In the ALP, Might Melissa's Malignance Mirror Mounting Malice?

She was hoping to get back into the thick of Aussie federal politics, former UNRWA lawyer and unreformed Israel-hater Melissa Parke, who when representing (2007-16) the safe Labor seat of Fremantle, Western Australia, was a junior minister in the latter stages of Kevin Rudd's government, swept from power in 2013.

In selecting the glamorous blonde to run against conservative Celia Hammond in the normally safe Liberal WA seat of Curtin, relinquished by glamorous blonde Liberal former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, Labor bigwigs evidently thought her high profile meant Ms Parke had a fighting chance of wresting the seat away from the less stellar Liberal hopeful.

But it's all gone awry for Parke and her backers, because she's now quit as a candidate in order to save her embarrassed party the "distraction" caused by her loathsome antisemitic slurs on Israel, scathingly compared in today's Melbourne Herald Sun by political commentator James Campbell as "actually manag[ing] to say something new" in the "long history of slanders" of the Jewish people.

A proponent of BDS in its economic and cultural guises, who in 2017 was one of about 60 prominent Australians (including APAN's president, ex-Bishop Browning) publicly opposed to Bibi Netanyahu's visit to Australia, Parke last month told the launch of WA Labor Friends of Palestine (to quote a report in WA Today) that

'Australia should recognise a Palestinian state and likened Israel's settlements to China's island building activity in the South China Sea.

She also took aim at Israel's influence in Australian politics and said there was no doubt Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, while illegal under international law, were "a reaction to and a consequence of decades of brutal occupation".

Ms Parke, a former lawyer for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in Gaza, said Australia had to break away from its "strategic dependence" on the United States and recognise Palestine as a state, which is contrary to Labor policy.

"There are already 137 nations that recognise the state of Palestine, that is more than 70 per cent of the world," she said.

"And, inshallah [Arabic for 'God willing'], Australia will join that consensus once we have a Federal Labor government.

An APAN illiterate has his say

"It's also time finally for Australia to support an end to the brutal occupation of Palestine and for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees."

In her speech to Palestinian supporters, which was held in the Perth offices of the United Voice union, Ms Parke said the discrimination experienced by Palestinians in Israel was because of a "fully fledged system of Apartheid"....

"A false narrative sold to the western world is that Israel is a beacon of western democracy and human rights."

Ms Parke said Israel "propagates the myth that it is a small country that just wants to live in peace".'

Moreover,

'WAtoday also revealed earlier this week WA Labor senator and Senate Deputy President Sue Lines told the same meeting of pro-Palestinian activists that a powerful "Israel lobby" had been influencing her party's policy on Palestine and peace in the Middle East.

Senator Lines said policy in the area had stalled because "the Israeli lobby is so powerful within the party and outside of the party".'

 The report quotes Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin as follows:

'He said Ms Parke had the "inglorious distinction" of being the first, and only, Labor MP to publicly endorse the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which seeks to force Israel to withdraw from occupied or contested territories and aims at "the complete and total isolation of the state of Israel and to dismantle the national home of the Jewish people".

"BDS was rightly condemned as a form of antisemitism by Julie Bishop, who Ms Parke is now seeking to replace as the federal member for Curtin," Mr Ryvchin said."BDS has also expressly been repudiated by the Australian Labor Party and rejected as national policy even by the Greens."It is regrettable that such an extreme and divisive figure should receive the endorsement of the Australian Labor Party, particularly at a time when it is vital to strengthen the political centre and diminish the appeal of low populism and false and polarising rhetoric."

 Parke also, as widely reported today, for instance the Sydney Morning Herald here, declared:

 "One case I remember vividly, a pregnant refugee woman was ordered at a checkpoint in Gaza to drink a bottle of bleach," she said.

"It burnt out all her throat and insides. Fortunately her baby was saved.

"Another refugee was forced to put her baby through the X-ray machine."

It is that vile canard in particular that disgusts the Herald-Sun's James Campbell, who pointedly observed that another Labor candidate, Josh Wilson, was at the meeting addressed by Parke and did not take issue with her remarks.

Campbell adds that while current federal Labor leader Bill Shorten is committed to friendship with Israel, the fears of pro-Israel Australians that, post-Shorten, the party (remember the lurking presence of Bob Carr and cobbers?) might fall into the hands of a Corbynista-type leadership remains a realistic prospect.

ScoMo for me, I think.

Stinkers Out of Bedford (updated)

A tinker out of Bedford,
A vagrant oft in quod,
A private under Fairfax,
A minister of God –
Two hundred years and thirty
Ere Armageddon came
His single hand portrayed it,
And Bunyan was his name!

Thus wrote Rudyard Kipling in his poem "The Holy War" (1917) of John Bunyan, author of A Pilgrim's Progress.

Not too many Christian pilgrims featured in this must-see piece, I fear, nor much of progress either.

And certainly no traces of what Bunyan, Kipling and we ourselves might conceive of as a "holy war".

What's the world coming to?

We may well ask.

There's a not very comforting suggestion here

Oh, and in the "shome mishtake shurely" department, this

Meanwhile, an unmissable article that I missed

And more great graphics from Edgar Davidson

As well as the links regarding the Paris atrocities that that veritable bloodhound Ian provides in the comments section of my previous post.

More stinkers: anthropologists in America vote for BDS

Green slime oozing ... ("Isis funded by Rothschilds")

"A War By Other Means": Aussie Academic Philip Mendes Chats About BDS (video)

In this brief interview with Henry Greener, left-leaning Australian academic Dr Philip Mendes, co-author of the newly published book Boycotting Israel is Wrong (which as Mendes notes is aimed at "the moderate Left" and offers a "progressive" solution to the conflict) talks about BDS.  (The Peter Slezak mentioned in the video is an Israel-bashing Sydney academic, not to be confused with a Sydney medico of the identical name; Michael Danby, also mentioned, is a staunchly and famously pro-Israel Labor federal MP.)

Hey, Hey, Anti-Zionists, Whad'ya Say?

It's absolutely sweltering in south-east Australia today, and even though I've a fan on my desk blasting cold air I'm too lethargic to write much.

So, instead of hot air from me, there are these new graphics, which many readers will have already seen elsewhere.  For insights into the hypocritical Western anti-Israel mindset they're pretty good, aren't they?

Read more here

Improper Bostonians: Israel-Hating Leftists "Occupy" Israeli Consulate (video)

Here's another example of leftwing slanderers of Israel, the type of people on whom my previous post focuses. A breakaway group of "Occupy Boston" Israel-defamers march to the Israeli Consulate, barge in, and chant the usual crap about "apartheid" - at one point intoning a female demoniser's soundbites repetitively in the robotic way that followers of some crackpot sect might repeat the sayings of its resident guru.  Oh, and they'll "be back".  (Read more about this event here)

Hat tip: Shirl in Oz & Vlad Tepes blog

Continuing Canards From The Israel-Demonising Left, and Pat Condell On "Islamised ... Self-righteous Leftwing Bubbleheads"

Beneath a newly-uploaded video of the most recent march (last month) of the Melburnian leftwing rabble who demonise the Jewish State in general and Max Brenner in particular the uploader declares:

"The following is the footage from the latest BDS action in Melbourne, as we marched down the streets of the CBD chanting loudly for Palestinian liberation.

Australia is a very pro-Israel nation, with a strong lobby, a powerful pro-Israel Murdoch press, and an ideological framework installed that defends Israel's right to commit apartheid and terrorism upon the Palestinians without regret. In its history, Australia has been always a leading nation in defending and condoning war crimes committed by its allies, including the United States, Sri Lanka, Britain, etc, and include now Israel to that list. As such, we are facing an uphill battle by organising and participating in these BDS rallies against those businesses that profit from apartheid and terrorism...."

(Will Richard Goldstone's recent demolition of the slander that Israel practises apartheid cut any ice with these people? The Equator belt is likely to freeze over first...)

On Twitter, an "ethical" travel writer, Gail Simmons, whose work appears in the Guardian, made the following ill-informed and obscene tweet, caught by the redoubtable Adam Levick of CiF Watch:

"One of the greatest supporters of Zionism was Hitler himself. Explains lots about the actions of the Zionists!"

 As an indignant Aussie reader of CiF Watch, and of this blog, remarked, in a letter to Al Grauniad:

'Your newspaper has an infamous reputation in the Jewish community worldwide as being amongst the most anti-Israel and even Judeophobic publications in the English speaking world, so I'm not "holding my breath" for you to take my complaint seriously....

However, when your travel writer, Gail Simmons, "tweets" that Hitler was a Zionist; I have to complain. Not only is this a gross inversion of History  (Hitler had plans to invade Palestine and Murder the Jews there with the help of his friend the Mufti of Jerusalem once he was done murdering European Jews), it is about as highly offensive to Jews and Israelis as it gets....

Why is it that Jews are the only ethnic or religious group that can be insulted without consequences by your employees?'

Why indeed.

On the blog "Liberal Conspiracy," Ben White, another darling of the Guardian and author of Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide, questions Conservative MP Louise Mensch's forthcoming appearance as a guest speaker at a conference organised by the pro-Israel organisation StandWithUs:

'The attendance of a Member of Parliament at such an event is troubling, given StandWithUs’ track record of promoting extreme positions and working with disturbing allies.

The UK chair of StandWithUs disputes the international legal consensus that Settlements in the Occupied West Bank are illegal.

A 2009 investigation into StandWithUs’ donors accused the group of having "a web of funders who support organisations that have been accused of anti-Muslim propaganda and encouraging a militant Israeli and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East"....

A StandWithUs event of the same name happening in the US this month features Itamar Marcus, an Israeli settler who features in Islamophobic film Obsession.

Here in the UK, StandWithUs is working with religious fundamentalists, sending their national coordinator to speak at a conference promoted by those who believe that God will "curse those who curse Israel"....'

To which the well-known blogger Richard Millett has, among other commenters, made the highly pertinent response:

'This is beyond parody allowing White to smear SWU when White was due to share a platform with Sheikh Raed Salah (until Salah was arrested) who has made derogatory statements about Jews and gays. For example, calling homosexuality "a crime. A great crime. Such phenomena signal the start of the collapse of every society".'

And adds the relevant link

 Love him or loathe him, Pat Condell doesn't mince his words in this video, which should be mandatory viewing for all those western left-liberals who make common cause with Islamofascists in castigating Israel and seeking its demise.

 (Hat tip: Shirl in Oz)

Lush Cosmetics Company's Lush Hypocrisy (video)

Lush, the soap and cosmetics company that prides itself on its ethical campaigns, and which in the UK at least has been busily helping to demonise Israel, has no problems when it comes to doing business with Saudi Arabia, one of the world's worst offenders against human rights, not least of the female of the species:

Baying Down Alarms Against The "Apocalyptically-Inspired Enemy": The Illiberal Liberals of the West

In Front Page magazine David Solway has written a perceptive and timely article entitled "Islamophilia and Judeophobia," examining the Western liberal establishment's "venereal attachment to Islam and its tandem resilement of Israel and Jews," its "schmoozing with terrorists," and its "demonization of Israel" which, as he puts it,

"is a sign not only of collective bad faith, international hypocrisy, millennial prejudice and pure malevolence, but quite simply of massive intellectual derangement. It is facilitated by a refusal to sift the historical facts from the welter of lies and disinformation that deliberately cloud the historical and political context, the dismissal of the provisions of international law and, once again, the abandonment of reason."

Having pointed to the manifestations of this phenomenon in Norway, he concludes:

'What we are really witnessing in Europe, the U.S., and its outriders in Canada and Australia—the synoptic West—is the doleful spectacle of a civilization in denial, a myopic civilization that in most of its cultural and political centers will not recognize it is under attack and that seems haplessly incapable of mounting meaningful resistance, let alone launching a counter-attack against an apocalyptically-inspired enemy to ensure its own preservation—what Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism designates as “the self-absorbed delusions of the Eurocentric imagination” refusing to understand that “a liberal society must be, when challenged, a warlike society; or it will not endure.” The turn against Israel is merely another expression of the West’s complicity in its own demise, for Israel is not only the ancient home of the Jewish people to which it is legally and historically entitled, it is the fount of the West’s moral and cultural inheritance, and a tributary source of the West’s civilizing imperative.

Between Islamophilia and Judeophobia falls the shadow.' [My emphasis]  http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/02/islamophilia-and-judeophobia/

One "liberal" of the type identified by Solway is former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland, Secretary-General of the Council of Europe.  He features in my recent blogpost on the toxic amount of antisemitism in Norway, much of it driven by the political left. http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/07/sad-song-of-norway-its-antisemitic.html

Immediately after Breivik's atrocities, the pro-Palestinian Jagland (whose own nation cares little about Jews' rights amid the multicultural mix that it's become, and who decried a Jew's appointment as Obama's chief of staff) told a British newspaper, The Observer, Sunday stable-mate to the odious anti-Israel Guardian (itself a classic exemplar of left-liberal Islamophilia) that is incumbent on western political leaders to beware of stoking far-right, anti-Muslim sentiment.  This is obviously a rebuke to David Cameron, who recently made an uncharacteristically tough speech regarding multiculturalism and the limits of tolerance: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/02/requiem-for-islamic-wolves-in-sheeps.html

Jagland added:

'We also need to stop using 'Islamic terrorism', which indicates that terrorism is about Islam. We should be saying that terrorism is terrorism and not linked to religion.' http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/30/david-cameron-far-right-nobel-warning

So presumably if Jagland (who wants to rebrand multiculturalism "diversity"), would have political leaders and all the rest of us turn a deaf ear to speeches such as this one, or at least a blind eye to who is doing the talking:

It's high time Jagland and his compatriots, especially the ruling leftist elite, took some advice themselves.  They could do no better than to heed Alan Dershowitz, who knows partly from firsthand experience what a rancid antisemitic country theirs is:

"The time is long overdue for Norwegians to do some deep soul searching about their sordid history of complicity with all forms of bigotry ranging from the anti-Semitic Nazis to the anti-Semitic Hamas. There seems to be a common thread"  http://www.hudson-ny.org/2310/terrorism-norway-israel

Inevitably, it's being claimed in some quarters, including Norwegian ones, that Breivik was in the pay of Mossad:

And almost as soon as Breivik's "Manifesto" became known, individuals whose writings he's mentioned were being blamed as if they'd somehow egged him on.

A post on a leftwing site in the United States typifies the depths to which a number of anti-conservatives will go to impugn their opponents and cajole them into silence.  It begins:

'As a writer, it sure sucks when someone murders a bunch of people based on your ideas. (I mean, I assume that sucks. Weirdly, it's never happened to me.) So you can understand why right-wing anti-Islam bloggers are all being kind of defensive, these days.

Anders Breivik, the anti-Islam terrorist who killed 77 people in Norway on July 22, read a lot of American anti-Islam bloggers, many of whom he cited in his lengthy manifesto. Breivik's favorites included Robert Spencer, a self-proclaimed expert on Islam whose "Jihad Watch" blog was quoted and cited in Breivik's manifesto, and Spencer's ally and collaborator Pam Geller, whose "Atlas Shrugs" was similarly recommended by the killer.' http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/08/01/pamela_geller_norway

Others at whom the finger has been pointed include the prominent British columnist Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan, Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post, and Australian Keith Windschuttle, editor of Quadrant magazine:
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/07/breivik-and-totalitarian-democ.php
http://melaniephillips.com/hatred-smears-and-liberals-bullying-us-into-silence
http://melaniephillips.com/a-weird-obsession

Writes Windschuttle:

".... Even though the stakes in the present conflict over multiculturalism in the West are very high -- with the concepts of free speech, the rule of law, equality of women and freedom of religion all open to debate -- most conservatives have respected the rules of evidence and the avoidance of ad hominem abuse.

Their left-wing opponents, however, as the Norwegian tragedy has demonstrated yet again, will resort to the lowest tactics to shut down debate they do not like and to kill off arguments they cannot refute by any other means." http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/07/charge-of-deadly-provocation-is-false

See also: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/08/the-myth-of-right-wing-terrorism

As one of the annotations to an edited video on the Vlad Tepes blog of a press conference by British Islamists notes, it's not certain that those featured will succeed in their stated aims, but it's not certain they'll fail, either.http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=36208

Those Diabolically Hypocritical Leftists and Israel: A Devilishly Delicious Dialogue

As regular readers of this blog will know, I've been highly critical (and still am) of aspects of the attitude and coverage of  Anglo-Jewry's premier newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle,  in regard to Israel.

However, I've never denied that the paper has some magnificent regular and guest contributors - that courageous prophetess for our time Melanie Phillips, the combative historian and academic Geoffrey Alderman, and the fine investigative journalist Martin Bright being among my favourites.

In the issue immediately before Passover the paper carried a wonderful satire by journalist and author Nick Cohen (who, despite his surname, isn't Jewish, though of course he's generally assumed to be), entitled "Dialogue with a Western Leftist".

Concentrating on leftist attitudes to Israel, his piece captures so well that essential hypocrisy and self-righteousness to which the Left is so incorrigibly prone. 

"You say you support the Palestinians?" is the opening question.

"Yes," the leftie, a gem of a pastiche of the genre, replies.

"Which Palestinians?" comes the challenge.

"I support all Palestinians," is the earnest answer.  "Their oppression by Israel is the greatest injustice of our time.  Western hypocrites ignore racism, and use false accusations of antisemitism to stop legitimate criticism.  The Zionist-controlled media label resistance 'terrorism', while ignoring the state terrorism of Israel which is the root cause of all the violence in the Middle - "

 "All right, stop there.  You still have to choose.  Do you support the Fatah leadership in the West Bank, which may be corrupt and unpleasant but is at least presiding over an economic boom and allowing some freedoms, or Hamas, which tortures its enemies and tramples on the rights of women."

 "Hamas won Gaza in free elections.  Palestinians must unite against the colonial enemy and the Israel Lobby in the West."

"But they cannot unite.  Religious reactionaries from the extreme right - and 'the extreme right' is the correct term by the way - who are building an Islamic emirate in Gaza and want a caliphate to cover the whole world, do not mix with democratic politicians, however imperfect they may be.  You saw what happened in Gaza.  The Islamists won one election, cancelled all future elections, and threw their opponents from highrise blocks.  If David Cameron threw Ed Miliband off the Post Office Tower, would you still say that he was worthy of support?"

"It is not for us to intervene in Palestinian affairs.  Hamas is an issue the Palestinians must resolve themselves."

"Listen to yourself. 'It's not for us to intervene?'  You and your friends intervene all the time.  You close down Jewish shops, oblivious to the ghosts of Kristallnacht that thuggish policy raises from the grave.  You lobby to stop Israeli academics visiting our universities, and don't worry that the last movement to ban Jewish intellectuals was - "

"I knew it!  I knew it!  I knew you would accuse me of antisemitism.  Your kind always does.  It's a dirty trick to silence legitimate debate."

"I agree it can be sometimes.  But when you will not condemn Islamist movements that lift Jewish conspiracy theories direct from the screeds of European fascism, I am entitled to suspect that you suffer from a severe case of Judeophobia at the very least.  Your repeated references to the 'Israel Lobby' and 'Zionist-controlled media' don't reassure me on that score either."

"I am a left-winger, how dare you accuse me of racism?  I have fought racism all my life, and don't ignore the Islamophobic racism of Israel and her friends, as you do.  If there are antisemitic elements in the Islamist movement, they are a rational response to Western oppression.  You would hate Jews if Israelis were doing this to you."

"Dear God.  Where to begin with that.  Do you really believe there's no racism on the left, and that extremism can be rationally explained?  In any case, it's not just antisemitism you excuse, is it?  You have abandoned internationalism, secularism, and, most disgracefully, the struggle for the emancipation of women.  Your friends in Gaza have even banned women from sucking on hookah pipes and, let me tell you, I don't have to have a psychiatry degree to understand the male sexual hysteria that lies behind that telling prohibition.  Here's a test.  The Palestinian Authority is about to declare the territories an independent state.  The Israelis hate the idea.  What do you think?"

"I worry that a two-state solution will not be full and just.  The expelled refugees must have a right of return."

"That is a recipe for war without end.  Israelis will never allow millions of Palestinians to swamp their state.  Your trouble is that you are a voyeur.  The violence of bearded reactionaries with a Koran in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other excites you.  You prefer the thrilling intransigence to the arguments of boring men in suits in Ramallah, who are willing to compromise for a better life.  You need the burning corpses of Palestinians and Jews to bring light to your empty life."

"And your trouble is you are a sly apologist for imperialism.  You never consemn Israeli atrocities, but use nit-picking points of detail and clever rhetorical tricks to distract attention from crimes against humanity.  You are a neo-con and a zio-Nazi, and I am never going to speak to you again."

"Don't worry, there are millions more like you out there, and I'll be having this conversation for the rest of my life.  Send in the next one on your way out."

Yes, a great pastiche from Nick Cohen that certainly rings a great many bells for me!

Update: Below is Nick Cohen's "Dialogue" in video form:

Beware the Lies of March

It’s March, and a grotesque annual event known as Israel Apartheid Week will soon be upon us. Ever since the end of the white supremacist apartheid (Afrikaans for separateness) regime that existed in South Africa from 1948-93 the fascist left and its foolish cohorts have been gunning for Israel, singling out Israel, the State of the Jews, the culmination of Zionism, the liberation movement of the Jewish People, for obloquy and censure, unremittingly, obsessively, insanely, evilly – and racistly. The aim is to delegitimise the Jewish State – to make it a pariah among the nations – and to ensure its ultimate demise.

Bizarre, is it not? That a tiny country –  the size of Wales or Tasmania or New Jersey –  and occupying just one-sixth of one per cent of the land occupied by the Arab powers, a tiny country that is still the only true democracy in the Middle East, should be the focus of such relentless scrutiny and hostility?

Thus some of the most corrupt and inegalitarian countries in the world, including those which deny basic rights and freedoms to women, to foreign workers, and to members of minority faith, were responsible for the obscene United Nations resolution of 1975 that equated Zionism with racism.

And although that infamous resolution has since been rescinded (thanks in no small measure to the initiative of Australian Zionist leader Mark Leibler, brother of the great Isi Leibler who is so consistently a prophet for our time) the repellent characterization of Zionism as racism persists.

That zealous promoter of replacement theology and inveterate critic of Christian Zionism Stephen Sizer, an Anglican clergyman in Surrey, has been quoted as saying that Israel is “fundamentally an apartheid state because it is based on race” and “even worse than South Africa,” and that it too will hopefully be “brought to an end internally by the rising up of the people.”

What vile, shameful rot. In fact, it's so mendacious and so outrageous that I will go so far as to label it racist. South African apartheid was based upon the premise that white people by virtue of their genes are inherently superior to black people.  Yet in striking contrast to that twisted philosophy Israel consists of Jews of all skin colours. And whereas non-whites in South Africa were denied civil rights, in Israel non-Jews are equal before the law.

The Arab minority in Israel (20 percent of the country’s total population) enjoy all the rights of citizenship. One of the best-educated Arab populations in the Middle East, it, like the Druze, has representatives in the Knesset, and elsewhere in public life.

Israel, from the outset in 1948, became the first country in the Middle East in which Muslim women were entitled to vote. In vast swathes of the Middle East women are still treated almost as sub-human, yet for reasons best known to themselves Western women in their thousands ignore the plight of those women, and concentrate instead on vilifying Israel, where women are as free as any in the developed world.

The so-called “apartheid wall” is a favourite metaphorical target of their ire, in common with their anti-Israel menfolk. Yet, as I showed in a previous post, Israel’s wall (in reality mainly a fence) is a security barrier that has many counterparts in the world http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/11/which-wall-would-that-be.html.

Its purpose, which it has served admirably, is to prevent terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Yet it alone preoccupies the left and other critics of Israel, who evidently believe that Israelis are not entitled to defend themselves as other peoples are.

