For the Biased ABC, "Professor Sprout" Spouts her Leftist Bile

She took out Australian citizenship in 2013, did British actress Miriam Margolyes, who divides her time between the land of her birth and that of her adoption.

The 79-year-old, whose acting roles include Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films, received her certificate from the fair hand of then prime minister Julia Gillard herself, declaring at the time that she was looking forward to voting left here.

Ten years ago, following an anti-Israel outburst by Ms Margolyes on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, British blogger Ray Cook took her measure, here.  What he wrote of her still fits.

The inveterate Israel-basher is known to make and sign statements that denigrate the Jewish State and give aid and comfort to Israel's enemies.  This, for instance, sponsored by APAN, the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network.

This, too, for example:

'Along with more than 600 other fellow artists, we are announcing today that we will not engage in business-as-usual cultural relations with Israel. We will accept neither professional invitations to Israel, nor funding, from any institutions linked to its government.... Now we are saying, in Tel Aviv, Netanya, Ashkelon or Ariel, we won’t play music, accept awards, attend exhibitions, festivals or conferences, run masterclasses or workshops, until Israel respects international law and ends its colonial oppression of the Palestinians....'

And this, from 2015, which gave joy to the many Israel-haters who infest the corridors of the ABC, the BBC's terrible twin Down Under (taxpayer-funded, accordingly obliged to be objective in its treatment of news and current affairs, but not), and pack the studio audience and dominate the panel of QandA, its equivalent of the BBC's Question Time. 

She was an obligingly leftwing panellist, as her ABC hosts knew she would be, not only demonising Israel, but to rip roaring approval from the usual suspects insulting Aussie prime minister Tony Abbott ("He's a Tit!"), who as a conservative and a practising Catholic to boot is everything the arch-secularist (though pro-Islam) ABC abhors.

Back in 2013 when she received her Aussie citizenship Ms Margolyes enthused about Australia, telling the Sydney Morning Herald, inter alia:

"The main thing is a lack of class," she said. "I don't like class distinction and there's too much of that in England. There's an energy here - an optimism, a vitality. I think England doesn't have that anymore."

In a new three-part ABC documentary she has deplored, among other supposed failings, the fact that Australia has become the "colony of America" and that "Now, there is a sourness, a narrowness and a racism, which I will fight wherever I see it for the rest of my life".  And she's used the F word to defy her critics.

This is vintage ABC, and vintage Margolyes.  She's entitled to her views, of course, but the sheer bloody-mindedness and hypocrisy of the national broadcaster in all this is not lost on Sky News commentator and Australian newspaper journalist Chris Kenny:

'Sky News host Chris Kenny says a documentary series on the ABC which "bags Australia" by UK actress Miriam Margolyes is the same "clichéd, left-wing, morally superior, identity politics on steroids drivel" constantly seen  on the public broadcaster.

Ms Margolyes ... made headlines earlier in May after professing to having preferred UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to have died when he was ill with COVID-19.

"Our national broadcaster only praises Margolyes, in fact it has given her a job making a documentary series about Australia," Mr Kenny said.

In an interview with the ABC's Fran Kelly, Ms Margolyes was not even asked about her "controversial, widely publicised comments about preferring a conservative leader to die".

"Instead the ABC just asked her to bag Australia," Mr Kenny said.

"A billion dollars a year to deliver anti-intellectual attacks on Australia, a public broadcaster dedicated to dumbing down the nation".'  [Emphasis added] 

The Not So Divine Miss M

British actress (I suppose it's poltically correct to say "actor") Miriam Margolyes, who has been an Australian citizen for some years (the photo shows her receiving her naturalisation certificate from no less a personage than them prime minister Julia Gillard), is an inveterate Israel hater, who can usually be relied upon to sign leftist "as a Jew" statements vilifying Israel.  This, for instance.

