"Jewish Privilege": Wanna know its secret?

A clue:

Another clue:

 A related one:

Simple, innit.

See? (more from Mr Rosenberg here):

Yes, more unashamed antisemitism from Tony Gratrex, the incorrigible organiser of the Reading Palestine Solidarity Campaign branch, a Facebook friend of Stephen Sizer (who as I've said many times really should have the decency to de-friend him):
How about it, Your Reverence?

Malcolm Fraser's Mad Malice: The Israelis deliberately bombed the USS Liberty claims former Aussie prime minister

"Tamie has one.  Malcolm is one".  That was a crudely sexist (Tamie, short for Tamara, is Malcom Fraser's wife) bumper sticker that I remember seeing on vehicles in Canberra after Fraser took office in 1975.

It reflected the raw anger and contempt among sections of the Australian public for the way in which the Liberal Party prime minister had been catapulted into office that year, in an audacious totally unexpected and possibly illegal coup involving the peremptory sacking of the Labor Party prime minister Gough Whitlam by Governor-General Sir John Kerr, an event of the "I-remember-where-I-was-and-what-I-was-doing-when-I-heard-the-news" class. and one which still rankles with many Australians today.

From a conservative's perspective, Gough Whitlam, a patrician lawyer of radical bent, was arguably  the worst prime minister in Australian history, and, in contrast to Fraser, he was certainly no friend to Israel.

But since leaving office Fraser has changed, shifting ever leftwards, as seen in this recent interview with political scientist and public intellectual Robert Manne, whose journey has been similar. A former blogger here in Australia, a chabadnik, expressed this metamorphosis of Fraser's, which includes being an apologist for Islam, well in 2007:

''Former PM Malcolm Fraser (from 1975-1983) is opening his big mouth again and accusing the present government of using "the politics of fear to damage traditional Australian values". He said this and more in a speech at the Australian National University today as reported on ABC news.

 [Fraser] was one of the most right wing PMs we have had and is now reinventing himself as a (small "l") liberal.'

In one of my early blogposts, in 2010, I summed up Fraser thus:

'The supercilious Oxford-educated scion of the squattocracy and of a mother of Jewish descent, Una Woolf, Fraser is widely remembered for three things: the controversial manner of his appointment to office, the much-mocked pronouncement that "life wasn't meant to be easy", and the mysterious loss of his trousers in a seedy hotel in Memphis in 1986 when he was chairman of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group.  While prime minister he was a hard-headed rightwinger, and in 1975 his Cabinet learned of a plot by Palestinian terrorists to assassinate three prominent Aussie champions of Israel - future Labour prime minister Bob Hawke, communal leader Isi Leibler, and journalist Sam Lipski.  Fraser was perceived as friendly to Israel.

Subsequently, however, Fraser - evidently determined to be an elder statesman of international import - reinvented himself as an extreme small-l liberal and a self-righteous exponent of "human rights", founding the organisation Australians All.  He sounded off to the embarrassment of his Liberal Party successors, undermining them, especially the estimable and staunchly pro-Israel John Howard.  He loftily dismissed widespread public fears of large-scale Muslim immigration, made light of the threat from radical Islam, called for Israel to negotiate with Hamas (thereby earning the soubriquet "Mad Mal of Hamastan"), and rounded on "the Jewish lobby" - yes, he used that very phrase - when Zionist leaders pointed to the flaws in his arguments and questioned the wisdom of his views. He flounced out of the Liberal Party in 2009, condemning its conservatism. Early this year he was quick off the mark to urge the then prime minister Kevin Rudd to expel Israeli diplomats from Canberra in reprisal for the use of four Australian passports by the team believed to be responsible for the assassination in Dubai of the Hamas arms dealer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

Perhaps the kindest thing to be said about Malcolm Fraser is that he should have had the grace and good sense years ago to button his lips and fade quietly into one of those spectacular antipodean sunsets.'

