AUSTRALIAN FRIENDS OF PALESTINE ASSOCIATION: PUBLIC MEETING HELD IN THE SEAT OF STURT, SOUTH AUSTRALIA.

TEXT OF SPEECH BY DR. DAVID PALMER
Burnside Community Centre
Wednesday, 31 October 2007.

Australian foreign policy, the current election, and the issue of justice for the Palestinian people.

Tonight I would like to focus on the importance of foreign policy in the current Australian election, and in particular the issue of Palestine, Palestinians, and Israel.

It is curious – isn’t it? – that foreign policy is hardly an issue for either the ALP or the Liberals at the moment. We hear nothing about the US-led war and occupation in Iraq; and nothing really on the horrendous treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank, where the illegal “wall” is being built, or the Gaza Strip, where people are going hungry and are threatened with having electricity and water cut off by the Israeli government.

The war in Iraq is immensely unpopular in the United States, and even service personnel – some of whom I know quite well – believe it is a war for oil profiteers and opportunistic politicians. Lebanon had a thriving economy at the beginning of last year, but it was completely ruined by Israeli bombing by mid-year, with support from the US State Department and US military aid. Combatants had been captured on both sides, but the Israeli government decided to wreck vengeance on the Lebanese people, killing some 3,000 civilians and displacing almost half a million from their homes.

President George W. Bush has called regularly for democracy in the Middle East, but when the Palestinian people held their elections in the territories last year they elected the wrong people – a majority Hamas government. The US and its allies, however, refused to accept the democratic verdict of the Palestinian people, even though Hamas agreed initially to end violence. Democracy, then, must mean those approved by President Bush, so perhaps the word “democracy” has a new meaning in this strange new century.

The reality is that for the majority in the world, international issues like these ARE important. Even in one of the most conservative countries in the world – Japan – the people in the last few months ended the LDP majority in the upper house because of LDP support for US naval operations linked to the Asian wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But in Australia – even though a majority here has long disagreed with the US-led war in Iraq – we have a foreign policy that basically could have been written in the US State Department by Condoleeza Rice. And the same goes for uncritical support for Israel and refusal to recognize Palestinian rights.

Now the US wants to attack Iran, with George Bush claiming that Iran soon will be able to send missiles with nuclear weapons to attack cities in Europe and America. Haven’t we heard this before? Why does anyone take this absurd rhetoric seriously? If the State Department’s Christopher Hill can get the US to work with China, Russia, and South Korea to negotiate with North Korea, then why can’t the US and its allies – including Israel – negotiate with Hamas? Hamas was democratically elected – the dictatorship of Kim Jong-il was not – but Hamas is branded as “terrorist” while Kim and his coterie are recognized as negotiating partners.

This same hypocrisy is evident with regard to Iran. Yes, Iran may supply aid to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories – but this aid is miniscule compared to US aid to Israel. Israel, as I’m sure most of you know, is the largest recipient of US aid in the world. Israel is a nuclear power with missile delivery capacity, yet it has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The US demands that Iran allow for inspection of nuclear sites, but makes no such demand on Israel.

Why does Australia support US policy and in particular the policies of the current Bush administration? Why, instead, does Australia not act as a broker – a negotiator – for peace in the Middle East? Why is the current Australian government so fanatically pro-US and pro-Israel, instead of assuming an independent stance – against any violence directed at civilians, whether Palestinean or Israeli?

The Liberals will lose government on November 24 – regardless of what the Murdoch press trumpets daily in The Australian with Newspoll claiming Howard is clawing back. Howard will go and Labor will form a new government. To vote for Christopher Pyne in this seat is to vote for a government that will be turfed out – in essence it is a waste of your vote. The Liberals, too, offer nothing in terms of peace in the Middle East or Iraq. And they offer nothing in terms of justice for Palestineans or security for Israelis. Labor may appear to be the same, but they are not. The differences are very important.

Labor has supported a negotiated settlement to the North Korean nuclear crisis – it did in the past and it will in the future. The US once did, then opposed real negotiations under Bolton’s role in State, but now has been compelled to reverse course under Hill. An Australian Labor government should advocate the same multilateral approach – negotiations with all parties, a just settlement, and opposition to military aggression and occupation – on the Palestinean issue. There is no point to continuing to back US policy in support of militarized Israel. Yes, Kevin Rudd is an ardent supporter of Israel and seems to support its militarism – but the ALP is bigger than just Rudd – and Rudd was a key figure in the initial policy of engagement with North Korea in the Keating years. Perhaps I’m naïve, but I believe that potentially things can change under a different government here in Australia.

There is another political reality that Australian politicians – from all parties – will soon need to face. A majority of Australians oppose the war in Iraq. Many in this majority understand that there is a link in all the US-led and backed wars that have occurred and may yet occur in the Middle East and western Asia – whether in Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, or Palestine. A large part of Australia’s ethnic groups – those from Arab countries and Iran – feel the same way, as do many in Australia’s large Muslim community from countries stretching half way across the globe, from Indonesia and Malaysia to Africa.

However, there also is another constituency that needs to be heard, however, and its numbers are presently very small in Australia compared to America. These are Jews who disagree with current Israeli policy – people like Antony Lowenstein, author of My Israel Question. Australians need to understand that “Israel” does not equal “Jews” – they are not the same. To criticize Israeli policy toward the Palestineans, also, is not to “deny” the Holocaust – but in fact to fully recognize it and not repeat it against others. The Holocaust included theft of property, ethnic cleansing, persecution based on race and religion, and denial of all legal rights. The slogan “never again” applies to the Holocaust under fascism, but also in other places. I have heard it too from atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki where I have conducted interviews and research. Certainly we can apply this most basic human right to the Palestineans as well – and support justice for them.

In the United States, former President Jimmy Carter has spoken out for a just settlement of Palestinean rights and was invited by students to speak at Brandeis University – the premier non-sectarian Jewish university in the US – earlier this year. As a Ph.D. history graduate of Brandeis, I was proud that my alma mater took this courageous stand, which has been very unpopular with some older donors who have lost the deep sense of social justice that has long been a Jewish tradition. I am proud that finally these younger people took their stand – in that tradition and despite fierce opposition.

We need to take this stand in Australia also. Your vote in the upcoming election can make a difference – for peace in the Middle East – but only if you also involve yourself in speaking to your MP – an MP who is part of the new government, not the old one that will soon be gone – for justice on this major issue.


TEXT OF SPEECH BY PAUL HEYWOOD-SMITH QC
Burnside Community Centre
Wednesday 31 October 2007

Welcome to all. You are participating in the democratic process. It has been said recently that democracy in this country has been hijacked. The parties and the media control the debate.

We are here tonight to say. The people can raise an issue.

Let me commence by acknowledging that there will be people here this evening who are strong supporters of Israel. To you I also say, “Welcome”. My Association is mindful of the interests of Jewish Israelis. Our view is that Israel has been taking the wrong path. It’s interests are dependant upon it reaching a just accommodation with it’s Arab neighbours.

Let me also make it absolutely clear from the outset that AFOPA is totally opposed to racism of any sort –whether that racism is directed against people of the Jewish faith, Arabs, Muslims, Australian aborigines, Sudanese – any racial, ethnic or religious group. We hold no truck with White Supremacists, Holocaust deniers, whoever. In fact we consider ourselves – in World terms – as totally mainstream. It’s because we believe that the Australian government is out of step on this issue, that we are raising it.

Christopher Pyne – in one sense he’s a little unlucky. If AFOPA was based in Melbourne we might have brought this campaign against Michael Danby, Labor MP for Melbourne Ports. But we are not. We are based in Adelaide. Even in Adelaide, we could have based it on the seat of Mayo. Heaven knows Alexander Downer deserves it. But no, Sturt is more accessible and has a lesser margin and Christopher Pyne has stuck his neck up there and been vocal and has invited this challenge. But it’s not a personal campaign. All we wish to do is to raise this issue as an issue. Neither major party, indeed no party, seems to be particularly interested in foreign affairs. We are here to say to the Australian electorate: “Hello, there is a major issue here”. “Perhaps you should be interested in what is happening in Palestine”. “Perhaps there is some connection between it and what happens each time you are forced to take your shoes off when you go through a security screen at an airport. Perhaps there is some connection between it and your disquiet when your son or daughter goes off for a holiday in Bali, or Malaysia, or Lebanon or Egypt. Perhaps there is some connection when your son is sent off to Iraq in the Armed Forces”.

I have given many speeches on this topic.

What I have learnt? Any speech on this topic must start at only one place…the history.

I intend to spend about a half hour on the history – necessarily truncated. David Palmer will then address us on Australian foreign policy and the need for it to be independent.

Before I commence I want to say that what I here assert comes essentially from mainstream history texts, including by Israeli historians, and recognized contemporary commentators.

Humans have lived in Palestine continuously for thousands of years. The Zionist catch–cry, “A people without a land, for a land without a people”, was, when it was first uttered in the 19th Century as it is today, a palpable falsity and an insult to any adult’s intelligence. As too is the suggestion that “God gave us this land”.

“I give this country to your posterity from the river of Egypt up to the Great River, Euphrates”: Genesis XV, verse 18.

“For the Jews this is the origin of their right to the Promised Land. However the “posterity” includes the descendants of Ishmael since he was the son of Abraham by his concubine Ketivah, and the ancestor of all the Arabs, Christian or Muslim”. (I.F.Stone: “Holy War”).

In biblical times people of the Jewish faith and others, people who we today call Arabs, lived in Palestine which was part of the Roman Empire. It had become part of the Roman Empire in 63 B.C. For something approaching 80 years prior to that time there had been what might be described as an independent Jewish state in part of what we know as Palestine. Are we seriously being asked to give any weight to that as a claim by the Jewish peoples to Palestine?

As with so many other defeated peoples in Roman times, many Jews were taken to Rome as slaves. Gradually they dissipated. Some communities of Jewish people remained in what we now call the Middle East but as the centuries passed the Jewish religion lost its driving power there.

With the fall of the Roman Empire Palestine came to be ruled by Persia and Byzantium. In 638 AD Jerusalem surrendered to the Arab Caliphate. From that time until today whilst Muslims, Jews and Christians have all resided in Palestine, there can be no doubt that the overwhelming majority were Muslim and Arab.

From the 10th Century onwards, the majority of the World’s Jewry was settled in Europe, and became, decisively, a European, as opposed to an Oriental people. This is critical, because it meant that when the Jews returned at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries, they did so as colonizers.

By the 1880’s Palestine’s population was 650,000. No more than 50,000 were Jewish.

Anti-Semitism in Europe at this time prompted the creation of a Zionist movement to create a home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Some might say a noble goal, but for the fact that the plan, as evidenced by Herzl’s diary, was that it was to be at the expense of the native population who were to be spirited out of the country and their land expropriated.

The Zionist movement commenced to buy Arab land in Palestine. The Jewish National Fund, established in 1901, laid down that all land which it acquired was to remain inalienable Jewish property that could not be sold or leased to others. Moreover only Jews should work the land that Jews acquired.

