Tony Burke: shadow Minister for Terrorism

Labor frontbencher Tony Burke is expected to propose a resolution at the upcoming national conference that if "Israel continues to build and expand settlements, a future Labor government will consult like-minded nations towards recognition of the Palestinian state”.

Last year, at an Australia Palestine Advocacy Network Fundraising Dinner Burke said:

...If you are serious about justice, then we need to acknowledge and acknowledge the truth, that all Israeli settlements on Palestinian land are illegal. If we’re serious about speaking the truth then we must unequivocally be able to say that East Jerusalem is occupied…

For those who are political advocates within Palestine itself, I will never know the bravery that comes with putting your life on the line and at risk, in engaging in politics in different ways.

"putting your life on the line and at risk, in engaging in politics in different ways..."??  What did he mean by that??

USyd mocks anti-Israel conspiracy theorists

Since University of Sydney Associate Professor Jake Lynch, and senior lecturer Dr Nicholas Riemer, led a disorderly and noisy disruption of a lecture by Colonel Richard Kemp on 11 March, and a subsequent inquiry by the University into the rucus, a petition defending Lynch, with the support of Lee Rhiannon, Melissa Parke and Mike Carlton, called on the university’s vice-chancellor, Michael Spence “not to allow [him]self to be made the agent of the Israel lobby’s persecution.”

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, Dr Michael Spence, today released the below statement:

"In recent days the claim has been made that the allegations brought against staff, students, contractors and visitors to the University concerning their behaviour at the lecture given by Colonel Kemp on 11 March are politically motivated. This claim is simply risible.

"The concern for the University is whether the conduct of those people breached the University's Codes of Conduct.
"In fact, by sheer happenstance, people on each side of the debate concerning the merits of Colonel Kemp's lecture were included in the 13 against whom allegations have been made.

"The University is not interested in the political views of staff or students. It is very interested in upholding its Codes of Conduct."

Activists corrupt noble principles in defence of Lynch

From THE AUSTRALIAN, APRIL 27, 2015, by ALEX RYVCHIN*:

The defence of Jake Lynch and the students who stormed the lecture theatre at the University of Sydney during a talk by Colonel Richard Kemp, has been speciously framed as a struggle for the right of free speech and dissent.

No mention is made of the protesters having admitted that it was they who were trying to suppress free speech by shutting down Richard Kemp’s lecture altogether. 

There is a rich irony in anti-Israel academics and students invoking the right of free speech in order to deny the right of free speech to anyone they disagree with, and specifically of anyone who dissents from the disingenuous, one-dimensional caricature that constitutes their portrayal of Israel.

The right to protest or hold opposing views is not in question. When protesters held anti-Israel banners outside the lecture theatre and distributed flyers to all who entered to hear Kemp speak, they were exercising these important rights, no matter how misguided their message was. Their subsequent conduct had an altogether different and darker purpose — to deny Kemp his right to speak, and to deny the students, academics and visitors in the audience their right to listen and engage with his ideas.

There is no room for competing ideas or opinions in the narrow, grim worldview of the far-left.

In the wake of the negative media coverage that the censorious protesters attracted, Lynch’s supporters quickly launched an Op-ed offensive with one clear message: The protesters who tried to deny Richard Kemp and his audience the freedom to speak, were themselves being denied the right of free speech. With typical moral inversion, the perpetrators were now being cast as the victims.

Nick Riemer, who convenes an anti-Israel boycott group at the University of Sydney asserted that the University of Sydney would make itself “the instrument of the Israel lobby’s witch hunt”, if it investigated the allegations against Lynch and the students.

At a subsequent forum organised by Riemer at the University of Sydney, titled “Why boycotting Israel isn’t antisemitic”, Riemer claimed that “the Israel lobby had only to snap its fingers for the university to jump.” The irony of using an event aimed at distancing BDS from anti-semitism to rail against the so-called string pulling of the pro-Israel community, was obviously lost on Riemer.

A petition defending Lynch, which drew the support of the usual anti-Israel voices, including Lee Rhiannon, Melissa Parke and Mike Carlton, made further insinuations regarding unnatural Jewish power and manipulation. The letter called on the university’s vice-chancellor, Michael Spence “not to allow [him]self to be made the agent of the Israel lobby’s persecution.”

The theme was picked up by the National Tertiary Education Union, which released a statement claiming that the investigation into the actions of Lynch and the students is “solely designed to placate external parties”. The union didn’t mention the “Israel lobby” by name but it didn’t need to. The mere allusion to this seemingly supernatural force is far more evocative.

There is a great deal of scholarship around the racially infused use of terms such as “Jewish lobby”, “Zionist lobby” and “Israel lobby”, all of which mean the same thing. The term is intended to cast the involvement of the Jewish community in public affairs as somehow subversive, undemocratic and inherently sinister. It is intended to appeal to antisemitic views of the Jews as exercising an extraordinary or dark power. It is crude, conspiratorial thinking.

The effect of the unchallenged use of the term is to limit or worse, deprive the Jewish community of its right to speak on matters of importance to it, a right extended to all communities and all people in our free society.

It is significant that while a range of stakeholders have spoken publicly on the matters that transpired at the lecture, including alumni, academics, students, political commentators, politicians and concerned members of the public, only the views of the Jewish community have been described as a “witch hunt” or depicted as shadowy, controlling or unduly powerful.

The themes of victimhood and power were then taken to their absurd conclusion by Riemer, who in a rambling letter condemning the university for issuing show cause notices, claimed that the investigation into conduct on campus and any resulting disciplinary action should be seen as the University “siding with a nuclear power” and “siding with Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair.”

Equally disturbing has been the perversion of noble ideals central to university life to spare Lynch and his followers from the consequences of their deplorable conduct.

NSW Council for Civil Liberties president Stephen Blanks defended the actions of the student activists claiming that they were “exercising their legitimate right of free speech”. The claim that the investigation into students who shouted down Colonel Kemp’s free speech with a megaphone actually infringes on their rights of free speech is beyond parody.

There is a further right at stake in this battle. That is the right to express views sympathetic to Israel or otherwise antithetical to the far-left smorgasbord of causes. Kemp had not uttered a word about the Arab-Israeli conflict when the theatre was stormed. His mere presence on campus and reputation for defending Israel was enough to ensure that his basic right to speak was violated by baying, ranting crusaders with megaphones. This is a chilling development played out on campuses throughout the world, where facts are held hostage to embedded prejudices and small bands of protesters can suspend the rights of others as they seek to fulfil their quest for moral superiority.

*Alex Ryvchin is the public affairs director at the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

Recognising a culture of hate, death and refusal to share the land

In the light of the ALP apparently considering recognition of the non-existent state of "Palestine", see this from "a previous posting"

If the Palestinians would:

• recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people (which would mean acknowledgment of the character and permanence of Israel...);
• accept demilitarization of Gaza and the 'West Bank';
• change their culture of hatred by amending their founding documents that proclaim their intention to annihilate Israel;
• forego their unconditional and non-negotiable position on their absolute “right of return” to Israel;
• cease incitement against Jews and Israelis in their schools, newspapers, mosques, media, summer camps, TV programming and educational system;
• cease portraying Palestine on their maps as including the State of Israel;
• cease their acts of murderous violence across Israel; 
• cease justifying violence against Israelis as a legitimate form of political action;
• cease naming tournaments, marketplaces and streets after Palestinian “martyrs" whose claim to fame is that they murdered [Jews];
• cease firing thousands of rockets into Israeli population centers;
• cease building terrorist tunnels into Israel for the sole purpose of kidnapping and murdering Israeli civilians;
• cease referring to Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs”;
• cease providing payments to the families of suicide bombers;
• cease embracing as ‘heroes’ released Palestinian terrorists who murdered Israelis;
• cease attempting to bring war crimes charges against Israeli officers and officials at the International Criminal Court;
• cease insisting that the UN Security Council impose a deadline for Israeli withdrawal from the 'West Bank';
• cease playing the victim on the international stage and begin taking responsibility for their own failures, and cease promoting the apartheid, racist idea that any future Palestinian state will be “Jew-free” (as Mahmoud Abbas said in 2010), ........

then recognition of a Palestinian state based on a two-state solution would become feasible.

At this moment in time and for the foreseeable future, however, there is no serious evidence that the Palestinian leadership (be it Fatah or Hamas or both) want a state of their own that will live in peace with Israel as a Jewish state which rests on land they consider to be a sacred part of the Islamic ummah. In fact, there is ample evidence that they will treat anything they get as a staging ground for further attacks on Israel until it has been annihilated or subjugated to Islamic rule.