She is consequently a darling of the anti-Israel media including the supposed-to-be impartial taxpayer funded ABC, which as Herald-Sun columnist Rita Panahi showed brilliantly in an article this very day (behind a paywall, I'm afraid) is now more blatantly than ever  the home of leftist activism posing as journalism, a place that's nor merely a conservative-free zone but, increasingly, a centrist-free one as well.

In March 2015 Margolyes, a panellist on the ABC's Q&A program (the ABC's version of the BBC's Question Time) scapegoated Israel for antisemitism.

As former federal MP Michael Danby, observed in 2015,:

"I think it is appalling that the ABC had on its Q&A program the execrable woman Margolyes, who, of all the actors in Australia, had to be brought on to Q&A to comment on international affairs.

She who said, quite disgracefully on this program on Monday, that antisemitism is quite understandable.

It is not understandable in any circumstances.The death of those people [in Paris and Copenhagen] is not justifiable, Ms Margolyes.

You are a disgrace, and the ABC is a disgrace for putting you on..."

The latest way in which unapologetic Corbynista Margolyes has broken ranks with mainstream majority Jewish opinion is her endorsement of this despocable slur on Chief Rabbi Mirvis, who of course has, not before time, issued a statement deploring the effect of Labour Party antisemitism upon British Jews:

Pretty shameful, eh?

"Ms Margolyes, You Are A Disgrace, & The ABC Is A Disgrace For Putting You On": Aussie MP

Federal MP Michael Danby, the ALP (Labor) member for Melbourne Ports, speaking last week in the House of Representatives in Canberra:

"I think it is appalling that the ABC had on its Q&A program the execrable woman Margolyes, who, of all the actors in Australia, had to be brought on to Q&A to comment on international affairs.

 She who said, quite disgracefully on this program on Monday, that antisemitism is quite understandable.

 It is not understandable in any circumstances.

 The death of those people [in Paris and Copenhagen] is not justifiable, Ms Margolyes.

 You are a disgrace, and the ABC is a disgrace for putting you on.

Eighteen months ago, the Abbott opposition agreed with the then Labor government to continue the program of secure schools funding that I initiated with the previous government in 2007.

 I am very grateful that this funding has continued—and it has continued in my electorate to the extent of millions of dollars. It is absolutely necessary despite the blandishments and stupidities of Miriam Margolyes and the fools who put her on Q&A and who support her views.

 These events around the world directly affect us here in Australia. Can you imagine being an unarmed person standing outside the Elwood Synagogue, as they do, every week when I see them, a lovely couple of twins who live around the corner who look after their elderly mother, and their contribution to Australian society is to act as a volunteer to protect their fellow Australians in that institution.

 I honour them and I honour every person who does that kind of work that Dan Uzan did outside the Copenhagen Synagogue."

Long-standing champion of Israel Danby also said: 

'The Danish Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, led hundreds of mourners recently at the funeral of Dan Uzan, a Danish citizen who was one of two people killed in a shooting spree in Copenhagen just a few weeks ago. Security was tight at his funeral, the police out in force with sniffer dogs. I want to give him a name. Uzan was an individual—a giant of a man, six foot nine—who, in minus 10 degrees, stood outside the Copenhagen synagogue, protecting a party of 80 12-year-olds, a Bat Mitzvah. Two apparent drunks tried to get in. They got past the police with their machine guns. He refused to let them in; he refused to believe that they were not putting on an act, and his act of incredible bravery led to his being shot in the head by this terrorist and the police only then waking up themselves and being shot by these two individuals, who got away, one of them later to be shot and killed.

The mother of the girl whose Bat Mitzvah was held that night said:

 "We feel like Dan stopped the terrorist with his body. He was our hero even before this incident. He was a kind-hearted man, a good soul. Dan and the other guards who were there are the true heroes of this incident."

That is what Mette Bentow said:

 "She is the mother of Hannah, who was celebrating, as I said, her Bat Mitzvah with 80 other 12-year-old girls. She said that synagogue was protected by that hero, Dan Uzan."