The scene above is apartheid.  So is the scene below.

You won't find discrimination against minority religions in Israel:

Nor against non-heterosexuals:

And as for Apartheid Week, how about this?

Or this?

Not even a squeak of protest out of the anti-apartheid crowd, eh?  Now isn't that strange!

Hen am levadad yishkon uvagoyim lo yitchashav ("Lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations") declares the Torah (Numbers, 23:9).

Whatever interpretation religious commentators put on that phrase, politically, in our day, during these dark and troubling times through which we are passing, it has a familiar resonance.  It invokes the spectre of antisemitism, which we in the West had once so naively, so optimistically, yet so naturally assumed had been laid to rest by the Nazis' demonstration of the depths of degradation and depravity to which that unfathomable disease called Jew-hatred can lead.

How wrong – how unpredictably wrong – we were.

Make no mistake: as Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University has observed, “Labeling Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ is the embodiment of the new anti-Semitism that seeks to deny the Jewish people the right of equality and self-determination among the nations”.

See also: http://walloflies.org/
And, of course, h/t to Elder of Ziyon for most of the great posters I've reproduced here.

Western Wets and their Penchant for Palestine

I’ve remarked more than once that The Australian is the national newspaper Down Under that’s most consistently fair to Israel. For a start, it has the perspicacious, pro-Israel columnist Greg Sheridan, who’s been with the paper for many years. Now, it’s proved its credentials yet again with a superb article by Brendan O'Neill, the editor of Spiked Online, entitled “Palestine an obsession of radical West, not Arabs”.

Tearing into the execrable John Pilger (an Aussie, I regret to say), O’Neill goes on to observe that while there was a dearth of anti-Israel placards in Tahrir Square,

‘on the pro-Egypt demonstration in London on Saturday [I assume he means the one sponsored by Amnesty International – see the video below], there was a sea of Palestine placards. "Free Palestine", they said, and "End the Israeli occupation". The speakers had trouble getting the audience excited about events in Egypt, having to say on more than one occasion: "Come on London, you can shout louder than that!" Yet every mention of the word Palestine induced a kind of Pavlovian excitability among the attendees. They cheered when the P-word was uttered, chanting: "Free, free Palestine!"

This reveals [continues O'Neill] something important about the Palestine issue. In recent years it has moved from the realm of Arab radicalism, where Egyptians and other peoples frequently demanded the creation of a Palestinian state, and has instead become almost the exclusive property of Western middle-class radicals, such as Pilger.

Emptied of its nationalist vigour and militancy, the Palestine problem, it seems, is now of little immediate interest to protesting Arabs and is instead the ultimate cause célèbre for Western liberal campaigners who like nothing more than having a victimised people they can coo over.

The power and allure of Palestine in Western radical circles is extraordinary. Palestine is the only issue they get excited about. But there is nothing progressive in their pro-Palestine fervour. It is not driven by future-oriented demands for economic development in a Palestinian homeland in the West Bank or Gaza. Instead it is driven by a view of Palestinians as the ultimate victims, the hapless and pathetic children of the new world order, who need kindly, wizened Westerners to protect them from Big Bad Israel.....

For these historically ignorant campaigners, Israelis are the New Nazis and Gaza is the new Warsaw Ghetto. As the title of a recent talk in London put it: "A New Hitler for a New Age? The Rise of Israeli Terror."

Palestinian pitiers have no time to think about the inconvenient fact that Hamas is an intolerant political entity that has no time for gay rights or women's equality. Instead, everything gets reduced to a Narnia-style story of wicked witches v happy fauns, because this is ultimately about providing vacuous-feeling Westerners with some much-needed momentum in their lives, not about untangling a messy political reality.

It's very revealing that Palestine has become less important for Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals at exactly the same time. With the Palestinian people somewhat deflated, the Palestine issue can become perfect political fodder for the victim-oriented, fancy-dress radicals of the modern West.’

Read all of Brendan O’Neill’s article here: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/palestine-an-obsession-of-radical-west-not-arabs/story-e6frg6zo-1226006572220