Leftist "Hypocrisy ... Racist Hypocrisy" regarding Israel (includes video)

Amid interruptions, New South Wales treasurer Dominic Perottet and colleague Alister Henskens condemn in state Parliament some dubious company that a couple of opposition Labor MPs have been keeping in connection with protests against Bibi Netanyahu's recent (highly successful) visit to Australia:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT3D-_xFlrQ

Reported J-Wire recently, inter alia:

'The Australasian Union of Jewish Students invited members the NSW Young Greens to a meeting with  bipartisan young political staffers at the NSW Parliament.But co-convener of the NSW Young Greens Kleon Toffetti confirmed to the Daily Telegraph “We have a longstanding position of not supporting this organisation because … they support the occupation of Palestine­ illegally.”The Telegraph wrote in an email: “It is true that NSWYG have a history of not engaging with AUJS, and I expect that this will continue for the foreseeable future.

 A spokesperson for Greens leader Richard di Natale told J-Wire: “The NSW Young Greens are an independent body and we have nothing to do with them. They exercise total independence and in general their views do necessarily reflect ours.”

In a joint  statement Isabelle Polgar and Ariel Zohar of AUJS said:

 “The Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) is angered and disappointed that the NSW Young Greens have informed AUJS it is their official policy to boycott Jewish students. AUJS, the peak representative body of thousands of Jewish tertiary students across Australia and New Zealand, is a pluralistic organisation committed to engaging Jewish students with political parties and activists across the spectrum.

The fact that the NSW Young Greens have chosen to boycott an opportunity to engage with Jewish students on account of their mistaken beliefs about AUJS’ attitudes towards foreign policy speaks volumes of their problematic attitudes towards the Jewish community.

To reduce Australian Jews entirely to their political perspectives on a conflict occurring overseas, and to erroneously pigeonhole the entire Jewish student community as ‘support(ing) the occupation of Palestine’ demonstrates the deep, systematic prejudices which pervade the NSW Young Greens.

This is in line with the far-left trend where hatred for Israel is so strong that it can result in the antisemitic effect where the Jewish community is boycotted for the supposed crime of self-defining its cultural, ethnic and national identity.

We are deeply concerned that the youth wing of the NSW Greens has a policy of refusing to engage with Jewish students. This makes a mockery of the Greens’ recent support for diversity and multiculturalism in the context of the 18C debate.

We hope the NSW Young Greens are swiftly and clearly condemned by the senior party to avoid any suggestion that the Young Greens contempt for the Jewish community is shared by the senior leadership.

AUJS calls on the Leader of the Australian Greens, Richard Di Natale, to unequivocally condemn the executive of the NSW Young Greens and clarify that the Australian Greens want nothing to do with boycotts of the Jewish community.

It is inconceivable that these young leaders could one day become future leaders of the Greens.”

 J-Wire contacted Kleon Toffetti who responded: “I will be declining any further comment, or engaging with any media around this.”

 In the Aussie Spectator, Mitchell Goff on the hypocrisy and racism of the Greens:

"....Where in the past left-wing anti-Semites have hid behind the odious Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement or obsessive, pathological criticism of Israel, this decision pretends to be nothing else but blatant, unshielded anti-Semitism.

Now, it seems, they just don’t talk to Jews.

This virulent prejudice is as old as the world itself and it now seems to reveal itself more publicly in sections of the Left. This sort of reasoning is how anti-Semitism slips so seamlessly into the sort of political fascism that if directed at any other group would be the subject of endless Greens Party condemnation...."

Read it all here

Tardily, a pathetically worded statement (in effect saying that a Jew who disavows Israel is the only acceptable sort of Jew, which is of course the standard position for the Israel-hating Left) from the self-styled "anarcho-communist" Toffetti here

Below, on the Facebook page of an inveterate Israel-hater, a rather delicious example of anti-Israel hypocrisy from another Israel-hater named King and from the liker of his comment, Sizer fan Miranda Pinch, an as-a-Jew Anglican:

In yesterday's London Sunday Times,  Anthony Julius and Deborah Lipstadt on the latest Livingstone imbroglio:

"Ken Livingstone, who has been suspended from holding office in the Labour Party following his claims that Adolf Hitler supported Zionism, is a provocateur. That is to say: he doesn’t care about the truth.

