In Australia, Anti-Israel Activists Maintain That Loving Feeling

SBS ex-newsreader Mary Kostakidis retweets ...

It seems that anti-Israel activists in Australia might have decided that fiction (I mean the stuff that owns up to being fiction) is the propagandistic way to go.

My previous post tells of the adoption of a Palestinian activist's play by the powers that decide the curriculum in the Aussie state of Victoria, aimed at teenagers.

Quite a coup, leading to enormous satisfaction on the anti-Israel mob's part.

Where has the Aussie Jewish "leadership" been meanwhile?

Have they protested?

Have they been fobbed off with the fact that also on the VCE playlist for 2016 is a play that uses an Aboriginal leader's 1938 protest to the German Embassy over Nazi persecution of Jews as a peg on which to hang its themes?  If so, they are woefully mistaken, for the latter play is in no sense a trade-off.

Soon to be launched, in Adelaide, is a novel by pro-BDS stalwart Professor Emeritus Stuart Rees of Jake Lynch's Peace Centre.

Like the Palestinian activist's play, Rees's novel would appear to have a love story as hook on which to hang a political message.

The book is to be launched in May by Adelaide barrister Paul Heywood-Smith QC, a founding member of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA).

An early AFOPA initiative in Adelaide (2010)

 

 

In 2013 AFOPA paid for billboards in Adelaide showing the misleading maps

Mr Heywood-Smith's views on Israel and on its supporters within the Australian Jewish community can be glimpsed here (something about "divided loyalties").

And then there's his own book, The Case for Palestine: The perspective of an Australian observer, launched last year.

Here's what Michael Easson, a patron of the Australia Israel Labor Dialogue, had to say about it.  Inter alia:

"Heywood-Smith is an unsteady captain of his ship and sometimes runs aground. His caveat emptor, that ambition might outstretch ability as an historian, is amply evidenced. Two egregious clangers are the naming of the social democrat Russian Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky as a ‘Jewish Bolshevik’ (he was neither) and the claim that Sir Raphael Cilento, having merely ‘questioned’ ‘Zionist imperialism’, was drummed out of Australian diplomatic life. (Cilento was a Holocaust denier, big supporter and donor to the far-right League of Rights, in short, an anti-semitic ratbag).

 Superficial, sophomoric judgements abound in this philippic....

Heywood-Smith raises the discredited claim that most Jews are actually not descendants from the land of Israel but Khazar converts, a possibility that discredits Zionism. He even manages to claim that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini, the notorious Hitler supporter, hardly amounted to much: ‘There is no evidence, however, that Amin’s views translated into material support for Nazi Germany from the Palestinian people.’ All he ever did was raise a volunteer Muslim SS contingent in the Balkans. Almost harmless, really.

In a potted history of WWI, Heywood-Smith argues ‘Britain became desperate to bring the US into the conflict. This enabled Zionists to play a winning card’, implying that they bargained with Britain to support a Zionist state. All this shows is that Heywood-Smith cannot help finding a point and embellishing it. He claims all the problems with the Middle East stem from western imperialism and the creation of Israel. This is simple-mindedness writ large. He snidely questions whether Australian Labor MP Michael Danby, who is Jewish, is guilty of dual loyalties....

Bizarrely, Heywood-Smith claims that then Israeli PM Ehud Barak refused to meet with Yasser Arafat in 2000 at the Camp David Summit convened by Bill Clinton. (They met many times. This is where Barak offered the Palestinian Authority nearly 97 per cent of the West Bank, plus land swaps). Instead of transparency, as the Palestinians wanted, the Israelis traded in secrecy, Heywood-Smith claims.

Mother love is in the air

 He expresses sympathy for the BDS campaign and complains that the Palestinian Authority is complicit with doing deals with Israel and ‘so clearly does not represent the Palestinian people.’ Australian-born Martin Indyk, a consistent critic of Israeli PM Netanyahu and adviser to Presidents Clinton and Obama, is dismissed as a Zionist. 

So, what are Heywood-Smith’s solutions? ‘The Jewish communities that thrived for centuries in Morocco, Tunisia, Baghdad, Damascus, Istanbul and Seville, to mention but a few sites, should be encouraged to restore themselves.’ Jews go home, in other words...."

On Show, An Aussie BDSer's Israel Fixation

On Monday evening the ABC's Q&A program (analogous to the BBC's Question Time) consisted of what compere Tony Jones (pictured, looking towards aboriginal activist Rosalie Kunoth-Monks and Emeritus Professor Stuart Rees, founder of the Sydney Peace Prize and director of the Sydney Peace Foundation at the University of Sydney) characterised as "a panel of distinguished elders".