Also killed in that shooting spree in Copenhagen was Finn Norgaard, who was killed at the Copenhagen Cafe earlier. He was a Danish film director who produced documentaries for Danish television and in 2004 produced Boomerang Drengen [Boomerang Boy] about an Australian boy's dream of becoming a world boomerang champion. These events directly affected Australia.

Guarding a Jewish communal building in Melbourne

I wish the ABC had humanised the victims more, because there are thousands of people, every weekend and during the week, who stand outside Australian institutions, particularly Jewish institutions.

 They are volunteers who, like Dan Uzan, guard institutions from people like this, because of the security circumstances that we live. They do not have, unfortunately, armed police, as they do in Europe.

 Perhaps it is a good thing that the situation is not so bad in Australia that it demands it. But they have no-one to protect them, and I honour their work and understand their fear of the events that happened in those place.'

[Emphasis added]

"The Campaign To Boycott Israel is An Antisemitic Policy ... The Problem Starts With The World's Media": Aussie newspaper publisher

The Cambridge Union has voted that Israel is "a rogue state": ayes 51 per cent; noes 19 per cent; abstentions 30 per cent.  Ben White, the ubiquitous anti-Israel campaigner who spoke in favour of the motion along with Ghada Karmi and Norman Finkelstein, has his triumphant take on the sordid matter here.

Miriam Margolyes, coincidentally herself a Cambridge graduate, the "star of stage and screen" known to young audiences as "Professor Sprout" of Harry Potter fame, but whose longest-running, not to say infamous, role seems to be that of an "Ashamed Jew" (see Ray Cook's unforgettable review here) has been up to her old tricks.

And as a result of her demonisation of Israel an the ABC's Q&A show (Australia's answer to the BBC's "Question Time") the  veteran leftist has been enjoying rather too much of the limelight in the Australian press this past week or so, especially from its Israel-bashing elements.

She's attracted attention not only because she repeated her despicable mantra that Israel is responsible for the rise of antisemitism worldwide, but because she described  prime minister Tony Abbott as "a tit".

Liberal Party minister Josh Frydenberg, assistant treasurer in Abbott's team, did his best to refute her ignorant views, in a courteous manner.

Pity another visiting Brit (actually, Margolyes now has dual Aussie/British citizenship) Melanie Phillips was not on the panel to show her up.

Or the alter ego of Dame Edna Everage, who rather splendidly dealt with Margolyes on a previous Q&A when she spouted similar invective against the Jewish State.

As Ted Lapkin, a former adviser to the Abbott government, has observed in The Australian newspaper:

'The moment actress Miriam Margolyes opened her mouth to opine on anti-Semitism during the ABC’s Q&A this week, the moral rot at the heart of 21st-century leftist thought came on full display. Responding to an audience question on the issue of Jew-­hatred, the ever-so-progressive Margolyes indulged in a nauseating exhibition of “blame the victim” pathology. The reason “people don’t like Jews”, she didactically intoned, “is because of the actions of the state of Israel”.

Margolyes declared during a BBC interview in 2010 that she “totally understood” Palestinian anti-Jewish hostility because Is­rael “foments it”. Using Margolyes’s line of reasoning as a guide, the slaughter of Jews in Paris and Copenhagen should not be blamed on the jihadi fascists who actually pulled the triggers. The true culprits responsible for the shedding of Jewish blood in France and Denmark are instead those dastardly Zionists whose ­actions incite justifiable Islamic resentment.

.... Through her uncritical pro-Palestinian activism she provides political aid and polemical comfort to one of the most noxious theofascist movements in the world today.

....  Margolyes is Jewish, a fact that marks her for death in the Hamas covenant that explicitly invokes a genocidal campaign to kill every Jew on earth. She is also openly gay, another capital offence in the Hamas playbook. And she’s a woman, and thus consigned to second-class citizenship under the strictures of sharia law.

