Greens candidate for the NSW lower house seat of Marrickville Fiona Byrne (she who pushed a boycott of commercial, cultural and sporting exchanges with Israel last year without a mandate from her constituency to do so) has made it clear that if successful in next week's election "she will seek to extend the Israel boycott across the state" - Byrne's Israel boycott slammed.
Despite the Council ban, the local town hall has been booked for a function for an AFL "peace team" made up of Israeli and Palestinian footballers later this year.
The AFL Peace Team was condemned when it made its last visit to this country by anti-peace groups such as Australians for Palestine who are behind the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement whose aim is to deligitimise and dehumanise the Israeli people.
The members of the Peace Team have been harassed in the past by Byrne's type of people but it's hard to allege "Apartheid" when you get two such groups together in the same team - a team which sets an example for others in their troubled land and elsewhere that two warring peoples can overthrow old hatreds and co-exist together in peace and harmony.
The Greens, Marrackville Council, the Australiand For Palestine and BDS boycotts are at odds with the attainment of this noble aim. They also cut across the Greens Party's own national policyon the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours.
That policy was on the books when the Greens councillors on the Marrackville Council were elected to manage their local municipality (you know, collect the garbage, grant or deny planning permits etc). If a citizen of this municipality wanted to find out the candidate's views on Israel and the Arabs, he or she would have been sadly mistaken if they looked up the policy on the net.
So if you ask a Green what his or her party's policy is on Israel/Palestine, will you get a straight answer?
I doubt it - and that's enough reason why the conflicted Byrne and her party should be ignored by the voters of Marrackville and why she has been deservingly labelled an "extremist by NSW Labor.
One can only hope that the State's Liberals do the right thing in this electorate and place Byrne last on their how to vote cards.
No comments:
Post a Comment