RHIANNON RESPONDS

The Senator responds in today's OZ as follows:-

TWO articles on the weekend ("Secret past of Greens senator" and "Rhiannon's secret rendezvous with agent-running KGB officers", 28-29/1) that attempt to link me with the KGB are based on inaccurate ASIO records.

Christian Kerr's reliance on the discredited stories of former ASIO spies has resulted in a story of few facts, much supposition and considerable distortion. I have never been a spy and no one ever attempted to recruit me.

The article is about my trip to England when I was 18 and travelling with friends before university.

According to Kerr the then ASIO director-general had informed his counterpart in MI5 about my visit to England and asked them to supply details of my activities. They would have been disappointed as my hospital cleaning, factory work, partying and sightseeing were hardly subversive.

Kerr has been given access to material in my ASIO file that was redacted in the version that has been made public.

Since 1999 I have been a public representative of the Greens party. I have a strong track record of opposition to racism and bigotry and reject any implication that I am anti-Semitic.

Lee Rhiannon, , Surry Hills, NSW

This is precisely the type of response expected from Rhiannon the politician. It totally fails to address her membership of a political party that supported the totalitarian, anti-Semitic Soviet regime of the time and the best she can come up with is that she worked hard and partied in England.

Which suggests to me that she's quite comfortable with having supported a regime that persecuted Jews for decades and openly supported the nations and the terrorist groups that sought to eradicate the Jewish State and its inhabitants.

Some denial!

LETTER OF THE DAY

Today's Australian.

More questions raised about that Greens Senator

CHRISTIAN Kerr highlights Senator Lee Rhiannon's communist past including her support for the Soviet Union at at time of "heightened persecution of Soviet Jews" ("Secret past of Greens senator", 28-29/1).

The Soviet anti-Semitic campaign included allegations that Zionism was a tool of Western imperialism and Jewish capitalism, that Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis to perpetrate the Holocaust and that Zionism was a racist philosophy.

Rhiannon's support for the Soviet regime during this period poses questions about the motivation behind her support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

Philip Mendes, Kew, Vic

Worth keeping a secret

Christian Kerr exposes Green's Senator Lee Rhiannon's secret past, her connections a man identified as a KGB agent and the influence of the former communist hard left within the Greens Party in the Weekend Australian - Secret past of Greens senator Lee Rhiannon

Rhiannon is known for her radical stance against Israel and her involvement in the racist BDS movement, a stance embraced by many of her fellow Watermelon Green travellers.

I wonder how many of those who voted for the Greens at the last election were aware of who they were electing?

More from the propaganda factory

I was rather bemused to discover on reading this in our local pro-Palestinian propaganda sheet, Al Age - No stone left unpunished.

Having lost their dignity and their moral compass the Al Age editors have really sunk to a new low with this rehash of a previously published and discredited story.

Do they really think that their readership are such mindless cretins as to swallow the proposition that when Palestinian children fling petrol bombs at Israeli soldiers or settlers, this is not a serious offence? That you have to get into the real heavy form of assault and murder before an offence becomes serious?

Try throwing a petrol bomb in the middle of Federation Square this afternoon* and sit back and wait to see whether the public thinks it's a serious offence?

Of course that's not all that's fishy in this Al Age article. When one reads this piece from AIJAC - When propaganda masquerades as fact one can easily understand exactly why this is so and why its credibility on matters Middle Eastern plumbs new depths with every day.

* I don't recommend this by the way.

KOSMINSKY'S KON

Supporters of Peter Kosminsky's disgraceful series The Promise like to point to the fact that the writer is Jewish and many of the actors are Jews and Israeli; therefore the script must be kosher.

Well, not really.

Not according to cast memmbers - The Promise: Even the extras felt ashamed

Israelis Yehudit and Chaim Collins who worked as extras on the film say they were told by an agency that the scenes were for a film set in the 1940s, called Homeland.

Mrs Collins says that Kosminsky "exploited every known antisemitic cliché in this admittedly extremely well-made, and therefore convincing, work of fiction."

Kosminsky:

"We've shown the final film in Israel to show to the cast and crew and they loved it. They knew what they were working on."

There are enough lies on the final version so what's wrong with one more?

HIZBULLAH TO THE WORLD: "GET STUFFED"

"For the UN secretary general the military capacity of Hezbollah is not acceptable - for Israel, as for any other nation faced by a similar terrorist threat, it is intolerable." - Moshe Arens in Haaretz - Better late than never.

Hezbollah's leader Hasan Nassrallah's response to Mr. Ban Ki-moon:

"We are pleased by your concern. We want you, the U.S. and Israel to be concerned ... Hezbollah will not relinquish its weapons."

Now piss off Ki-moon and stop bothering Hizbullah. They're too busy building up weapons and murdering Syrian opponents of Assad's regime (Syrian regime 'importing snipers' for protests) to be bothered with you.

The celebration of imperialist lackeydom

Colonialism and imperialism used to be the scourge of any self-respecting leftist but thanks to Peter Kosminsky's "The Promise" it has made a stunning comeback in these circles.

Suddenly, the word of British soldiers who took part in the British occupation is taken as the gospel truth while those who fought to remove them from their land are thieves, murderers and liars. The old system has been thrown over its head.

Well, not exactly because the new system only applies when there are Jews involved. 

Absent the Jews and guerilla warfare against the imperialist enemy and its lackeys is, um, well ... still kosher. 

But terrorism, as evidenced by the small group of nasty Jews in their war against the British and by the modern day Israelis who have the utter gall to resist suicide bombers and missile attacks on their civilians is bad. In every other conflict, we will find an excuse for it because one man's terrorism is another man's fish.

That's why The Promise can't be taken seriously - because if the basic premise is that those murdering Jews lost the hearts and minds of the British troops back in the mandate days because of the behaviour of the Irgun and Stern Gang then what does it say about Islamist terror today that's evident in dozens of different parts of the globe and responsible for so much death and destruction today? Look at Iraq, the Phillipines, Afghanistan, Thailand, Syria and Nigeria - it's everywhere!

However, in the eyes of those who subscribe to the Kosminsky world view, that sort of violence only deserves our condemnation if the perpetrators are circumcised*.

* ladies, please forgive my non-pc ways but it's a different world today and my mind's been blown after hearing the latest rendition of the Internationale from the local muezzin.

TIME THE IMPEDIMENT?

You would have thought that a student of Jewish History could spell "Anti-Semitism" but not Sara Dowse, an apologist for The Promise, the British series run by SBS late last year.

A letter from Dowse to Michael Ebeid of SBS gets a run on the website of Australians for Palestine. In it, she tries to justify the screening of the series and attacks the comprehensive complaint from Mr Peter Wertheim of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry about the recent SBS screening of the series. She claims to be "a student of Jewish history and the British Mandate period in particular" and reckons that she found it to be "an amazingly fair-minded fictional portrayal of an immensely complex set of events".

Naturally, as with virtually every critic of Jewish community stand, she fails to go into any specifics. Apparently, she's been thinking about it but "time has been the only impediment".

I would suggest to Dowse that time isn't the only impediment as she goes on to add:

"I’ve been surprised not to hear of negative comment about ‘The Promise’ until now, given that the knee-jerk response to anything remotely critical of Israel or the Jewish partisans in the lead-up to its establishment is to slap on the label of Anti-Semiticism."

One wonders what world she's been living in and really ... if she's such an expert on the subject she professes to be so knowledgeable about, why she can't address one of the many examples of the Wertheim complaint and debate about it and then perhaps, tell us what "Anti-Semiticism" means.

Persiflage or Propaganda - one side now

A couple of days ago I referred to a deceitful piece of propaganda dressed up as news in the Melbourne Age about the Palestinian Speed Sisters who drive at speeds of 200 km/h in the shadows of the oppression of the occupation.

