A Different Kind of Newspaper?

Graham Perkin (1929-1975), the editor of The Age (1966-1975), is credited by Eric Beecher (of crickey.com) in his review of Ben Hills' biography, Breaking News, with transforming The Age into "the gold standard of modern Australian journalism over the past half century"; inventing "the paradigm for investigative journalism in Australia"; and creating "an open, ideas-infested newsroom atmosphere." (Tribute to editor who inspired a newspaper's golden age, Sydney Morning Herald, 8/5/10)

Beecher also quotes Perkin as saying, in 1969, "We are trying to produce a different kind of newspaper. A popular newspaper of great quality and breadth. Our paper will look at the whole world, at all people. It will attempt to spread understanding and encourage decency, discourage inhumanity and attack prejudice." (ibid)

Admirable sentiments, of course, but when it comes to the Palestine/Israel conflict, Perkin and his kind all seem to suffer from Achille's heel.

Speaking of which, it just so happens that another, contemporary sufferer, Phillip Adams, was interviewing Ben Hills on ABC Radio National's Late Night Live recently when this little exchange took place:

Adams: Let's look at some of the dark side of the Perkin's moon... I think it's fair to say that there was a lack of balance in Middle East coverage which made the Israelis quite happy.
Hills: Yes, certainly he took a couple of sponsored trips to Israel but... those were the days the '67 war was coming up. It was plucky little Israel against the Arab world. And the Arabs had done themselves no favours by hijacking aeroplanes and blowing them up so... it is quite understandable that public sympathy and the sympathies of The Age were completely with Israel at that stage and that the Arab point of view didn't really get a look in in The Age for many years. (Graham Perkin & the Golden Age of Journalism, 6/5/10)

Seems that even an editor's editor can go weak at the knees under the influence of Israeli pheromones. And just look at our talking heads. When is Adams going to admit to the number of free rides he's given to Zionist propagandists over the years? And here's Perkin's protege, Ben Hills, rushing to the great man's defence with the lamest of excuses.

Interesting too that for Murdoch's Australian it is still, 35 years after Perkin's death, "plucky little Israel against the Arab world."

Zionism Red in Tooth & Claw

The latest issue of The Australian Jewish News (7/5/10) carries a most extraordinary advertisement, co-sponsored by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the St George Bank, for JNF NSW's June 2 Annual General Meeting.

The ad features Paul Howes, Australian Workers Union (AWU) national secretary and ACTU vice-president, as the AGM's "guest speaker."

For a Zionist institution that these days likes to conceal its historic role as a snapper-up of Palestinian land for Jews-only use with folderol about tree-planting and conservation*, the JNF here bares its teeth as an integral component of the Zionist project to wipe Palestine off the map.

[*See my 12/8/08 post A Certain Jewish Tree Planting Group]

The relevant text (accompanying a photo of Howes) reads as follows: "UNION CHIEF WHO SAID: 'I'm proud our nation helped to kill Hamas terrorist in Dubai'... come hear outspoken Paul Howes..."

Let's get this straight: JNF NSW is inviting the Jewish community - as the ad puts it: "The entire community is invited" - to come and hear Paul Howes tell them how proud he is that Australia helped a gang of Israeli assassins asphyxiate an unarmed, defenceless man in a third country. That's right - Australia, accessary to murder!

Just imagine the uproar (particularly in the Murdoch press) were a local Arab/Muslim organisation to invite the Arab/Muslim community to celebrate the murder of an Israeli abroad.

Of course, Howes did not put it quite that starkly when, in his Sunday Telegraph column of 7/3/10*, he wrote "I'm proud that our nation has played a small and accidental role in the removal of the terrorist al-Mabhouh from the planet." He was referring, of course, to the Mossad assassins' use of Australian passports. One can't help wondering, however, whether Howes would be entirely comfortable with the JNF's 'streamlining' of his words. What part of the old saying - If you lie down with dogs, you'll get up with fleas - does he not understand I wonder.

[* See my 7/3/10 post The ACTU's Sarah Palin]

While on the subject of the JNF, there is one little indicator that Australian Jews are finding the JNF's apartheid somewhat problematic. In the AJN's regular Vox Pop feature, in its issue of 10/8/07, 5 young Jews were asked: "Should the JNF be allowed to exclude non-Jewish Israelis from leasing its land?"

Four of the 5 answered as follows: They shouldn't be able to refuse, because what difference does it make if they are Jewish or non-Jewish? It's discrimination. (Kim Alman, Student, 17); No, as long as they have good intentions and are happy to live under the same laws as everybody else. (Wendy Ginsburg, Medical administrator); No, provided the people supporting the JNF are aware that they are giving the money to both Jews and non-Jews. (Greg Kitay, Financial analyst, 26); It's a straight business decision. They should lease to whomever they see fit, but they shouldn't discriminate on the basis of race. (Josh Gordon-Carr, Student, 20). The fifth answered, Yes. The money given to the JNF is provided by and meant for Jews, hence the name. (Danny Buchen, Student, 19)

Four out of five ain't bad.

Connections

"Ingeus [the job placement agency 97% owned by Kevin Rudd's wife Therese Rein] has operations in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Israel and South Korea. The group appointed the corporate blueblood David Gonski as chairman last October..." ($1m bounty Reins on PM's household, Scott Rochfort, Business Day/Sydney Morning Herald, 7/5/10)

"Mr Gonski, the chairman of the Australian Securities Exchange, Coca-Cola Amatil and Investec Bank, sits on dozens of other boards including Westfield Group, Singapore Airlines and Sunraysia... Mr Gonski is a high-profile philanthropist in Sydney's Jewish community, and a long time confidant of Westfield boss Frank Lowy." (David Gonski to chair Therese Rein's company, Natasha Bita, The Australian, 3/11/09)

Gonski is also a member of the "extended executive" of the United Israel Appeal (UIA) NSW. (uiansw.org.au)

Indonesian Rambamming

Not content with romancing Australian media hacks in Israel, a process of co-optation I have called rambamming*, Australia's Israel lobby has also been busy romancing their Indonesian counterparts. [*See in particular my 30/3/09 post I've been to Israel too]

Organised jointly by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Indonesia's first (?) rambamming took place in 2007. AIJAC's executive director Dr Colin Rubenstein was uncharacteristically blunt, voicing the lobby's rationale as follows: "[The 7 Indonesians] were a group of very senior journalists with great political contacts and influence on public opinion." (Indonesians make historic visit to Israel, The Australian Jewish News, 2/11/07)

While in Israel, the Indonesians met then foreign minister Tzipi Livni (who reportedly told them "it was important for Indonesia to be a force for moderation in the Middle East") and president Shimon Peres (who said, "Our enemies are not the Muslim or Arab world. Our enemies are hatred and terror"). (ibid)

The 2007 rambammed were Bambang Harymurti, editor-in-chief of Tempo; Uni Lubis, vice-chief editor of Star AN TV; Tofan Mahdi, managing editor of The Java Post; Ray Wijaya, news division head of PT Cipta TPI; Meuta Hafid, news anchor of Metro TV; Artine Ution, chief editor of TPI TV; and Endy Bayuni, editor-in-chieh of The Jakarta Post.

This February, 9 more Indonesian hacks took the plunge: Arief Suditomo, programming and production director of the SUNTV Network and editor-in-chief of RCTI television; Maria Hartiningsih, senior journalist at Kompas Daily; Heru Hendratmoku, production director at Radio News Agency; Dwi Kristanto, front-page editor, Rakyat Merdeka; Eva Mazrieva, news producer at ANTV Jakarta; Retno Shanti Ruwyastuti, deputy chief editor, Metro TV in Jakarta; Purwanto Setiadi, managing editor, Tempo; Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, deputy chief editor, The Jakarta Post; and Avian Tumengkol, editor-in-chief, Waspada Online and editor-at-large, The Waspada Daily in Medan. (Source: Selamat Israel, AJN, 30/4/10)

