THE POGROM

Frenzied attacks on Israel such as those conducted in the Melbourne Age during the course of the past week in the wake of the assassination of the Hamas arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh and Passportgate have not been contained to the Fairfax press alone. They been replicated in certain media outlets around the world and represent an ongoing campaign of deligitimising the Jewish State.

But the Age has gone further this week, stepping up its attacks with no less than three op eds condeming Israel and without permitting a response at all. To make matters worse, based on my information, the paper has chosen to not select for publication in its letters section, letters written to rebut some of the many errors of fact and logic contained in the work of writers Szego, Saikal and Mashni - each one of them combined with the continuing selective reporting of events from the region and some vile cartoons building to a crescendo of misinformation about Israel and a scandalous piece by its Middle East correspondent on an Israeli fruitcake whose racist book "The Invention of the Jewish People" has garnered scorn from serious scholars around the world. Would Koutsoukis ever write such a piece of fairy floss about anyone who wrote a book entitled "The Invention of the Palestinian People"?

The combined effect of the Age's propaganda campaign has meant that the media pogrom against the Jewish State is well and truly up and running. A nice build up for next week's outpouring of even more racism with Apartheid Week.

This of course, is way off beam with what's happening in the Australian street which has a better grip on reality than the Palestinists working away at the Age. The general vibe out there is that one more murdering terrorist is pushing up daisies and irrespective of whoever did it and how it was done, the world is a better off place without him. Many simply cannot understand why, in light of the hundreds of deaths caused in the region by Islamist terrorists of the ilk of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, this news outlet is so obsessed with running cover for Hamas and vilifying the one country in the region whose citizens are constantly targeted by would be mass murderers. This is going on despite the absence of proof that Israel was even involved in his death.

As I said, this is a media pogrom.

Thankfully, Fairfax doesn't have a monopoly over the news and we have the Australian newspaper which provides a balance to the unhinged nonsense being foisted on the Age readership.

Respected journalist Abraham Rabinovich presents a story that could never be written in the rival newspaper because it tells a positive story about how Mossad has managed to penetrate the inner-most workings of Hamas - Spy fears shake Hamas to the core.

There's also an exceptional opinion article by historian Andrew Roberts - Israel a victim of double standards after slaying. Roberts tears apart some truly vicious attacks on the Jewish State originally published in the Financial Times by Israel bashers who claimed, inter alia, that "colonial ambitions" and "checkpoints, barbed wire and separation walls" were "turning Israel from a democracy into an apartheid state", thereby creating a "looming global threat to the country’s legitimacy” and of how Israel's "miliitarist extroversion” over the Dubai murder demonstrated an "Israeli preference for instantly satisfying executive solutions to complex political and geopolitical problems" which would "widen the international battle-space for tit-for-tat attacks” and "encourage the perception that [Israel] is a rogue state".

In other words, the same sort of pap that the Age has been dishing up to its readers all week (including the noxious hateful cartoons of Tandberg and Leunig which wouldn't see the light of day in a decent newspaper). Here's what Roberts has to say:

All that the Dubai operation will do is remind the world that the security services of states at war – and Israel’s struggle with Hamas, Fatah and Hizbollah certainly constitutes that – occasionally employ targeted assassination as one of the weapons in their armoury, and that this in no way weakens their legitimacy. As for the "separation walls" and checkpoints that one sees in Israel, the 99 per cent drop in the number of suicide bombings since their erection justifies the policy. There is simply no parallel between apartheid South Africa – where the white minority wielded power over the black majority – and the occupied territories, taken by Israel only after it was invaded by its neighbours. To make such a link is not only inaccurate, but offensive. If Arab Israelis were deprived of civil and franchise rights, that would justify such hyperbole, but of course they have the same rights as every Jewish Israeli.

Far from having any colonial ambitions, Israel wants nothing more than to live peaceably within defensible borders. But equally it demands nothing less.

Thanks to the Australian, we can enjoy a semblance of balance in what we are told about events in this troubled region and a far superior coverage to that provided by a failing newspaper fast becoming a propaganda preaching arm for Middle Eastern terror movements that are not only a thorn in Israel's side but which, if allowed to prosper will continue to threaten the rest of the world.