Orrible Members: Lappin it up?

"The Honorable Member."

"The Honorable Member for Indi."

Has a nice ring to it, eh?

Indi is a federal parliamentary electoral constituency in the Australian state of Victoria.  Its first parliamentary representative following the Federation of Australia in 1901 was the brilliant Jewish lawyer (Sir) Isaac Isaacs, destined to become the country's first native-born Governor-General.

He sat for Indi as a Protectionist, and since then the seat of Indi has had representatives from all the main political parties in Australia.  Its present member, Cathy McGowan, is an Independent who defeated the high-profile Liberal Sophie Mirabella at the last election.

In 2010 and 2013 another Independent hopeful, Alan Lappin, contested Ms Mirabella's seat of Indi.

Mr Lappin's a farmer and small business owner who contributes not infrequently to the correspondence columns of his local newspaper, the Border Mail, and posts not infrequently on social media. 

A scroll down through his Facebook posts since the beginning of the year (to venture no further) suggests that he doesn't harbour warm and fuzzy feelings towards Israel:

Uh huh.  We get the picture.

This one, below, is a shocker.  But it seems to have passed without criticism by the poster's Facebook friends.

Not so this shocker, posted on Facebook in the past few days:

 

It did draw remonstrances from some of the poster's Facebook friends, Jewish and non-Jewish (a few of whom have evidently de-friended him), in response to which he did the honorable thing and took it down, while, however, adding this caveat:

Whether or not the poster will make another bid to enter federal politics remains to be seen.

What is seen is that despite such dodgy posts a number of high-profile anti-Zionist activists, including politicians, remain his Facebook friends with no apparent attempt to remonstrate or rebuke.

 That's the real moral of this little tale.