in ominous detail, enhanced by tables, graphs, and figures, the vast arsenal of rockets, mortars, and other weapons that Hamas allegedly manufactured and smuggled in through tunnels (including 'Iranian-made rockets' that could 'strike at much of Southern Israel' and 'hit key infrastructure'), as well as the 'spider web of prepared strong points, underground and hidden shelters, and ambush points' Hamas allegedly constructed. He reported that according to 'Israeli senior officials,' Hamas mustered 6,000-10,000 'core fighters.' He juxtaposed the 'Gaza war' with the 1967 war, the 1973 war, and the 2006 war, as if they belonged on the same plane. He expatiated on Israel's complex war plans and preparations, and he purported that Israel's victory was partly owing to its 'high levels of secrecy,' as if the outcome would have been different had Israel not benefited from the element of surprise. The Israeli brief alleged that Hamas 'amassed an extensive armed force of more than 20,000 armed operatives in Gaza,' 'obtained military supplies through a vast network of tunnels and clandestine arms shipments from Iran and Syria,' and 'acquired advanced weaponry, developed weapons of their own, and increased the range and lethality of their rockets.'

"Nonetheless, even Cordesman was forced to acknowledge, if obliquely, that what Israel fought was scarcely a war. He conceded that Hamas was a 'weak, non-state actor,' whereas Israel possessed a massive armory of state-of-the-art weaponry; that the Israeli air force 'faced limited threats from Hamas's primitive land-based air defense'; that 'sustained ground fighting was limited'; that the Israeli army avoided engagements where it 'would be likely to suffer' significant casualties; and that 'the IDF used night warfare for most combat operations because Hamas did not have the technology or training to fight at night.' However, overwhelmingly, Cordesman persisted in his dubious depiction of Cast Lead. Israel had demonstrated that it could fight 'an air campaign successfully in crowded urban areas,' according to him, as well as 'an extended land battle against a non-state actor.' In fact, the air campaign was not a 'fight' any more than shooting fish in a barrel is a fight. As if (however unwittingly) to bring home this analogy, Cordesman quoted a senior Israeli air force officer who boasted, 'The IAF had flown some 3,000 successful sorties over a small dense area during three weeks of fighting without a single accident or loss.' But how could it be otherwise if 'the planes operated in an environment free of air defenses, enjoying complete aerial superiority'? Depicting Cast Lead as a protracted ground war was no less detached from reality Hamas was barely equipped, barely present in the conflict zones, and barely engaged by Israeli forces except when it could not fight back." (Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, 2018, pp 63-64)

[*"Shortly after Operation Cast Lead ended on 18 January 2009, Anthony Cordesman published a report titled The 'Gaza War': A strategic analysis. It warrants close scrutiny both because Cordesman has been an influential military analyst, and because the report neatly synthesized and systematized Israel's makeshift rebuttals as criticism of the invasion mounted." (ibid, p 39) And how often have we heard this Israeli apologist on Radio National over the years?]

Zionist Hypnosis in Australian MS Press

Rockets, missiles shatter Gaza truce (Fares Akram, AP/The Australian, 6/5/19)

"[Israeli] retaliatory barrages"
"retaliatory airstrikes"
"retaliatory airstrikes"

Toll rises as Gaza violence flares (Nidal al-Mughrabi, AP/Reuters/Sydney Morning Herald, 6/5/19)

"Israel hit back"
"Israel retaliated"
"[Israeli] tanks and aircraft responded"

Israel, Palestinians pull back from brink (AFP/ The Australian, 7/5/19)

"Israeli retaliatory strikes"
"Israel said it strikes were in response to"

Shoot at Anything that Moves

Whenever you read about Israeli war crimes in Gaza in the msm, the latter's stenographers will faithfully parrot Israeli army spin about every effort being taken to ensure that Palestinian civilians come to as little harm as possible during the course of military operations. In fact, the opposite is true. For Israel, all Palestinians are the enemy. Hence, Palestinian civilians will always bear the brunt of any such Israeli attack.

Here is more from Norman Finkelstein on the original Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009):

"Parrying the censorious thrust of these human rights reports, Israel's brief declared that it 'took extensive measures to comply with its obligations under international law,' and that... the IDF directed attacks 'solely against military objectives,' and endeavored to ensure that 'civilians and civilian objects would not be harmed...

"Based on what journalists and human rights organizations found, and what Israeli soldiers in the field testified, however, a radically different picture of Cast Lead comes into relief. 'We're going to war,' a company commander told his soldiers before the attack. 'I want aggressiveness - if there's someone suspicious on the upper floor of a house, we'll shell it. If we have suspicions about a house, we'll take it down... There will be no hesitation.' A combatant remembered a meeting with his brigade commander and others where the 'rules of engagement' were 'essentially' conveyed as, 'if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot.' Other soldiers recalled, 'If the deputy battalion commander thought a house looked suspect, we'd blow it away. If the infantryman didn't like the looks of that house - we'd shoot' (unidentified soldier); 'If you face an area that is hidden by a building - you take down the building. Questions such as 'who lives in that building[?]' are not asked' (soldier recalling his brigade commander's order); 'As for rules of engagement, the army's working assumption was that the whole area would be devoid of civilians... Anyone there, as far as the army was concerned, was to be killed' (unidentified soldier); 'We were told: 'any sign of danger, open up with massive fire' (member of a reconnaissance company); 'We shot at anything that moved' (Golani Brigade fighter); 'Despite the fact that no one fired on us, the firing and demolitions continued incessantly' (gunner in a tank crew). 'Essentially, a person only need[ed] to be in a 'problematic' location,' a Haaretz reporter found, 'in circumstances that can broadly be seen as suspicious, for him to be 'incriminated' and in effect sentence to death'." (Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, pp 44-45)

First They Came for Assange

A must-read from Greece's former finance minister and Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, Yanis Varoufakis:

"My meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange all took place in the same small room. As the intelligence services of a variety of countries know, I visited Assange in Ecuador's London embassy many times between the fall of 2015 and December 2018. What these snoops do not know is the relief I felt every time I left.