To respond to him is already to elevate him; to debate him is a waste of time. Self-pitying, self-admiring, he believes himself to be a truth-telling, special-interest-defying, independent-minded maverick. He cannot be persuaded out of these delusions.

The implication is that anti-semitism is best engaged with at the level of reason, or ignored, following a diagnosis of imbecility. The problem with that approach is that it overlooks the fundamentally malicious nature of anti-semitism. Anti-semites have not reached their conclusions by some faulty line of reasoning that can be corrected. As if Livingstone, when presented with the historical record would say: Oh I see! Gosh, I got it wrong!

Livingstone and people like him conform to a familiar pre-1933 – that is to say pre-Holocaust – type of anti-semite. This kind of anti-semite lived among journalists, politicians and others with access to newspapers, radio stations and other public forums. They could be relied upon to see the Jews behind every scandal, to give a “Jewish twist” to any issue of public concern.

When criticised, they dismissed their critics as in the pay of the special interests that they had exposed. Of course their enemies attacked them: didn’t that prove they were on the right track?

They mostly appealed to constituencies liable to resentment at others’ perceived success. They tended to cast themselves as oppositionists, progressives. Their constituents were down, when they should be up. The Jews were up, when they should be down. Why was this so? A ready answer was always provided.

This explains much in Livingstone’s own career. He found his pleasure in anti-semitic asides mostly in the long years of his own political opposition.

The Times, 7 April 2017

There are three questions that have been raised by the sorry affair. The first question is: does anything that Livingstone has said raise any interesting historiographical issues? The answer is no.

The second question is: why is the Labour Party unable to address the shame that his continued membership brings upon it? The answer to that is that his tastes are shared by too large a fraction of the party — or too large a fraction, at least, of its governing bodies.

And the third question: why are we unable to recognise Livingstone for what he is? The answer lies in the history of anti-semitism. If anti-semitism blinds people to the world, then the recent history of anti-semitism has blinded people to its earlier history. Specifically, the Holocaust has blinded us to the pre-Holocaust diversity of anti-semites. There any many species in the anti-semitic bestiary.

Anti-semitism has right-wing versions, but also leftist ones

There are religious versions – principally, Christian versions, and at least one Muslim version; political versions – principally, right-wing versions, but also liberal and leftist ones. And yet Hitler’s programme of genocide has come to define anti-semitism. It is as if the horror of Hitler’s mass murder of Jews has erased the assaults and exclusions, the slurs and defamations that conditioned their existence before Nazism. The pre-Nazi history of anti-semitism has been lost; non-Nazi contemporary anti-semitisms are inadequately acknowledged, when not altogether defined out of existence.

Imagine these various kinds of anti-semites as denizens of an ugly zoo. And imagine that they flourish there, attended by zoo keepers – let them stand as a sympathetic or neutral “state”. At different times, some beasts will flourish more than others. Some will draw the attention of visitors more than others. But they co-exist – the social anti-semites, the progressives, the Christian and Muslim and secular anti-semites, the reactionaries.

Then suppose that one night, while the management of the zoo sleeps, the ugliest and most dangerous of them all, the exterminationist anti-semite, breaks out of his cage and goes on a rampage in the town. After bloody battles, he is destroyed. The zoo itself is wrecked; many of the other beasts die or go into hiding. One or two, appalled by what has happened, abandon their home.

In due course, the townspeople forget about the zoo’s history; they remember only the moment of the rampage. In their minds, where once there was a variety of anti-semites, different in menace and in intensity of conviction, now there is just one type – and he is dead.

Quietly, patiently, with the assistance of the returning zoo keepers, the other beasts begin their work of reconstruction, inviting in other beasts from other zoos. The townspeople stop going to the zoo. And then one day, they wake up to find that it is flourishing once again."

Another video (not brand new but a two-year-old classic), wishing Jewish readers Chag Sameach:

Very interesting 26-minute video re the Rambam from Rabbi Lord Sachs: