Milady's Cobber Down Under

I saw this observation by David Collier

and (although not directly related to the subject of the Beyond the Great Divide Post  to which David links) I thought of this, by a friend, from their mutual student days, of Baroness Tonge.

From London, retired, and resident in Western Australia, this son of Jewish parents writes:

Mr Garcia-Webb is good at a phrase, and in retirement he authors "social fiction," fiction as a vehicle for social commentary, which often in his  case constitutes propaganda against Israel, sometimes narrated by imaginary Palestinians.  Not surprisingly,  the baroness has left comments appreciative of his work.

Examples of his oeuvre:

Here (written in 2015):

No one aged less than 67 years has lived in peace in Gaza

“What does it mean, to live in peace?” Jala had asked that question innumerable times, starting when she was only only three. “Perhaps you will understand when you are older,” her loving parents had explained....

 Here (written the same year):

 "....It is essential, I have decided, to allow them to think they are winning. To be cocky, or to spit in their eye leads to even worse torture. If they are annoyed, they torture prisoners to death. You may have read of them. They hang themselves. Or die from a mysterious illness despite the very best Israeli medical care....

Insha’Allah"

 Here (likewise):

"Had I ever thought, really thought, considered in depth, agonized, sat on dilemma’s piercing horns, what single thing I wanted most of all in life? Health, wealth, better eyesight or hearing, less pain, to be young again, happiness, improved memory. Or more broadly, an end to world hunger, climate change, war, famine. More narrow the overthrow of the 1%, an end to occupation of Palestine, the collapse of US hegemony, a world without politicians exploiting pseudo-terrorism controlling every day to day thought and action. Democracy. Peace. Death"

Here, 2015 again (the narrator is female):

 '....In January 2012, the national Union of Israeli Students became a full time partner in the government controlled spread of Israeli propaganda. Student were to be paid $2,000 to spend five hours a week spreading pro-Israeli propaganda online. Propaganda is rather an elastic term. They were also paid to be internet trolls. I had been labelled an anti-Semite many times by then. Initially my response was to laugh. Did they not realise that deliberately and falsely labelling a person as an anti-Semite actually denigrated what it was to be Jewish? Sometimes the attacks were simply name calling. On other occasions they threatened bodily harm. It got worse whenever Israel’s attacks on Palestinians got worse, since that would normally be an occasion for me to write an article on the subject. Hate mail really poured in during the atrocities of Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza summer of 2014. For the first time I began to take the hate mail seriously. Sometimes I found myself using reflections in shop windows to check if anyone was following me. Sometimes I awoke suddenly at night trembling at a sound I thought I had heard.

 Then came the elections in Israel. Netanyahu was returned but with a diminished power base. As he manoeuvered to make a government he descended further into what I had for some time labelled as a psychopathic state. The key to what happened next lay in the revelations to the ordinary public that the US, the UK and Israel has worked together to turn the initial student uprising in Syria into a war that would kill over 200,000, injure over a million and displace 7.6 million people. Even worse, if that were possible, Israel funded ISIS at the same time as the US and others claimed to be attacking it. I wrote a number of articles on this theme.

 The shifting levels of darkness jolted and a clear patch opened to revel a conversation between two men. One I somehow knew was from the Mossad. The other was unidentifiable, but spoke with an Australian accent....

 The first time they detained me a car pulled up, two men jumped out, put a sack over my head and manhandled me into the back of the car. I felt a needle in my thigh and woke up in a dark cell. The interrogation that followed was so low key that it should have been laughable. They wanted me to confess to being a terrorist but obviously had no evidence at all. They released me in the backstreets of Perth in the small hours of the morning. When I got back to my flat, I found it trashed. My clothes were everywhere, milk and broken eggs covered the kitchen floor, plates and glasses had been thrown against the walls. Written across the bathroom mirror in red lipstick were the words. “Remember bitch, you can’t tell anyone or it’s 5 years jail”.

 It happened again about a week later. This time the interrogation was tougher. When I got home I found that the flat had been trashed again. The fourth time it happened was two days before I died. I woke up in the small hours again wondering what the noise had been. I reached for the bedside light an turned it on. There were two men in the room. “Come on bitch, it’s time for another car ride.” I screamed and felt the familiar needle in the thigh....

 After a while the door opened. A hand reached in and grabbed my hair and pulled me out of the room, the floor smeared with blood as the rough concrete did its job. A hand reached between my thighs. I looked him in the eye. “Later.” He smiled and frogmarched my down the corridor to another room.

 This was the same room they always used for interrogations. But there was no desk. I was strapped down onto a slab and the torture began in earnest. In the darkness the pain returned in crippling waves. I tried to scream but there was no sound. Just pain, waves and waves of pain....'

 Here, written in 2016 but set sometime in the near future:

"....Overseas, things were a little more complex. Israel now belonged to the right wing Zionists. There were precious few Palestinians alive in the West Bank. Most had been forcibly transferred to the Gaza ghetto where they hovered on the brink of starvation if not extinction. Sufficient food and electricity was allowed for them to stay alive, but not for them to prosper let alone mount a serious revolt. Any spark of resistance was met with Lockheed F-35 fighter jets dropping DIME weapons and cluster bombs. Both the jets and the weapons were paid for by US tax payers; Israel had long since become the major recipient of US overseas aid.

The US propaganda media, which was most of the media, described it as the successful implementation of a two state policy and praised the Administration for helping Israel solve the Palestinian problem..."

The leftwing Mr Garcia-Webb is also a  presence on social media.
Here's just a sample of his what he's posted on Twitter: