Improbable?

LETTER OF THE WEEK

In yesterday's Age, a response to a recent grubby piece of work from the paper's maestro of cheap shots.

Hamas role

RUTH Pollard's report, ''Gaza's children live and die on contaminated water'' (The Saturday Age, 23/6), ignores Hamas responsibility for the water contamination and energy crisis in Gaza. The IDF Co-ordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (CoGAT) reports that at least 27 projects to deal with water and sewage purification are in place in Gaza - all facilitated by Israel, and not one funded by Hamas. She could also have mentioned the reason for Israel's blockade - the rockets fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip, with Hamas' support or participation. More than 100 were fired last week alone. Hamas' preference for weapons directed against Israel over welfare and water for Gazans is the real root of Gaza's highly unfortunate predicament.

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

SILENCE OF THE SHAMS - PART FIVE

SILENCE OF THE SHAMS - PART FIVE: CHEAP AND VISCIOUS

A new editor matters not a when it comes to the cheap, viscious and nasty Melbourne Age and its skewed propagandist coverage of the Israel/Palestine issue.

Read this attack on Israel and I'll tell you what's wrong with it over the next few days.

A clue is the information which the Age choses to cover up in telling this one sided story.

The BBC In Its Own Words: “We Made a Mistake”

Honest Reporting carrie this story about the BBC admitting it made a mistake in its coverage of the 2011 massacre of members of the Fogel family - The BBC In Its Own Words: “We Made a Mistake”.

Hopefully, this will start a trend with others in the media ... perhaps those who have just changed editors could look back on some of its dreadful coverage of the conflict between Israel and the Arabs over the past few years.

BOYCOTT THIS!!!

I can't understand why those who boycott chocolate shops because the franchise is Israeli can do that and ignore this - Families horror as its revealed Co-op funeral firm piled naked bodies up in grim warehouse morgue.

Goodbye Editors

They're resigning like dying flies at Fairfax Media but I think they deserve credit for their jobs as editors.

Take the bloke who resigned from the Age today and once kept a straight face telling incredulous audience that his newspaper's coverage of the conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbours was honest and balanced.

Here's a sample of his editing work.

Stories like this one were routinely edited out of existence on his watch - Palestinian terrorists who killed dozens of civilians glorified in video by Palestinian national band on PA TV.

We're all really going to miss that sort of editing.

COMING SOON TO MONASH UNIVERSITY

All I can say is that Monash University students are a tolerant lot these days and must have mellowed since the times when racists of this ilk would have been run off campus -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pHxBW-oJdl8#t=0s

THE SILENCE OF THE SHAMS - PART FOUR

THE SILENCE OF THE SHAMS - PART FOUR: CHEAP AND NASTY JOURNALISM

At the end of a week in which the indiscriminate firing of more than 100 missiles at Israeli civilian was allowed to go mainly unreported, Fairfax Media through its Jerusalem bureau chief, takes another cheap shot at Israel this morning with a story about how the poor quality of water affects the lives of Gaza's children under the Israeli blockade of the territory ruled by the Hamas thugs who are perpetrating war crimes by firing those missiles which are the cause of the blockade in the first place.

Gaza's children live and die on contaminated water

Yes. It's true that it's a tragedy that Gaza's children have to suffer filthy water just as it is a tragedy that children in many other third world countries suffer exactly the same thing. Usually, the responsibility for the lack of such amenities rests with the rulers of those countries but, in this piece from Ruth Pollard, Hamas which has governed Gaza since its bloody 2007 junta, doesn't get a single mention. Nor does the fact that at least 27 water and sewerage projects established in Gaza were facilitated by Israel and none by Hamas.

The problem is that Pollard can't resist a few cheap shots in order to sheet the blame principally upon Israel rather than on Hamas which rules Gaze illegally and which spends much of its time, money and effort to build up it's arsenal of weapons to use indiscriminately against Israel's civilians.

Worse still, this maestro of cheap shots, plays hard and fast with the facts in her latest propaganda piece when she comes up with the extraordinary statement that "Israel says it has eased the blockade over the past year and is now allowing in more building supplies and other essentials."

What extraordinary gall to preface that statement with the words, "Israel says" as if the proposition is something that has to be looked upon with extreme scepticism!

That would be funny if it didn't come from a reporter who not long ago lapped up every piece of disinformation given by sources close to Islamic Jihad over the alleged suffering of hunger striking Palestinian prisoners including those who were jailed for terrorism.

Pollard also conveniently ignores the fact that the Palmer Report commisisoned by the UN declared that Israel's blockade of Gaza was in fact legal under international law. Rather, she claims the opposite.

Slack.

We know that things are tight financially for Fairfax Media but surely it can spare her the taxi fare from Jerusalem to the Gaza crossings so that Pollard can see for herself the trucks as they roll the humanitarian aid into Gaza, a territory ruled by racist thugs committed to their genocide? At least then she wouldn't have to tell her readers what "Israel says" or what some UN official claims. She would know for herself instead of producing this extraordinary sham whose final paragraph attempts to draw an equivalence between the war crimes of Hamas and Israel's self defence against terrorism.

And Pollard doesn't need a great deal of funding to be able to work out that only two civilians have been killed to date in the latest round of fighting. One was a Palestine girl killed in Gaza by a Hamas rocket which misfired and the other was an Israeli civilian killed by Hamas rocket fire. The other deaths were four Hamas terrorists and a few others from Islamic Jihad and lesser known Palestinian terrorist organisations. Their pictures and stories are plastered over the internet including a site about their exploits - Hamas details its own rocket attacks.

If only Fairfax had the resources to cover this complex situation fairly and honestly instead of only producing cheap shots and shoddy journalism directed against one of the players in the region while giving a free pass to murderers and war criminals.

The Colour Ugly

The laws of copyright were certainly not designed to encourage or even permit selective censorship based on national origin or religion

- Alan M Dershowitz

Hebrew has been one of the languages of the Jewish people since time immemorial and certainly from well before the time English was spoken.

Today, we discover that prize winning author and anti-Israel bigot Alice Walker who wrote, "The Color Purple", has refused to give permission for her book to be translated into Hebrew - Alice Walker's Bigotry.

Alan Dershowitz goes on to say that Walker, "who has a long history of supporting terrorism against Israel, has now resorted to bigotry and censorship against Hebrew-speaking readers of her writings."

"This is the moral and legal equivalent of neo-Nazi author David Duke disallowing his books to be sold to Black and Jewish readers."

In a week when more than 100 Palestinian rockets were fired indiscriminately from Gaza into Israel by Hamas whose charter is racist and contemptible, Walker's action in my view runs much further than bigotry.

She is now an actor in the campaign of hatred and delegitimisation of the Jewish people - a cheerleader for haters who commit crimes against humanity on a daily basis.

This is the colour ugly.

MAKES SENSE

You would think that at a time when Hamas and other terrorist groups are raining missiles down on Israeli civilians, the ailing Age might actually cover the story. After all, one hundred rockets targeting civilians means 100 war crimes, most of them committed by Hamas which runs Gaza.

Instead today's Age has a story about Israeli depoting illegal South Sudanese immigrants back to their home country now that it has achieved independence.

Nearly all of these illegal immigrants came to Israel through Egypt and there have been horrendous stories about the way they were treated by the Egyptians on their journey and of how some of their countryment were murdered and raped along the way. Blank page stuff of course.

THE SILENCE OF THE SHAMS: PART THREE

THE SILENCE OF THE SHAMS: PART THREE: A DEAFENING SILENCE

A deafening silence

Haaretz expoes hypocrisy ... as does Daniel Meyerowitz-Katz in The Punch - Why worry about Syria when you can pick on Israel?

THE SPECTRE OF IRAN

Thoughts on Iran, Nuclear Weapons, and Tehran’s Regional Role

By Barry Rubin June 20, 2012

Months ago, when it was at its height, I wrote that the hysteria about Israel allegedly being about to attack Iran and the argument by some that Israel should do so were nonsense. Now it is clear that there was never any chance that such a thing would happen. And that idea was a bad one expressed by non-Israelis who didn’t know what they were talking about.

Now, former Mossad head Meir Dagan, identified, along with former Israel Security Agency director Yuval Diskin, as the main critic of any such preemptive attack, has made some interesting remarks.

Dagan explained that he agreed that the international community wasn’t doing enough to stop the Iranian nuclear project. Israeli threats were made to prompt more action, not as a signal of an imminent attack.

While sanctions are high against Iran, the Obama administration is also granting exemptions to key countries like China, Russia, and Turkey. While the burden on Iran’s economy remains onerous, a regime like that in Tehran is not going to buckle to such pressure, especially since it believes that once it has nuclear weapons that will secure the government’s safety from foreign threats. The ongoing negotiations, which seem eternally able to trigger naive hopes in Western circles, will go nowhere.

For his part, Dagan correctly noted, “The military option must always be on the table with regards to Iran,but it must also always be a last option.” Israel always retains such a choice even if Tehran does get some deliverable nuclear capability. And such an outcome is still years away. The idea of a crazy Iranian government eager to launch nuclear missiles against Israel at the first opportunity is not realistic, though the Tehran regime is bad enough and may do so at some later time. At any rate, if and when Iran actually has a small number of weapons and if Israeli leaders feel there is sufficient danger, they can preempt then. And a wide variety of Israeli defensive measures — ranging from sabotage to computer viruses, to electronic countermeasures and to planes and missiles — should not be underestimated either.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

About Barry Rubin

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist for PajamasMedia at http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan)

THE SILENCE OF THE SHAMS - PART TWO

THE SILENCE OF THE SHAMS - PART TWO: PALESTINIAN KILLED IN CLASH WITH LEBANESE - THE MEDIA YAWNS

Lebanese army clashes with Palestinians; 1 dead

Not a word in the local press but imagine the outcry if this would have happened in clashes between Palestinians and the IDF?

BAD AND BADDER

A great cartoon from Yaakov Kirschen of drybones blog

THE SILENCE OF THE SHAMS - PART ONE

THE SILENCE OF THE SHAMS - PART ONE: THE SHIP OF FOOLS

As Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post and some other reputable publications are reporting, the Turkish IHH leader Bulent Yilidirim is suspected of funding al-Qaida.

If you cast your minds back two years to the Gaza Flotilla Incident, claims that IHH members who travelled on the ill fated Mavi Marmara were the provocateurs who chanted anti Jewish slogans on the ship and whose aim was to provoke violence to embarrass the Israelis were scoffed at by many commentators including some fellow travellers on the flotilla. A few of them even gained fame and even won awards for journalism.

When the truth slowly came out and the sham was exposed, it was treated with silence and consigned to the blank pages.

One can only wonder now into what hole those who tried to paint the IHH terrorists as humanitarians have slunk themselves into?

Is this the end of the Blank Pages?

There are some funny things afoot at Fairfax and some are speculating that perhaps the Fairfax newspapers are on the way out. Here's an interesting item from yesterday's Australian - Fairfax investor backs Rinehart.

Well, if they go, then we might have to go as well ... which is a pity because they do a great job with the footy and the races!

The missing reporter

This story from Missing Peace is one that should be taken up by every jounalist who believes in the integrity of his or her profession - JPOST Palestinian reporter Toameh latest victim of PA’s campaign against free speech.

This rare truth-telling journalist is finding it increasingly harder to report the corruption and lack of freedoms in the PA, and as a result our news world is becoming a quieter, but certainly not a better, place.

On his own Facebook Page abu Toameh posted this silent cri de coeur: “A campaign of intimidation, harassment, pressure, threats and boycotts has made it impossible for an Arab journalist to work in the Palestinian Authority-controlled territories.”

WHO'S LYING?

Here's an interesting take on the Houla Massacre - Someone is Lying About the Houla Massacre.

As the article shows, there is no shortage of hoaxing when it comes to situations such as these. And, as the writer points out this is not to absolve the Shabiha death squads who have deservedly gotten a lot of bad press over the past few weeks because they are killers.

The problem is that killers and hoaxers abound in this region.

BEFORE THE OCCUPATION

Thanks to elderofziyon this interesting youtube video on Arab cartoons of the Six Day War

FAIRFAX REALISES THAT SPRING HAS SPRUNG

It's taken a while but they're finally figuring it out - Arab Spring turns toxic

The overthrow of dictators in the Middle East has mostly led to more of the same.

IRANIAN GOLIATH

From drybonesblog the Iranian Goliath

SPRINGTIME FOR EGYPT

Will this ever make it into the mainstream media - Mob attacks women at Egypt anti-sexual harassment rally?

A mob of hundreds of men have assaulted women holding a march demanding an end to sexual harassment, with the attackers overwhelming the male guardians and groping and molesting several of the female marchers in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

Never to be seen in the Age

Moments after the handshake she discovered she only had four fingers in her right hand.

Fairfax Media allegedly has someone sitting in its Jerusalem Bureau close enough to the action to look into this - Where Did All the Billions of Dollars Given to the Palestinian Authority Go?

Surely?

FLAMES OF PROTEST FAIL TO MAR SPIRITS

I received a tweet earlier this week:

Haters are like crickets, Crickets make a lot of noise, You hear it but you can't see them, Then right when you walk by them, They're quiet.

I'm not too sure about them always being quiet when you walk past them because the haters who were out in the streets of Melbourne earlier this week made a fair bit of noise as the people walked past them in their attempt to mar celebrations of Israel's independence. However, the ferals do fail to do anything but inspire contempt for their hate filled agenda - FLAMES OF PROTEST FAIL TO MAR SPIRITS.

The crowd which is apparently unperterbed by the fact that the Syrian regime which is just down the road from Israel/Palestine and which has comfortably housed leaders of Hamas and Hizbullah is currently butchering Arabs in the streets but has no qualms about coming out in support of corrupt, murderous regimes like those who are running the show in the various Palestinian governments.

On those subjects, the haters are remarkably quiet.

And about those Palestinian "governments", it's worthwhile to note (as a reader pointed out in a letter to today's Australian) that there "have been no Palestinian parliamentary elections since 2006, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's term expired in 2009, and Hamas rules the Gaza Strip after staging a bloody coup there in 2007. And Abbas promises that no Jew will be allowed to live in any future Palestinian state".

That's what these sick and heateful morons who burn effigies of Victorian politicians in the streets are all about.

FREE SPEECH IN EGYPT - NOT ON YOUR LIFE

Egypt's censor shuts down film that promotes peace with Israelis

Thanks again to Elderoziyon

LETTERS OF THE WEEK

In today's Australian responding to an outrageously error filled article in yesterday's edition:-

Palestine worldview

SAMAH Sabawi's article was not only factually inaccurate, but illustrated the extremist worldview that has done so much to prevent a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace ("Palestinians the only compromisers", 4/6).

She argues that in 1988, the PLO "announced that they were willing to accept a state on 22 per cent of their historic homeland, along the 1967 Green Line". In fact, the acceptance was tactical and conditional, including a demand for the unprecedented right of return that would destroy Israel demographically.

Moreover, in 2000 and 2008 Palestinian leaders refused to accept offers of a state even along the lines she posits they had agreed to. Indeed, the offer in 2008 was for land equivalent to the 22 per cent of mandate Palestine that Sabawi insists the Palestinians accepted in 1988.

In 2005, Israel pulled out of Gaza - hardly the act of a nation bent on the one-state solution - only to face cross-border shelling.

And yet despite the pro-two-state declarations of all three of Israel's main political parties, as well as majorities in Israeli opinion polls, she insists that there is a secret Israeli plan to create a one-state solution on all of historic Palestine.

Such conspiratorial thinking, flying in the face of evidence, is a reason there is no peace today.

Tzvi Fleischer, Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, Melbourne, Vic

WHAT a shame that talented women such as Samah Sabawi are focused on the rear-view mirror. Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel, unlike all of us non-Aborigines in Australia.

Rather than try to turn the clock back in an endless vendetta that would see all of us returning to where we came from, Sabawi might be better advised to look to the future.

It's so much easier to indulge in outdated rhetoric about the Zionist agenda than to deal with the hard task of lifting up the Arab masses who are not doing too well in any of their indigenous areas.

Judy Singer, Balmain, NSW

PETTY, SICK AND INSANE

For every day of its existence Israel and Syria have been in a state of war. The Syrians have been up to their necks in the warmongering against the Jewish State in all of its major battles for existence and, of late the Butcher of Damascus has been crucial in hosting leaders of the genocidal Hamas movement and in providing a supply route for weapons betweenn the ayatollahs of Iran and the Islamic Hizbullah terrorists.

When forces loyal to Assad the Butcher killed at least 108 people and injured around 300, mostly women and children, last week in Houla in Homs province Israel's leaders came out strongly in their condemnation of the massacre - Netanyahu 'revolted' by Syria's Houla massacre.

There is no reason for Israel to become embroiled in the events taking place in Syria and there is no evidence to support such a suggestion. It was therefore unnecessary to include Israel or the U.S in the mix of bad guys currently involved in the massacre of the Syrian people unless you have a certain paranoid, sick agenda that must involve the "Little Satan" in every nasty plot that affects the region.