The Balfour Declaration in 1917 occurred whilst Britain was at war with the Ottoman Empire and after Britain had been flooded with Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, causing riots and demonstrations against them in the streets of London.[1] The Balfour Declaration called for a home for Jewish people in Palestine but added “…nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

The Balfour Declaration was of course internally inconsistent. It was not possible for there to be a ‘home’ as contemplated and for that ‘home’ not to prejudice the non-Jewish communities. At the start of WWI Kitchener promoted the Arab Revolt (against the Turks), promising: “If the Arab nation assists England in this war England will guarantee that no intervention takes place in Arabia and will give Arabs every assistance against external foreign aggression”. That the Arabs believed that they were betrayed by the British is totally understandable.

That betrayal in my view derived from a deep seated British racism towards the Arabs. Peter Mansfield in his book The Arabs notes:

It is scarcely necessary to go any further than this to find justification for the Arab’s sense of betrayal by the West and their special bitterness over Palestine. If the West has a feeling today that the Arabs are taking their revenge it should be easy to understand the reasons.

That book was written by Mansfield in 1978. How prophetic was it to become?

A British census of 1918 gave an estimate of 700,000 Arabs and 56,000 Jews. This was a significant population. The land mass of Palestine is half the size of Tasmania. Tasmania’s population today is less that $500K. No “land without a people” there.

It is the tragedy of the Palestinians that the Balfour Declaration occurred at a time when President Wilson was advocating self-determination of subject peoples following the Great War and it is illuminating to consider what happened to the balance of the Arabian part of the Ottoman Empire. All, Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq, Egypt, the Persian Gulf Sheikdoms and Yemen (including what was to become Saudi Arabia in 1926) had either full independence or sufficient to control immigration by at latest 1936 – most much earlier. The indigenous people of Palestine, however, the most socially, culturally and economically advanced, were not considered fit for independence at any time prior to when it was too late, in 1948.

The Palestinian Arabs provided bitter resistance from as early as 1921, even when immigration was relatively small. After 1933 their alarm turned to despair, as they saw large numbers of Jews coming into their country and buying up the land and utilizing it to the exclusion of all Arabs. The Arabs may well have absorbed significant Jewish immigration but for the totally inadmissible premise that the Zionists planned to make their culture the only one in the country. They insisted on Hebrew, separate schools and hospitals, self segregation, and the expulsion of Arabs from every institution they established. Theirs was undoubtedly a racist agenda.

In 1939, when the Jewish percentage of the total population was approaching one-third, Britain purported to stop further Jewish immigration.[2] This decision remained in force until after World War II. The revelations of the Holocaust, however, made it difficult for Britain to stop immigration both officially and via the Zionist underground. In August 1945 President Truman endorsed the Zionist demand that 100,000 Jews should be allowed immediately into Palestine. By late 1947 the official UN estimates for Palestine were: Arabs, 1.3 million; Jews, 600,000.

In 1947 the United Nations voted 33:13 (with 10 abstentions) to partition Palestine. The 33 chose to give another nation’s land (some 54% of it) to the Jewish people. An Arab proposal to ask the International Court of Justice to judge the competence of the General Assembly to partition a country against the wishes of a majority of its inhabitants was only narrowly defeated. (It is hardly necessary to point out that no such resolution could conceivably be passed today, or even ten years after 1947, after the addition of many Afro-Asian countries to the General Assembly.)

It is of interest to note the views of prominent Australians at the time. Australia of course voted for partition. However Australia had two quite senior officials in the UN Secretariat. The most senior was Sir Raphael Cilento who served in the UN Secretariat from 1946 to 1951. The most senior Australian official in the Secretariat after him was Sir Walter Crocker, to become Australia’s High Commissioner for India in 1951 and later, for many years, the Lieutenant-Governor of South Australia. Crocker delivered a paper on Cilento in 1984 entitled “The Role of Sir Raphael Cilento at the UN”. In 1948 Cilento was Director of Relief Projects based in Beirut in which post he had much to do with Palestine.

Crocker records his own perceptions of the creation of Israel:

At the seat of the UN at Lake Success, day after day, week after week, month after month, the public galleries, the lobbies, the corridors, the cafeteria, were filled with Zionists and other Jewish zealots, pushing and persistent. Not a few were fanatical, not a few were arrogant, all were increasingly self-confident. They were given over to the dream of turning Palestine into Israel. Their dedication was admirable.

But, unfortunately, the fact that Arabs already were inhabiting Palestine, and had done so for centuries, had no relevance for the zealots. The Arabs had no rights: they were to be torn up from their land to make way for the Jews. The self-centeredness on this point was absolute and it was not admirable.

What the Zionists later referred to as “the miracle of Lake Success” could indeed scarcely have happened except in that place and at that time. In the name of internationalism a form of extreme nationalism was carried to victory, and in the name of the rights of small nations to independence… a minority in Palestine, the Jews, took by force of arms the home of the indigenous majority, the Arabs.

Crocker records Cilento’s belief that the creation of Israel and the manner of its creation, made wounds that were unlikely to heal and further, that the Palestinian Arabs were condemned to degradation if not genocide. How prophetic was that. Cilento was charged with anti-Semitism and like others his career at the UN ceased; moreover, despite his incredible career to that point in time, following his return to Australia in 1951 (aged only 58), he never held another official post. But as Crocker records, to charge Cilento with anti-Semitism was “as unfair to Cilento as was charging all Jews with the values of the Zionists.” What Cilento questioned was Zionist imperialism and in that he was joined by the Vatican, by leftwing papers like the Guardian, and others.

But let us return to the story. In 1948 on the withdrawal of British forces the Palestinian peoples, along with their Arab neighbours resisted what they saw, not surprisingly, or unreasonably, as the stealing of their country.

In the war which resulted, Israel occupied some 80% of the land (26% more than allocated to it by the UN). The Israelis occupied over 500 Arab villages and towns and destroyed some 380, so that the inhabitants could not return. I quote from Tanya Reinhart’s work “Israel/Palestine”. Tanya Reinhart was an Israeli (Jewish) scholar and journalist. She delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the University of Adelaide in October 2006 and later addressed a number of our federal parliamentarians in Canberra. I was privileged to be at both events. She wrote:

“During the war of 1948, more than half of the Palestinian population at the time – 1,380,000 – were driven off their homeland by the Israeli Army. Though Israel officially claimed that a majority of the refugees fled and were not expelled, it still refused to allow them to return, as a UN resolution demanded shortly after the 1948 war. Thus the Israeli land was obtained through ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants”.

Tanya Reinhart passed away in New York earlier this year.

The Palestine War and the harsh injustices that it caused the indigenous inhabitants left a legacy of bitterness among all the Arabs against Israel and the two Western Powers most responsible for its creation – Britain and the U.S. It has been the single most powerful factor behind the bitterness of the Arab and ultimately Muslim worlds and the growth of anti-Western feeling over the past six decades.

In 1950 the Israeli Knesset passed the Law of Return that “every Jew has the right to immigrate to Israel”. No such right was afforded, however, to the true inhabitants who now resided in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt.

Immediately after the 1967 war in which Israel occupied the remaining 20% of Palestine, Israel encouraged settlers to go into the occupied territories and take the land.

In 1988 an Intifada Meeting of the Palestinian National Council called for partition of historical Palestine into two independent States … along the lines of the ’67 borders, as determined by the UN Resolutions 181, 242 and 338. This is significant. Israel justified its settlement activity on the basis of a need for security given that the Arabs wanted to push Israel into the sea. Here was the white flag (and most unfortunate it was for Israel) for Israel cannot afford peace, for peace means boundaries, confinement, and the loss of the dream of a Greater Israel.

Henry Siegman, writing in the London Review of Books, in August of this year, quotes the commentator Geoffrey Aronson, who has monitored the settlement enterprise from its beginnings, thus:
Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.

1993: the Oslo Accords – whereby the Palestinians re-committed to the idea of two states, involving giving up nearly 80% of the historical Palestinian homeland. Nothing was to come of it. Instead Oslo has been used by Israel as a cover to extend and consolidate its illegal occupation and to double if not treble the settler population. The attitude of the Likud government is best illustrated by Sharon, then foreign minister, in 1998: “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours…Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”

2000: Camp David Summit at which Arafat was said to have refused a most generous offer giving to the Palestinians some 95% of the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem as its capital. This presentation was put out to people around the World to encourage them to abandon any interest in the Palestinians that they might have had. It was of course a fraud. It was a slander on the Palestinian people. It is an indictment of the Western press that allowed the Israeli publicity machine to put it across. It is a monument to the power of constant repetition, that such repetition raises the lie to objective truth.

The truth started to come out when a U.S. official who was present became too disgusted by the hypocrisy after putting up with it for a year. Robert Malley published a series of articles in the New York Times. And what came out of them was this.

Israel withdraws from 90 – 95% of the Occupied Territories retaining 130 settlements in the 5 – 10%. Included in the Palestinian lands would be 50 additional settlements which would entail 40 – 50% of the newly created State that Palestinians would have no access to. The 5 – 10% making up settlements retained in Israel was occupied by 120,000 Palestinians, but they would not become Israeli citizens since they would vote in the Palestinian elections. Thus Israel could annex the land without giving any rights to Palestinian residents. The small village of Abu-Dis on the outskirts of Jerusalem would be re-named Al-Quds, the Arab name for Jerusalem thereby enabling Israel to present to the World that it was dividing Jerusalem. The Arab inhabitants of East Jerusalem (to become part of Israel) would not become Israeli. Israel ‘agreed’ that Palestine would have the privilege of providing health, education and welfare to them; but they could not have citizenship, nor, the right to vote in Israeli elections. Barak’s unofficial map allowed no external borders with any other country for the Palestinian State.

That was the Israeli idea of sovereignty. That was the most generous offer that was refused.

The ME peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is “to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people”.

September 2000: Sharon announces that he intends to exercise his “elementary right” to visit “our holy site” (Temple Mount) thereby provoking the second Intifada.

2001: Sharon is elected. Military rule in the territories is re-established. The Palestinian Authority’s infrastructure is destroyed. Life is made totally unbearable for the Palestinians in the hope that they will just leave. In December 2001 the Israeli Army raids the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in Ramallah, destroying and confiscating computers and documents. In the words of Edward Said: “They were effacing virtually the entire record of collective Palestinian life”. It does not take much imagination to see how important it is that if there is to be systematic ethnic cleansing that the less records there are to verify that people actually lived in a particular place the better.

2003: In April a “Roadmap” for resolving the conflict is announced by Kofi Annan on behalf of the US, the UN, Russia and the EU (the Quartet)…The Palestinians accepted the road map in its entirety but Israel announced 14 caveats and prerequisites that would preclude any final peace talks and thus ensured the initiative’s failure.

2003-6: Apart from all of the other destruction that it does one clear purpose of the Wall is the destruction of Palestinian history. Ancient buildings are bulldozed to create the Wall and settler roads. The purpose is to Judaize Palestine. By targeting historical Arab sites Israel plans to destroy Palestinian cultural heritage. Its a form of genocide. It is happening particularly in Hebron and Nablus. It is in direct contravention of the Hague Conventions.

