Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

But here, back in the Land of the Free, we did the ubiquitous annual sequel to the Xmass/NY excesses: Australia Day.

Or, 'Straya Day, as some call it, or Cronulla Day, as I've come think of it.

As the humidity has risen, under the Southern Cross, as we've sat out the back, sweating under Bogan-vile-a laced pergolas, we paused to ponder what excesses may define this year's celebration, as pimple faced corksniffers took to the streets, draped in union jack flags.

Drunken brawling at the cricket? Multiple V8 prangs wiping out whole swathes of drunken teenagers at high speed? Maybe epidemic amphetamine overdoses at pop concerts?

Surely not race riots again?

No...

We couldn't get through even one Ozzy day without making international spectacles of ourselves, again.

This time most all due to the personality disordered Tony Abbott who, having provoked outrage from Indigenes commemorating "Invasion Day" at the tent embassy that Abbott in his crass way had said should be pulled down, was then somehow included in Julia Gillard's company, within sight of the seething aborigines at the Tent Embassy. Result, a near lynching for Gillard, as Abbott looked on from the shadows, like Iago, no doubt satisfied at the nasty incident he did so much to set up, accidentally or otherwise...

Meanwhile, back in the real world what have we missed, while Geoff does his thread derail?

Personally, the excellent SBS doco on the dark history of asylum seeker detention, last week. Webdiary regular Marilyn Shepherd appeared on this show; she's been involved in this issue with its consequences both for asylum seekers and the politics of this country since the time she was a staffer for a political party in Canberra. 

For me, it was as though a blindfold had been removed. Many people have tried to debate or inform on this over the last decade, but  a doco like that, ten years on, exposes all the spin by providing a chronology of events, as well as revealing the actual consequences for many innocent asylum seekers, who became political footballs for the tabloid media and politicians.

A loss of innocence for me, not so much over Howard's exploiting of it but the extent of it and its cynicism and callousness. Most of all, a shock that Australia would stoop to deliberate brutality on this scale, just to fly an electioneering policy.  I just automatically presumed that we would run detention centres like migrant hostels; even after the riots of  ten years ago. It never twigged fully for me that the these places would be that deliberately and extensively oppressive, as depicted in the doco.

It was a game, a complex and vile game.

I am not quoting Finkielkraut. If I was I would most certainly make that clear with quotation marks, or indents, or italics as I do when I quote anybody.

The words are mine and they reflect what I took to be his theme from some articles of his I read some years ago and absorbed. No doubt there are a few twists of my own and from elsewhere.You are allowed to do that when you are in 100% agreement with the insight ,  make it clear you are not quoting and have absolutely no intention of returning to the source. This is not Ground Hog Day..

The article I most remember was published in  English in a Canadian Jewish newspaper but Arie is quite right, I would have read his translations of French language articles as well..  

Richard: Since you two have taken this thread waaay off-topic, how about one of you starting a new one? 

Finkielkraut's formula from memory was that anti-racism has become the new antisemitism but you get the point. It is the remarkable achievement of the left that they have defined Zionism (and therefore "Zionists") as racist (which is a vile antisemitic notion in its own right) .   

Once you have accepted that notion then you are free to adopt every other antisemitic notion going and they do. You can also play around with the meaning of "Zionists" and you might even  trick yourself into overlooking all the nudging and winking going on.

All you have to do is define the enemy as racist and they are evil and anyone fighting them is on the right side of history. 

This grubby reptilian mental manouevre is why the left is able to despise and condemn as apartheid the only country around that guarantees the rights of women, Arabs, gays, religious and ethnic minorities ... while at the same time doing the bidding on Press TV and elsewhere of a regime that publicly hangs gays, executes women and girls who are thought to be virgins after gang raping them and wages campaigns of extermination against religious and ethnic minorities.

Is anti-racism the new antisemitism? In the context Finkielkraut put it, of course it is. 

 I'm pretty certain most readers will know precisely who I am talking about, Arie.  I don't engage with Holocaust deniers and other members of the genocidal left. At least not at their level. There has to be something seriously wrong at the very core of such of a person.

About half a dozen years ago he flatly denied that criticism of Israel was ever unjustifiably written off as anti-semitism and invited any one to provide an example of that.

I'I didn't actually quite say that. I called for an example of someone serious, seriously suggesting that criticism of Israel was of itself antisemitism. I'm still waiting.

This was in response to the ever present moan from the gutless left that "you can't criticise Israel without being called an antisemite". Bullshit. The exact opposite is the truth. You can't support Israel, and its right to exist, without being denounced as a racist. That's the point.