Although the taxpayer-funded ABC, like the licence-payer-funded BBC, is obligated to provide political balance, that obligation was (predictably, in a trend so reminiscent of the BBC too) honoured more in the breach than the observance, for only one of last evening's silver-haired panellists, Peter Coleman, former editor of the conservative monthly magazine Quadrant and former leader of the New South Wales Liberals (on the left of the above photo, seated between art critic and former New South Wales Art Gallery director Betty Churcher and British primate expert Jane Goodall), did not lean towards the Left.

A perusal of the show's transcript here (or the video here) will confirm that Coleman managed to land much-needed punches in relation to John Pilger (whose film "Utopia" was the subject of a question) and made a classic politically incorrect elephant-in-the-room observation regarding violence against women in traditional aboriginal society (the kind of observation's that turned Quadrant editor and historian Keith Windschuttle into a target of obloquy by many leftist historians and which earned Coleman a much-applauded rebuke by Jane Goodall).

There was no question specifically relating to Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, although as the transcript and video reveal Jane Goodall touched upon that subject in passing when discussing the "Roots & Shoots" project that's dear to her heart.

But any viewer who thought that this edition of Q&A was going to be free of anti-Israel propaganda reckoned without the near-fanaticism of BDS enthusiast Stuart Rees, who managed to turn a question about the Australian budget and its impact on young Australians into an opportunity gratuitously to introduce "the Palestinians":

Zoe Thompson: ... My question is to the panel generally. The current budget seems to place an unfair burden on young people. The proposed changes to higher education are expected to increase fees, leading to a bigger debt burden for most. Young people also have to contend with the prospect of being locked out of the housing market, especially in major cities and, as we have already talked about, we’re inheriting a  –  they are inheriting a huge environmental problem. As a mother and a high school teacher, I know that young people feel uncertain about the future. Are the burdens of today's young people greater than in the past? Greater, for example, than when you were young people?

Tony Jones: Stuart, we’ll start with you.

Stuart Rees: Yeah, certainly they are because when I was brought up in a period of not - nowhere near - well, it certainly wasn't economic prosperity but we hadn't discovered the market. We hadn't discovered the notion that your and all the students here are simply commodities. On Q&A last week, we had a politician and an economics journalist saying and trying to reassure the audience that the major problem of this country was debt. Well, it is debt but, in terms of your question, it is actually a moral debt. It is a moral debt that we need to get rid of regarding the treatment of Indigenous people, regarding the treatment of asylum seekers, regarding the treatment of the young unemployed and the mentally ill. Let alone the vulnerable people around the world whom this current government treats with complete indifference, people in West Papua, the Tamils of Sri Lanka and the Palestinians in the Middle East. So, yes, unfortunately it is because of this absurd mantra, this absurd notion, that the market is king and you have just had a Commission of Audit who said that we  –  the future is about competitive Federalism. It is not. It is about a common humanity.

To his credit, Peter Coleman jumped in, and had his say, before Tony Jones steered the discussion back to relevance:

Peter Coleman: Tony, can I say something on this? Well, I disagree entirely. 

Stuart Rees: I am surprised. 

Peter Coleman: As you'd expect. I'm so damn old that I was at university in the 1940s and it was an age in which there were no handouts, no student pensions and my circle of people simply had to work their way through the damn university and to go on strike or to have demos or riots about reduced handouts or the size of the debt that they incur by having their fees paid for is unthinkable. So I don't have too much sympathy with the young that you talk about. As for the Palestinians and the Israelis, I don't see how you can work them together. The real problem there is not – is the organisation of which you are such a distinguished leader, Stuart, that is the Boycott Israel movement, the BDS, and while that continues, although I notice your university union, the Tertiary Education Union, has denounced it and rejected it [see here], but I simply feel that you miss the point. 

Tony Jones: Now, Peter, I am letting you finish that point because that was raised by Stuart but let's go back to the question.

Incidentally, next week's Q&A might be worth watching, since, in Tony Jones's words, it will have
"a panel that includes a Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, one of the few Jewish MPs Josh Frydenberg and alongside him rising Labor star Ed Husic, the first Muslim elected to the Federal Parliament".

Anyway, for anyone who's a glutton for punishment, here's Stuart Rees speaking in favour of academic BDS to Sydney students in 2012 during the so-called "Israel Apartheid Week":