There is of course a certain attraction to the wall, because it shuts in as well as shuts out. Those who have felt for the Palestinians first asked themselves: is this something positive? Is this going to give the Palestinians respite from the creeping annexation?

But when it became apparent where the wall was being built, and how, it became clear that this was just another tool in the oppression of these poor people. If the Israeli Government had set about building a wall on the ’67 borders, on the Green Line, rather than on occupied Palestinian land, I rather suspect many people would have said: “This is good”. But of course if the Israeli government was prepared to do that they wouldn’t need a wall. There would be no suicide bombers. A great yoke would have been lifted off the shoulders not only of the Palestinians, but of the Israelis, and, ultimately, of us.

But no the wall as envisioned contemplates three Bantustans. These are Gaza, and two West Bank areas all totally encircled by Israel. No external borders. No right of free passage. No independent economy. This is what Sharon had in mind when he spoke of a Palestinian State.

The sole consideration that dictates the path of the Wall is the settlements, and assuring that they remain on the western side of it. But it catches Palestinian villages as well – leaving them on the western side of the Wall. There is a stench associated with these villages. It is the stench of transfer. That is, transfer “out”. For what choice do the Palestinians have caught on the West of the Wall. They cannot move. They cannot find a livelihood. Similarly other Palestinian villages are left on the East of the Wall but their agricultural lands are placed on the West. One of the purposes of the Wall, without a doubt, is to make the lives of the inhabitants Hell, in order to convince them by and by to go away, to become, with their brothers and sisters of 1948 and 1967, refugees.

I should mention the International Court of Justice? On 8 December 2003 the UN General Assembly voted to request an Advisory Opinion from the ICJ with regard to the legality of the construction of the wall, and whether Israel was under a legal obligation to remove it.

This was a significant development. This was the first time the World Court had been drawn into the dispute. The vote to request the Advisory Opinion was passed with 90 states in favour and eight opposing: Australia, the USA, Israel, Ethiopia, Nauru, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau. Good company. 74 states, including the European Union, abstained. The US in opposition to the request to the ICJ expressed the view that “giving an advisory Opinion … risks undermining the peace process and politicizing the court”. Australia, or at least the government of which Christopher Pyne is a part, took a similar position saying that the decision might “complicate the work of the international quartet or jeopardise the implementation of the Road Map”. Hello, what work, what Road Map?

On 9 July 2004, the court handed down its Opinion, that the construction of the wall by Israel is in breach of international law and that it violates principles of the UN Charter and norms that prohibit the threat or use of force and the acquisition of territory. The construction of the wall was also found to be inconsistent with the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people. More significantly, the court also said that all states should not recognise “the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall”. The Court was composed of 15 eminent Justices. The ruling was 14:1. The one was a US judge.

In the immediate aftermath of the publication of the Opinion, Israel declared that it would seek the support of the US to veto any Security Council resolution relating to the Opinion and the wall and the US did indeed indicate that it would veto attempts by the Council to adopt a resolution on the issue. On 20 July 2004 the Tenth Emergency Session of the General Assembly resumed to consider the Opinion. It adopted Resolution GA10248 condemning Israel’s construction of the wall and calling on it to dismantle the structures and abide by the court’s Opinion. The resolution was adopted by a vote of 150 states in favour, ten abstained, while Australia joined five other countries (the USA, Federated States of Micronesia, Israel, Marshall Islands and Palau) in voting against the resolution. Good company again. Well done Christopher Pyne. That’s why were here.

2005 – and the withdrawal from Gaza. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian Bantustans. Gaza’s situation today shows us what these Bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants.

UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish state’s international legitimacy, also recognized the remaining Palestinian territory outside the new state’s borders as the equally legitimate patrimony of Palestine’s Arab population on which they were entitled to establish their own state, and it mapped the borders of that territory with great precision. Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law and the democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its implementation.

In the course of a war launched by Arab countries that sought to prevent the implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel enlarged its territory by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to acquire territory as a result of war, then the question now cannot conceivably be how much additional Palestinian territory Israel may confiscate, but rather how much of the territory it acquired in the course of the war of 1948 it is allowed to retain. At the very least, if “adjustments” are to be made to the 1949 armistice line, these should be made on Israel’s side of that line, not the Palestinians”.

Suicide bombers

Let us start by considering the position of the Palestinian today.

The position of the Palestinian is seemingly hopeless. He watches (as he has done for 40 years) and sees the Israelis or Jewish people from the Bronx, or Melbourne, come on to his land and build a settlement. The settlers either uproot the olive trees that he tended with his father and grandfather as a child, or confiscate them to themselves. This is easily done. They simply say that they are a security risk – snipers could hide in them. He has no job, he lives in poverty. He watches the bulldozer come in and bulldoze his house. If he resists the Israeli Government screams “terrorist”, but more painful than that, the U.S., and World’s media calls him a terrorist. By so labelling him, Israel and the West systematically suppress the reality of the Palestinian experience of dispossession and make it possible to ignore the Palestinians’ undeniable claims to the land. The Palestinian is in despair; he has been rendered peripheral; he is isolated; his sense is only of displacement and loss. He probably feels how a Jew in 1930’s Germany felt.

In January 2004 Gideon Levy, a highly respected Israeli journalist, described a recent visit to Nablus. He writes:

“One sees Nablus declining relentlessly into its death throes…
An hour’s drive from Tel Aviv, a great Palestinian city is dying, and another of the occupation’s goals is being realized. It’s not only that the splendid homes have been laid waste, not only that such a large number of the city’s residents, many of them innocent, have been killed; the entire society is flickering and will soon be extinguished. A similar fate has visited Jenin, Qalqilyah, Tul Karm and Bethlehem, but in Nablus the impact of the death throes is more powerful because of the city’s importance as a district capital and because of its beauty… But the true wound lies far deeper than the physical destruction: an economic, cultural and social fabric that is disintegrating and a generation that has known only a life of emptiness and despair.

Joseph Weitz was from 1932 the director of the Jewish National Land Fund. In 1965 his diaries were published in Israel. On 19.12.1940 he wrote:

“It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country…the only solution is Eretz Israel, or at least Western Eretz Israel, without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point!…there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transfer them all; except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe. And the transfer must be directed to Iraq, to Syria, and even to Transjordan.

Today the settlers, generally Jewish fundamentalists, and their supporters regard ethnic cleansing of the Arabs as an imperative, even a commandment from God. Jewish fundamentalists are thought to account for some 20-25 per cent of the Israeli population, higher than the number of Muslim fundamentalists in Iran. Jewish fundamentalists are of course embarked on a process of genocide; witness Baruch Goldstein’s murder in 1994 of 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron’s Mosque. This act was praised by many rabbis and Goldstein elevated to the status of martyr. Witness the attempts today to have the assassin of Yitzak Rabin released from prison.

Tanya Reinhart, of whom I spoke earlier, notes the statistics pertaining to Palestinian injuries. She notes the standard IDF assertion that some Palestinians were injured by ‘stray bullets’. She questions how it can be that ‘stray bullets’ have a remarkable tendency to overwhelmingly strike eyes, the head, or knees. Reinhart makes this allegation:

“Israel’s systematic policy of injuring Palestinians cannot be explained as self-defence, nor as a spontaneous reaction to terror. It is an act of ethnic cleansing – the process through which an ethnic group is driven from a land that another group wishes to control. In a place so closely observed by the world as Israel/Palestine, ethnic cleansing cannot be a sudden act of massive slaughter and land evacuation. Rather, it is a repetitive process by which people are slowly forced to perish or flee.”

For years I have been advocating ‘justice in Palestine’. Many times people have said to me, “Oh, yes, but how can you possibly defend those suicide bombers?”. There is a fallacy there. It is that to promote Palestinian rights is to condone suicide attacks. The Israelis turn the fallacy on its end. If you remove the constraints on Palestine, if you open a roadblock, or remove soldiers, or, dare I suggest it, lift the occupation, you would be rewarding terrorism – rewarding suicide bombers. The best response to suicide bombers is justice, not more repression. Justice, or the giving of it, should not be seen as giving in to terror. Justice is justice. It stands apart, and on its own feet.

You and I live in a free and secular society. We can vote in a Federal election. We naturally are offended by and lament the methods of the suicide bombers. But it is appropriate to attempt to understand them. It is not difficult to understand them.

Let me also say this. Palestinian atrocities come, after all, in the service of what the World regards as a legitimate purpose, the ending of occupation. The Fourth Geneva Convention stipulates that occupied peoples have the right to fight for their liberation. Israeli atrocities come in the service of an illegitimate purpose, that occupation’s perpetuation. It was Herzl who said: “He who desires the end desires the means”.[3] But in proposing such an end – a Jewish state in Palestine – and such means, he was proposing a great deception, and laying open his whole movement to the subsequent charge that in any true historical perspective the Zionists were the original aggressors in the Middle East, the real pioneers of violence, and that Arab violence, however fanatical it might eventually become, was an inevitable reaction to theirs.

In July and August 2006 we witnessed an atrocious event – the 6th Lebanon War. Zionism rests on the fundamental belief that Jews have superior rights to the land. Such belief excludes any possibility of true democracy or equality of peoples. Israel’s destructive rampage in Lebanon is merely the next step in the evolution of that ideology. At the end of that War the World had an immediate expectation. That there would be, within as short a time as possible, an International Conference to address the issue of the festering disputation: primarily between Lebanon and Israel; the Shebaa Farms; but also between Israel and Syria; the Golan Heights; and also between Israel and the Palestinians.

We shouldn’t have held our breath. Within days it was business as usual. Our National Press largely dropped the issue. Our politicians did the same. Christopher Pyne had this to say about it in the first week of August 2006 at the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation:

We’re here tonight to support Israel. I can’t know what it is like to be a Jew right now in the world, not being of the Jewish faith. I can’t imagine what it is like to be a Jew sitting here in the synagogue, or a Jew in Israel, or a Jew anywhere else in the Diaspora, thinking about the War of Independence in 1948, the Suez Crisis, the Six Day War, Yom Kippur, the 1982 offensive in Lebanon, the Intifada’s that have occurred since that time, the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and now to be back again in Lebanon in 2006.

The only thing that I can imagine that Jewish people around the world must be thinking is: “When will this end?” And it is a very good question. …….

Nobody believes or wants Israel to be involved in war, but it is not true to say that there is a moral relativity between the actions of Hezbollah and the actions of the state of Israel. It is not true to say that the terrorism of Hamas or the desire of Iran to wipe Israel off the map, or Syria to support Hezbollah or Hamas are somehow morally relative to the right of Israel to protect itself and its people. This is a debate which we have been having for ten – twenty – or more years. In my experience I’ve been having this debate for thirteen and a half years as the Member for Sturt. And again in the last two weeks we hear that there is fault on both sides: Israel is as much to blame as Hezbollah, or Syria, or Iran, or Hamas.

It is not true, and we have to say it is not true.

We agree its not true Christopher – Israel is totally to blame by reason of it having maintained an illegal occupation for 40 years.

