Phil Weiss: Below is a dialogue with Glenn Condell about the Australian discourse on The Issue. First there's a long piece by Condell. Then I interject a couple questions, and he writes back. Condell:
My three missives to the political leadership of Australia about their
complicit silence on Gaza went unanswered and my letters to the local
broadsheet unpublished. At least I received a reply from Mike Ticher,
letters editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, evasive and wrongheaded
though it was. But the pollies – not a cracker!
Downstream from the leadership in Canberra, there are a few honourable
exceptions to the fearful silence. Greens Senator Bob Brown, an openly
gay veteran of the environmental movement who embarrassed President
Bush with some home truths when he addressed the Australian parliament
before the Iraq war, is characteristically blunt:
'The devastating Israeli military attack on the United Nations
buildings in Gaza, which has reportedly wiped out the relief agencies'
food and medical supplies, should cause a rethink in the Australian
Government's stance, Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown said today. "It
is time the Prime Minister took decisive diplomatic action. He should
start by calling in the Israeli ambassador to express the Australian
people's horror at what is happening in Gaza," Senator Brown said.'
Most notably, Federal Labor MP Julia Irwin managed to have an op-ed published in the Herald, which was admirably forthright:
'You've got to hand it to the Israeli public relations flacks: only
they could convince you that killing children was an act of
self-defence.'
Despite it’s being surrounded by columns from the usual Zionist
apologists, the Herald's associate editor Kerrie Anne Walsh commented
shortly afterward that:
'Ms Irwin's article generated a greater flood of correspondence to The
Sun-Herald than any issue in recent years, the overwhelming majority in
support.'
Unfortunately, not much of it made it past Mr Ticher, who in his weekly report on the letters on 17 January stated:
"As ever most letters focused on moral rights and wrongs: who did what
40 or 60 years ago, who had or had not broken international law and was
or was not justified in certain actions. Those certainly should be
debated, but it would make a change to have a more pragmatic debate
about what might realistically work to change the situation."
(It was Mr Ticher that I dealt with when attempting to have a letter
published in May last year, complaining that the final column of the
Herald's former ME correspondent Ed O'Loughlin – a sane and balanced
journo, who in this last piece included some criticisms of Israel – had
been pulled after Lobby pressure. Mr Ticher edited the life out of my
letter, but it was published (muted hooray!). Mr O'Loughlin has been
replaced by Jason Koutsoukis, who I'm sure is much more palatable to
Lobby tastebuds. With stories during the assault like 'Israel attacked
on two fronts: rockets from Lebanon (9/1/09),' you wonder if they
recommended him.)
The choice of letters each day in the Herald during the crisis did not
reflect the ‘overwhelming majority’ in support of Ms Irwin’s
condemnation of Israel. Normally there was a pro-Zionist letter for
every one critical of Israel, and these last were generally pretty tame
affairs. Several friends of mine also tried to get letters published,
to no avail. The flood of reader support for Ms Irwin must have
overwhelmed poor Mr Ticher, or maybe he was just dazed by the unusual
sight of a politician from one of the major parties exhibiting a
backbone.
My own federal representative, Malcolm Turnbull, is the leader of the
opposition federal Liberal Party and our electorate, Wentworth, has
more Jewish voters than any other in this country. He is very
ambitious, and predictably Zio-friendly. He and his wife, a former Lord
Mayor of Sydney, are a sort of antipodean version of the Clintons, with
better bloodlines. He has personally been mum about Gaza, but his
website says:
'The federal Opposition welcomes today’s resolution by the United
Nations Security Council calling for an “immediate, durable and fully
respected ceasefire” in Gaza and southern Israel. We welcome also the
specific provisions of UNSC Resolution 1860 relating to guarantees to
Israel’s security, including the explicit condemnation of terrorist
attacks on civilians and the demand that member-states act to stop the
smuggling of arms into Gaza. These were always the necessary
pre-conditions for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza'
Brave words Mal. Neat omission of a few other relevant UN Resolutions
too. No point writing to him. The last time I tried his office sent me
an auto-generated newsletter.
But I think I’d prefer that craven silence to the sort of cowardly
reply 'Susie' received from Senator Sherrod Brown [of Ohio, and great liberal hope], posted in a comment
on the 'lamppost' thread here at Mondo on 21 January.
By contrast, the letter Eva Smagacz got from MP Nicholas Soames is
great, and illustrates again how Europe generally, and the Brits in
particular still have a genuine political culture.
Still, the media worries me more than the politicians. If the media
turned over a new leaf on Israel the pollies would be forced to do so,
but I don't think that scenario would necessarily apply in reverse.
Mr Ticher told me last week that the reason the Herald hadn't covered
Sydney's largest protest since the Feb 03 Iraq march (last Sunday) was
that it was the third such protest in a month. I wrote back to say
surely the fact that such numbers bothered to get up off their arses so
often in a holiday period made it more rather than less newsworthy.
That was the end of our conversation about 'the protest that wasn't'
and not even a redacted letter was published this time.
The lady running the op-eds and letters at the only other broadsheet
here in Sydney (Murdoch's national Australian), Rebecca Weisser, is an
even more worrying example of the Zionist media gatekeeper. See the
exchange below (from 21:30 to 33:30) and note also the careful pablum
from Labor polly Craig Emerson, and more to the point, the obvious fear
exhibited by the Herald's political editor, Peter Hartcher, when he
gets himself in over his head in response to Ms Weisser. He suddenly
finds his balls when asked at the end about the industrial action he
and his colleagues were taking at the time to protest staff cuts, but
Israel and the Lobby neutered him. As a bonus, there are also some
lovely young sayanim flexing their muscles, which it seemed to me did
not go down very well with the rest of the audience. Only John Pilger
comes out of it with any credit:
So our public space, populated by people of Mr Hartcher's calibre and
patrolled by people of Ms Weisser and Mr Ticher's obviously biased
mindset (their predecessors Peter Switzer and Miranda Harman also
appear to be of Jewish descent, as if this were a prerequisite for any
opinion editor in Australia's two major broadsheets), is a generally
antiseptic, truth-free zone so far as Israel is concerned. One of my
netmates here who used to work as a journo at the Herald (Phil is
acquainted with him) tells me he's been told by former colleagues that
the board is under intense Lobby pressure to rein in the
'pro-Palestinian' newsroom.
Melbourne is even worse. The Age (a Fairfax stablemate of the Herald)
has just had another bout of Zio-pressure which has left the staff
there reeling:
'This morning as I ring around, it is clear that the newsroom remains
tense and upset. Staff are rallying around. They fear unfairness… I
have found out this morning that the person within The Age who is
getting the blame – and who has taken responsibility for the “error” –
is both under enormous strain, and not solely or chiefly to blame.'
The link is to a blog at Crikey, an 'independent' subscription news
source started years ago by corporate activist Stephen Mayne, who
permitted criticism of Israel, and anything else that warranted it. His
motto was 'disclosure, disclosure'. It was sold to corporate interests
once it started to gain traction, and now minds it's p's and q's, just
like the big boys.
It also runs blogs by people like Margaret Simons, who wrote the piece
above and is I suppose also a member of the tribe (we're surrounded!).
She in this piece runs cover for the Lobby in the guise of sympathy for
the Age journos, who ran a comment piece by one of their regular
contributors which the local chapter of the Lobby jumped all over. The
piece was by Michael Backman, a business columnist specializing in Asia
generally and Malaysia in particular. He has obviously travelled in
Nepal:
'Trekking in Nepal is fashionable among young Israelis. So much so that
many shops in Kathmandu and Pokhara have signs in Hebrew. But once you
get on the trekking circuit and speak with local Nepalese guides and
guesthouse operators you soon discover how disliked the Israelis are.
Many guesthouses in this poor country will even tell Israeli trekking
groups that they are full rather than accept them. This has nothing to
do with religion or politics: Nepalese people are some of the warmest,
most hospitable in the world. Rather, they say that the young Israelis
are rude, arrogant, and argue over trifling amounts of money even
though they clearly have means.
Israel needs to change. The Parsees of India might provide a model. The
Parsees are a very tiny, very rich ethnic and religious minority. They
own perhaps most of the land in central Mumbai as well as the country's
largest conglomerate. And yet ordinary Indians admire and respect them.
Violence against them is unthinkable.'
I think ‘’how disliked many of the Israelis are’ would have been better
– surely they’re not all arseholes – but the reaction, under the
circumstances, beggars belief. The whole piece can be read at Backman's
site (where by the way I notice that the 'contact' button has been
disabled – I wonder why):
http://www.michaelbackman.com/NewColumn.html
At Crikey, Ms Simons said about the column: 'Bad enough. Very bad, in fact. How did such a racist column come to be published?'
The comments below the post give Ms Simons some well-deserved curry,
but she comes equipped with the trademark armour-plated hide, as some
of her replies indicate. Her post does however contain some useful
behind the scenes information:
'Yesterday a bizarre apology was published on page two of the Age,
under the usual pro forma information about contact numbers and the
like:
"A column by Michael Backman headlined “Israel living high on US
expense account’’ was published in error. The Age does not in any way
endorse the views of the columnist, apologises for the distress the
column caused to many readers, particularly in the Jewish community and
regrets publication of the column."
Now, if publishing the column was strange, this was even stranger. The
wording suggested that the column was – woops – published as a
production error – without anyone realising or thinking about it or
noticing what it said. This was not the case, as I detail below.
As for saying that the Age does not endorse the views – who ever said
it did? Every day newspapers around the world publish columns
expressing dozens of views that the editorial team does not endorse.
That is part of the job of a newspaper.