The Australian's Cut and Paste has identified the same story calling it "Persiflage or propaganda?"

I'll settle for both.

I'm still wondering if the Palestine Bureau chief of the Age ever bothers to look at the other side. For instance, here's an interesting piece from The Jerusalem Post - Israel and the Palestinian Arabs – The last six months (Part 1).

"... just last week we read that Israeli doctors are treating the wife of the mastermind of the Munich massacre. Abu Daoud’s terrorist gang murdered 11 Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972. Today, his wife is being cared for at Tel Aviv’s Assuta Hospital. Her three daughters from Ramallah, Jordan and Syria have even been granted visas to visit her."

Perfect for the Blank Pages of the Age.

CONDEMNATION OF ONGOING HUMAN RIGHTS REPRESSION IN GAZA, EXPRESSES SOLIDARITY WITH RIGHTS ACTIVIST ASSAULTED

The International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians (Chairperson Fiamma Nirenstein MP) has issued a condemnation of ongoing human rights repression in Gaza.

Rome — "As chairperson of the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians I would like to express the solidarity of our organization with Mahmoud Abu Rahma, a human and civil rights activist, who has been recently stabbed in Gaza, as reported by Al-Mezan, a Gaza-based NGO that employs Mr. Abu Rahma.

The attack is allegedly connected to the release of an article written by Abu Rahma in December, in which he sharply criticized the Palestinian armed groups in Gaza, as well as Gazan and West Bank leadership, for repeated human and civil rights violations, banning the freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly, and the use of torture and illegal detentions, which resulted in the death of several individuals. In his article, Abu Rahma also condemned the unfortunate common practice by terrorist groups to act in "densely-populated areas", displaying a "continuous negligence of the resistance groups who show little or no care for people's life and well being".

The abuse of human rights in Gaza has steadily increased since Hamas’ coup in 2007. Political opponents, women, homosexuals, religious minorities are reported to be under a growing threat. There has also been mounting intolerance toward Gaza's small Shiite minority, which has lately experienced harassment and mass arrests while celebrating a Shiite holiday.

The International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians, an organization committed to uphold the principles of democracy, further the cause of human rights and promote the rule of law, firmly condemns the ongoing repression in Gaza. We praise the courage of Mahmoud Abu Rahma and we call on the international community to open its eyes and act to shine a light on Gaza’s human rights situation, first and foremost by supporting political objectors, so that their exposure will not be vain".

The tragedy is that most of the world doesn't know or care about the likes of Mahmoud Abu Rahma. He should have been a racing driver.

It's just not right for them to put our suicide bombers in jail!

The Palestinian Speed Sisters: Racing for unthruth, injustice and the Palestine Authority way!

It looks as though  the Age Palestine Bureau newbie, Ruth Pollard, is following office policy to never miss an opportunity to remind readers about the Israeli occupation complete with road blocks and check points designed to make life difficult for the Palestinians. Every activity the Palestinians undertake today - even their sports - must be dictated by that  same old tired story of oppression by those nasty, sadistic Jews who, for no reason at all, make life difficult for these charming people who want nothing more in their lives than to love their fellow humans. Pollard's effort today is a good example - Palestinian  women take the fast track to freedom.

In a story about a few Palestinian chicks who like racing cars, Pollard doesn't hold back in letting her dumb readership know about Israel's military occupation which allegedly "permeates every part of Palestinian life, enforced by a network of checkpoints staffed by heavily armed soldiers, many of them fresh out of school".

I say "dumb", because almost every article published nowadays in this newspaper about the conflict between Israel and the Arabs always seems to boil down to that single point while the other side of the conflict is routinely ignored. If anyone can be convinced that the current situation has been brought about by one side only and that the Palestinians are blameless in this tragic scenario, then that person is a dumb fool.

And I reckon the Age thinks that there are enough dumb fools among its readership to think that it can get away with consigning any negative story about the Palestinians and their supporters directly into the blank pages that nobody is allowed to read.