Already dubbed by some "Mad Mal of Hamastan", Fraser has reached a new low in his comments about the small valiant beleaguered Israeli nation. Evidently Fraser has been reading, and giving credence to, one of the darkest anti-Israel theories on the internet, as exemplified by this article by British antisemite Alan Hart.

As the Australian Jewish News (which hit the news stands today) reports, during an interview last Friday on ABC Radio Melbourne, when Fraser (plugging his new book Dangerous Allies) was asked by host Jon Faine

'if he agreed [with former Foreign Minister Bob Carr] that “the pro-Israel and in particular Jewish community lobby in Australia wielded too much power”, Fraser responded, “They certainly do.”

When Faine suggested other religious, ethnic and communal groups, like the Italian community, also lobbied the government, Fraser said, “I don’t think the Italian community, just to take one example, try to get us to follow any particular policies in relation to Italy. And that’s the difference … The Jewish community seek to get Australia to support policies as defined by Israel.”

Shockingly, Fraser also wallowed into the muck of conspiracy theory when he said, referring to the USS Liberty disaster of June 1967:

“Israel years ago, during one of the wars, killed 30 or 40 Americans on a spy ship in the Western Mediterranean.

The Americans tried to cover it up. It wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate.”

Long-serving Zionist Federation of Australia president and current AIJAC head Mark Leibler is reported as saying:

“To make these allegations about Israel deliberately targeting Americans when there’s no evidence to support it, when successive inquiries by both the Americans and the Israelis have demonstrated that this was an accident, I just think it is appalling beyond description...".

The present president of the Zionist Federation points out

“The [USS Liberty] incident was subject to no less than 10 American investigations and an additional three Israeli investigations, all of which found that it was indeed an accident.

If Mr Fraser has a credible source to back up his outlandish claims, then he is duty-bound to reveal it.”

Read more here

Mondoweiss & the Far Right?

This is a guest blog by Professor William D. Rubinstein.

He writes:

Mondoweiss, the fanatically anti-Zionist website run by Jews, has many open and demonstrable links (unsurprisingly) with the extreme Left, especially with the Center for Economic Research and Social Change (CERSC), which publishes the International Socialist Review and sponsored the “Socialism 2012” conference.

Significantly, Mondoweiss now appears to be developing links with the extreme Right.  A blog posted by Philip Weiss (co-editor of the site, for whom it is named) on 9 March this year, headed “Conservatives for Palestine” , gave an account of the “National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship”, which he attended and addressed.

The Conference was apparently wholly the work of extreme conservatives, ranging from neo-isolationists and old line “Foreign Office Arabists” to out-and-out ultra-right antisemites and Holocaust deniers.

After conceding that “the conference had its share of lunacy” Weiss asked in his blog:

"Does anyone really think that we can build a freedom coalition [sic] without these folks? Certainly we won’t unpack the special relationship with Israel without reexamining the human cost to the United States. That includes the attack on the USS Liberty ..., the 9/11 attacks, the murder of Robert Kennedy.'

I will return to these points below, but it would be useful first to consider the organisers of this conference.

Weiss notes that Grant Smith and Alison Weir “did a fabulous job of organizing the conference”. When I first read this, I feared that the latter might be the Alison Weir who is a well-known British author of popular histories, including such works as The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Traitors of the Tower, who had unaccountably developed a side interest in Israel/Palestine.

(Re the Balfour Declaration)

Thankfully, this is someone else entirely, an American of the same name, who has long had a fanatically anti-Israel blog and who has recently become head of the so-called Council for the National Interest.

Despite its neutral-sounding title, this Council has been described by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as “an anti-Israel organisation that opposes U.S. aid to Israel and disseminates demonizing propaganda about Israel to academics, politicians, and other audiences”.

The flavour of Alison Weir’s stance on Israel (readily available on her blog) may be seen in her posting “Israel Organ Trafficking and Theft: from Moldova to Palestine”, which gained international notoriety when it first appeared. (It is still there.)

