In Australia, Anti-Israel Activists Maintain That Loving Feeling

SBS ex-newsreader Mary Kostakidis retweets ...

It seems that anti-Israel activists in Australia might have decided that fiction (I mean the stuff that owns up to being fiction) is the propagandistic way to go.

My previous post tells of the adoption of a Palestinian activist's play by the powers that decide the curriculum in the Aussie state of Victoria, aimed at teenagers.

Quite a coup, leading to enormous satisfaction on the anti-Israel mob's part.

Where has the Aussie Jewish "leadership" been meanwhile?

Have they protested?

Have they been fobbed off with the fact that also on the VCE playlist for 2016 is a play that uses an Aboriginal leader's 1938 protest to the German Embassy over Nazi persecution of Jews as a peg on which to hang its themes?  If so, they are woefully mistaken, for the latter play is in no sense a trade-off.

Soon to be launched, in Adelaide, is a novel by pro-BDS stalwart Professor Emeritus Stuart Rees of Jake Lynch's Peace Centre.

Like the Palestinian activist's play, Rees's novel would appear to have a love story as hook on which to hang a political message.

The book is to be launched in May by Adelaide barrister Paul Heywood-Smith QC, a founding member of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA).

An early AFOPA initiative in Adelaide (2010)

 

 

In 2013 AFOPA paid for billboards in Adelaide showing the misleading maps

Mr Heywood-Smith's views on Israel and on its supporters within the Australian Jewish community can be glimpsed here (something about "divided loyalties").

And then there's his own book, The Case for Palestine: The perspective of an Australian observer, launched last year.

Here's what Michael Easson, a patron of the Australia Israel Labor Dialogue, had to say about it.  Inter alia:

"Heywood-Smith is an unsteady captain of his ship and sometimes runs aground. His caveat emptor, that ambition might outstretch ability as an historian, is amply evidenced. Two egregious clangers are the naming of the social democrat Russian Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky as a ‘Jewish Bolshevik’ (he was neither) and the claim that Sir Raphael Cilento, having merely ‘questioned’ ‘Zionist imperialism’, was drummed out of Australian diplomatic life. (Cilento was a Holocaust denier, big supporter and donor to the far-right League of Rights, in short, an anti-semitic ratbag).

 Superficial, sophomoric judgements abound in this philippic....

Heywood-Smith raises the discredited claim that most Jews are actually not descendants from the land of Israel but Khazar converts, a possibility that discredits Zionism. He even manages to claim that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini, the notorious Hitler supporter, hardly amounted to much: ‘There is no evidence, however, that Amin’s views translated into material support for Nazi Germany from the Palestinian people.’ All he ever did was raise a volunteer Muslim SS contingent in the Balkans. Almost harmless, really.

In a potted history of WWI, Heywood-Smith argues ‘Britain became desperate to bring the US into the conflict. This enabled Zionists to play a winning card’, implying that they bargained with Britain to support a Zionist state. All this shows is that Heywood-Smith cannot help finding a point and embellishing it. He claims all the problems with the Middle East stem from western imperialism and the creation of Israel. This is simple-mindedness writ large. He snidely questions whether Australian Labor MP Michael Danby, who is Jewish, is guilty of dual loyalties....

Bizarrely, Heywood-Smith claims that then Israeli PM Ehud Barak refused to meet with Yasser Arafat in 2000 at the Camp David Summit convened by Bill Clinton. (They met many times. This is where Barak offered the Palestinian Authority nearly 97 per cent of the West Bank, plus land swaps). Instead of transparency, as the Palestinians wanted, the Israelis traded in secrecy, Heywood-Smith claims.

Mother love is in the air

 He expresses sympathy for the BDS campaign and complains that the Palestinian Authority is complicit with doing deals with Israel and ‘so clearly does not represent the Palestinian people.’ Australian-born Martin Indyk, a consistent critic of Israeli PM Netanyahu and adviser to Presidents Clinton and Obama, is dismissed as a Zionist. 

So, what are Heywood-Smith’s solutions? ‘The Jewish communities that thrived for centuries in Morocco, Tunisia, Baghdad, Damascus, Istanbul and Seville, to mention but a few sites, should be encouraged to restore themselves.’ Jews go home, in other words...."