We are rarely informed about the reasons why the occupation continues to this very day - how the dysfunctional Palestinian leadership has refused to negotiate on countless Israeli peace offers, how divided they are and how Hamas in Gaza preaches genocide against its Jewish neighbours and how the corrupt and duplicitous Palestine Authority does the same but only unofficially. The fact remains that right now in officially sanctioned PA media the hate and bigotry against the Jews is there for everyone to see - unless you're like the Age and you don't want to see and you don't want your readers to know about it. That's why news about such real news like the call by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein for the killing of Jews on PA television is off Pollard's radar, not to mention the constant threats of violence against Jews and the regular missile attacks on Israeli civilian targets where school busses are attacked and infants get their throats slit while in bed.

So what we're left with is a puff piece story about a few Palestinian chicks who like driving fast - so fast that when one of them drove at  200km/h on a highway in Israel she was busted by the cops (read: occupation regime) who took away her licence. Now, the bastards will only let her "drive her modified black 328i BMW on the track, or at the practice area  in the shadow of Ofer prison in Betunia, where so many Palestinians have been  tried before military courts and jailed."

You have to love the way Pollard managed to weave the propaganda about Palestinians being tried before military courts and jailed into a tale about a driver who risks the lives of other road users by going at double the speed limit. Never mind that Pollard neglects to provide examples of why some of these people were tried and jailed in the first place?

Oh, and she must have forgotten the quote,

"It's just not right for them to put our suicide bombers in jail!"

If the occupation is bad and so oppressive, why are the Israelis allowing these women to race in Israel's formula-three competition in Eilat which is part of the Jewish State and not "occupied territory"?

The Speed Sisters recently went to Britain and one told Pollard how  beautiful London was with her "long dark curls  spilling over the impossibly  cool Ferrari jacket she picked up on the  trip." That's a fantastic line for a laugh especially when you think about how they would go about speeding cars and wearing that racy gear in Gaza, the home of fundamentalists in Hamas?

While in London she probably turned on the television to view The Promise and thought she was back home watching the racist anti-Semitic revisionist history the PA puts on. The only difference is that the folks back home aren't as dumb as the Age thinks its readership is - although they're still embarrassed because they know it's all lies and garbage.

Meanwhile, in Gaza the disgusting treatment of women, gays and religious minorities under Hamas goes on unabated without being reported here, but who cares? Not Al Age.

So, all we're left with is the comment of one of those Palestinian blokes who boasts that in "Saudi Arabia, women are prevented from  driving - here in Palestine we have women who drive race cars."

They've been letting women drive cars in Israel since it's inception  - is that good?

The Front Page of Today's Age ...

... doesn't contain articles such as these to provide readers with some context -

Firstly, free speech as expressed in areas controlled by the Palestine Authority whose representative was quoted on the front page of yesterday's Age as supporting racist stereotyping against Jews. This is from Palwatch.

Then, there's this article from Haaretz about how the other mob from Gaza treat fellow Muslims - Hamas brutally assaults Shiite worshippers in Gaza.

It's strange how a newspaper can omit to publish such stories from the region but never misses a beat when it comes to highlighting the poor behaviour of a small sect of Jews in Israel (except that it fails to mention their anti Zionist leanings).

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrating the life of the great American civil rights leader who was assassinated in April, 1968.

Ten days before his assassination, Dr. King said:

"Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect her right to exist, its territorial integrity and the right to use whatever sea lanes it needs. Israel is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security, and that security must be a reality."

IT FIGURES

ISRAEL IN FIGURES

Look away Al Age

From Jeff Weintraub's blog

Tunisians greeting Hamas leader chant "Kill the Jews"

Look away Al Age ...

THE ECAJ COMPLAINT ABOUT THE PROMISE

There is a debate raging about the ECAJ complaint about the SBS series The Promise.

The complaint is set out here.

