The Australian Friends of Palestine Association’s pro-Palestinian protesters are now counting down to 100 consecutive weeks of peaceful protests in the heart of Adelaide, South Australia next month. To some people 100 weeks seems like a long time but if we put it in context with the seemingly inexorable march of Zionism it is insignificant. For at least 5980 weeks Zionists have plotted, planned and executed the theft of Palestinian land and lives to create a Zionist state. They have achieved this by being totally focused on their goals and by being impervious to distractions.
Distractions like United Nations Resolutions would stop most entities in their tracks. However, the state of Israel has shown complete disregard for the 224 UN Resolutions against their treatment of the Palestinians and the country of Palestine. These have been shamelessly swatted away like so many annoying insects. Nothing has stood in the way of the Israeli government continuing to grab Palestinian land.
[Mondo covered the Adelaide protests at 44 weeks, and no press, back here.]
The Zionist attacks on our protests in Adelaide have been mild in comparison to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians but, like Zionism, they have been persistent and increasingly ugly. We have witnessed at close hand the strength of the Christian Zionist movement in Australia. However the Christian Zionist distractions are an obvious but unsuccessful ploy to take our attention away from Palestine. Yelling at us “F— Palestine, what about the homeless?, Aboriginals?, Syrians ?” or whatever red herring is the flavor of the month will not deter us.
In fact, in the last 6 months or so, we have attracted new protesters including a small group of buskers who sing in the Mall at the same time as our protests. Helen and Phil usually perform songs about Palestine by noted political troubadours, David Rovics and Phil Monsour. They have attracted even more attention to the plight of the Palestinians and helped us educate Australians about the truth of Israel’s human rights abuses in Palestine. Above is one moving example of their work, David Rovic’s “Palestine”.
I believe that long range Zionist planning has been shown to be flawed as they did not anticipate the Palestinian call for a worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. They had no idea that this growing grass roots movement would have the same sense of purpose and commitment as Zionist ideologues have shown in the past towards colonizing Palestine. Here in Australia we are starting to see evidence that our BDS campaigns are effective. The 2012 BBC World Service’s survey clearly shows that Australians have changed their attitude to Israel. 65% of Australians now believe that Israel has a negative impact on the world. This is an increase of 7% on the previous year’s result.
The BDS movement may be misrepresented and ridiculed by the mainstream press but the truth of the matter is that BDS actions all over the world are growing and the movement will not be diverted from its goal of a just peace for the Palestinians.
Congratulations and well done to Adelaide BDS’ers, in going out every single week you’ve been more steadfast that us in Melbourne and I think Sydney also. We need to pull our socks up!
Congratulations from across the Tasman. You are doing way better that we are!
Thanks for your encouraging comments. I’ll pass them on to the protesters at the next protest.
Fantastic thing you are doing there. Good on you.
Good for you….keep it up.
Once again thanks for great positive comments. Really helps us. We get a fair bit of abuse in the Mall, on our You Tube channel and now hate mail is arriving at our PO box. Just yesterday someone started a letter to us saying “Hey assholes”and it went downhill from there on including a repulsive suggestion about what this chap would do to myself and another woman in our organization. Do they realize how much damage a letter like that does to their cause?
Keep up the great work, Margaret. It will all count in the end when the bots are defeated. The pop stars and corporations only come on board very late in the game.
link to youtube.com
Hang in there. You must be doing something right, or you wouldn’t be bugging them so much.
Love and appreciation from Sydney.
From Melbourne: It’s good to hear that you are still going – well done. I’m sure that you are having to tolerate lots of abuse. When I’m next over there I’ll come and say hello. Has the ABC reported this, and if not, why not?
Thanks straightline, we’d love to see you in the Mall at one of our protests.Yes, it’s been extraordinary to look at media interest in our protest. I wrote an article for Mondoweiss last year about how we had been protesting for 44 weeks but not one word had appeared in print in our local media. Now our local media is a one man band, the Murdoch owned “The Advertiser”. The following is interesting and I think shows the power of Mondoweiss, 2 weeks after Mondoweiss published the article the Advertiser ran an article on BDS. They did not come down to see or photograph the protests in the Mall but published lots of information about some violent student protests in Melbourne. I have watched hundreds of pro-Palestinian you tubes of flash mobs and protests and they only garner main stream media attention when there is viiolence because that feeds in to the narrative that all Palestinians and their supporters are violent. The only time we will garner mainstream media attention is when there is violence at one of our protests. And believe me the Christian Zionists have doen their utmost to provoke violent reactions.