Amos Oz, Oz, Oz, Oi! Oi! Oi! 2

A documentary about Israeli literary icon Amos Oz is coming our way. Here's The Weekend Australian's film critic Evan Williams waxing worshipful:

"Amos Oz: The Nature of Dreams is a documentary... about the Israeli writer and literary academic Amos Oz. Born in Jerusalem, Oz lived on a kibbutz as a teenager and served with the Israeli army during the Six-Day War. A secular Jew, he has something of the stature of a sage in his homeland. Among Israeli writers and intellectuals he is perhaps the staunchest advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Watching him I was struck by his candour, his evident love of plain language. Newsweek has described him as 'a kind of Zionist Orwell: a man obsessed with simple decency and determined above all to tell the truth, regardless of whom he offends'. To judge from this sensitive and always affectionate documentary, he is most likely to offend zealots on both sides. He is particularly resentful of Europeans who lecture Israel on history or morality. Europe, he reminds us, is a small continent whose wars have shed more of the world's innocent blood than those of any other continent or nation... I commend the film, not only to those interested in Israel's history and politics, but to all those troubled by fanaticism and intolerance in any of their modern guises." (Review, 1/5/10)

Don't you just love Williams' logic? Anyone not as worshipful of Oz as he, must, ipso facto, be a zealot and so hopelessly out of order. And as for bloody-handed Europeans (collectively guilty, of course!) having no right to criticise Israel, it is only William's obvious ignorance of the Palestine problem that prevents him from seeing the Zionist project for what it is - the most virulent form of European colonialism.*

So for all you zealots out there offended by Williams' shallowness and gullibility just click on the Amos Oz tag below and read my 21/8/08 post Amos Oz, Oz, Oz, Oi! Oi! Oi!

[*Here's Israeli writer (and Oz basher) Yitzhak Laor's take on Zionism and European colonialism: "It should have been through us that Europe could have redeemed itself for its colonial past. It should have been through us that Europe learned to tolerate Islam, the most prominent refusal to accept Western secularism as a way of life. Tragically, what has happened is the opposite. It is through us that Europe... intensified its hatred of Islam and the Arabs: our state - presented as the true heir of Holocaust victims, most of whom looked 'very different from modern Europeans', most of whom were mocked in the same manner that traditional Muslims are mocked today - gave way to the return of the colonial. If we peel away the belief in the eternity of Zion, an eternity that every nationalist in the world believes about his or her nationhood; if we push aside the ancient religious yearning for Zion, a yearning that never disappeared but was also never acted upon by the believers until political Zionism took over and nationalized the Jewish religion; if we forget the prayers for redemption in Zion, which are still recited daily by religious Jews in Israel, as well as in Paris or Brooklyn or Yemen, we can get at the pure logic of the tragedy: Zionism thought it would politically resolve the exile within Europe - Jews as 'Orientals inside the Occident' - not just by an Exodus, by going elsewhere, but by going to the heart of the colonial hinterland of Europe, the East, not to become part of that East but in order to become a representative of the West 'over there', far away from the exile we were subjected to 'here', inside Europe. This is how Herzl put it, in very crude words, in his programmatic book The Jewish State. After his bitter and sincere description of European hatred toward the Jews following the Dreyfus affair, a hatred he saw as incurable, he writes: 'For Europe we could constitute part of the wall of defence against Asia: we could serve as an outpost against barbarism. As a neutral state we would remain in contact with all of Europe, which would have to guarentee our existence'." (The Myths of Liberal Zionism, 2009, pp 5-7)]

Mind Wide Shut

The ABC puts out a lavish monthly music/arts/culture magazine (cum program guide) called Limelight. Unfortunately, in its April 2010 issue, it's added another string to its bow: Zionist propaganda.