Regretably, we are already seeing attacks on the Jews for simply making of the complaint and to the everlasting shame, some of those doing so claim to be Jewish themselves.

However, I don't expect any critique on the substance of the ECAJ complaint from these people. I doubt they are aware of or understand the history of the conflict and they certainly don't care about the deception and the outright lies perpetrated by this propaganda piece thinly disguised in the veil of a work of fiction.

Here's a sample from the complaint:-

The Jewish narrative is either falsified or simply not told. For example, there is no mention at all of:-

• the history of Palestinian Arabs attacking Jews before 1948, including the 1886 attack on Petah Tikva, attacks against Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall in 1911, murders of Jews in 1912, riots and deadly pogroms against Jews in 1920, 1921 and 1929, the Hebron Massacre in 1929, the years of Arab terror between 1936 and 1939 and atrocities committed by Palestinians against Jews in the period 1946-8;


• the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel for more than 3,000 years, including the existence over many centuries of the independent and at times sovereign States of Israel and Judah, all of which is attested to by an abundance of archaeological and documentary evidence;


• the fact that the Hebrew language and culture of the Jewish people is a Semitic language and culture which is indigenous to the land of Israel;


• the fact that there were five waves of mass Jewish immigration into the country between 1881 and 1939 and that the Jewish immigrants established the institutions of statehood and civil society and a viable economy well prior to the Holocaust and World War II;


• the fact that the international community, as early as 1920, recognised the legitimacy of the Jewish people’s aspirations to reconstitute their national home in Israel and obligated Britain, as the Mandatory power, to “facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes”.

I have no confidence whatsoever in the ability of the SBS which, after all made the decision to air the series without allowing a discussion on the historic inaccuracy that undermines its validity. It is far too conflicted to make a fair and considered appraisal of the complaint even when one ignores the internal political pressure within its ranks.


Now let's be clear about this. Israel's detractors will not allow a discussion of the inconvenient points made above. They will seek to airbrush them out of existence and attempt to shut down any debate on the substance while, at the same time cry foul that this is an issue of free speech and that the Jews are the ones attempting to censor the work of their critics.

Try that when there's an issue of racist stereotyping against anyone else and see where it gets you.

ARAB SPRING SPRUNG

At the same time that the likes of the Melbourne Age bury their heads in the sand and remain in denial about the effects of the so-called Arab Spring on the Middle East, the Australian's Greg Sheridan in Territorial compromise loses ground in Arab Spring explains that the peace process remains diabolically perilous.

Ultimately, Israel won't make a peace deal unless it believes a Palestinian government can govern its territory effectively, provide law and order there and prevent attacks on Israel from Palestinian territory. That is inconceivable today and all the trends of the Arab Spring make it ever more unlikely.

That is not to say it is worthless to have a peace process. The two sides need to be talking. Not only that, I have become convinced it is vital for the Palestinians to have a political horizon, a political road, an acknowledgment that everyone accepts that they should have a state eventually.

PALESTINIANS SCREWING JEWS

I'm thinking of sending this to SBS to help them understand how offensive it can be when you start stereotyping people.

HAMAS LEADER WARNS PA ABOUT PURSUING PEACE

You would think this to be an important piece of news about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians but you are not likely to read about this in the mainstream press in this country.

Strangely enough, when the current round of talks blow up, we'll know all about it and we know who will get the blame in the local Arabist rag.

Hamas leader warns PA against pursuing peace with Israel instead of Palestinian unity

AGE LETTERS WHITEOUT

The Arabist Al Age published the following letter in yesterday's edition:

Voluntary segregation

IN RESPONSE to the article ''Faith in equality a must'' (Comment, 2/1), the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in January 2011 that it is illegal to enforce gender separation on public buses, but the ruling allowed that the buses in question could run temporarily on the basis that any segregation must be voluntary.

Sharyn Mittelman, Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, South Melbourne

If you think it doesnt make sense, you might be right. I wonder how much content the letters editor airbrushed out of existence to achieve that outcome and why on earth it was deemed necessary to mangle such a letter in the first place?