And yet the Age's pathetic, sick and unfunny cartoonist decided it was necessary to include Israel in his depiction of Syria's bloody mess pressing the U.S into the fray for good measure.

This is simply disgusting and unworthy of what passes for a serious newspaper, particularly since it came on the same day as this - 3 hurt in apparent anti-Semitic attack in France (ironically not reported you know where).

Why BDS Scars Don't Heal

A Stand With Us Production

Wasteful

Greg Sheridan in The Australian on some of the wasteful exercises of diplomacy being carried out in your name - Carr must restore sinew of diplomacy

The aid budget is out of control and poorly spent. No area illustrates this more graphically than aid to Palestinian groups. Some of it goes to organisations with clear links to terrorist organisations.

And some of it goes to UN organisations that members of the government themselves deride as "notoriously corrupt".

The Palestinian Union of Agricultural Work Committees has received $5m of Australian taxpayers' money via payments from AusAID through World Vision.

According to Gillard government officials in devastating Senate estimates committee testimony this week, one Bashir al-Kheiri was president of UAWC from 2008 to last year. He is closely associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a proscribed terrorist organisation, and has served substantial jail time for terrorist offences. There are many other connections between UAWC figures and the PFLP.

The government's entire defence on this matter has rested on the narrow legal argument that in funding the UAWC it is not breaching laws against funding terrorists because there is no formal organisational connection between UAWC and PFLP, and there is no diversion of funds.

No doubt the government is right that it is not breaking the law. But what possible reason is there for Australian taxpayers to labour so that they can provide resources to individuals associated with the PFLP? It is complete madness, morally repugnant and against common sense.

That's right. Your dollars are probably buying a nice villa for a corrupt official in Gaza or the West Bank as well as financing some missiles to be fired at innocent woman and children. Shows how much we care!

Whose Apartheid?

Dangerous Zionists occupying a beach somewhere between the river and the sea

The mainstream media in this country finds it difficult to relate stories such as this one (Palestinian school principal punished after scandalous dance with Israelis) which appeared in the Gulf News during the week.

It's about a young Palestinian school principal who took his students from the West Bank to the beach at Jaffa and was punished for his efforts because his students came too close to rubbing shoulders with the young Israelis on the same beach. It seems that whilst the PA Ministry of Education licensed the excursion, mixing with Israelis on the beach should not have been allowed, according to an official who preferred to remain anonymous.

This is of course, a clear example of apartheid, one of many instances from the official Palestinian side which agenda driven journalists prefer to consign to the blank pages. After all, as the photographs on this page clearly reveal, the Zionist occupiers constitute a grave danger to the oppressed Palestinian people.



H/t Elder of Zion

THE HATRED OF SPRINGTIME

Here's a brilliant piece from Michael Totten that reminds us how hatred can spring from places that once promised a new spring.

“Are you Zionists?”

...

“What if we were Zionists?” I said, directing my question to Ahmed as much as to our interlocutors.

“They wouldn’t talk to you,” he said.

I was annoyed and tempted to say, never mind then, we’re done here. How would they feel if I opened an interview by asking if they were terrorists? Part of me wanted to get thrown out of their office, not because I itch for fights on the job, but because I learn as much from one interview that goes off the rails as I do from six that are predictable. But I don’t sabotage interviews. That’s up to the folks on the other side of the table. And anyway, conversations like this one that merely go wobbly, rather than implode catastrophically, can also be more revealing than typical ones.

Did I lie when I said I wasn’t a Zionist? What’s a Zionist, anyway? A person who thinks Israel has a right to exist? If so, then, yes, I suppose I’m a Zionist, or perhaps just a Zionist sympathizer since I am not Jewish. But these working-class mustachios in Tunisia’s back-of-beyond have another, more phantasmagorical, definition of the notorious Z-word. I’m certainly not a Zionist as they define one. Neither is Armin Rosen.

“We are not against Jews,” said the man behind the desk in whose office we sat, “but Zionists didn’t go to Palestine to coexist peacefully with Arab nations. They went there to take land from Palestinians and kill them. This is not a country that wants to peacefully coexist. This is a country that wants war between Arab nations.”

This is nonsense on stilts, of course, and since he and his colleagues wanted to know if Armin and I support that, then, no, neither of us lied, not really, when we said we weren’t Zionists.