"I wanted to meet Assange because of my deep appreciation of the original WikiLeaks concept. As a teenager reader George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, I, too, was troubled by the prospect of a high-tech surveillance state and its likely effect on human relations. Assange's early writings - particularly his idea of using states' own technology to create a huge digital mirror that could show everyone what they were up to filled me with hope that we might collectively defeat Big Brother.

"By the time I met Assange, that early hope had faded. Surrounded by bookcases featuring Ecuadorian literature and government publications, we would sit and chat late into the night. A device on top of a bookshelf emitted mind-numbing white noise to counter listening devices. As time passed, the claustrophobic living room, the badly hidden ceiling-mounted camera pointing at me, the white noise, and the stale air made me want to run out into the street.

"Assange's detractors have been saying for years that his confinement was self-inflicted: he hid in Ecuador's embassy because he jumped bail in the United Kingdom to avoid answering sexual assault allegations in Sweden. Women must be heard when reporting assault. Only the violence that men have inflicted upon women for millennia is viler than the disrespect and denigration to which women are subjected when they speak up.

"I recall saying to Julian that, had it been me, I would want to confront my accusers, and listen to them carefully and respectfully, regardless of whether official charges had been brought. He replied that he, too, wanted that. 'But, Yanis,' he said, 'if I were to go to Stockholm, they would throw me in solitary and, before I got a chance to answer any allegations, I would be bundled into a plane heading for a US supermax prison.' To drive the point home, he showed me his lawyers' offer to Swedish authorities to go to Stockholm if they guaranteed that he would not be extradited to the United States on espionage charges. Sweden never considered the proposal.

"During Assange's years in Ecuador's embassy, in circumstances that the United Nations deemed 'arbitrary detention,' many friends and colleagues mocked his fear - and lambasted me for believing him. Last September, the historian and feminist intellectual Germaine Greer summed up that belief on Australian public radio: 'He won't be extradited to the United States,' she said derisively, blaming Julian's lawyers for misleading him into fearing such an extradition while collecting his book's royalties.

"Now he is languishing in Belmarsh, a notorious English high-security prison, in a windowless basement cell with even less fresh air and light than before. Unable to receive visitors, he awaits extradition to the US. 'Let him rot in hell,' is a frequent response from good people around the world who were incensed by WikiLeaks' release of Hillary Clinton's emails ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, which blew fresh wind into Donald Trump's sails. Why, they ask, has Assange not released anything damning on Trump or Russian President Vladimir Putin?

"Before I explain why his detractors should reconsider, let me state for the record my personal frustration with his support of Brexit, his injudicious attacks against his feminist critics, his editorializing in favour of Trump, and, crucially, his communications with Trump's people. I expressed this frustration to his face several times. But castigating WikiLeaks for not publishing leaks that damage all sides equally is to miss the point. WikiLeaks was established as a digital mailbox where whistle-blowers could deposit information that is true and whose revelation is in the public interest. This is WikiLeak's sole obligation. By design, it cannot control who leaks what; its technology prevents even Assange from knowing a whistle-blower's identity. If this means that most leaks will embarrass Western powers, that is WikiLeaks' great, if imperfect, service to us - service that, to my frustration, was diminished by Julian's editorializing.

"Recent developments prove that his current predicament has nothing to do with the Swedish allegations or his role in aiding Trump against Clinton. With Chelsea Manning in prison again for refusing to confess that Assange incited, or helped, her to leak evidence of US atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan, the best explanation of what is going on comes from Mike Pompeo, Trump's first CIA director and now US Secretary of State.

"Pompeo described WikiLeaks as 'a non-state hostile intelligence service.' That is exactly right. But it is an equally accurate description of what every self-respecting news outlet ought to be. As Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky have warned, journalists who fail to oppose Assange's extradition to the US could be next on the hit list of a president who considers them the 'enemy of the people.' Celebrating his arrest and turning a blind eye to Manning's continued suffering is a gift to liberalism's greatest foes.

"Besides liberalism, Assange's persecution by the US security-industrial complex has another victim: women. No woman, in Sweden or elsewhere, will get justice if he is now thrown into a supermax prison for revealing crimes against humanity perpetrated by awful men in or out of uniform. No feminist goal is served by Manning's continued suffering.

"So here is an idea: Let us join forces to block Assange's extradition from any European country to the US, so that he can travel to Stockholm and give his accusers an opportunity to be heard. Let us work together to empower women, while protecting whistle-blowers who reveal nefarious behavior that governments, armies, and corporations would prefer to keep hidden."

Something Unique in Australian Journalism?

Has veteran Australian journalist Tony Walker done something unique in Australian journalism? Call on a bloviating Zionist lobby operative to put his money where his mouth is:

"In an opinion piece in Sydney's Daily Telegraph, Jeremy Leibler, the president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, likened [Melissa Parke's] criticism (ill-defined) of Israel to a 'new anti-Semitism'. 'Disguising itself as anti-Zionism, the new anti-Semitism uses criticism of Israel as a Trojan horse to perpetuate age-old stereotypes about Jews under a quasi-intellectual cover,' Leibler wrote. I reached out to Leibler to ascertain what criticism of Israel might be acceptable in the interests of enabling reasonable discussion about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and its attitudes more generally to the peace process. He did not respond." (Melissa Parke incident raises difficult questions about Israel, Tony Walker, smh.com.au, 17/4/19)

News Corpse

Sky News Australia is owned by Murdoch's News Corp. The following testimony by a former employee tells you all you really need to know about this particular 'news' outlet:

"... I wasn't shocked [by the Christchurch terror attack] ... This is because for the past three years, I've worked at Sky News. More specifically Sky News 'after dark' - when the rolling coverage of the day's news makes way for conservative commentators to share the 'opinions you can't ignore'. As a young Muslim woman, I had many crises of conscience working here, but the events of Friday snapped me out of the endless cycle of of justifying my job to myself. On Saturday, I finally sent in my letter of resignation... I realised pretty quickly though that the Sky News I worked on wasn't focussed on reporting facts and informing the public. Rather, conservative media commentators came together with current and former right-wing politicians, disseminating misinformation which bordered on conspiracies. I compromised my values and beliefs to stand idly by as I watched commentators and pundits instil more and more fear into their viewers. I stood on the other side of the studio doors while they slammed every minority group in the country - mine included - increasing polarisation and paranoia among their viewers... I answered calls from viewers who yelled about immigrants and Muslims ruining Australia. They did not realise that the person on the other end of the phone was both of those things. And in the aftermath of Friday's terror attack, Sky's coverage also stood out. It was one of the few Australian media outlets who played the live stream footage from inside the mosque... Some nights I felt physically sick, others I even shed tears in my car on the way home." (As the Christchurch attacks unfolded, I knew I had to quit my job at Sky News, Rashina Farrukh, abc.net.au, 19/3/19)

Brace Yourselves

Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times journalist who died in 2012 in the Syrian city of Homs, has lately been the subject of media attention, focusing on a US court case in which her sister was awarded over $300m on the grounds that Colvin was "specifically targeted because of her profession, for the purpose of silencing those reporting on the growing opposition movement in the country." Presumably, this enormous sum is to be paid out of frozen Syrian government funds.

The verdict can legitimately be viewed as a case of lawfare, waged in the context of the US regime change war on Syria. The official narrative, of course, is that Syria is essentially an Arab Spring affair, in which an evil dictator wages brutal war against a people struggling for freedom and democracy, and indications are that we are about to be exposed to an overdose of the official narrative, either wittingly or unwittingly, in the form of a veritable flood of Colvin-related material. These include a biography by Lindsey Hilsum, In Extremis: the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin, a documentary (Under the Wire) and a feature film (A Private War).

Hilsum, for example, has written (in the Guardian of course) that the verdict "should be celebrated by all who care about freedom of speech. At a time when journalists are frequently vilified and threatened, it acknowledges the significant role we play in exposing war crimes and injustice." (Marie Colvin verdict gives meaning to her death, 3/2/19) 

But what of the greatest war crime of all, the plotting and execution of wars of imperial regime change?

In light of the above, US journalist Rick Sterling's expose, Marie Colvin, Homs & media falsehoods (off-guardian.org, 29/1/19), which accuses Colvin of distorting the truth in her Syrian coverage, should be required reading for anyone concerned with separating fact from fiction in the matter of Syria.

But to return to the theme of lawfare, check out this most interesting comment on the Colvin court case from the comment thread which follows Sterling's piece:

"If you have your sights set on becoming a multi-millionaire in America, then suing a country that engages in 'an extra-judicial killing' seems the way to go (though I'm guessing if the country you decide to sue is a member of NATO and/or isn't targeted for US-style regime change then you may have a harder time getting the verdict of your choice rubber-stamped.)

"What makes this brand new, US-created law even easier to rule in your favour is the fact that no actual evidence is required, or to put it another way, it's the quantity of so-called 'evidence' and not the quality. At least that's the case according to the presiding judge, Amy Berman-Jackson of the US District Court for the District of Columbia who ruled that because the defence had gathered nearly a thousand pages of attached exhibits, declarations and 'expert reports', then an actual evidentiary hearing was unnecessary. That's right, the sheer volume of so-called 'evidence' literally outweighed any of its veracity, validity and objectivity.

"To make matters worse (if that is at all possible in a realm beyond satire and farce) it seems the bulk of this 'evidence' wasn't gathered and presented by any state and/or UN agency but by a dubious quasi-legal NGO with the grand-sounding (is there any other kind?) title of the 'Commission for International Justice & Accountability'.

"I should add that, in addition to the CIJA, the court relied on a Syrian defector, codenamed 'Ulysses' (it seems the entire official narrative is a made-for-Hollywood script and it seems no coincidence that this $300m plus court ruling is announced along with a supporting documentary and big screen Hollywood movie) who tells us that 'senior regime officials' celebrated after confirmation of her death, with one officer declaring (no doubt in a low growl): 'Marie Colvin was a dog and now she's dead. Let the Americans help her now.' Oh, and he helpfully tells us the Syrian intelligence officer responsible for targeting Marie 'Matrix' Colvin through the non-existent satellite phone and non-existent informer on the ground was rewarded with a brand new Hyundai car (no doubt painted sinister black or deep blood-red).

"Finally, how judge Jackson, who tells us Marie Colvin 'was specifically targeted because of her profession, for the purpose of silencing those reporting on the growing opposition movement in the country,' came up with the figure of $300m plus to be stolen from any Syrian state assets or accounts that happen to be in unfriendly foreign hands and given to her surviving family is a total mystery. Surely it cannot be for her projected earnings as a Sunday Times hack? (and let's face it, judging from her Homs reportage which is part 'colour revolution lite' and part Mills and Boon, she was hardly going to go on and win any literary Pulitzer prizes." (Paul Harvey, 3/2/19)

Mike Carlton's 'On Air' 5

In conclusion...

"It was Fairfax that cracked. Ignominiously, Darren Goodsir, a decent man and a good journalist, was trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. From the boardroom and the executive suite, his lords and masters were howling for my head on a platter. So was the lobby. They had to be placated, he told me, yet he wanted to keep me writing for the paper. I could see his dilemma, an added distraction he did not need. As the Herald slowly imploded, with more and more of its best and brightest journalists 'taking redundancy' - that cloying euphemism - he had to battle to shore up newsroom morale and to keep the show on the road. Nor was his own job safe: notoriously, Herald editors had the career prospects of a subaltern on the Somme.