The Promise and its ludicrous brainwashed prejudice

This brilliant piece was written some time ago by Howard Jacobson about the SBS series The Promise - Ludicrous, brainwashed prejudice

Forget Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is old hat. The new strategy – it showed its hand in Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children, and surfaced again in Channel 4's recent series The Promise – is to depict the Holocaust in all its horror in order that Jews can be charged ("You, of all people") with failing to live up to it. By this logic the Holocaust becomes an educational experience from which Jews were ethically obliged to graduate summa cum laude, Israel being the proof that they didn't. "Jews know more than anyone that killing civilians is wrong," resounds an unmistakably authorial voice in The Promise. Thus are Jews doubly damned: to the Holocaust itself and to the moral wasteland of having found no humanising redemption in its horrors.

It matters not a jot to me that the writer/director of The Promise is a Jew. Jews succumbing to the age-old view of them and reviling what's Jewish in themselves has a long history. Peter Kosminsky would have it that his series is about Israel, not
Jews, but in The Promise Israel becomes paradigmatic of the Jews' refusal to be
improved by affliction.

In a morally intelligent world – that's to say one in which, for starters, Jews are not judged more harshly than their fellows for having been despatched to concentration camps – The Promise would be seen for the ludicrous piece of brainwashed prejudice it is. Ofcom's rejection of complaints about the drama's partiality and inaccuracy was to be expected. You can't expect a body as intellectually unsophisticated as Ofcom to adjudicate between claims of dramatic truth and truth of any other sort. And for that
reason it should never have been appealed to. That said, its finding that The Promise was "serious television drama, not presented as a historical and faithful re-creation", is a poor shot at making sense of anything. You can't brush aside historical re-creation in a work of historical re-creation, nor can you assert a thing is "serious television" when its seriousness is what's in question. A work isn't serious by virtue of its thinking it is. Wherein lies the seriousness, one is entitled to ask, when the drama creaks with the bad faith of a made-up mind.

BOMBED!

According to today's Australian newspaper, a suicide bomb attack ripped through central Damascus last night, killing at least 25 people and wounding 46.

Suicide blast kills 25 in Syria

Two weeks ago, 44 people were killed in a similar attack.

It's not big news when a couple dozen Arabs get murdered by other Arabs rather than Jews so don't expect the story to get much prominence elsewhere.

The Lament of the Age

J-wire contributor Raffe Gold lambasts anti-zionist Anthony Loewenstein over his latest piece of nonsensical blogging in The Lament Over Loewenstein but, as worthy as his criticism might be, the real problem is with the opinion piece which Loewenstein quotes and which appeared in both the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald on 2 January, 2012.

Loewenstein is, after all, a proven ignoramous but one expects a lot more from the Fairfax press than a piece which totally misrepresents the recent events in Israel involving a minority group of religious fanatics and their disgraceful attitude towards women in public.

As Gold points out, most of the groups involved, such as the Netura Karta are vehemently ant-zionist but it's doubtful whether anything in Al Age or SMH would alert its readers to the fact that such despicable people are on the same side as Loewenstein and many of the apologists for Islamism who regularly write opinion pieces for the Fairfax organisation.

BROKEN PROMISE

I haven't said anything yet about the series "The Promise" recently shown on SBS because I recorded it (for home use only) and only finished watching it yesterday.

I will have more to say on this highly fictionalised account which will no doubt be used by the anti-Israel crowd and Jew bashing fraudsters for years to come and almost certainly disingenuously passed off as evenly remotely authentic by those who love to twist and distort the history of the conflict between Israel and the Arabs.

In the meantime, I have a question for my readers. My VCR ran out of tape five minutes early so I missed the ending.

Did the Grand Mufti win the Nobel Peace Prize in the final scene or did they award it posthumously to Hitler that year?

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM THE IDF

Hat tip: elderof ziyon