So why was this strange apology published? Part of the background is
the instant action by the Jewish community, and in particular the
Australia-Israel Jewish Affairs Council and its chairman Mark Leibler
and executive director Colin Rubenstein. Rubenstein spoke to Age editor
Paul Ramadge on Monday morning, and he and Leibler met Ramadge face to
face that afternoon. Rubenstein told me this morning that Ramadge
“happily agreed” that the column was offensive and outrageous, said its
publication was due to a “breakdown in editorial procedures” and
promised that he had the affair “under the microscope”. He also
promised an unreserved apology.'
While the Age scurried around excusing itself, it was happy to run a piece by the Mr Liebler mentioned above:
in which our former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (another Liberal
leader called Malcolm, but one from an age when leadership was
something more than strategy) is taken to task for misunderstanding the
concept of proportionality:
'He seems to mistakenly think that the concept of proportionality in
warfare has something to do with how many die on each side. In fact,
it's about whether an attack is proportionate to its military
objective.'
Which is of course to 'stop the rockets'.
So the Age retracts, with abject apologies, a piece which makes a
relatively innocuous (and eminently checkable) reference to what many
Nepalese tourism operators think of their young Israeli visitors'
manners, but has no problem running something that excuses the murder
of over 1300 mainly innocent people, 400 of them children, not to
mention the utter devastation of their home, because Israel fears that
'Hamas' thousands of rockets' might one day 'flatten a kindergarten or
hospital before it is entitled to respond'.
Not much 'proportionality' in evidence there.
I have been thinking about what a decent, trustworthy newspaper/media
outlet might look like in the future, and one initiative I think would
help bring the deserting hordes of readers back to into the fold, is a
clear undertaking to provide a web interface to publish EVERY letter,
email or voicemail the outlet received, and every article submitted for
consideration. Disclosure, disclosure.
That way, when the Mike Tichers and Rebecca Weissers of this world make
their choices as to how many and which letters and articles to run,
readers could easily check the log to see if the temperature of that
part of the public bothered enough to contact the organization about a
particular issue was being accurately reflected, without a bias one way
or another. It would be nice to think that the phone calls and emails
from denizens of the Lobby to the board and management could be
included in this riot of openness, but we must keep our feet on the
ground.
On another note, I was heartened to receive an email from the CFO of
the University I work for assuring me that he was 'not aware' of any
University investments in Israel. I was upset however to learn that one
of our union representatives received a 'we know who you are' phone
call from a member of one of the local official Jewish organizations
for daring to support action against the assault on Lebanon in 2006.
This didn’t made him knuckle under this time round; quite the reverse.
There's a parallel in this to the Gaza invasion itself, in that the
intemperate actions of the Zionists involved may eventually invalidate
the very outcome they were after.
There is courage involved in taking the Lobby on, but what's required
to do this it seems to me pales in comparison to the sort of courage it
takes to resist what the Lobby provides support for – the IDF's murder
of innocent Palestinians. Take a look at this lady, and you will doff
your cap:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21676.htm
Look also at the callow young IDF soldiers, prevented by the lady's bravery from murdering protestors. I wonder if they have ever been to Nepal.
Weiss: I then wrote to Condell saying I was going to post his piece but was somewhat squeamish about the references to Jewishness. When I bring up a journalist's Jewishness, I try and explain why I'm doing so, that Jewish identity has gotten intertwined with Zionism, etc., that's why it's relevant. Condell uses the word tribe some, and also Zio- this and that. Could I remove the references? Condell wrote back to say, Edit it however you want. Then he offered me this explanation. And though I don't share Condell's tone about this, I've left his original intact. Also, I asked what "sayanim" are. Condell:
my standpoint, it is worrying that the op-editors and letters svengalis
in the key posts here appear to be Jewish, as were their
predecessors. I really do feel this fact is not entirely unrelated to
the the sort of bullying I describe. All I want is what we call here a
'fair go' and it's absence doesn't just upset me, it genuinely worries
me.
were Nigerian or Kurdish or Japanese too, but perhaps not quite so much
given that none of these minorities threaten the relative peace I hope
my kids grow up in, just as I did. I believe the eerie silence I
referred to before stems from the top-heavy presence of Zionists in
these key posts, and the sort of sinister backup they get from the
Lobby. The incidents I describe are the tip of the iceberg.
Jewishness that is at issue. After all, I would be happy (ecstatic, in
fact) if you or say Antony Loewenstein (who I refer to obliquely – the
ex-Herald journo) were to sit in their place. It's their covering for
what in this instance amounts to war crimes; actions which, with their
crucially well-placed support, make it look as if my country is
completely indifferent to. The boiling undercurrents are being
airbrushed into history and I think there might one day be a price for
that.
Zionists of my acquaintance were happy to use that term themselves and
it carries no particular baggage for me, but you may well be more clued
up than me about it's advisedness as an identifier. Drop it by all
means.
cause – those diasporans happy to carry out actions on behalf of
Israel, particularly Mossad. Anyone whose business or job might be able
to help black ops. Their work is called hasbara. Nowadays these terms
have degenerated into descriptors for keyboard warriors who who go into
bat for the Likudniks, or the dream of Eretz Israel