"For my part, I was angry that few at the paper seemed at all interested in the filth heaped upon me. Still less was I accorded the courtesy of a face-to-face meeting where I could put my case... Our negotiations were by phone and email. Goodsir wanted to suspend me for a cooling-off period of about three weeks until the end of the month, and he pushed me again to apologise to the aggrieved. I reluctantly agreed, with the proviso that I would not grovel to anyone who had called me Hitler's cocksucker and the like. I thought the deal was done...

"[A]t around ten pm, the phone rang again. It was Sean Aylmer, Fairfax's editorial director, and therefore Goodsir's boss... [H]is voice was cold. 'We've decided to suspend you indefinitely,' he said... The arrogance, the impertinence of this apparatchik calling late at night to relay this decision was bad enough. But Fairfax had broken its word to me. A rank and cowardly betrayal. Weak-kneed, the company had buckled to the pressure from the lobby and the bullying from the Murdoch press. How they would cheer in Holt Street when they heard they had won. I was not going to cop it anymore. 'You needn't bother suspending me. You can get fucked, Aylmer. I've just quit.' I slammed the phone down in his ear." (pp 513-15)

Mike Carlton's 'On Air' 3

Juicy carrots for politicians of all sides and pliant journalists...

"The lobbying is slick and sophisticated, sometimes subtle and unseen, at other times loud and combative. Huge effort goes into influencing Australian political and public opinion, and media coverage of Israel and the Middle East. Cabinet ministers and editors invariably take the phone calls. The AIJAC is always ready with a free, well-written article to push the current line on the opinion pages.* Generous financial donations are slung to the major political parties. In his entertaining Dairy of a Foreign Minister, Bob Carr complains at length of the lobby's attempts to browbeat the Gillard government into backing the belligerent Likud hard line in Israel, a situation he thought scandalous and depressing.

"The respected Australian journalist John Lyons has explained, in detail, how the AIJAC operates and agitates above and below the wire to advance the policies of the Netanyahu government. Lyons, now a senior ABC editorial executive, is a former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and for six years was the Australian's Middle East correspondent. In his memoir, Balcony Over Jerusalem, he writes: 'The longer I was in Israel, the more I realised that key figures in the Australian Jewish community sat on the far right of the Israeli political spectrum. In Israel I was able to have meaningful discussions with key army or intelligence figures about the Palestinian issue. But with many of Australia's Jewish leaders this was just not possible. It was almost as if they felt that, given they were not living in Israel, they needed to take a harder line than many people living there.'

"Lyons details the AIJAC's relentless public and private attempts to discredit him for his reporting, and the work of other Australian correspondents in the Middle East. When all else fails, the lobby hurls the 'anti-Semitic' tag into the ring. You criticise Israel or Netanyahu or the Likud party: therefore you must hate Jews. You are an anti-Semite. This is a giant leap, as daft as suggesting that to criticise Tony Abbott, say, or to question our defense policies is to hate Australians. But it is a charge almost impossible to rebut, with a dizzying catch-22 dangling from it. We say you are anti-Semitic, you say you are not. But if you disagree with us you must be anti-Semitic. Even to suggest that there is an Israel lobby is anti-Semitic.

"That's the stick for journalists unwilling to regurgitate the hasbara or propaganda pumped out by the Netanyahu government and the Israeli military. There are also juicy carrots for politicians of all sides and pliant journalists willing to be schmoozed. Money is no object. The AIJAC and another group, the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, run regular 'study tours' to Israel, funded by generous Jewish donors. Selected politicians and hacks are flown business class, put up in five-star hotels, and wined and dined in the best Tel Aviv restaurants while being escorted around showpiece hospitals, kibbutzes and settlements. Lyons writes: 'No editors, journalists or others should take these trips: they grotesquely distort the reality and are dangerous in the sense that they allow people with a very small amount of knowledge to pollute Australian public opinion.'

"He is right. They offered me one of these junkets many years ago; I declined it for exactly those reasons. But it is a heroic figure indeed who stands between an Australian journalist and a gravy train. As I write, another eight hacks have returned from one. They were the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, the editor-in-chief of Huffington Post Australia, the editor of the Weekend Australian's Inquirer section, the news director of the Daily Telegraph, reporters from Channel 7 and Sky Television, and producers from SBS Television and radio 2GB. Their minder was Vic Alhadeff, from the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.

"Alhadeff evidently weaved his magic. At a welcome home reception at Sydney's Australian Jewish Museum in October 2017, the eight brimmed with gratitude. Israel 'captured my heart and my mind', wrote Anna Caldwell of the Telegraph. There were 'so many signs of hope... every day we saw Israelis and Palestinians working side by side - they all wanted peace'. All this discovered in a week. Everyone agreed it had been wonderful. Fancy that. These travelling troupes are sometimes allowed to see Gaza, but only from a distant hill.

"Here, then, were the wheels and levers of a powerful media machine aimed right at me. Murdoch's newspapers lined up alongside." (pp 509-11)

[*For example, Ryvchin popped up on the opinion page of The Australian only yesterday: Amnesty lost its way over Israel]

To be continued...

I Read the Herald Today, Oh Boy

I see that Nine Entertainment Co. rag The Sydney Morning Herald is crowing about polling that shows that its "readership has surged ahead of its News Corp rivals after the way digital and newspaper audiences are measured was changed to better take into account growing consumption on mobile devices." (Herald moves further ahead in readership, 21/1/19)

But what exactly are readers 'consuming'?