.... [J]ust as the Islamic Middle East is consumed by civil war and genocide, Margolyes seeks the downfall of the sole democracy in that tortured region. Margolyes’s ethical disorientation is a symptom of a greater malady. She’s a microcosm of the “long march through the institutions of power” advocated in the late 1960s by Marxist student radical Rudi “the Red” Dutschke.

Across the past half-century much of our media and many centres of cultural authority have devolved into leftist monocultures of self-flagellation that preach moral relativism, the evils of free-market capitalism and the black-armband narrative of Western history.

As a result we’ve become so timidly PC that many of us are incapable of recognising the obvious fact that Westminster democracy is superior to Wahhabi theocracy.'

But enough of the objectionable (some say the "Jewish anti-semite") Margolyes.

"If I can speak on behalf of the community tonight I would like to express my appreciation to the prime minister, Tony Abbott, who has been a staunch friend of both the Australian Jewish community and Israel"

So proclaimed Australian Jewish News publisher Robert Magid at the launch in Sydney of a book celebrating 120 years of his newspaper. 

'....[T]here are dark clouds on the horizon.

Only yesterday it was revealed that at a rally in Sydney demonstrators chanted: "Khaibar ya yahud, jaish Muhammad saya'ud" – Look out Jews the armies of Mohammad are coming."

While the chanting is seen on the streets of Sydney, the problem starts with the world's media. 

Hamas is a terrorist organisation that rules Gaza with an iron fist, tortures Palestinians, throws people from the roofs of buildings and executes citizens without due process.  It diverts humanitarian aid to build rockets and terror tunnels.  Its schools teach children to kill Jews.

Its aim is the extermination of the State of Israel.  Yet none of this is reported by the media for fear of retribution by Hamas.

On the other hand, Israel is a free society.  One can write the most mendacious reports about Israel with impunity and the international media takes full advantage.  There is group-think among international journalists based in Israel which has contributed to the demonisation of Israel.

Many of the appalling features which are prevalent in Palestinian society are perversely attributed to Israel in a complete inversion.

Most of us in this room know about Israel's amazing technological advances, its flourishing culture and the fact that it sends rescue teams to natural disasters throughout the world.

But you will not see the media reporting this because they are focusing rather on settlements, conflicts, the lack of progress in negotiations for which Israel is purportedly solely to blame.

Non-Jewish Australian businessmen who visited Israel last year during the war with Hamas said that media reporting of Israel in Australia did not reflect the reality they experienced.

In a recent British poll asking which country people most abhor, Israel came second only to North Korea.

Every murderous, totalitarian regime which kills gay people, treats women as chattels, practises apartheid, arrests dissidents without charge, tortures prisoners, executes for misdemeanours and where no freedom exists is preferred to Israel.

 The Boycott Israel movement is spreading around the world.

So should we boycott Israel?

Only if we use the same yardstick for Israel as for every other country, such as China, Russia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, all Arab, African and Latin American countries.  The result would be total isolation.

.... The campaign to boycott Israel is an antisemitic policy.  Why would you boycott the only liberal democracy in the Middle East?

There is only one answer: because you have an irrational hatred of Jews.

....  While the majority of Muslims in the West might be repulsed by the behaviour of jihadis in their midst, their distorted understanding of the Israeli Palestinian conflict contributes to their widespread anger and hatred toward Israel, which morphs into hatred of Jews.

As a result, the main threats to the Jewish communities come mainly from hotheads in the Muslim community....

Our immigration policies have been a success because immigrants have been free to express their values insofar as they are consistent with Australian values, values such as sexual equality, tolerance of their fellow citizen's beliefs, freedom of expression and the rule of law.

But this isn't the case for all communities.

There is a small but vocal section of the Muslim community that has not accepted Australian values.  The onus is on the leaders of the Muslim community to purge imams, teachers and other members of their community who promote violence and hate speech and refuse to embrace the moral foundations of Australian society....

We should support an immigration policy which blocks entry to anyone who is likely to destabilise Australian society....' {Emphasis added]

The Aussie Anti-Israel Arena Acquires A Star Performer

Compare and contrast these two letters, which appeared in the same British newspaper (one not noted for its love for Israel) on the same day:

'The real problem with the Gerald Scarfe cartoon [which, of course, appeared in another British newspaper, the Sunday Times, on 27 January, sparking outrage] is that it perpetuates the "big lie" about the Jewish state.

Not the blood, not the hook-nose: that's what all his cartoons look like. It promotes the idea that Zionism/Israel/Netanyahu/Jews (take your pick) are singularly at fault for the plight of the Palestinians.

Israel is not blameless, but what about Palestinian division and rejectionism? The ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab world? The rabid anti-Semitism throughout the Middle East? Last Monday, the day after the cartoon was published, 10 Palestinians were killed just as Scarfe had prophesied... but they were murdered in Syria, a conflict that has claimed more lives in two years than the entire Arab-Israeli conflict.

That is why the cartoon could be described as anti-Semitic even though its author is not.'

A reasoned and entirely reasonable view of the matter, written by a Jewish individual in Hertfordshire.

His letter followed this one, authored by 28 Jewish and apparently Jewish individuals, plus (or are they all members of?) the Brighton-based Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, which reads:

'The suggestion by Zionist supporters that Gerald Scarfe's cartoon in The Sunday Times was anti-Semitic is a classic example of the abuse of the term. It drains the term of all meaning and, like the boy who cried wolf, desensitises people to anti-Semitism when it does rear its head.

Jennifer Lipman's grudging defence ... of Gerald Scarfe described the cartoon's portrayal of Palestinian blood cementing the Separation Wall as "profoundly offensive" because the intention of the Wall was to prevent suicide bombing. We disagree. Palestinian blood is being shed and the security pretext for the wall was a means of further confiscating Palestinian land. That was why the wall didn't follow the 1967 Green Line.

On 23 January, without warning or excuse, Israeli soldiers killed student Lobna Hannash, 21, outside al-Arroub Agricultural College. On 17 January a boy of 16, Saleh al-Amareen, was shot in the head at a refugee camp in Bethlehem. These are but two examples of why the cartoon was extremely pertinent.

Those who constantly raise the bogus cry of "anti-Semitism" whenever Israel is criticised are trading on the memory of the past oppression of Jews in order to justify the current oppression of the Palestinians.

As Jewish opponents of Zionism and racism we wish to declare that we do not believe that there was a trace of anti-Semitism in Gerald Scarfe's cartoon. Holocaust Memorial Day was indeed a fitting time to signal the evils of racism. As the Prophet Micah said: "They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity." (Micah, 3:10).'  [My emphasis]

Several of the signatories to that putrid statement are seemingly ubiquitous anti-Israel activists.  Their names appear on most if not all "as-a-Jew" denunciations of the imperilled little Jewish State.  At least two participated in the despicable disruption of the IPO concert in the Albert Hall in 2011, and, if my memory serves me correctly, have been involved in similar stunts.  The signatories include three out of the four academics who recently implored Cliff Richard to cancel his forthcoming visit to Israel.  Another signatory has addressed Al Quds Day crowds in London as a featured speaker.  Yet another posts anti-Israel messages on a certain social networking site with almost manic frequency and zeal, messages which are sometimes so shockingly intemperate (and attract shockingly intemperate messages of support in return) that the mind boggles at the discovery that the person in question is a Jew.

There's a stand-up comedian on the list, the halachically Jewish son of Communist parents.  His name appears immediately below that of the first signatory, the well-known actress Miriam Margolyes.

Ms Margolyes, the subject of this memorable post by blogger Ray Cook, needs little introduction to readers in either her native Britain or in Australia, where she has maintained a home for some years.  An inveterate critic of Israel, she took part Down Under  in Caryl Churchill's controversial Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, a play seen by many as antisemitic.  That performance, which also starred the well-known Aussie actor and comedian Max Gillies (husband of a prominent critical-of-Israel Jewish publishing executive whose academic press has published anti-Israel works by Antony Loewenstein and Jacqueline Rose) was held to raise money for Australians for Palestine.