They do this because they cannot face the fact that attacks on Israel, from both the left and totalitarian Islam, are very often motivated or informed by antisemitism sometimes in its most dangerous forms. They have to cover for this. From the left, it masquerades as "anti-racism". The Islamists don't even bother with the masquerade. This does not seem to bother the left at all.

I haven't forgotten that distasteful piece you translated on Bibi's official visit to the Netherlands, Arie. I'm writing a response that I intend to send to that newspaper and submit here as a thread starter.

In the meantime I've been pondering the nature of Dutch hypocrisy. Orwell once described hypocrisy as the defining feature of the English as if no other people was afflicted. It is easy to see how Orwell could have made this mistake. He was fluent in French and obviously could get comfortably by in Spanish but there is no record he could speak a word of Dutch.

Maybe Memri will have to open an operation on the Netherlands, and certain other small European countries with native languages hardly anybody else speaks, so the rest of us know what they are saying among themselves. Just like with Hamas.

It's too late for Norway. Its tiny Jewish community has been advised by antisemitism experts to emigrate.  It seems the "anti-racists" don't like them. Sweden is going the same way by all accounts. . Norway will be left with what it has after the "Zionists" are gone.  A crime ridden, racially divided and increasingly violent society with an ever dwindling stock of civil liberties. 

Congratulations, European leftists. 

Richard:  It's getting a bit awkard in the back room.  Could you and Arle both be a bit more mindful of "playing the ball, not the man" ?  Thanks.

I remember  that conversation Arie and recall reading a piece at the time that this remarkable French philosopher wrote and was published in a Canadian Jewish newspaper.

He put his finger right on the point. They don't talk about the "Jews" this time, they talk about the "Zionists" and most especially "the Zionist enterprise" which they condemn as "racist". Over and over and over again. The racist tag is essential. They do it with an alacrity that can still be startling after all these years. This achieves a number of things. It focuses on Israel as one of the worst, if not the worst  problem in the world but with a strong theme that the tentacles reach way beyond Israel with the "Zionists". It allows Jews in the West and even in Israel to opt out for now and that's important. The Nazis did that too. Right now useful idiots who can say they are Jews are especially useful to the dickhead and genocidal wings of the left, not to mention totalitarian Islam.

The allegation that it is impossible to criticise Israel without attracting charges of antisemitism is a classic example. No one has ever been able to come up with a case. Somone serious who has ever seriously suggested anything like that. Absurd. Most of Israel's sternest critics are Israelis. The exact opposite is the truth. It is impossible to defend Israel, and its right to exist, without attracting slurs of racism. Sooner or later it always happens. It is central to their case. I've been called a racist so many times I print them out, laminate them and use them as place mats.

That is why this is something different. This is an attack on the very concept of Jewish nationhood, and especially its enormously successful manifestation, as vile and an abomination, including an abomination in the eyes of the left because it is "racist". The "Zionists" offend both man and God..

They do this because by attacking "Zionists" this way they are attacking the West.  This is the appeal of it for the dickhead and genocidal lefts.

This is what I took Finkielkraut to mean when he said that "anti-Zionism" has become the new antisemitism and I believe he is exactly right.

I haven't forgotten Arie, Paul. I was just saving him for last.

Paul, if I had a strongly held opinion that I was not prepared to defend in an open conversation with someone with another opinion then I would start to have a look at my opinion. Perhaps I wouldn't hold it quite so strongly. That's what grown ups do.

When I use the term "left" in this context, I mean the whole political movement that simply will not do that. Instead they keep their opinions just as strong. This includes the Stalinist wing at least of the Greens of course but it goes way beyond that.

A number of conclusions can be drawn about different facets of the "left" when they do this. That is when I deploy terms such as "gutless left". There is also a "pissweak left", "dickhead left", "way out crystal gazing fruitcake left" and a "genocidal left". The groups overlap of course.

This is known as nuance. 

Hi all and happy new year. I am currently on holidays in Perth and using my new IPad. So I will be brief.

During the quiet time over Christmas I have been learning how to tweet.

I have been looking at things to follow and best sources of information. I have noticed many subjects that are ignored by the Australian press.

One that is ignored is the plight of the indigenous people of West Iran, Attrocities reported in Indonesian and pacific island newspapers are not covered in Australia at all see twitter @PurePapua  for good examples.

It is a disgrace that we ignore such close neighbours. 

Speaking of Prospero, Marilyn, did you know they banned Shakespeare from school curricula in Arizona?

It reinforces Jay Somsundarum's sobering message, with his book commendation to do with a verging to dystopic near future, that has me in mind of  my uncompleted version of Attwoods "Handmaidens Tale" but further into the future.