Tel Aviv, by 'travel writer' Tamara Thiessen, begins with this plea to the reader: Don't let chronic political tension keep you away from Israel. Intensely enriching, human and historic, its dolce vita in the Middle East lifestyle peaks in the pleasure-seeking, seaside city of Tel Aviv."

Dolce vita lifestyle? Tell it to the Palestinians!

Some of the dumber bits (followed by my comments):

"Imagine that you head to Israel without thinking of the country's political-cultural crisis, but with your mind wide open. I ponder this possibility on the plane after finally overcoming a decade-long apprehension of bombs on buses."

Political-cultural crisis? Ethnic cleansing & occupation = a political cultural crisis? Mind wide open? Mind wide shut more like it.

"[O]ver 400 kilometres of a planned 700 km 'fence against terror' has been built along the West Bank borders..."

Along the West Bank borders? Really? Not inside the occupied West Bank?

"Looking over the sun-hazed skyscraper silhouette, I sense how Jewish emigrants envisaged the city a century ago, surging up from the sand dunes only a couple of kilometres from the ancient Arabic port of Jaffa. Their idealism of building a peaceful, modern town was captured in the name Tel Aviv, meaning the Hill of Spring."

Ah yes, sand dunes for a people, for a people without sand dunes. Lest we forget: "The city of Tel Aviv was established in an area where Arab localities existed - particularly Jaffa and its suburbs in the south, but also smaller villages east and north of the city, whose names we still know today. The Arab localities in the Tel Aviv area, as well as their inhabitants, have been largely erased from the maps of the region and from its posted signs. While Hebrew-speakers still make use of the names Abu Kabir, Manshiyya, Summayl, Shaykh Muwannis and Salama, little is known about these places, and what is known is repressed." (Map of Tel Aviv & Its Palestinian Villages, zochrot.org)

And as for that "ancient Arabic port of Jaffa," it's now but a shadow of its former self, literally bulldozed by Tel Aviv (aka the Zionist project), its remnant Palestinian population (following the Great Purge of '48) barely hanging on:

"The ground floor of Zaki Khimayl's home is a cafe where patrons can drink mint tea or fresh juice as they smoke on a water pipe. Located by Jaffa's beach, a stone's throw from Tel Aviv, the business should be thriving. Mr Khimayl, however, like hundreds of other families in the Arab neighborhoods of Ajami and Jabaliya, is up to his eyes in debt and trapped in a world of bureaucratic regulations apparently designed with only one end in mind: his eviction from Jaffa. Sitting on the cafe's balcony, Mr Khimayl, 59, said he felt besieged. Bulldozers are tearing up the land by the beach for redevelopment and luxury apartments are springing up all around his dilapidated two-story home. He opened a briefcase, one of five he has stuffed with demands and fines from official bodies, as well as bills from four lawyers dealing with the flood of paperwork. 'I owe 1.8 million shekels [$500,000] in water and business rates alone', he said in exasperation. 'The crazy thing is the municipality recently valued the property and told me it's worth much less than the sum I owe'. Jaffa is one of half a dozen 'mixed cities' in Israel, where Jewish and Palestinian citizens supposedly live together. The rest of Israel's Palestinian minority, relatives of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, live in their own separate and deprived communities. Despite the image of coexistence cultivated by the Israeli authorities, Jaffa is far from offering a shared space for Jews and Palestinians, according to Sami Shehadeh of the Popular Committee for the Defence of Jaffa's Homes. Instead, Palestinian residents live in their own largely segregated neighborhoods, especially Ajami, the city's poorest district. Only last month, Mr Shehadeh said, the Jewish residents' committees proposed creating days when the municpal pool could be used only by Jews. Although Jaffa's 18,000 Palestinian residents constitute one-third of the city's population, they have been left powerless by politically since a municipal fusion with Jaffa's much larger neighbor, Tel Aviv, in 1950. Of the cities' joint population, Palestinians are just 3%. After years of neglect, Mr Shehadeh said, the residents are finally attracting attention from the authorities - but the interest is far from benign. A 'renewal plan' for Jaffa, ostensibly designed to improve the inhabitants' quality of life, is in fact seeking the Palestinian residents' removal on the harshest terms possible, he said. 'The municipality talks a lot about 'developing' and 'rehabilitating' the area, but what it means by development is attracting wealthy Jews looking to live close by Tel Aviv but within view of the sea', he said. 'The Palestinian residents here are simply seen as an obstacle to the plan, so they are being evicted from their homes under any pretext that can be devised. 'Some of the families have lived in these homes since well before the state of Israel was established, and yet they are being left with nothing'. The current pressure on the residents to leave Ajami has painful echoes of the 1948 war that followed that followed Israel's declaration of its existence. Once, Jaffa was the most powerful city in Palestine, its wealth derived from the area's huge orange exports. AS Israeli historians have noted, however, one of the Jewish leadership's main aims in the 1948 war was the expulsion of the Palestinian population from Jaffa, especially given its proximity to Tel Aviv, the new Jewish state's largest city. Ilan Pappe, an historian, writes that the people of Jaffa were 'literally pushed into the sea' to board fishing boats destined for Gaza as 'Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion'. By the end of the war, no more than 4,000 of Jaffa's 70,000 Palestinians remained. The Israeli government nationalized all their property and corralled the residents into the Ajami neighborhood, south of Jaffa port. For two years they were sealed off from the rest of Jaffa behind barbed wire. In the meantime, Jaffa's properties were either demolished or redistributed to new Jewish immigrants. The heart of old Jaffa, next to the port, was developed as a touristic playground, with palatial Palestinian homes turned into exclusive restaurants and art galleries run by Jewish entrepreneurs." (Extract from Jaffa's 'renewal' aims at expulsion of Palestinians, Jonathan Cook, antiwar.com, 16/9/08)

"By the time we leave, I have stopped thinking so much about the differences between Arabs and Jews. We have eaten along with other Jewish people at fantastic Arab eateries and seen Jews and Arabs walking alongside each other as friends. In the New Year they held a peace march together in the streets of Tel Aviv."

And Kevin Rudd is a smart but humble man, and the moon is made of green cheese, and the tooth fairy exists, and...

"Having discovered Israel, I feel more civilised: firstly, by my insights into these two rich cultures, and secondly, from an understanding that there is hope."

Pass the bucket, quick!

Thiessen dares quote Dr Johnson - twice:

"As 18th century writer Samuel Johnson said, 'The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are'."

"Again to quote Dr Johnson, 'Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness'."

You want Dr Johnson, Ms Thiessen? Ill give you Dr Johnson: "Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it." Think about it.

How to Pick a Palestinian Terrorist

Ever wondered what it's like being The Australian's opinion page editor Rebecca Weisser?

Guided by your near supernatural ability to differentiate between what you call mainstream and radical opinion, and your unerring sense of exactly what it is the readers want to read (See my 26/4/10 post Do You Want Your News Limited?), you and you alone can decree the following 'opinion' mainstream and so worthy of gracing the pages of The Australian:

"What is more, any Palestinian state would materialise only amidst compromise. There will be no return to the 1967 borders; at most Palestinians would be compensated for territorial adjustments made necessary by large blocs of Jewish settlements and Israeli security concerns. There will be nothing more than a token right of return for Palestinians to Israel. Jerusalem will remain undivided and at most shared. Terrorists would see all this as a sellout, and they would target not just Israel but those Palestinians and Arab states that made peace with it." (The Palestinian peace distraction, Richard N Haass, The Wall Street Journal/The Australian, 30/4/10)

So if you're a Palestinian and you cannot bring yourself to graciously accept (a) Israel's hanging on to large chunks of occupied West Bank territory in defiance of international law and the resolutions of the United Nations; (b) the ongoing 62-year exile of Palestinian refugees from their homes and lands in pre-1967 Israel; (c) Israeli sovereignty over occupied East Jerusalem; and you dare to suggest that any Palestinian leader who does is a sellout, then, hey, you're a terrorist.

Got that?