Probably no one (in these parts) has heard of Shatzi Weisberger.
A Jewish dyke for a free Palestine (her own description), she passed away at 92 in New York City – where else? – last December. The story said, “love is organising”, whereas we all thought, post the 2017 liberation of homosexual Australians to enter into a bourgeois, heteronormative institution we used to call “marriage”, that “love is love”. No, love is organising. Organising for other people’s “freedom”.
There wasn’t much love about on 7 October in certain parts of Israel. Merely rape, torture, beheadings, kidnappings and the like. Of babies (notwithstanding the ruminations of the now silenced Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Middle East correspondent, the appalling Tom Joyner), no less. You cannot get more innocent than that. They didn’t ever get the chance to grow up and become rabid, Palestinian hating Zionists.
Earlier this month, The Australian reported Middle East correspondent Tom Joyner wrote that the "the story about the babies is bullshit" in a WhatsApp group for international media, referring to reports of Hamas militants beheading 40 infants.
Mr Anderson told a senate estimates committee on Tuesday, Mr Joyner was "remorseful and apologetic for the words that he used".
No, you can only take “love is love” so far. Love is really is organising for the professionally affronted.
“Queer Jews for a free Palestine” is a poster that has also been seen at the odd rally. There hasn’t been a slogan like this since “land rights for gay whales”. Of course, today’s organising cadres don’t care so much about whales, whatever their sexual “orientation”. They are willing to put up wind farms in the sea that are more or less guaranteed to reduce the whale population. Laughably, some progressive journalist recently had a go at Peter Dutton for suddenly developing an affection for whales. The real story is the greenies’ equally sudden loss of interest in them. I always thought that the greenies’ affection for animals was merely theoretical. They loved theoretical whales, not real ones. Recent developments confirm this.
The self-identification of the Shatzi Weisberger class along multiple, predictable lines – anti-Zionist, homosexual, green (in theory), anti-colonialist – covers the lot. As Unherd notes:
The noisiest activists most attract our attention. But the whirlpool also sucks in those rubberneckers who just want to know what mantra they have to intone today. Silence, being “violence”, is never an option: on all sorts of issues, you need to have a view. Here, “intersectionality” provides a solution: instead of going through the laborious effort of selecting your stance on each issue à la carte, you can opt instead for the set menu: climate justice is racial justice is LGBTQ justice is reproductive justice is Palestinian justice.
Shatzi thought she was being clever by inserting the word “Jew”. As in, it gave her special permission to have a view, a little like Douglas Murray defending George Orwell’s alleged homophobia. I am gay. It privileges me. Like minority status is always claimed to do. I can forgive Orwell his anti-modern idiosyncrasies. I can call Israel colonialist. Indeed, I can oppose Israel’s very existence. I am a Jew!
An obvious question for Shatzi’s peers – free from what? Might not a two-state solution move the Middle East towards the goal of freedom? Freedom for all concerned. Like freedom from being murdered for Jewish babies. Freedom from rape. Freedom from torture. Freedom from being kidnapped. That would be the two-state solution rejected by the then Palestinian leadership in 2005.
Arguably, Gaza is far freer now, under Israeli “colonialism” than it ever was under the two previous colonial powers, the Ottoman Empire then the British Empire. Are murdered South African farmers butchered in the just, post-colonial South African state free? Are the victims of non-colonialist African intra-racial black genocides free? Are all of these unfortunates freer than the citizens of Gaza? Benign colonialism can have its rewards. (Am I defending colonialism? No, I am merely defending and welcoming benign regimes. They ain’t that common).
Yes indeed, freedom can be a relative thing. No one was free under the Covid State. Certainly not in Australia. All today’s Palestinian freedom cheer-squadders like the Greens Senators and Tony Burke and dear old Albo and Bob Carr, and the ABC and the rest, revealed a clearly circumscribed love of freedom from 2020 to 2022, as they locked us all in our homes, had us sacked from our jobs, ruined businesses and spent a trillion dollars on managing a meagre virus. Spending that has created the inflationary crisis has engulfed us and that will enslave generations of Australians. So please don’t lecture us about your love of anyone’s freedom. The ubiquitous Bob Carr’s position seems to have been – freedom for Palestinians; no freedom for Australians when there is a mild flu about.
Free from genocide (I hear them ask)? Well, a doubling of the Palestinian population in Gaza doesn’t sound like a very efficient genocide by a nation famed for its efficiency. One of Tablet magazine journalist Elise Albert’s discussion points for her hypothetical conversation with a Hamas support “after the war we didn’t want is over” is as follows:
We can talk about how a population that doubled over the past 20 years can possibly be said to be a victim of genocide.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/open-letter-hamas-defenders
It is a question.
The only definition of “free” that an anti-Zionist will come at is “free from the existence of Israel”. At least Hamas and the Iranians say it out loud. They want a one state solution with a difference. They want to create ten million or so Jewish refugees. After they have achieved their aim, will they be lining up (as they usually do with refugees) to welcome them? No, their subsequent attitude would probably resemble the current Jordanian position – we don’t want any Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Supporting “freedom” has its limits, clearly. As Will Jones at The Daily Sceptic notes:
“We Will Always Be There for Our Palestinian Brethren” Says Jordanian King – Who Refuses to Take in a Single Gazan Refugee.
Sounds a little like the old line from Yes Minister – “we will give them every assistance short of help”. (Jordan, of course, was created by the same process and at the same time as Israel. Iraq and Syria are also recent Middle Eastern national creations).
The cold war on the streets continues. We were greeted this week by the covering of Sydney’s eastern suburbs with posters showing Netanyahu to be Hitler in disguise.
“These were placed very deliberately in an area that is really the hub of Sydney’s Jewish community,” Mr Ryvchin [a Jewish leader] told Sky News Australia host Peta Credlin.
“They knew that hundreds or thousands of Jews would pass through that area and witness this.
“This is where we are and it is inevitable when you have weekly protests all over the country where Holocaust analogies are made, where Israel is labelled as the greatest evil in the world, this sort of thing is going to happen.
“If these cretins that put this poster up want to look for a Nazi analogy and want to know who Hitler is in this, perhaps they should consider which side of the conflict just went door to door in Israeli towns and villages massacring, raping, burning, torturing as many Jews as they could find.”
Yes, he was stating the obvious, but stating the obvious is increasingly essential in a dumbed-down, ideology saturated polity.
Netanyahu as Hitler? Talk about Godwin’s law. And I don’t think the perpetrators were talking about the Israeli Government’s recent crimes against their own unvaccinated. Its only actual crime of which I am aware (empty, ahistoric, pro-Palestinian propaganda notwithstanding). And that crime is a matter for Israeli voters to resolve. It is no one else’s business. They might get around to holding a Covid non-inquiry just like the other Western “democracies”.
The covering of public spaces with hate speech – which we all thought was a crime under the modern, woke regime – has been enabled by the political class, half of which is visiting Uncle Xi in China while the other half has been wallowing in conservative self-love in London. While Sydney burns with hatred. Much of the political class, recently given a whacking great pay rise (another one), has either confined itself to mealy-mouth calls for “peace” – please define peace – or has, like the execrable Tony Burke, taken the gloves off in his anti-Semitism. Removed his mask, if you will.
https://www.australianjewishnews.com/federal-minister-tony-burke-slammed-for-abc-radio-interview/
Then we have the Greens senators, who understand neither democracy nor the Middle East. Led by senators with good Aussie names like Mehreen Faruqi – the fruits of multiculturalism revealed yet again – they have done their bit for the normalisation of hate speech.
They probably have Palestinian flags tattooed on their arses. (Do Ukrainian flags wash off?)
The ABC itself is without shame in its treatment of the Israeli question (as on so many other issues). It is little wonder that the ignorant twenty-somethings simply latch onto the latest opportunity to virtue-signal on a trendy cause of which they have little understanding and even less knowledge. As UnHerd notes:
Gen Z has an Israel problem.
