"We Refuse To Outsource [Australian] Foreign Policy To The Lowy Institute" (video)

Here, eyes blazing and voice embittered, is veteran anti-South African apartheid activist Kolin Thumbadoo, who migrated to Australia in the 1980s, viciously maligning Israel, Sydney businessman Frank Lowy and the Lowy Institute, and H. V. "Doc" Evatt, at the Palestine Action Group Sydney's demo a couple of days ago against Max Brenner in Parramatta.  Hear the crowd whoop and call as they eagerly digest his rabble-rousing, ignorant invective.

Towards the end, to the approval of his listeners, he compares Israel with Nazi Germany, and makes the familiar-among-Israel-haters observation about "the children of the Holocaust" that was not long ago condemned so ably by non-Jewish pro-Israel blogger Chas Newkey-Burden:

'[T]here is still one anti-Israel argument that makes my jaw drop. And it is one that is made with unfortunate frequency. It is the "they-of-all-people" argument: the suggestion that the Jews, having faced extraordinary persecution, should know better than anyone not to be oppressors.

Put aside for a moment that the "oppression" which proponents of this argument are accusing Israel of committing is usually imaginary. When directed by gentiles towards Jews, the "they-of-all-people" argument is in its very essence so fundamentally ill-judged and unjust, and voiced with such a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, that my spirit flags when I hear it.

Where to begin in response? The heroic Howard Jacobson made a fine start when he proposed that "they of all people" is the natural successor of Holocaust denial. He wrote that the argument leaves the Jewish people doubly damned: to the Holocaust itself and to elevated moral scrutiny as a result of it.

I agree, and I would go further. I contend that, as a result of the Holocaust and what preceded it, it is we gentiles who should know better. The Holocaust followed centuries of slander, persecution, violence and murder committed by gentiles against Jews. So it is not you who have an increased responsibility to behave morally, but us.

For instance, something that we gentiles should know better than to do is lazily accuse Jewish people, or the Jewish state itself, of any misdemeanour. We have seen what centuries of slander against the Jewish people led to during the 1930s and ’40s. We see the hatred, heartbreak and bloodshed that such anti-Jewish libels continue to provoke, particularly in the Middle East....

Let us strip the "they-of-all-people" argument down to its very basics: gentiles telling Jews that we killed six million of your people and that as a result it is you, not us, who have lessons to learn; that it is you, not us, who need to clean up your act. It is an argument of atrocious, spiteful insanity. Do not accept it; turn it back on those who offer it. For it is us, not you, who should know better.'