From Hage Docker To Hage Soccer

"It was always going to be a sensitive topic, but a proposal by two university lecturers   –  one a Jew,* the other a Lebanese-born Christian  –  that Australian academics boycott their Israeli counterparts has unleashed a storm of protest," went a report under the byline Geoff Strong in the Melbourne Age on 6 June 2002.

"Angered at Israel's treatment of Palestinians, the pair last month launched an online petition calling for the boycott. They have collected about 100 signatures but have also provoked a counter-petition that attacks the pair for singling out Israel and failing to request similar boycotts of academic contacts with totalitarian regimes such as China and the Arab states.

John Docker, a fellow of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, and Sydney University anthropology lecturer Ghassan Hage, launched their petition after similar petitions were published in Europe and the US...."

 [* Read this, from Strong's report:

'Dr Docker said yesterday that he was offended by Israel's actions against the Palestinians. "I was brought up in a left-wing Jewish family and part of that upbringing was a concern for human rights, but Australian Jews seem absorbed by Zionism."

 And compare it with this, by Paul Bogdanor:

'Docker grew up in the Sydney suburb of Bondi. His parents were both active in the Communist Party, his father Irish and his mother of East End Jewish background....

Docker was brought up without any religious beliefs, and didn't think of himself as Jewish during his childhood....' ]

I well remember the online Hage/Docker petition: pro-Zionists had sport with it, adding such signatories as "Adolf Hitler" and "Yasser Arafat" and even, if I'm not mistaken,  "Ariel Sharon".  Thus bestrewn with signatures each more preposterous than the last, and choc-a-bloc with  pro-Israel comments, the petition became a laughing stock, a notable floparoo, and if I recall correctly its originators ultimately hid the "add signature" facility from public view so that no further sport could be had.


 Now, I see, Ghassan Hage has tried to make sport of his own with that by now rather famous video of the Palestinian the Yishuv soccer team playing in Australia in 1939.


Rather more on the ball that those poor deluded anti-Israel propagandists who have triumphantly posted the video in the conviction that it showed a team of Arabs playing for their nation "Palestine" (see here and here), Hage has nevertheless made some strange, unfathomable comments:

 Meanwhile, in Sydney, from Lynch, Riemer and assorted academic buddies, more BDS nonsense.

From Dr Philip Mendes of Monash University, a  new article in which, inter alia, Hage is mentioned.

And from Dr Dvir Abramovich, of Melbourne University, some recent pertinent words relating to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions/demonisation of Israel mania mania:

'There is a well-funded and powerful cottage industry of NGOs, journalists, academics and activists who are crystal clear about their unabashed anti-Israel ideology. The goal of their openly declared war is to damage Israel’s standing in the court of world opinion and to bring about its collapse.

This fire-hot, unbridled hatred is obsessive and irrational, based on a methodical marshalling of lies that paint Israel as immoral and genocidal....

Facts and truth-telling are out.

This relentless, pernicious global crusade makes Israel’s existence the source of all troubles in the Mid-east and an ever-present threat to lasting peace, much more than Iran or ISIS.

Forget the dictatorships. Israel is the embodiment of evil, just like Nazi Germany. By that warped logic, fascist Israel is not just worthy of punishment and isolation through the BDS and UN censure, it is a country guilty of ethnic cleansing and oppression, that has no right to exist....

A world without Israel is the new anti-Semitism....'

Read all of Dvir Abramovich's article here