But this is an issue that must be urgently re-instated. It is an issue which is poisoning our lives. Consider the London bombings in July, 2005. Journalists and commentators had a field day in addressing the war on terror.

Why do young British people, of Arab and Muslim extraction, with everything to live for, become suicide bombers? Let me tell you. It is not because they are upset over poverty in Africa, nor that they have concerns over globalisation. And neither are they radicalised by global warming, or even the reliance by the West upon oil. From my reading of history, nor does it appear to me that militant Islamists are intent on converting Christians, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists or whoever, to Islam. Islam has in fact been a religion of tolerance throughout its thirteen centuries, unlike, at particular times, what might be said of others.

Some of these issues might get the odd Muslim excited, even angry. They do not cause an 18 year old Leeds boy to blow himself up and hope in doing so that he will take as many of his fellow citizens with him as he can.

No, it is none of these things. It is something far more personal than that. It is racism practiced against his fellow Arabs and Muslims, if not himself. It is injustice on a mammoth scale. It is humiliation daily thrust upon his brothers – a humiliation of ninety years standing which continues today as strongly as it commenced during the British Mandate. It is Palestine.

That is not to say that it is only Palestine. There is Chechnya. There is Kashmir. There is the arrogance of the West in Iraq, and Iran, and Syria. But Palestine is where it started. And Palestine is where it continues, and is at its heart.

And Palestinians’ brother Arabs, and brother Muslims know this. They feel the same pain, the same humiliation. They have felt the same pain, and the same humiliation for sixty years. That pain and humiliation does not dissipate, because the injustice continues. The injustice has never been addressed. The parents and grandparents of many Arabs were expelled from their homes, and the homes of their ancestors, in Israel in 1948 and never compensated. They lived their miserable lives in refugee camps in Lebanon and Gaza, Jordan and the West Bank. They died without compensation. Their children remember them, and it’s their time to act.

As I have indicated, it is not only Palestine. But Iraq is a convenient extension. War is made the easier because the inhabitants of Iraq are Arab and hence inferior. And who implements the war? The answer is the usual suspects – Britain and the U.S. They are aided by their Anglo-Saxon cousin, Australia. These are the rulers, and the Iraqis, like the 1917 and 1947 Palestinians, are the ruled.

As if it is not bad enough that these rulers invade and occupy, but they must praise themselves as bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. And if you think that these views might exaggerate the position, consider that young Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Saudis, Egyptians and Iraqis may not think so. Their Muslim brothers in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia might just agree with them. They might just have a feeling that history might be repeating itself. They are aware of one occupation that has been continuing now for nearly forty years – that in the West Bank and Gaza. They may not want another. And when they hear Bush and Blair and Howard, and Pyne, assert that the insurgents are foreign terrorists, they really hear them saying: “These people are of such an inferior culture and state of development that they simply couldn’t want to just have their own country back”. In other words, they recognize inherent racism when they see it.

Terrorism and suicide bombing will thrive wherever there is injustice and illegitimate occupation. And it will thrive all the more the longer that injustice and occupation continue.

Thank you for your attention. I invite you to listen to my colleague David Palmer. I hope that you will start demanding something from your politicians. I hope that your first step will be to send a message. A message that results from the dis-election of Christopher Pyne.


ENDNOTES

[1] David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch. (Nation Books, 2003.) p. 159.
[2] After the receipt of the MacDonald White Paper, the Government asserted that it was “not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish state, that 75,000 Jewish immigrants should be admitted over the next five years, but no more after that without the approval of the Arabs.”
[3] Hirst, p. 139.

AUSTRALIAN FRIENDS OF PALESTINE MEET THIS EVENING TO DISCUSS PALESTINE AND THE LIBERAL PARTY’S STANCE AGAINST THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE

The Australia Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA) is holding a public function in the seat of Sturt, Adelaide SA, as part of a campaign to unseat the sitting member Christopher Pyne. The coalition policy and actions are boldly biased in favour of Israel and do not reflect the Australian support for human rights and fair go to all.

The meeting will be held at 7.00pm this evening (Wednesday, 31 October 2007) at the Burnside Community Center on the corner of Burnside Road and Portrush Road Burnside. The speakers will be Dr. David Palmer of the American Studies Department, Flinders University, and Mr. Paul Heywood-Smith, QC.

If you’re in Adelaide, why not come along!

THE U.S. AND THE FRENCH REJECT REALITY OVER IRANS SO-CALLED NUCLEAR AMBITIONS

The right-wing French government and the US government have rejected the report of Mohamad El Baradei, the head of the UNs nuclear watchdog organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which has said that there is no evidence to suggest that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

The problem with the French and the American’s rejection of the IAEA’s report is that neither the French nor the Americans have produced any evidence whatsoever to support their claim that Iran is developing weapons.

Just more propaganda and rhetoric from those that told us exactly the same stuff about Iraq as they are now trying to tell us about Iran.

IS THIS THE ULTIMATE ISRAELI ENDGAME: IT BEGINS WITH ISRAEL ATTACKING THE GAZA AND ENDS WITH THE U.S. ATTACKING IRAN?

The Gaza Strip is already geographically entirely isolated from what remains of Palestine in the West Bank. Now the Israeli stranglehold on the Gazan people is being tightened even further as the Israelis commit a deliberate war crime by collectively punishing the Gazan people because of the actions of a few Palestinian fighters who are resisting Israeli aggression and occupation of Palestinian lands.

As well as depriving the Gazan people of essential power, some Gazans are also being denied access to urgent medical treatment that is only available to them in the West Bank. In one case a man with a heart problem and in need of surgery has been refused permission to leave the Gaza to travel to the West Bank for treatment because he refuses to tell Israeli authorities about his brother who is wanted by the Israelis. Because of the Gaza Strips isolation, all travel to the West Bank by Gazan Palestinians involves Palestinians having to pass through Israel. Conversely, Gazans wishing to return from the West Bank to Gaza must also travel through Israel. This presents a problem however, since the Israelis are making it extremely difficult for Gazans to enter the Strip often forcing them to wait many days before being allowed through.

So why are the Israelis causing the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip to suffer so? What’s their endgame?

The long-term endgame is simple and obvious; the Israeli right-wing Zionists wish to have the Gaza Strip annexed to Israel and the Palestinian people of the Gaza removed, in the first instance to the West Bank, but ultimately out of Palestine altogether as the West Bank too later becomes part of Greater Israel later on. The strategy has been simple. Geographically the Gaza had already been isolated from the West Bank; the next step was to politically isolate the Gaza from the West Bank by wedging Hamas against Fatah.

Fatah corruption in the Gaza became so intolerable to Hamas that Hamas took action to stop it. They needed to do this by taking control of the Gaza which meant eliminating Fatah control and influence.

It is now becoming apparent, however, that, despite the heavy fighting and violence between the two sides in the Gaza, Fatah deliberately ceded the fight to Hamas there in order that the Gaza be isolated even further from the West Bank. In doing so the Israelis supported Abbas, the West Banks Fatah leader, in the suppression of Hamas in the West Bank. This support, in turn, was supported by the US via Elliot Abrams, the deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy’s office. The end result is a West Bank ‘Fatah-land’ and a ‘Hamastan’ in the Gaza; classic divide and rule strategy that was just what the Israelis intended.

Knowing that Hamas and their allies in the Gaza would continue to launch rocket attacks against Israel to deter the Israelis from making incursions into the Gaza and in retaliation for Israeli killings inside the Gaza, the Israelis have used this as an excuse to continue their oppression and persecution of the Palestinians in the Gaza as they move toward the next stage of their plan to destroy the Gaza Strip as a Palestinian territory. In order to substantially up-grade their offensive against the Gazan people, the Israelis are, rather than hoping that the rocket attacks by Gazan fighters diminish or stop, will actually increase in retaliation against increased Israeli sanctions. In other words, the Israelis are deliberately provoking the Gazan fighters to continue attacking Israel with rockets in order to provide a casus belli for ultimately invading the Gaza in a full-on attack similar to that which the Israelis launched against Hizbollah and the Lebanese people last year. Gazans seeking refuge in their thousands would then be allowed to flood into the West Bank never to be allowed to return to the Gaza. Meanwhile the Israelis will then mop up Hamas in the Gaza.

For the Israelis it is then hoped that the scenario would follow what was planned for last year, but failed, when the Israelis provoked Hizbollah in south Lebanon. This time it is the other way around – Israel attack Hamas in the Gaza, Hizbollah attacks Israel to relieve pressure on Hamas in the Gaza, Israel launches massive counter-attack against Hizbollah, Syria aids Hizbollah, Iran aids Syria, US attacks Iran.

Voila! Endgame!

ISRAEL TIGHTENS THE SCREWS ON THE GAZAN PEOPLE

Like most nations that set out to turn the people of another nation against their government, the Israelis have failed to learn the lessons of the past as they try to turn the Gazan people against the Hamas government that now leads them inside what has become a besieged state.

The Israelis are doing everything in their power to pressure the Gazan people to capitulate to Israeli demands that Hamas hand over power to the West Bank’s al-Fatah faction of Mahmoud Abbas. The Israelis know, however, that this is not likely to happen.

They know this because they are very much aware that when a large population of people are subjected to persecution and aggression without actually being fully invaded and occupied the population band together to help each other and, rather than turn against their government, are more inclined to support it even when the population do not otherwise support many of policies of their government. In Germany during the last war the phenomenon was called ‘Kriegsozialismus’ or ‘War Socialism’. It wasn’t confined to Germany; London during the ‘Blitz’ experienced a similar phenomenon whereby people under attack from a foreign enemy disregard notions of any wealth or class distinction within their own population in order to give help to others who, under ordinary conditions, would otherwise feel constrained from doing so. A similar situation can be seen developing in the Gaza. While not everyone is happy with Hamas, they are now supporting Hamas simply because they realise that Israel is not attacking them because of Hamas but because they are simply Gazans living in a land that the Israelis want for themselves.

The Israelis in fact are simply attempting to make life for the Gazan people so intolerable that that they would prefer to leave Gaza permanently and take their chances in the West Bank or elsewhere. This then would also isolate their enemy, Hamas, leaving them free then to repeat the process in the West Bank.

PUTIN: 'AN AMERICAN ATTACK ON IRAN WILL BE VIEWED BY MOSCOW AS AN ATTACK ON RUSSIA'.

The stand-off between the US and Iran over what the US regards are Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions has reached a new turning point which could greatly escalate tensions between the US and Russia. Not only is Russia not going to support the US in the UN over new sanctions against Iran, support that is essential if the US is be successful in pushing for new sanctions, but, according to a recent report in Asia Times Online by informed reporter Pepe Escobar, Putin has told the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that ‘an American attack on Iran will be viewed by Moscow as an attack on Russia’.

Escobar also reports that the Supreme Leader isn’t all that happy with President Ahmadinejad’s leadership style. Escobar has quoted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as saying “I approve of this government but this does not mean that I approve of everything they do.” However, the Supreme Leader does continue to support Iran’s civilian nuclear program.

While sanctions are beginning to pinch in Iran, they are not likely to deter Iran from pressing ahead with its civilian nuclear program. For the US this is not really a problem inasmuch that, while Iran pushes ahead with its enrichment program, albeit for peaceful purposes, the US and Israel can continue with their propaganda about Iran seeking nuclear weapons. The last thing the US and Israel really want is for Iran to actually give up its nuclear enrichment program because that would deny at least Israel a casus belli to attack Iran though the US could still attack over the alleged help that the Iranians are giving to the Iraqi insurgents.

The problem, of course, is not so much Irans nuclear plans since Israel concedes that Iran has no nuclear ambitions that are an existential threat to Israel, but the Israeli and US desire for regime change in Iran. Even if internal pressures were to topple Ahmadinejad from office this would not be enough for the US and the Israelis as there would still remain the problem of strong Iranian support for Hizbollah in Lebanon via Syria, and Hamas in the occupied territories. These remain the principle reasons for Israel and the US demanding regime change in Iran.

If the report of Putin’s statement about an American attack on Iran being viewed in Moscow as an attack on Russia is true then this changes entirely the face of Middle East posturing by the West. Firstly, any attack plans the US and/or Israel had for action against Iran will now need to be put on hold or discarded altogether. More importantly, Russia’s new policy of alliance with Iran now positions Russia as another major player for hegemony in the region, a situation that the US will need to consider very carefully before taking any further action anywhere in the Middle East.

What the US and Israel do next is going to be interesting.

RIGHT-WING AUSTRALIAN FOREIGN MINISTER WANTS TO SEND AUSTRALIAN TROOPS TO WEST BANK!

ALEXANDER DOWNER IGNORES PLIGHT OF GAZAN PALESTINIANS

It’s just as well that the Howard government is likely to be ousted at the next election if for no other reason than it will save the Palestinian people of the West Bank from being invaded by Australian troops. The warmongering Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer who lied incessantly about Iraq’s WMDs as he pushed for war against Iraq would like to see Australian troops in the West Bank in order to protect the Palestinian people from democracy and ensure that Hamas aren’t ever voted into government.

Downer told an audience of Jewish leaders in Sydney last night: "If the Israeli defence forces withdrew from the West Bank, Hamas will just take over.” Downer ignores completely the fact that the Palestinian people overwhelmingly asked Hamas to ‘take over’ when it convincingly won the majority of seats in the Palestinian government in free democratic elections held in the occupied territories back in January of 2006.

The last thing the Middle East needs is more foreign troops marching over their real estate – or at least what’s left of it. What Downer should be doing is making representations to the Israeli government deploring the fact that Israeli Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, is planning for the collective punishment of Gazan civilians in retaliation for the hostile actions of a small number of Gazan militia against Israel.

It should be made quite clear to the Israeli government that, under the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 21 October 1950, the collective punishment of civilians is a war crime. The Israeli government’s crimes against the Palestinian people have included the killing of innocent Palestinian children and other civilians through bombardments and aerial attacks, indiscriminate so-called ‘targeted assassinations’ which are nothing more than extra-judicial executions of Israel’s enemies in which many innocent passers-by are also often killed, the bulldozing of homes and productive fields, the deliberate obstruction of the flow of basic goods and products into the Gaza and the denial of medical facilities to hospitals in the Gaza. These are actions and crimes against an oppressed people which modern societies should not tolerate, let alone condone. Alexander Downer will be seen to be doing both if he does not take steps immediately to at least remind the Israeli government that they are indeed about to commit a specific war crime.

Perhaps after the next election Australia will have a Foreign Minister who, on behalf of all decent people in Australia, will be able to tell the Israeli government that their actions are not tolerated in a modern civilised world.

IS EXTREME RIGHT-WING ZIONIST NETANYAHU JOCKEYING TO POSITION HIMSELF TO LEAD ISRAEL AGAIN?

Ex-Israeli Prime Minister, Likud Party leader and extreme right-wing Zionist, Binyamin Netanyahu, is trying to position himself for a second shot at being Israel’s Prime Minister. Speaking in Jerusalem yesterday, Netanyahu demanded that the division of the city of Jerusalem not be part of any of the discussions at the peace conference in Annapolis due later this year.

Likud is not the only right-wing Israeli party that is demanding that Jerusalem remain in its entirety in the hands of the Israelis; Israel Beiteinu and Shas, two of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s coalition partners in the government are threatening to leave the coalition “…if the issue was even raised during the upcoming peace conference” according to a ‘Jerusalem Post’ report on Tuesday. Netanyahu is encouraging them to defect saying that “Olmert is clearly out of touch”.

As Netanyahu demands Jerusalem is not divided, he continues to enjoy popularity in Israeli polls. Olmert, on the other hand, is in a totally unenviable position whereby he is damned by the right-wing of Israel if he does suggest that parts of Jerusalem goes to Palestinian control in a future Palestinian state and damned by the Palestinians if he doesn’t. Not only are the talks doomed to failure for the Palestinians but they seemed to be doomed for failure for Olmert’s own future as well.

Apart from not wanting any part of Jerusalem to be divided, the Israeli right-wing parties are also against the Palestinians having any kind of state of their own, let alone a part of Jerusalem to go with it. Olmert has already told the Knesset that any agreements made at the Annapolis meeting will come to the Knesset for ratification prior to being finally accepted, so he has already doomed any agreement – especially if there is any mention of a piece of Jerusalem being hived off to the Palestinians as part of the deal. A petition has already been signed by more than half of Knesset members stating they would not support a divided Jerusalem. Since the Palestinians will not agree to statehood without at least a part of Jerusalem being part of the deal, the talks are doomed to fail. If, after the failure of the talks which most pundits are already predicting, Olmert still insists on following the road to a two-state solution then his opposition in the Knesset could easily oust him with a vote of no confidence which would put Netanyahu either straight into the Prime Ministership or, if there is an election, his popularity would more than likely get him there anyway.

THE LIES OF AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER JOHN HOWARD EXPOSED YET AGAIN.

On 31 March 2007 Australian Prime Minister John Howard in a doorstop interview was asked: “Is it likely that he'll [David Hicks] be released, perhaps just after the election and Green's leader Bob Brown saying that this sentence has been designed with the election in mind. How do you feel about....” to which Howard, cutting off the reporter, responded: “Well that is ridiculous. I mean Bob Brown of course would say that. We didn't impose the sentence, the sentence was imposed by the Military Commission and the plea bargain was worked out between the military prosecution and Mr Hicks's lawyers and the suggestion that of Senator Brown that it's got something to do with the Australian election is absurd.”

It turns out that the plea bargain wasn’t worked out between the military prosecution and Mr. Hick’s lawyers after all. Indeed, it was actually worked out between John Howard himself and US Vice-President Dick Cheney personally.

It seems Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown was right after all and, now that the election draws nearer, it seems that it had everything to do with the election – only not quite as Howard anticipated.

Cheney had visited Australia between 22 and 27 February 2007 and in a joint press conference in Sydney on 24 February 2007 it was obvious that the Hicks case had been talked about extensively during their meetings. However, both Howard and Cheney had told the press that they merely wanted to expedite the matter through the US ‘judicial’ system as quickly as possible. There was no mention of any ‘deal’ having been made then and in the 31 March 2007 doorstop, as we have seen, Howard denied that any deal had been made.

The lie has been revealed after a story in ‘Harpers’ by Scott Horton happened to mention the deal while writing an article about justice at Gitmo generally. Horton writes:
“Another officer cited the case of David Hicks. ‘One of our staffers was present when Vice President Cheney interfered directly to get Hicks’s plea bargain deal. He did it, apparently, as part of a deal cut with [Australian Prime Minister] Howard. I kept thinking: this is the sort of thing that used to go on behind the Iron Curtain, not in America. And then it struck me how much this entire process had disintegrated into a political charade. It’s demoralizing for all of us’.”

Now the Howard minions in his government departments are scurrying around to ensure that Hicks, due for release at the end of the year, keeps his mouth shut about the deal by demanding that Hicks is placed under a control order on his release which will ‘restrict Hicks' movements and communications and require him to regularly report to police for up to 12 months’ according to Australia’s ABC.

While the polls look very ominous for Howard and his Liberal government as the 24 November 2007 Australian general election draws ever closer, the last thing Howard needs, both for the short term when looking at his problem from the election point of view, is to be revealed once again as a liar and, from the long term point of view, having history, a subject that Howard himself has always personally revered, reveal him to be nothing more that a liar when the history of his own era is written.

John Howard proves once again that far from being a Great Australian Statesman, he remains just a Lying Tyrant. And that is how history will remember him.

THE ISRAELI ENDGAME IS A ‘GREATER ISRAEL’; THERE IS NO ROOM IN A ‘GREATER ISRAEL’ FOR A PALESTINIAN STATE.

THE QUICKER THE WORLD WAKES UP TO THIS REALITY, THE QUICKER THE WORLD CAN DEMAND THE ONLY REAL SOLUTION THERE CAN BE – THE ONE-STATE SOLUTION.

Nobody it seems, least of all Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is holding their breath in anticipation of anything meaningful coming from the upcoming ‘peace’ talks between Israel and the Palestinians to take place – or at least planned to take place – in either November or December at Annapolis in the US.

In the latest upset the Israelis have claimed that they have unearthed a plot to kill Israeli Prime Minister Olmert. The Palestinians in turn allege that the Israeli claim is just another ploy by which talks can be delayed or put off. The reality is that the right-wing Israeli Zionists do not want a Palestinian state to exist. They are backed by the convergence of powerfully influential pro-Israeli interests in the US consisting of neoconservatives, Christian Zionists and the right-wing Israeli lobby. Going through the motions of attempting peace talks toward some kind of settlement leading to a Palestinian state is only pandering to American public opinion and the Bush administrations efforts to seek support for such talks in order for it to appear that the US is trying to bring about a settlement to the Middle East crisis in general.

For the Israeli Zionists and their supporters in the US a Palestinian state is most definitely not the endgame they want. The endgame for the Israeli Zionists, the neoconservatives, the Christian Zionists and the Israeli lobby is the creation of a Greater Israel which includes the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and hopefully even south Lebanon up to the Litani River.

The quicker the rest of the world realise that this is the only endgame that the Israeli Zionists want then the quicker the world can begin to demand, via the UN, the only conceivable solution to the Israeli-Palestine problem and that is the one-state solution whereby the Israeli and Palestinian people live freely together in all of the Palestine lands governed by a secular democratic government elected by all of its peoples that operates without favour to either Jews or Arabs based on race and which allows all the freedoms expected of a modern democratic, multicultural and tolerant society.

The alternative is more of the same which will ultimately destroy the Middle East and possibly even our world.

‘FINAL CONFRONTATION’ NEWS.

OLMERT COMES AWAY EMPTY HANDED FROM MEETING WITH PUTIN – OR DOES HE?

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert paid a quick visit to Russia yesterday to meet President Vladimir Putin anxious to hear what Putin had to say to President Ahmadinejad of Iran who Putin had visited in Tehran only the day before.

The rapidity of Olmert’s visit could well be an indicator that Israel and the US are ready to move on in their quest to deal Iran a blow that it will find difficult to recover from and hopefully, from Israel’s and America’s point of view, usher in the desired ‘regime change’ that Israel needs before it can go ahead with dealing with Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the occupied territories.