 It quotes Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley) as saying, about the international trade in allegedly stolen or bought organs: "Israel is at the top.  It has tentacles reaching worldwide."  Israel's motives, Weir quotes Scheper-Hughes as explaining, are “Revenge, restitution – reparation for the Holocaust. ...We’re going to get every single kidney and liver and heart that we can. The world owes it to us.’”

(The Jews have certainly diversified from the old days, when all they did was poison the wells.  And it is refreshing to know that all the Jews do now is to steal donor organs; in years gone by they kidnapped and murdered gentile boys at Passover, using their blood to make matzoh.)

So much for one of the principal organisers of the Conference.

Although his remarks are somewhat cryptic, Mr Weiss has apparently bought into the gutter conspiracy theories about the assassination of Robert Kennedy and about 9/11.  I frankly don’t know what precisely he has in mind regarding Kennedy.  I assume he is referring to the fact that assassin Sirhan Sirhan (who is still in prison, 46 years later), a Palestinian, is said to have acted because Kennedy, in a televised debate, promised to supply arms to Israel. And I assume that Weiss thinks there were dark forces (i.e., the Zionists) behind this claim.  What prompts the “9/11 attacks” remark I leave to your imagination.

Everyone knows that antisemitic conspiracy theorists claim that Jews were somehow behind the attacks (or the US government) – not Al Quaeda.  The “USS Liberty” reference is to an American naval ship which was accidentally attacked by Israeli forces during the 1967 Six Day War, in the mistaken belief it was an Egyptian vessel.  Thirty-four Americans were killed.  Israel immediately apologised and paid compensation.

Extreme rightwing and antisemitic sources (like this one) have brought up this tragic incident time and again, even after nearly half a century.  (They apparently can’t think of anything more recent, and of course need something to weigh against the countless Arab and Muslim terrorist attacks on American targets.

Mondoweiss now appears to be buying into this cesspool of madness and crackpot dementia.

It will be interesting to see how the site’s core supporters – of whom it is safe to say that 95 percent are on the extreme Left – react.

They say that the extremes meet.  This will be a test case.

A Tale of Two Rivers: an Anglican vicar tells ...

Those who read Playboy "for the articles" may recall this libel from the mouth of arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, in the September 1988 issue of the magazine:

Arafat: ".... Look at the slogans they [Israelis and Zionists] use: that the land of Israel is from the Euphrates to the Nile. This was written for many years over the entrance to the Knesset, the parliament. It shows their national ambition ... Do you know what the meaning of the Israeli flag is?"

Interviewer: "No."

Arafat: "It is white with two blue lines. The two lines represent two rivers, and in between is Israel. The rivers are the Nile and the Euphrates."

Declares the genocidally antisemitic Hamas Covenant, echoed by Hamas leaders:

"After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates" 

 Iran has also wallowed in the libel, as has its proxy, Hezbollah.

As seen on Elder of Ziyon blog here

In March last year, as Elder of Ziyon pointed out on his blog last Friday,  the libel was featured in a  Global Research article here:

'When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing war on Syria, not to mention the process of regime change in Egypt, must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East. The latter consists in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of an Israeli expansionist project.

“Greater Israel” consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates.

The Zionist project supports the Jewish settlement movement. More broadly it involves a policy of excluding Palestinians from Palestine leading to the eventual annexation of both the West Bank and Gaza to the State of Israel.

 Greater Israel would create a number of proxy States. It would include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Sinai, as well as parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia...'

 In a very competent entry regarding the Israeli flag, Wikipedia notes of the 'Greater Israel' canard:

'Both Zionist and anti-Zionist authors have debunked the claim that the stripes on the flag represent territorial ambitions. Daniel Pipes notes "In fact, the blue lines derive from the design on the traditional Jewish prayer shawl", and Danny Rubinstein points out that "...Arafat... added, in interviews that he gave in the past, that the two blue stripes on the Israeli flag represent the Nile and the Euphrates... No Israeli, even those who demonstrate understanding for Palestinian distress, will accept the... nonsense about the blue stripes on the flag, which was designed according to the colours of the traditional tallit (prayer shawl)..." Persistent critic of Israel and Zionism Israel Shahak is equally explicit. In his The Zionist Plan for the Middle East he states

 A good example is the very persistent belief in the non-existent writing on the wall of the Knesset of the Biblical verse about the Nile and the Euphrates. Another example is the persistent, and completely false declarations, which were made by some of the most important Arab leaders, that the two blue stripes of the Israeli flag symbolize the Nile and the Euphrates, while in fact they are taken from the stripes of the Jewish praying shawl (Talit). [My emphasis]

Saqr Abu Fakhr, an Arab writer, has also spoken out against this idea. He writes that the "Nile to Euphrates" claim regarding the flag is one of seven popular misconceptions and/or myths about Jews which, despite being unfounded and having abundant evidence refuting them, continue to circulate in the Arab world.'

A succinct explanation of the design of the flag was given as follows by a religious Jew on a forum where the canard had been raised (and run with):

"I hope you will take this answer as the truth it is and not pay attention to terrorist propaganda.

 The blue stripes in the flag are a reference to the blue stripes of the prayer shawl and the tzit[z]it (fringed garment traditionally worn under or over a shirt) which in turn infer the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky. In Jewish tradition the blue of the sight of the sky and the sea is supposed to bring us to an awareness of G-d's presence."

  To quote Elder of Ziyon here:

"Today, Arabs and antisemites are convinced that the "Greater Israel" plan is alive and well.

How does that jive with the fact that Israel has been doing nothing but giving land up since 1977?"  [My emphasis]

That's a question that Hassan Alkatib should have asked the Rev Stephen Sizer (about whom, incidentally, see a most interesting article by Dexter Van Zile here) when the two met up for a chin wag.

Alkatib, a British Muslim who makes documentaries that are hardly supportive of the Zionist Entity and used to be a reporter for Iran's propaganda outlet Press TV (on which Sizer has not infrequently appeared), blogs here.  Notwithstanding that one of his documentaries promotes Islam as "the final revelation" (which presumably means that Islam has superseded Christianity) Sizer in this video appears delighted to talk to him, the subject of the talk being Sizer's bête noire, Christian Zionism.

Now, the vicar has made a number of eyebrow-raising statements in his time, and he's true to form in the video.  I was, for example, amazed to hear him tell his attentive and receptive Muslim interviewer not once but twice in the course of the interview that kibbutzim were modelled on by the collective farms in Eastern Europe under Communism. 

Oh dear!  Has the vicar not heard of Bilu (an acronym based on a verse in Isaiah: Beit Ya'akov Lekhu Venelkha ("House of Jacob, Let Us Go Up" i.e. in the sense that to go to Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel, is to ascend)?   Does he not know that this movement, founded in the nineteenth century, established the first kibbutz and that the year was 1909, long before the Russian Revolution?

In response, to Alkatib's question as to whether Christian Zionists "see Muslims as a threat":

 "Sadly some do ..."

(I wonder why that is; could this sort of thing and this and this and  this have something to do with it?)

I could cite other eyebrow-raising replies to Alkatib, and indeed there were things that Sizer might have said to his interviewer but did not, as when Alkatib asked him: "Do you think Herzl was inspired by Nazi Germany ... having a country just for one race?"  A resounding condemnation of the mindset that prompted this question would have been nice; instead, it was not directly answered.

But it was when Alkatib asked Sizer about the idea of Greater Israel (from "the Nile to the Euphrates") and whether Christian Zionists really believe in it that I really sat up and took notice.  The vicar replied:

"Some Christian Zionists do argue that, yes they do."

And then came the bombshell:

"But it's ironic that the Israeli flag has two blue lines and a star between them.  They deny that but remarkably it does look like two rivers from the Nile to the Euphrates, but if you buy that ... Jerusalem's got to be the capital ..."  [My emphasis]

 But then I remembered this:

(Cross-posted on News and Views from Jews Down Under here)