Among other things, chief executive of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies Vic Alhadeff''s account of his recent junket in Germany as a "guest of the German Foreign Ministry" (Confronting Germany's new generation of neo-Nazis, 19/1/19).

Parenthetically, just why the German government would be squandering its taxpayers' money on a Zionist shill from down under is anyone's guess.

After informing us that "German Jews - who include an estimated 30,000 Israelis - are overwhelmingly positive, while profoundly concerned at the emergence of the AfD [Alternative for Deutschland]" party, which includes "neo-Nazi elements," he proceeds to tell us that "3600 British Jews have applied for German citizenship in the event Jeremy Corbyn becomes that country's prime minister."

Now before you exclaim, 'the mind boggles', remember that what you're dealing with here is a typical propaganda trick: cherry-picked facts taken out of context.

Here's The Times report on the subject:

"Thousands of British Jews have applied for foreign passports since 2016, driven mainly by a desire to retain EU citizenship after Brexit but also by fears over rising antisemitism and the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn coming to power. New figures obtained by The Times show that more than 3,600 Britons have applied for German nationality under a 2015 scheme inviting the descendants of those driven out on religious, racial or political grounds by the Nazis to reclaim citizenship, with most applications from Jewish people." (British Jews apply for foreign passports as 'insurance policy', Kaya Burgess, 17/11/18)

"... driven mainly by a desire to retain EU citizenship after Brexit... " says it all.

50 Years of Anti-Palestinian Press Bias

Here's the introduction to an important new study of press bias relating to Palestine/Israel coverage which, sadly, merely confirms what we already knew from our casual reading, namely that the mainstream US press is overwhelmingly anti-Palestinian in content, and has been since 1967:

"A study released last month by 416Labs, a Toronto-based consulting and research firm, supports the view that mainstream US newspapers consistently portray Palestine in a more negative light than Israel, privilege Israeli sources, and omit key facts helpful to understanding the Israeli occupation, including those expressed by Palestinian sources. The largest of its kind, the study is based on a sentiment and n-gram analysis of nearly a hundred thousand headlines in five mainstream newspapers dating back to 1967. The newspapers are the top five US dailies, The New York Times, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. Headlines spanning five decades were put into two datasets, one comprising 17,492 Palestinian-centric headlines, and another comprising 82,102 Israeli-centric headlines. Using Natural Language Processing techniques, authors of the assessed the degree to which the sentiment of the headlines could be classified as positive, negative, or neutral. They also examined the frequency of using certain words that evoke a particular view or perception.

"Key findings of the study are:

*Since 1967, use of the word 'occupation' has declined by 85% in the Israeli dataset of headlines, and by 65% in the Palestinian dataset;
*Since 1967, mentions of Palestinian refugees have declined by an overall 93%;
*Israeli sources are nearly 250% more likely to be quoted as Palestinians;
*The number of headlines centering Israel were published four times more than those centering Palestine;
*Words connoting violence such as 'terror' appear three times as much as the word 'occupation' in the Palestinian dataset;
*Explicit recognition that Israeli settlements and settlers are illegal rarely appears both in both datasets;
*Since 1967, mentions of 'East Jerusalem,' distinguishing that part of the city occupied by Israel in 1967 from the rest of the city, appeared only a total of 132 times;
*The Los Angeles Times has portrayed Palestinians most negatively, followed by the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and lastly The New York Times;
*Coverage of the conflict has reduced dramatically in the second half of the fifty-year period." (Exclusive: are US newspapers biased against Palestinians? Analysis of a hundred thousand headlines says yes, Dorgham Abusalim, palestinesquare.com, 9/1/19)

A comparable study of the Australian press, you can be sure, would only replicate such a bias. It should also be noted that since the Fairfax (now Nine Entertainment Co.) and Murdoch presses  ceased to employ Middle East correspondents, the former now recycles reports from the Washington Post and The New York Times, while the latter draws on items from the Murdoch-owned The Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Antidotes to the Official Story on Syria

What unmitigated crap this is from The Economist's latest editorial:

"With [Russia's] help, the heinous dictator Assad has won Syria's civil war after nearly eight blood-soaked years... Rather than stitching Syria back together, Russia has let Assad continue to tear it apart. It has helped him bomb his opponents into submission and given cover for his use of poison gas... He has pushed bitter Sunnis into the arms of extremists. Inequality, corruption and divisive rule originally fuelled the rebellion and nurtured the jihadist insurgency... " (After saving Assad's regime, Putin must take hold of the peace, The Economist/ The Australian, 5/1/19)

In one form or another, it has been relentlessly peddled by one msm outlet or another as the official line on the war in Syria - in reality, a war against Syria.

You can see some of its elements above: the demonisation of Asad as a Middle Eastern tyrant out of central casting, masking, of course, his popularity among Syrians generally; the deliberate framing of the conflict as a civil war, to disguise the bleeding obvious fact that it was really just another attempt - after Iraq and Libya - by the US and its client states at regime change; and the perverse portrayal of Asad as a wrecker, rather than as a defender of his country's independence and sovereignty etc etc.

It's more than time for an antidote to the official story's false narrative. I take this opportunity, therefore, to commend either (or both) Tim Anderson's The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change & Resistance (2016) or Stephen Gowans' Washington's Long War on Syria (2017). Since I'm reading the latter at the moment, here's an extract, countering the alleged sectarian nature of the Asad government, another favourite anti-Syrian government propaganda trope:

"The myth that the Assad governments, both those of Hafez and Bashar, were sectarian, persisted for decades, and the myth's longevity was due in no small part to its political utility to Washington and its Sunni Islamist allies. The myth was insinuated into the journalism of North America and Western Europe where it was often used to frame the US war on Bashar al-Assad's Syria as a sectarian civil conflict pursued by a state captured by an Alawite minority to advance its sectarian interests at the expense of the Sunni majority. Accordingly, the Syrian government was often described in the Western press as 'Alawite-led' while the armed opposition was just as often referred to as 'largely Sunni.' This ignored the reality that both the Syrian Arab Army, and Assad's cabinet, were also largely Sunni, and that this was a political (rather than sectarian) conflict between secular Arab nationalists on the one hand, and jihadists (backed by the US and its allies) on the other. But propagation of the myth of sectarian warfare comported with the predilection of Western discourse for Orientalist depictions of the Global South as a territory riven by ancient inter-communal animosities, which necessitated the intervention of the United States - the self-proclaimed force for good in the world - to establish order. It was useful for US strategists to propagate this understanding for a few reasons.

"First, it undergirded the imperialist strategy of divide and rule. Ideological agendas conveyed in Western media reached not only Western audiences, but audiences beyond the West, including in Syria. If the Syrian Sunni majority could be led to understand the Assad government as an instrument of the Alawite community, all the better for the US foreign policy goal of extirpating Arab nationalism from the Syrian state.

"Second, the myth of the Assad government as an Alawite instrument of oppression concealed the central role that secular Arab nationalism played in the Middle East and in the politics of the Assad government. This obfuscated the true dimensions of the conflict. If there were any references in Western media to the Assad government's commitment to the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party's values of freedom from foreign domination, state direction, planning and control of the economy, and working toward the unity of the Arab nation, I'm not aware of them. Acknowledging the ideological framework within which the Syrian government operated, rather than presenting Syrian leaders as motivated by a lust for power to advance a sectarian agenda on behalf of the Alawite minority, would have presented Syria's Arab nationalists as rational actors pursuing what many may have considered defensible, if not praiseworthy goals. However, to serve US foreign policy objectives, US strategists favoured the portrayal of Assad as a power hungry Alawite despot, covering up the Arab nationalist themes that genuinely pervaded his politics.

"Third, the false depiction of the Assad government as animated by a sectarian rather than a secular Arab nationalist agenda encouraged an understanding that US leadership, which is to say, Western interference in Syrian politics, was necessary and desirable for the supposed lofty humanitarian reason of bringing about peace in a country troubled by the oppression of a religious majority by a religious minority.

"In short, the myth of Alawite oppression of the Sunni majority both encouraged the phenomenon of inter-communal strife, and then used it to justify a US-led program of regime change to overcome it." (pp 31-2)

What Ethnic Cleansing? 2

So what happened to Safad? Here's the account in Nafez Nazzal's study, The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee 1948 (1978):

"Although 200 to 250 men of Safad were armed with various kinds of rifles and 35 to 50 rounds of ammunition each, very few had any systematic military training; they depended greatly on the Arab forces positioned in the city. Nevertheless when the Zionists attacked 'Ein ez Zeitun, the Arab [volunteer] forces refused to join in the fighting and would not permit the militia to join the villagers in defending themselves, assuring everyone that Shishakli and his men would repulse an attack on the city, and that the task of the Arab forces in Safad and the militia was to defend the city. The people of Safad became discouraged and lost confidence in their forces. 'Issa 'Abid al-Khadrah, a merchant and a member of the Safad militia, recounted:

'We could not defend the city, nor did we count on the Arab forces to protect it. Rumours spread that the Jews had been given 'Ein ez Zeitun... The fall of this village left the city besieged from the south, east and north. We felt that the Arab forces did not try to prevent this situation... If Sari Fnaish and his men did not protect 'Ein ez Zeitun, what would make you think he would protect Safad... what interest would they have in defending Safad but not 'Ein ez Zeitun?'

"The decisive battle for Safad began on the night of May 9-10. The Palmach opened heavy artillery fire on all positions occupied by by Arab forces in the city. Their use of the homemade mortar, the Davidka, which produced a great deal of noise, left the people of Safad in a state of shock. Usamah al-Naqib, a member of the militia reported:

'On the night of the attack, the responsible Arab commanders: Shishakli, Sari Fnaish, Ihsan Kamlamaz (trainer of the local militia); were out of the city. We did not have a unified command. Everyone fought on his own... We were unaware of what was happening in the other quarters of the city. Rumours spread that the ALA [Arab Liberation Army] had begun to withdraw... The people of Safad began to flee in panic. We could not find out what was happening... It was raining hard. We knew we could not sustain the defence of our city alone and so by midnight decided to retreat. We heard that the city fell to the Jews by the morning.'

"The fall of Safad on May 10, 1948 was a great shock to the Palestinians in Galilee. The villagers of the Hula Valley were disheartened and terrified; a great number of the villagers in Eastern Galilee began to flee. Almost all of the villages surrounding the city of Safad were now evacuated."

In Michael Palumbo's The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from their Homeland (1987), you can read about the sickening murder of a group of Arab POWs by a hoe-wielding  Israeli intelligence officer (pp 114-15). On page 115, you'll also find the admission of Yigal Allon, Commander in Chief of the Palmach, that his aim with regard to Safad and its surrounding villages was "to cleanse the Upper Galilee and create a continuous strip of Israeli territory in the region," and that he wanted to do this before May 15.

In Ilan Pappe's more recent book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), we learn that while the Palmach had 1,000 well-trained troops, the Arab volunteer force was only 400 strong, only half of whom were armed with rifles (p 97). Then there's this revelation on p 98: "The Palmach troops drove most of the people out, only allowing 100 old people to stay on, though not for long. On 5 June, Ben-Gurion noted dryly in his diary: 'Abraham Hanuki, from [Kibbutz] Ayelet Hashahar, told me that since there were only 100 old people left in Safad they were expelled to Lebanon."

The likes of journalists such as Michael Bachelard need to ponder and understand this simple fact:

"In virtually every war of modern and ancient times civilians have been forced to flee to escape the fighting, taking refuge elsewhere until, with the cessation of hostilities, they could return to their homes. [But] what occurred in Palestine during the war of 1947-49 was an exodus of a fundamentally different character. It involved the systematic expulsion of most of the Arab population from its homes, and its exile from Palestine, as part of a premeditated scheme to transform radically the demography of the country in fulfilment of the colonial ideal of Zionism - making Palestine 'as Jewish as England is English.' This colonial settler nature of Zionism - the substitution of one people for another by force of arms - and the tragic situation it has created in Palestine over the past half century, is at the heart of the current conflict in the Middle East, although this essential fact has unfortunately been obscured by Israeli and much Western scholarship on the Palestine question." (From Rashid Khalidi's  foreword to Nazzal's book cited above, p IX)

But Bachelard not only clouds the reality of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he goes on in his pathetic piece on Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp to broadcast the following Israeli propaganda trope: "We are in a concrete room inside a concrete jungle, behind concrete walls administered by an unyielding Lebanese state that believes these people to be a demographic problem, and so is adamant that these men, and their families, will never become citizens."

What an exercise in reality inversion is that!

No mention whatever that Israel, not Lebanon's concerns with disrupting its confessional balance, is the root cause of the Palestinian refugee problem as exemplified in Ain al-Hilweh and other Palestinian refugee camps throughout the Middle East.

A mere tweak of Bachelard's text suffices to illustrate the extent of his cover-up of this elementary fact: '... an unyielding Jewish state that believes these people to be a demographic problem, and so is adamant that these men, and their families, will never be allowed to return to their Palestinian homeland and become equal citizens with Israeli Jews.'

Better by far that Bachelard had never set foot in Lebanon than do propaganda service for apartheid Israel.

What Ethnic Cleansing? 1

Please tell me what is the point of 'journalism' such as this if not to keep readers in the dark and shield the apartheid state from the pariah status it so richly deserves:

"When the state of Israel was being formed in 1948, and a war with the Arab world raged, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes into neighbouring Lebanon and set up temporary camp." (The day I drank (bad) coffee with heavily armed militants, Michael Bachelard, The Sun-Herald, 11/11/18)

Nothing like the old passive voice to avoid the fact that Israel was created in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. And nothing like a hyped "war with the Arab world," to divert attention from the fact that that the campaign of ethnic cleansing began long before Arab League troops moved to put a stop to it.

Bachelard is either involved in self-censorship here, or is one of those who can see ethnic cleansing everywhere but Palestine.

The "heavily armed militants" with whom this late-sipper shared "(bad) coffee," were residents of Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon in south Lebanon, more than 95% of whose inhabitants originally came from the kaza of Safad and the surrounding area, in northern Palestine, according to French Middle East scholar Bernard Rougier's study of the camp, Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam among Palestinians in Lebanon (2004 French/ 2007 English translation).

The Palestinian city of Safad, now Israeli, and its surrounding villages, now in ruins, are situated in the eastern Galilee, so let's examine, shall we, what exactly went on there before any Arab armies arrived on the scene on May 15 when the British Mandate over Palestine officially ended.

Take, for example, the village of Ayn az-Zaytun, some 1.5 kilometres north of Safad, whose inhabitants cultivated olives, grain and fruit.

It was first attacked by Zionist forces as early as January 1948. Later, it was occupied by Palmach forces on May 1, 1948, as a prelude to the occupation of Safad.  These Zionist shock troops first unleashed a mortar barrage at 3 am, followed by a ground assault. After taking the village, they rounded up its inhabitants.

As Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi recounts in his exhaustive study All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied & Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (1992):

"The men... were taken away and the rest were humiliated and expelled while shots were fired over their heads, according to the villagers' testimony and Israeli sources. As for the men, some were later expelled and enabled to join their families, but 37 of them, selected at random, were taken captive. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, they were probably among a group of 70 people later massacred in a gully between  'Ayn al-Zaytun and Safad under orders from Moshe Kelman, the commander of the Palmach's Third Battalion. Morris reports that... after the prisoners were killed, and in anticipation of a Red Cross visit to the area, he ordered their hands to be untied, to conceal the fact that the killing had been done in cold blood.

"Several villagers attempted to return to their homes over the next couple of days but were fired upon by the Palmach; one of them was killed, according to Morris. As for the village houses, they were burned or blown up by Palmach sappers on 2 and 3 May. The destruction was carried out partly in order to terrify the inhabitants of Safad, who could watch the spectacle from nearby hills. The sight of the village being leveled had a demoralizing effect in the city, as well as in the surrounding villages of eastern Galilee." (p 437)

Continued in my next post...

The Great March of Return

"Israeli forces have killed 7 Palestinians, two of them children, and shot more than 90 others in one of the bloodiest days of a six-month protest movement along the frontier, the Gaza health ministry said." (Two children among seven people shot dead by Israel, say officials, Oliver Holmes, theguardian.com, 30/9/18)

"... one of the bloodiest days of a six-month protest... "

Think about that. Six months! 180 people dead so far. Thousands more maimed and wounded. And why? Because they simply want to exercise their inalienable right as refugees to return home.

If anyone can point me to a more sustained and heroic display of bodies-on-the-line under fire, I'd like to know about it.

Then there are their serial killers.

If anyone can point me to a more sustained, more mechanical response to unarmed protesters than that of Israel's snipers, I'd like to hear about it.

And while I'm at it, if anyone can point me to a more sustained silence on the subject of what have been weekly massacres of defenceless civilians in Gaza than that displayed by the Australian msm....

Dave Sharma: His Brilliant Career

2013

* "Australia's next ambassador to Israel [Dave Sharma] hopes to change what he says is 'a bit of a one-dimensional impression' of Israel among the wider Australian public." (Our man in Israel, The Australian Jewish News, 17/5/13)

Who'd have thought that burnishing another country's image was the job of an Australian ambassador?