President Bush has said that he is determined to go down the diplomatic road to achieving a ‘settlement’ of some kind with Iran over Iran’s alleged ‘nuclear ambitions’. The problem is, as far as Iran is concerned, there is no ‘settlement’ to be reached because Iran doesn’t have any ‘nuclear ambitions’ beyond generating electricity from nuclear powered stations.

The US and Israel are going down the ‘diplomatic road’ first simply because they have to in order to garner as much support as possible from the world community for an eventual attack on Iran that they hope will result in regime change. However, the US and Israel, as well as the Russians, know full well that Iran is not anywhere near having a program that is able to enrich uranium beyond that which is required for electrical power generation. The Russians, indeed, would in particular know because it is they that are helping build the nuclear plants for Iran. Furthermore, a nuclear armed Iran is not in Russia’s interests any more than it is in Israel’s or the US.

But, for the sake of diplomatic appearances, the Israelis and the US must continue to travel down the ‘diplomatic road’ all the while knowing that it is a pointless exercise that achieves nothing accept buy time for the Iranians and the Russians to try and avert a catastrophe that could end in a confrontation that escalates far beyond just the Middle East region.

Olmert went to Russia to see Putin, not to ask Putin to support further sanctions by the UN against Iran – Olmert knows that neither Russia or China are likely to support further sanction – but because he needed to ask anyway as part of the ‘diplomatic road’ Israel and the US need to travel down before launching their attack against Iran.

Over this coming weekend and during the first part of next week Olmert will be travelling to Europe to speak to French President Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown both of whom are likely to support Olmert’s request for sanctions. Visiting Sarkozy and Brown at least keeps up the appearance of ‘diplomacy’. At the end of next week or during the week after, the Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, will be heading off to China on a similar mission where the outcome is likely to be the same as Olmert’s visit to Russia – pointless.

Without Russian or Chinese support, Israeli and US requests for UN sponsored sanctions are doomed. The ‘diplomatic road’, as far as the Israelis and the US is concerned, will have been fully travelled.

For all his trouble all Olmert got for his efforts was a suggestion from Putin that Israel negotiate with Iran over the ‘nuclear’ problem. Clearly, that is not going to happen because both know there is no ‘nuclear’ problem to negotiate over and both know clearly what the Israelis really want.

The upshot of all this is; the faux ‘diplomatic road’ has as good as come to an end, just as it did prior to the US and their allies launching their attack against Iraq, and this will now leave the US and/or Israel free to tell the world that it has no choice but to deal with the Iran threat in its own way – which, since Iran’s ‘nuclear ambitions’ has always been just a propaganda and rhetoric tool to mask the real intent of Israel and the US, is exactly what Olmert was after in the first place.

Perhaps, looking at it from Olmert’s point of view, he didn’t come away from Putin empty-handed after all.

‘FINAL CONFRONTATION’ NEWS.

WHO BENEFITS FROM THE IRANIAN ASSASSINATION OF PUTIN?

The story in today’s Sydney Morning Herald is an interesting piece of propaganda from the 'West'. The report states that Russian “special services have been warned of a plot to assassinate President Vladimir Putin when he visits Iran on Tuesday”. While the report doesn’t say who has warned the ‘Russian special services’ of this pending ‘assassination’, one could be forgiven for seeming to be cynical after taking a fairly easily assessed guess at who it was simply by asking who would have most to gain by issuing such a warning.

Whoever the ‘assassins’ are, one may rest assured that it simply will not happen. Why will it not happen? Because there never was a plan to assassinate Putin; just putting it about that there is, or was, a plan is all that was intended. The damage is done. The intention, of course, is to wedge Iran and Russia.

Of all of the reports only the far-right Zionist mouthpiece, DEBKAfile, which has connections to Israeli intelligence, can come up with reasons why anyone would want to assassinate Putin. As usual, DEBKAfile have all the answers. They report that:

“…intelligence sources report that the assassination plot, hatched by three gangs which joined hands ad hoc, was betrayed to the Russians by a Chechen who was detained before he managed to slip into Iran and join the conspirators. The three groups are: Chechen separatists, whose revolt is almost completely crushed in Russia; an al Qaeda-Taliban group bidding to settle scores with Putin for his denial of Muslim rights in Kosovo; and an ultra-extremist wing of the clerical regime, which accuses Russia of selling out Iranian interests as an American vassal.”

One need not use too much of ones imagination to hazard a guess as to where this information came from especially considering that none of the other reports on this story in the mainstream media were game enough to cite DEBKAfile or its accusations.

From a propaganda point of view DEBKAfile actually do themselves a disservice. The mainstream media reports do not attempt to explain who is behind the ‘assassination attempt’ only saying that it will be in Iran and by “a number of groups of suicide bombers” leaving the reader to assume that it is Iranian suicide bomber groups and, of course, taking that to its logical conclusion in the minds of those that don’t know any better and have succumbed to just about anything that is told to them in the MSM, one should assume that it is some of the more radical elements within the Iranian government that are behind the plot with official denial that any such thing is likely to happen to top off the story. As always with DEBKAfile, they let themselves down as a propaganda unit for Mossad by going over the top with their stories and providing far too much information; so much so that it simply becomes totally unbelievable.

The reality is that the only people to benefit from putting out this story are the Israelis. The Iranians certainly would not be benefiting from Putin’s death; indeed, they would be losing one of their strongest allies.


THE ISRAELI BOMBING OF SYRIA STORY TAKES A NEW TWIST.

The story of the Israeli bombing raid on Syria early last month has taken a new tack. Now we are being told that the building that was attacked was still under construction and that it was intended to be part of a Syrian ‘nuclear reactor’. The story about the Israeli special forces penetrating the plant to steal the ‘nuclear material’ has disappeared; given this new story, such an adventure would now seem superfluous given that there would not have been any ‘nuclear material’ there yet.

The story has also provided neoconservative propagandists some grist for their particular mill. Notorious neocon warhawk, Joshua Muravchik, who has already advocated bombing Iran, has waded into the ideological fray over Syria’s so-called nuclear ambitions. He finds the potential of a ‘nuclear armed’ Syria about as dangerous as a ‘nuclear armed’ Iran, in fact even more so due to Syria’s far closer proximity to Israel.

But, again, when one casts aside all the propaganda and rhetoric about Syria and its so-called nuclear ambitions, we end up with absolutely nothing. Nowhere is there any evidence presented to even suggest that Syria has any kind of nuclear program or ambitions. All we have is the say-so of the US and Israel and its mouthpieces – and we are expected to believe this stuff?

WHAT WENT WRONG WITHIN WEBDIARY PART 1

The following article by ex-Webdiary Director Craig Rowley is published following a delay intended to provide Margo Kingston and David Roffey an opportunity to respond to Craig Rowley’s rebuttal of David Roffey’s claims that Craig Rowley had acted deceitfully at Webdiary. There has been no response from either Margo Kingston or David Roffey.

The following is Craig’s rebuttal and counter claim regarding David Roffey’s own deceit.


DNP Dz abuse (however justified) Webdiary Admin:
What Went Wrong Within Webdiary - Part 1

by Craig Rowley

My real name is the same as that which I have used online since I first had any content I'd created published to the World Wide Web. I do not hide my identity. I am Craig Rowley and I was a director of Webdiary Pty Ltd, a company formed by volunteers who believed that what Margo Kingston had made was good and well worth the extraordinary effort to maintain, develop, improve and grow it. These few people and I, we knew what Margo had suffered to see her dream become real and we saw the value in helping her keep that dream alive. Then some time this year something went wrong within Webdiary. This is the story of what has happened within the Webdiary management team in this past year as I have seen it unfold.

I tell this story in the hope that it prompts reflection by some members of that team, and by people who've been part of the Webdiary community, on what it means to be as the motto says: "Independent, Ethical, Accountable and Transparent". In essence, I hope that Webdiary can do what is necessary to once again return to focus on the noble aims Margo had set out in the Webdiary Charter and proudly claim that the motto she bestowed on her creation is truly reflective of its character. I hope the reputation of Webdiary can be restored by how it handles my own act of accountability and transparency in recounting this story.

Before turning to the chronological telling of what happened within Webdiary (that'll form the next part in what will be a short series of posts), it is useful from the outset to explain something of the way Webdiary has operated and how it has been managed.

An explanation of the title I have used for this post is a good place to start. The title I have used is what David Roffey, the Managing Director of Webdiary Pty, had added to a comment not published by Webdiary, a comment submitted by Paul Morrella on September 4, 2007 at 2:16pm. The standard operating procedure for those who've volunteered their time to moderate the comments submitted to Webdiary is to review each comment to ensure publication will be in accord with Webdiary's Editorial Policy. The acronym "DNP" means Do Not Publish, and it is added to those comments which go against the standard set out in the Editorial Policy. "Dz" signifies that the moderator in this instance was David Roffey. He decided that the comment submitted by "Paul Morrella" could reasonably be categorised as "abuse". However, for a reason that only he can properly attempt to justify, David Roffey also added those words within parentheses - (however justified). The "Webdiary Admin" part is the start of the title that the person using the name "Paul Morrella" included with the comment he had submitted.

For some reason, David Roffey determined that the comment by "Paul Morrella" was "abuse" and then indicated to the other Webdiary directors and volunteers working behind the scenes (for by logic they are the only people who David would have counted on being able to see his contemptible appendage) that he thought it was justified abuse. It is essential to make completely transparent what that comment contained in order to demonstrate what David Roffey's decisions represent. So, here it is, the comment in full with the element seen as abusive underlined (Ed note: 'blogspot' does not allow underline function or, if it does, I dont know how to activate it. Apologies):

‘DNP Dz abuse (however justified) Webdiary Admin’
Submitted by Paul Morrella on September 4, 2007 - 2:16pm.

I have read the Phill [sic] Kendall blog on occasion. This person is obviously unbalanced. The anger, and paranoia displayed by him on multiple occasions is palpable. For that reason I decided some time back not to enter into any further discourse with him. I have felt he is a person that not only looks for conflict; he feels an emotional need for it. The creation of imagined enemies all around would suggest this.

Unfortunately we never really know who we converse with over the net. Whilst most have a sense of proportion it is clear a minority do not. For this reason I will avoid any further comment here in the hope this person does find the help he obviously needs. I find the whole episode highly disturbing, and something I wish to refrain from entering into.

PS His claims (and there have been numbers of them) are completely, and disburbingly [sic] bizarre.
----------


Whilst the statement within that comment seen as abusive has been highlighted, it also contains several other errors.

First, the person using the name "Paul Morrella" misspells Phil Kendall’s name. Then, this person makes outrageous and ill-informed claims about Phil's state of mental health (as highlighted) and then claims to have "decided some time back not to enter into any further discourse" with Phil when in fact he had actually engaged in submitting comments about Phil Kendall, even after Phil had been banned from making any further comment on Webdiary.