The author continues:
It’s almost like a religious ritual. Every Saturday since 7 October, central London has swollen with protestors waving the Palestinian flag and chanting “From the River to the Sea”. For the impartial and curious observer, two facts are immediately striking. The first is not all that mysterious: the protestors are disproportionately Muslim. The second is more of an enigma: why are they so young?
For years, young people have tended to be much more pro-Palestine and anti-Israel than their elders. According to a poll conducted a few months before Hamas’s attack, American millennials are the first generation in history to sympathise with the Palestinians more than the Israelis. In Britain, 18- to 34-year-olds are also far more supportive of the Palestinians (23%) than the Israelis (only 7%) — almost the precise inverse of the 55- to 75-year-olds. This being so, at universities across the country, you will find students and academics calling for an Intifada and tearing down posters of the kidnapped Israelis.
What education system, I hear you ask? What study of history? What attainment of skills in critical thinking? What thirst for the truth of things? The truth of Middle Eastern politics, to take a random example. In our fact-free age, the dumbest generation (as mark Bauerlein calls it) get its information from social media, as UnHerd, again, notes:
TikTok [owned by the Chinese Communist Party] is awash with videos promising to tell you what the conflict really means, and what’s being kept from your eyes by the powers that be. “‘Israel’ isn’t a country,” one of the more infamous infographics patronisingly explains. (Note the scare quotes.) “They are a settler colony.”
Into a vacuum pours the unwisdom of the age, to a generation with “a generic lust for activism turbocharged among the young”. Love is activism, remember.
Yes, the political class is (at best) doing a full buttock-clench on the Middle East. With honourable exceptions, like the NSW Premier on a good day. But only on a good day. His still-in-employment Police Minister, the librarian from Lake Macquarie, hasn’t exactly led from the front in getting her officers to hunt don illegal hate speech. Don’t call this leadership.
This has simply given permission to the local Muslim small-b brotherhood to strut their stuff. In Sydney and across the Western world. A diabolical concoction of hatred, ignorance and ideology.
Meantime, the now almost daily marches for a free Palestine roll on, in the shadow of Armistice Day and, no doubt, across Remembrance Weekend, and the Jewish Queers for a Free Palestine are out there among them. Such queers certainly don’t feel the empathy for their fellow Nazi victims. Even though Pastor Niemollor didn’t mention homosexuals in his epic First They Came, he might well have.
The Nazi regime carried out a campaign against male homosexuality and persecuted gay men between 1933 and 1945. As part of this campaign, the Nazi regime closed gay bars and meeting places, dissolved gay associations, and shuttered gay presses. The Nazi regime also arrested and tried tens of thousands of gay men using Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gay-men-under-the-nazi-regime
A bit like the way Muslims treat them, only not as bad!
Homosexuals in Nazi Germany were much more “in the closet” than communists, socialists and trade unionists. But when Israeli politicians are compared to Hitler, such empathy is extremely unlikely. As John Hale says:
And those who consider themselves in a persecuted minority oppressed by the white heterosexual hegemony, and who side with those in a foreign country who they consider are also oppressed, seem to have a mental barrier disconnecting themselves from the threat that is the ideology of those they support. The scale of cognitive dissonance makes one wonder what kind of brainwashing they have been subject to.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/war-is-the-only-way-for-israel-to-find-peace/
The noisily persistent protesters, queer or not, don’t want a ceasefire to avoid a bigger war, a justifiable position. They can’t even define peace in a Middle Eastern context, or figure out what might come next. Would leaving “an existential threat to Israel alive and well”, as John Hales says, constitute a peace that any half sentient observer would accept? They claim the Palestinians aren’t free, without remotely understanding what freedom is, and means. They haven’t noticed, or don’t care, that they are waving the flags of murderers. They were willing to have their own (and my) freedom flushed down the toilet for two years in the battle over the virus. Without even noticing what happened to us all. And you don’t need to be especially pro-Israeli to reach these sobering conclusions.
Paul Collits
8 November 2023
These ignorant and uninformed people are the shame of our country.
Our police and politicians are useless and rudderless in this situation.
Homos for hamas is just amazing juxtaposition.