Last month, Ms Margolyes (pictured, receiving her naturalisation certificate from prime minister Julia Gillard), became an Australian citizen, and told the Sydney Morning Herald:

'Her desire to become a citizen crystallised when she wanted the right to vote against the former prime minister John Howard [whom I, Daphne, once had the privilege of meeting and who is, incidentally, outstandingly pro-Israel], whom she described as a ''pillock''.

On her agenda as a new citizen are joining the Australian Labor Party, getting to know more indigenous Australians and improving her knowledge of the ''other Australia'' beyond the middle class.

Quoting John F. Kennedy's famous line, ''Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country'', Margolyes said she wanted to help ''Australia become a nation of thinkers''....

She is also worried about the surge of nationalism and ugliness towards foreigners. While she plans to be a loyal citizen, she does not plan to follow blindly.

''This sheila is not going to shut up,'' she said ....'

Barry Digs For Israel

Celebrated British/Australian actress Miriam Margolyes is seen here in one of her recurrent roles, ardent Israel basher:

Equally celebrated Australian comedian Barry Humphries, long known as a supporter of Jews and Israel, and close friends since their schooldays at Melbourne Grammar with a distinguished rabbi whom I too know and love, has given Miss Margolyes a little piece of his mind on the ABC, when both were panellists on the discussion show Q&A.  A reader of my blog who saw it tells me:

'Miriam Margolyes had early complained about being attacked by Jews for being critical of Israel. Later from 37.20 Barry Humphries has a very subtle dig at her in his sarcastic way. I'm not sure she would have even gotten that he was attacking her.  He says after she brought up Mel Gibson (he had made a point that most actors were lefties);

[About Mel Gibson to her]  "....well you know, he’s a fellow anti-semite, which you should think about Miriam, and you know Miriam – whose wonderful show of Dicken's Women is in Sydney on Thursday night at the Opera House is incredible, it may not be mentioned again so I'm giving it a plug – you’ll find north London Jews will be perfectly happy with what you have to say, there’s a few anti-semites amongst them I can tell you."

To which she replies "and understandably so" ...'

Some time ago, blogger Ray Cook (no rightwing thunderer, by the way), at the end of a memorable piece prompted by Miss Margolyes's remarks on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show which implied support for a single state solution, observed:

'Margolyes and other ashamed Jews need to educate themselves. I am sick of being ashamed of them.

What is she saying now? Oh yes, the Israelis should understand and accept that they owe reparation to the Palestinians just like the Jews expect it from the Germans.

So she, perhaps unwittingly, makes a moral equivalence between the way Jews were treated in the Holocaust and  the way Palestinians (who have been hell-bent on another Holocaust for 100 years, and certainly 60) have been treated by the Israelis.

Who attacked Israel in 1967?

Why was the PLO formed in 1964 before there was any ‘Occupation’?

The Israelis are behaving ”so cruelly’. Yes, sometimes all those with power over others behave cruelly. Maybe she should understand why Israelis might do so to Palestinians who want to kill them, and blow up their children on buses and in their beds. Why can she only see one side to this conflict?....

How often do we see people in the media like Miriam Margolyes, Jews and non-Jews, well-meaning, decent people who just do not understand. They live in their cosy left-wing bubbles dreaming of world peace where all will be luvvies.

Sorry Miriam. You are a very nice woman and a wonderful actress, but you are a deluded Jew.

Go read some history. Go read the PLO charter and the Hamas charter.... [Y]ou need to wake up out of your deluded lefty dreams, you and all the ashamed Jews.'

Update: Habima's appearance at the Globe, which Miss Margolyes wanted cancelled, was disrupted by a  bunch of usual suspects, as this BBC report indicates.  See my next post.