Also, contrary to the opinion of "Paul Morrella", it is more likely to be true that we seldom really know who we converse with over the net. Perhaps it can be argued that one never really know one's self, let alone really knows anyone else through and through. However, pulling back from diving deep into questions of phenomenology, it is generally the case that whenever a community forms online there are instances where individuals seek and make in the real world a real connection with the people they interact with online. For example, I have had real world contact with Margo and each of the other directors. I do know them reasonably well (and I'll say more on this later).

One can also learn the patterns that repeat in a person's "online voice" and so in a sense can come to know a little about that person through their online ‘character. Based on what I know of the person presenting himself as "Paul Morrella", I am reasonably certain that he is not a member of any of the professions that qualify an individual to make informed comment on the mental health of another person. So, not only is his opinion an inexpert and in all probability very wrong one on the facts, it is indeed obviously abusive toward Phill Kendall and entirely unethical when judged by the criteria set out in Webdiary Ethics and the Editorial Policy.

Further, the person using the name "Paul Morrella" states that he will "avoid any further comment here in the hope this person …", etc. That proved to be a most hypocritical statement because later "Paul" submitted not just one but a number of comments that continued his cowardly attack on Phil Kendall.

Clearly, when judged against the criteria set out in Webdiary's Editorial Policy there was a lot wrong with the comment by "Paul Morrella" and the decision to mark it DNP was the correct one. Why then, did David Roffey decide to show to the others behind the scenes that he thought the abuse was justified? Why did Webdiary's Managing Director effectively join in the abuse?

The answers to those questions I do not know for sure. As indicated earlier, only David can properly account for his actions. However, I can offer what I know of David and the history leading up to this event in order to inform you sufficiently to help you test your own hypotheses about what the answer to the question may be. I'll do that fully in the next part by returning to the point where things started to go wrong within Webdiary and following the chronology through the time in which David Roffey and Margo Kingston started to routinely banish anybody who dares to question whether the decisions made by them accord with the Editorial Policy the published.

For now I'll just briefly explain why this example of unethical behaviour by the Managing Director of Webdiary is crucial to the telling of the whole story. I had by this time already resigned as a director of Webdiary and in part that was due to taking a stand against the non-consultative management style taken by David Roffey. The events described here then sadly mark the beginning of the end of my "membership" of what remains of what was once a much broader Webdiary community, for after I discovered David Roffey's unethical behaviour, I challenged him to be ethical, accountable and transparent. For doing that I was punished.

What I discovered was that David had published a comment submitted by "Paul Morrella" a short time after the one that was marked "DNP Dz abuse (however justified) …":

‘Angela Ryan’
Submitted by Paul Morrella on September 5, 2007 - 11:56am.

Angela Ryan

Anyway, perspective is always good. I think Phil has a good heart and that is always respected.

Well possibly, though, you have always agreed with him or at least never publicly voiced any difference of opinion. There are a few on this site it seems (including me apparently) that have unfortunately not had the same degree of foresight.

I personally find it sad, and disturbing, that a person would feel the need to find their enemies (imagined in my case) in cyberspace. Taking internet discourse regarding politics, and general issues so seriously is not something I would consider very healthy. Sometimes it is just helpful to walk away from the computer monitor, and find a true sense of proportion.
----------

Consequently, I submitted to Webdiary the following comment and, after waiting some time to see it published, I found David Roffey had appended his "editorial" comment to it:

'Ethics?'
Submitted by Craig Rowley on September 5, 2007 - 12:41pm.


Why is it that Paul Morrella can question Phil Kendall's motives, ethics, and mental health openly on Webdiary, but Phil Kendall could not (before being banned) openly ask the same questions on Webdiary about Paul Morrella's motives, ethics, and mental health?

David R: anyone can question anyone's motives and ethics. I'm not aware of Paul questioning Phil's mental health - his most recent comment on a sense of proportion applies to a fair few Webdiarists. And Phil wasn't banned for asking questions on those, he was banned for continually and persistently questioning identity when Margo had specifically said that she had checked, was satisfied, and would not publish any further comment on the subject, and for repeatedly accusing Margo and other editors of hypocrisy and other misdemeanours for sticking to that ruling. You can only insult Margo so many times before she's had enough.
----------

Given David Roffey's editorial statement, I then submitted the following comment marked NFP (Not For Publication):

‘Dz – publishing previous DNP: That’s a lie David. and I’v (the rest of the title: ... and I've the evidence)’
Submitted by Craig Rowley on September 5, 2007 - 3:42pm.


Dz: I was replying to your accusation that Paul had got away with a published comment, which he hasn't. If we banned everyone who was DNP'd, you'd have gone long ago.

Dz you say "I'm not aware of Paul questioning Phil's mental health...".

Yesterday, Paul Morrella submitted this comment:

‘DNP Dz abuse (however justified) Webdiary Admin’
Submitted by Paul Morrella on September 4, 2007 - 2:16pm.


I have read the Phill Kendall blog on occasion. This person is obviously unbalanced. The anger, and paranoia displayed by him on multiple occasions is palpable. For that reason I decided some time back not to enter into any further discourse with him. I have felt he is a person that not only looks for conflict; he feels an emotional need for it. The creation of imagined enemies all around would suggest this.

Unfortunately we never really know who we converse with over the net. Whilst most have a sense of proportion it is clear a minority do not. For this reason I will avoid any further comment here in the hope this person does find the help he obviously needs. I find the whole episode highly disturbing, and something I wish to refrain from entering into.

PS His claims (and there have been numbers of them) are completely, and disburbingly [sic] bizarre.


And I note that you had a shot at Phil as well with the "(however justified)" addition to the title. You were aware, very aware.

I think you should set the record straight and apologise for lying.
----------

Note that David Roffey added his own editorial comment to my comment, which indicates that he intended to publish it. I was advised by a friend that it was published and remained briefly available to readers and then disappeared without explanation. So, in the end, David decided to not publish my comment and his editorial retort despite there being no 'rule' or guideline with Editorial Policy on which to base that decision.

There are a couple important things demonstrated by that comment David had added. First, it can be taken by any reasonable person as an admission that David Roffey had indeed been aware of the abusive comment and the line being taken by "Paul Morrella" and that he'd signalled to those inside Webdiary's backroom that he thought personal abuse of another person (one he and Margo had already banned from making any further comment on Webdiary) no matter how wrong was in his opinion ‘justified’. Second, it shows that David's way when challenged with reason and logic on my part is to turn to attack and try to threaten me for daring to offer a defence for a man who could not defend himself. Third, it shows how quickly transparency is thrown out by David when it becomes inconvenient to him.

What should be obvious by this point, but perhaps I need to bring it to prominence, is that I still had the ability to see both what was and was not published by Webdiary on the conversation threads associated with those posts I had authored. The comments I expose to all here were made on the conversation thread associated with 'What if...? Solving the Iran stand-off'. After I saw that David Roffey had decided to cover up his lie rather than be ethical, accountable and transparent about it, I tried to formulate a comment that could not under any circumstance be categorised as a DNP without that being in itself another example of departure from the published Editorial Policy. My first attempt was this:

'DNP: Dz same Also … why wasn’t this observed?'
Submitted by Craig Rowley on September 5, 2007 - 4:28pm.


In the DNP marked comment submitted by Paul Morrella he stated:

For this reason I will avoid any further comment here in the hope this person does find the help he obviously needs.

Yet he came back the very next day to make further comment here and it was comment on Phil Kendall. One of you published it.

Why didn't editors observe that and contact Paul to tell him it would be best if he stuck to his supposed intention to not comment here, particularly on the very thing that could injure Phil?
----------

As you can see it was marked DNP by David Roffey. Why? Those familiar with Webdiary's Editorial Policy will see that it clearly does not contravene any rule expressed in that policy.
I tried again, submitting this:

‘There he is talking about others health again’
Submitted by Craig Rowley on September 5, 2007 - 6:32pm.


How many times is Paul Morrella going to be published making comments about the health of someone else?
----------

That wasn't published either. I can't show the DNP marks in this instance because I'd only copied this and subsequent comments I tried to submit at this time before they were "processed" by a member of the Webdiary team. Suffice to say that you'll find neither that comment nor this next few published on Webdiary if you look back over the conversation thread today:

‘Look … there is a theme here’
Submitted by Craig Rowley on September 5, 2007 - 6:37pm.


David Roffey you say "I'm not aware of Paul questioning Phil's mental health...".

Yesterday, as you and I know, Paul Morrella submitted a comment yesterday which you did not publish. It contains a stark example of Paul questioning Phil's mental health.

You knew about it because you left your mark on the unpublished comment. So you lied when you said you were "not aware", didn't you?

I think you should set the record straight and apologise for lying.

I also think it is unethical for you to keep publishing comments by Paul Morrella that do so much as even hint at questions about the mental health of another person who comments (or commented in the case of the people you banned).


‘David you lied and need to set the record straight’
Submitted by Craig Rowley on September 5, 2007 - 6:41pm.


David Roffey you say "I'm not aware of Paul questioning Phil's mental health...".

Yesterday, as you and I and all know, Paul Morrella submitted a comment yesterday which you did not publish. It contains a stark example of Paul questioning Phil's mental health.

You knew about that unethical questioning by Paul of Phil's mental health because you left your mark on the unpublished comment.

So you lied when you said you were "not aware", didn't you?

I think you should set the record straight and apologise for lying.

I also think it is unethical for you to keep publishing comments by Paul Morrella that do so much as even hint at questions about the mental health of another person who comments (or commented in the case of the people you banned).
----------

The reason for submitting in a short time two comments trying to convey the same message on this occasion was that I realised after submitting the first that I should have mentioned that all the people working behind the scenes at Webdiary would have already or in time know he had just lied to the broader community involved in the conversation as well as regular and occasional readers of Webdiary.

Seeing that other comments were being published, but not mine, I then submitted this comment thinking David was "on duty":

‘anyone can question anyone’s motives and ethics’
Submitted by Craig Rowley on September 5, 2007 - 6:48pm.

David Roffey today you said:

anyone can question anyone's motives and ethics.

I am questioning yours now because you and I both know you were aware of Paul Morrella's inappropriate comments about the mental health of another 'diarist and yet you subsequently said:

I'm not aware of Paul questioning Phil's mental health...

You were aware he had submitted comment questioning Phil's mental health at the time you published that editorial comment. I think you should explain yourself.

Be accountable.
----------

When that was not published, and yet comment by others was being published, I submitted this comment:

‘NFP – Dz get this straight’
Submitted by Craig Rowley on September 5, 2007 - 7:06pm.

You can keep reacting to presentation of the fact that you've made mistakes by getting mad at me, but it does not alter the facts.

I understand that it is your natural reaction to get angry with me when I challenge you, but when you have acted in a way that warrants challenging then I will do it.

It would be good if we could start talking about a solution to this situation soon. As I see it, this could have been solved a long time ago.

It could have been solved by a simple and consistent editorial approach where every time C Parsons (now as Eliot Ramsey) tried the 'remorseless ridicule' thing his comment is DNP and then at the next acceptable comment he's told by the editor that the earlier comments were not appropriate for publication and why (it runs counter to the 'civil discourse' standard Margo desired for the space).