* "Ziv Hospital is a profound example of humanity and decency at its most compelling. It is Israel at its very best, and a side of Israel that the world too rarely acknowledges." (Origin no bar to Israel lifesavers, Dave Sharma, The Australian, 31/8/13)

That, btw, was just the first of Sharma's opinion pieces celebrating the joy of Israel in Murdoch's Australian.

2014

* The highlight of Sharma's career as Australia's ambassador to Israel must surely have been his hobnobbing with Israel's housing and construction minister, Uri Ariel (Habayit Hayehudi MP) in - wait for it - occupied East Jerusalem - which prompted Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat to write in protest to Australian officials at the time: "It should noted that diplomatic recognition of the situation created by the attempted annexation of our capital is a flagrant violation of international law... Australia's Ambassador to Israel meeting with Israel officials in East Jerusalem has the effect of attempting to legitimize the illegal situation on the ground and may be deemed as aiding, abetting  or otherwise assisting illegal Israeli policies... As such, Australia's actions are tantamount to complicity in ongoing Israeli violations  of the international laws of war." (Bishop rebuked over envoy's East Jerusalem visit, Daniel Flitton, Sydney Morning Herald, 17/5/14)

Remember, this happened years before Trump's decision to move the US embassy to [West!] Jerusalem.

And how do we even know about Sharma's shenanigans back then? Only because of Uri Ariel's crowing about his achievement in bagging him:

"In fact, nobody would have known  this meeting was happening, had if not been for a press release distributed by Ariel's bureau blatantly pointing out the fact that the talks between the two were taking place at the government compound in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Most of the international community does not recognize Israel's authority in East Jerusalem. Therefore, few diplomats or representatives of foreign nations - if at all - would come to an official meeting with Israeli politicians or government officials in that part of the city. Media outlets self-identified as right-wing and with Ariel's Habayit Hayehudi... were quick to publish that the meeting was taking place, presenting it as a sort of Australian recognition of Israel authority over East Jerusalem." (PA complains to Australia after envoy meets Israeli official in East Jerusalem, Barak Ravid, Haaretz, 15/5/14)

2018

* "And if the Liberals hold the seat of Wentworth with new candidate Dave Sharma, [PM Scott Morrison] will have one of the most brilliant young diplomats of recent decades joining an already powerful team in national security." (Morrison prepares to take his place on the international stage, Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 15/9/18)

From Zionist dupe to "brilliant" diplomat in 4 years! Just wow! But how to explain how such a "brilliant" diplomat can put his foot in it to this extent: "Dave Sharma... has apologised for comments that teachers are 'underemployed'. 'School employees and teachers are similarly underemployed, working hours closer to three-quarters of a regular full-time job,' Mr Sharma wrote in an opinion peace for the Herald earlier this year. He apologize yesterday after receiving strong criticism for the comments from prominent Australian authors, educators and parents. 'I know teachers work really hard and around the clock,' Mr Sharma told the Herald yesterday. '[The article] was more provocative than it should have been; it was just meant to get people thinking about how schools are still a post-war institution even though life and families have moved on.' Mr. Sharma also wrote on Twitter this week that he owes 'all teachers an unreserve apology'. (Sharma sorry for insult to teachers, Pallavi Singhal, Sydney Morning Herald, 20/9/18)

* "Some of Sydney's wealthiest business leaders are lining up to throw money behind the new candidate for Wentworth, Dave Sharma, who has been described as 'the Liberals' Obama... Billionaires James Packer and Solomon Lew threw their support behind Mr Sharma. He also had the backing of prominent Sydneysider David Gonski and Jewish leader Rabbi Levi Wolff from the Central Synagogue in Bondi. A senior Liberal said Mr Sharma's ability to draw significant donations would be 'eye-watering'." (Billionaires lining up to back 'Liberals' Obama', Alexandra Smith, Sydney Morning Herald, 15/9/18)

Alas, that Monday's (17/9) letters to the editor, while scornful of Sharma's backers, missed the point. As, for example, this, from reader Frank H Talbot of Riverview: "Billionaires lining up to back a candidate in Wentworth? Something wrong here. Lincoln said government should be 'of the people, by the people, for the people.' This sound more like 'of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy'."

* "Liberal Dave Sharma isn't just raising money from rich-listers for his Wentworth tilt. The entrepreneurial Sharma is also currently overseeing the raising of $10 million for an Israeli tech company - Shekel Brainweigh - which the former diplomat shares and hopes to list on the local stock exchange next month. Shekel Brainweigh - an outfit that makes weighing technology for grocery self-checkouts - is planning to float on the ASX on October 26. That is the week after the Wentworth by-election. What a busy candidate!". (Sharma weighs his options, Will Glasgow & Christine Lacy, The Australian Business Review, 28/9/18)

Happily, the above piece throws some much-needed light on Sharma's seeming star-crossed affair with Israel. Twelve-and-a-half percent of Wentworth's electors are Jewish, the bulk of whom would consider themselves to be pro-Israel to a greater or lesser degree. The electorate is, if you like, Sydney's Zionist central. Malcolm Turnbull, of course, bent over backwards to keep the Zionists there sweet, hosting a visit to these shores last year by Netanyahu, and visiting Israel in turn the same year.

Typically, what has been omitted from the msm coverage of Sharma's bid to step into the former prime minister's shoes as the MP for Wentworth is the Zionist connection. It is fair to say that he has been parachuted from his North Shore home into Wentworth largely in order to satisfy its Zionist faithful - not, as the msm would have us believe, because he is some kind of pin-up boy for billionaires, Jewish or otherwise (Packer being a mate of Netanyahu's btw). Yet again, a lazy, cowardly, self-censoring Australian msm has failed to make this Zionist connection clear in its coverage.