Marilyn is exponentially smarter than me, she has a better grasp of techno and is a sort of prototype for where a future activist may start evolving into a cyber resistor of the future.

The last couple of years have taught me how quickly I can be wrong foooted by technology and sadly reminds me that I have reached the stage where I have "one foot in the grave", as with Meldrew from that teev show ( remember when people used to watch tv, after they got rid of old fashioned radio?)

 To quote that other ol' timer, Dylan,

"Your own road is rapidly aging, if you can't lend a hand, than get out of the way, for the times they are changing".

It seems, the best I can do is not get under the feet of a new generation that understands computers the way my generation understood books, compared to so many semiliterate Aussies who grew up in the hard times of depression and war, earlier still.

The fact is that it is the left/liberals who stiffle themselves. At least the US-hating, Israel-bashing, Jew baiting left, a classic and notorious example of which still hangs out here. At least I think it is of the left. As has been noted many times before, these people are indistinguishable from the neo-nazi right.

Mind you, there are plenty of people who would contend that the nazis were leftists too

What drives this stiffling is of course sheer bloody minded cowardice and dishonesty. They are too gutless to debate their muck in circumstances where they can be challenged and exposed by people who know what they are talking about and have zero tolerance for bare-faced lying.

That is why they prefer to talk only to themselves and choose media (or sometimes even a thread) where they feel unlikely to be challenged.That is why nearly all the "left" blogs (Loewenstein, Lattaan etc) do not ever allow comments other than from backslappers.

Gutless. Grow a pair.

Reading about the recent United States primaries in your rag has been entertaining, for it gives one the opportunity to observe the hollow men ply their trade. One can't help but see it as theatre, or a reality TV show on steroids, all in all a grand distraction that signifies nothing.

You see, while the limelight shone upon the hopeful nominees, the United States of America was quietly declared a battle field in our shared War on Terror. The Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who promised "change you can believe in",  signed (on New Year's Eve)  the National Defence Authorisation Act 2012, being the final nail in the coffin of habeas corpus.

A law that permits the indefinite detention, and possibly torture or assassination of  any citizen deemed (by persons unknown) to be assisting or associated with "terrorists".  No transparency, no lawyers, nothing, only the pleasure of the powers that be.

One would have thought such a brutal attack, by our best friends, on that which our fathers fought and died for, would have at least got a mention in the Australian media. I'll be buggered if I can find a word anywhere. Happy New Year Americans, you are all a lot safer now.

I'm glad you mentioned the bit about Obama and the NDAA Paul. It didn't go unnoticed by iWinnie (just prior his demise) that the original NDAA bill had a section that excluded US citizens. The administration (white house) sent the bill back to have the section removed - hence the (warrior) wombat's letter (above) to a main stream rag, and a copy to all his wombat mates prefixed with: this will never see the light of day.

Funny thing was, not long after iWinnie emailed his letter to the rag a huge carton of booze was delivered direct to iWinnie's hole by some guy named Fed X, all geared up in a brown shirt and boots. The grog was a gift from a guy in the US named Bud Wiser. IWinnie had no idea who Bud was, but since he had such a cool name, iWinner accepted the donation with uncivilized haste.

And then the stupid prick went missing - after a couple of days I thought it best to go find him. It wasn't hard. All I had to do was follow the dead marines all the way to the main drag - you saw the result on another thread, me thinks he went out with a bang, and then a whimper - but who cares, the last thing the silly bastard said to me was:

Justin, there's a little bit of the hollow men in all of us.

Column above should have mentioned Justin Obodie and also to a fair extent, Scott Dunmore, two people who attempt to engage with reality- as is shown in their comments elsewhere.

And a pity it is, that others wont follow suit, for fear of forsaking their denialist fantasies, or discarding the attempt to infect others with them.

If only they knew how they were being circumscribed by asshats and what fools they were being encouraged to be, in the presence of  their observant neighbours.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/sbs-fields-complaints-over-series-set-in-israel-20120116-1q37z.html

Now I had a grand father in Palestine from 1939-42 with the AIF and British army, he told us even then of jewish terrorism as amply described and shown in  the Jewish made The Promise, a series everyone I know watched and howled like babies over.

 And not just the cruelty to the Palestinians, but the British caging of holocaust survivors in wire cages on the beach where they stripped them and searched them and the British betrayal of the Palestinians.

But this minority group in a minority group think that this should all be suppressed here, as if they live in a thought bubble and the film hasn't been shown all over the world in the last year.

It can even be downloaded from the net.

Now don't forget the culmination of my last 10 years of advocacy for the one family will be shown next Tuesday night.

This story was one of the biggest and worst cases of censorship I know of.

Not one journo would touch the truth of it until Prospero.