Same goes for Jay White when he baited Phil Kendall on his return to Webdiary as 'new user' Paul Morrella. You could have DNP'd the 'baiting' comments and on the next acceptable comment explained why targeting and baiting (acting like a troll) runs counter to the 'civil discourse' standard.

That way you probably wouldn't have had to ban anybody.
----------

Notice that last one was submitted marked NFP. I was suggesting to David Roffey and the other Webdiary insiders who could read this comment that I would not back down from defending another 'diarist to a bully even if he is the Managing Director of Webdiary Pty Ltd. David's way, you see, is to attack anyone who challenges his decision making. I was also suggesting a reasonable and sensible solution to an ongoing problem with David's decision-making. A problem I will bring into focus in the next post.

More in Part 2 ...

ALREADY THE WHIFF OF PEACE IN PALESTINE HAS DISAPPEARED EVEN BEFORE TALKS BEGIN.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has already conceded to the extreme right-wing Israeli Zionists. He told the Knesset, directing his remarks specifically to the right-wing parties that make up Olmert’s coalition, Shas, an ultra-orthodox Judaist party, and Israel Beiteinu, a secular extreme right-wing Zionist political party, on Monday that there will be no Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank ‘unless Palestinian terrorism is stopped’. Since Palestinian ‘terrorism’ is actually Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, one can readily see that Israeli platitudes about peace and talk of a two-state solution are merely a ploy by which the Israeli Zionists can point the finger of blame for the talk’s failures at the Palestinians. The reality is that, like the Likud party, the Shas and Israel Beiteinu do not want a Palestinian state to ever exist. The goal of Israeli Zionists is a Greater Israel that ultimately includes the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And the recent appropriation of 1,100 dunams (110 ha.) of land from four Palestinian villages between East Jerusalem and the West Bank by the IDF only reinforces the notion that Israel has no intention of allowing the Palestinians a state of their own.

The quicker the world wakes up to the reality that a separate Palestinian sovereign state is not on the agenda of political parties like Likud, Shas and Israel Beiteinu then the quicker the world will realise that there can only be one solution – and that is the one-state solution of an integrated Palestine.

PALESTINE: TWO DIFFERENT ONE-STATE SOLUTIONS; ONE SHARING AND EGALITARIAN, THE OTHER RACIST AND EXCLUSIONIST.

The two-state solution as an answer to the Israeli-Palestine conflict is, as most the world learnt long ago, never, ever going to happen – and nor would it ever work. Even more to the point however, is the fact that neither side really wants a partitioned two-state solution.

Next month a few of the stake-holders who claim to have an interest in a resolution to the Israeli Palestine conflict will meet in the US to discuss, yet again, the possibility of a two-state solution. The plan at this initial meeting is simply to plan further meetings but for the participants it buys a little more time and makes it look good in the eyes of the world at large who will assume that at least some effort is being made to solve the problem.

The reality, however, is that the situation is no different today than it was immediately after the al-Nakba in 1948; the Palestinians want their lands back and the Israeli Zionists want to keep all that they have so far taken from the Palestinians. Not content with that, the Israeli Zionists also want to take from the Palestinians all of what little they still have left in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Talk of a two-state solution is a waste of time. What the Palestinians want are their lands returned to them; a goal a two-state solution will not be able to accommodate. The Palestinians also want a right of return for the original refugees and their descendents who were ethnically cleansed from Palestine when the Israelis took over; this is a subject that the Israelis will not even discuss. The Israelis want to keep their settlements inside the West Bank; an aspiration that the Palestinians could not possibly tolerate in a two-state solution.

The Israeli Zionist extremists, which includes the Israeli Likud Party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, do not even want a Palestinian state of any kind to exist, and, indeed, would secretly prefer, though, for obvious reasons, wouldn’t publicly say so, that all Palestinians in the Gaza and the West Bank be transferred to Jordan leaving those areas entirely free for Jewish-Israeli settlement, full colonisation and eventual incorporation into a Greater Israel State based on Jewish occupation and excluding the Palestinian Arabs. This is the Israeli Zionist ideal of the one-state solution. It excludes entirely the participation of the Palestinian people and is therefore totally racist.

The only possible ultimate solution is a one-state solution whereby both Israelis and Palestinians live together in a secularly governed democratic and integrated single nation.

This is the solution that Dr. Ghada Karmi, the Palestinian academic, is promoting in her visit to Australia which culminated in last Saturday evening’s Edward Said Memorial Lecture which Dr. Karmi delivered at the Adelaide University in South Australia. It is the solution that the peoples of the world should insist upon because it is the only solution that will provide a lasting peace to both the Palestinian and Israeli people and, ultimately, the much needed stability that the region so desperately needs.

A world that supports the one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict will benefit because the successful outcome of a world-endorsed one-state solution will have far more influence in promoting the cause of stability and peace through democracy throughout the rest of the region and will be far more successful than the kind of false ‘democracy’ that is now being forced down the throats of the Arab and Central Asian peoples by the guns and bombs of the US and their allies.

‘FINAL CONFRONTATION’ NEWS.

‘SYRIA HAD NUCLEAR FACILITY’ STORY IS BACK ON THE FRONT BURNER.

During the time that the Israeli Defence Forces blocked all news from Israeli sources regarding its attack on Syria back in early September it was leaked that the Israeli Air Force (IAF) had bombed a Syrian nuclear facility that contained nuclear material from North Korea. Quickly realising that bombing a facility that was ‘hot’ with nuclear material would have been a completely stupid thing to do given that radio active nuclear dust could well have spread all over the Middle East, including Israel, and beyond, it was decided to embellish the ‘leak’ of the Syria nuke story by adding that just prior to the air raid a special forces ground operation was mounted to remove the ‘nuclear’ material from the facility.

Then, realising that this story was really pushing the bounds of credibility into the realms of James Bond-like fantasy, the story was changed yet again. This time the air raid was said to have been against North Korean missiles that had found its way to Syria.

Now it seems the story has morphed yet again apparently in order to perpetuate the ‘Syria going nuclear’ myth as part of the continuing propaganda and rhetoric geared to bolster public support for the Final Confrontation between the US-Israel and Iran-Syria. The Jerusalem Post, citing an ABC News report, now claims that the IAF did indeed bomb a Syrian facility but one that contained ‘North Korean nuclear technology’ rather than actual ‘North Korean nuclear material’ implying that there was no danger from nuclear contamination of the region as a result of the bombing. Predictably, no further mention of the James Bond-like ground raid on the ‘facility’ is made; a part of the story that seems to have quietly disappeared from the pages of this particular piece of Israeli military history.

The ABC News report also mentions that the US was privy to Israeli plans well in advance of the planned strike and, indeed, had debated whether or not the Israelis should go a head. In the end, so the article implies, Israel went ahead despite US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s opposition to the strike. Her failure to halt the raid is further evidence demonstrating that Rice is increasingly losing influence over both Israeli policies and the polices of their supporters in the Bush administration, especially Vice-President Dick Cheney and his hawk supporters among the neoconservatives who are itching to get the Final Confrontation against Syria and Iran off the ground.


BUSH SAYS HE HAS ‘NO PLANS TO ATTACK IRAN’.

On 29 March 2002 Bush also told the world he had no plans to attack Iraq. Bush’s non-existent credibility isn’t exactly on the line anymore – he’s told that many lies that the world simply doesn’t believe a word he says. The only difference between the propaganda and rhetoric in the lead up to the attack on Iraq and the lead up to the coming attack on Iran is that this time the US only has Israel as an ally.

Of course, if President Bush insists that there will be no attack on Iran, then there is always the ‘lone deranged gunman’ option. Vice-President Dick Cheney, currently pushing Bush to bomb Iran, once having been sworn in as President, would not hesitate to bomb Iran in his push for the Final Confrontation.

DAVID ROFFEY AT WEBDIARY SHOWS HIS TRUE COLOURS

David Roffey, company secretary and editor at the Australian current affairs blog, Webdiary, has exposed his true colours over the recent debacle involving ex- Webdiary director Craig Rowley who Roffey has accused, without presenting any evidence whatsoever, of using multiple identities in debate.

This accusation demonstrates Roffey’s outrageous hypocrisy over the question of identities of debaters at Webdiary. As I have noted many times before in previous posts, the extreme right-wing commentator Eliot Ramsey continues to be allowed to peddle his propaganda despite everyone being fully aware that this person is none other than C. Parsons, an equally notorious peddler of right-wing propaganda at Webdiary in the past.

As a direct result of Craig Rowley being banned for reasons that no evidence was presented to support I wrote to Roffey saying the following:

David Roffey
It’s a pity that Webdiary has seen fit to ban Craig Rowley accusing him of adopting other identities, an accusation, I might add, that is not accompanied by any evidence – at least none that you have offered. This banning is gross hypocrisy if you do not ban Eliot Ramsey for the same reasons. There is abundant evidence demonstrating that Eliot Ramsey is C. Parsons, who used to post at Webdiary just prior to being banned himself yet you have made no mention at all of Eliot Ramsey’s deceitfulness or commented on why he is allowed to continue posting while you ban others.One now needs to wonder about your own credibility, Roffey, as well as that of Kingston’s who we know accepted Parsons as part of the right-wing with which the left and centre commentators could ‘debate’ with providing grist for Webdiary’s mill. Kingston has in the past openly said that keeping the right-wing commentators were essential if Webdiary were to be viable; indeed, commenting on the Holocaust and alternative ideas about the events of 9/11 were banned – and Kingston said so at the time – because the right-wing Webdiarists threatened to leave if such debate were allowed. Kingston as we know caved in to the right and their threats. It seems now that you and Kingston are further pandering to the right-wing’s whims by adopting double standards about who can and cannot post at Webdiary.I know that Kingston has suffered stress from death threats, etc., but perhaps if she had stood up to the right-wing and their thugs in the first place she might feel a bit better about herself. Pandering to the likes of Eliot Ramsey and their right-wing garbage certainly does not help and Webdiary’s continued accommodation of these liars and fraudsters reveals only the true corrupt position of Webdiary management.
Lataan


To which Roffey replied simply…

Damian you continue to be the sort of complete tosser that drove me away from the left thirty years ago ...
David Roffey

My response to that was:

I assume then, Roffey, since you are not able to address the issues I have raised with regard to both Craig Rowley’s banning and Eliot Ramsey still being allowed a platform at Webdiary that you are indeed part of the deceit and fraud that has reared its head there. Furthermore, since you concede that you are now no longer part of the Left, one can assume that you are now a party to the right-wing and support their lies and deceit and, indeed, are a part of it.
The Left, Roffey, I can assure you are far better off without lying and deceiving ‘tossers’ like you in it.
Lataan


Craig Rowley has asked me if he could air his side of the story at this blog and I have invited him to do so since Webdiary is unlikely to allow him to respond to Roffey’s accusation there. Since many Webdiarists do visit my blog, I think it is only fair that Craig Rowley be provided with an opportunity to have his side of the story told with a strong likelihood that other Webdiarists will be able to read for themselves both sides of the story – something which Webdiary have a very strong history of not otherwise allowing.