Despite the fact that the British resolution was non-binding and may have been motivated more for internal political purposes (conflicts between the British Labor Party and the governing Conservative Party), formal recognition of a Palestinian state (should it ever come to pass) would be a disaster for many reasons:

1. The Palestinians, despite numerous historical opportunities, have consistently refused to accept a Palestinian state (unless it includes the state of Israel). That is, their negotiation stance is contingent not on compromise but on struggle until victory.
2. The Palestinians have never been able to set up the infrastructure of a responsible state that would include transparent governance, a fair judicial system and a competent administration. Anything short of this would be a recipe for another failed Arab state.
3. The Oslo treaty is quite clear that resolution of borders and other issues must come through direct negotiations between the parties. Unilaterally declaring a state (as the British and Swedes have done) effectively undermines the treaty that committed both sides to a negotiated settlement between the two parties. That is, imposing Palestinian demands upon Israel using European or American pressure effectively destroys the Oslo treaty and undermines the peace process. In honor-shame Islamic cultures such as that of Palestinian society, if a foe (Israel) is forced to make concessions, it is seen as a sign of weakness and encourages further demands for further concessions.
4. It is a certainty that any Palestinian state so created will become a militant jihadist state controlled initially by Hamas and, later, quite possibly by ISIS. As the 2007 Hamas coup in Gaza showed, and as polls continue to show in the wake of Operation Defensive Edge, Hamas would end Fatah control over the 'West Bank' within months. This is what the Swedish and British parliaments have in fact endorsed in the name of “peace”.
5. With 48 Muslim majority states in the world (including 22 Arab states) - most of them failed states, none of them true Western-style democracies, and most of them belligerent - why on earth would the Europeans want to establish yet another guaranteed failed state? Given the current Palestinian leadership, establishing a formal state with all the rights that come with statehood (the right to govern, diplomatic immunity, a standing army, defined borders, an air command, sovereign control over land, territorial waters and air space, the right to collect taxes, and the capacity to enter into treaties with other states and to join specialized UN agencies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the Law of the Sea Treaty, and the International Criminal Court) would be madness. More importantly, this new “state” would be ruled half by a terrorist group (Hamas) and half by an unelected administrative entity (Fatah) whose last election occurred years ago. The government of each half considers the government of the other half illegitimate - and both are correct.             
6. Forgetting the fact that the Palestinians have been offered a state on numerous occasions over the past 70 years, there are plenty of other ethnic and religious peoples who have a far greater claim to statehood in the world - peoples who maintain their own language, their own religion, and in many respects, their own history - peoples that include the Kurds, Tibetans, Tamils and Chechens. To favor formal statehood to a group that shares the same language and religion as 22 other Arab states sets a dangerous precedent.
7. As ISIS expands its murderous Islamic juggernaut across Iraq and Syria and threatens Lebanon, Jordan, Libya, Saudi Arabia and eventually Israel, Europe and the U.S., Western recognition of another failed state (Palestine) would represent a major victory for radical Islamist forces in the Levant to establish a new base of operations in Palestine that would allow them to use state status, rights and diplomatic immunity to further their global Islamic crusade
8. Israel is the West’s only truly reliable ally in the Middle East. Establishing a jihadist, genocidal Islamic enemy with full state powers on her borders would not only sow the seeds of a new war with a jihadist-controlled Palestine, but would guarantee the collapse of other moderate Arab nations with whom Israel is currently allied in its war against the jihadists.

None of those speaking for the creation of a Palestinian state appear to have taken any of these critical issues into account. [Those who recognize the non-existent] Palestinian state have done nothing to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East. They have only sown the seeds of further war. The responsibility for the escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rests with the Palestinians who continue to turn their backs on peace.

Palestinian national identity is predicated on winning a zero-sum struggle with Zionism, not on a vision of a state of their own. Rather than take the many opportunities offered to them to build a future for their children, they have refused to relinquish their embrace of a culture of hate and death.


Consequently, eminently sensible proposals regarding borders, Jewish communities in the 'West Bank' and even Jerusalem are rendered irrelevant. 

...no peace is possible until Palestinian society makes the compromise it has been unwilling to do for nearly a century – to share the land.

Recognizing the non-existent won't help anyone

In the light of reports that the ALP may consider recognizing a non-existent Arab state of "Palestine", we should, remember that statehood requires a series of criteria, as set out in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States,including 

• capability of governance, 
• permanence of population, 
• defined territory, and 
• capacity to enter into relations with other states.

In fact, the Convention specifies that “the political existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states.”

For the Arabs of Palestine, these criteria must be read in the context of the commitments by the Arabs in several agreements signed with Israel over the years.

In the attempt to declare "Palestinian" statehood in 1988, over 100 states gave their recognition. But this attempt to unilaterally dictate a solution to the Israel-Arab conflict without agreement from Israel, did nothing to resolve the conflict

So any act of recognition of a non-existent Arab state, whether by the ALP or anyone else, can have no validity nor make any contribution to resolving the conflict with Israel.

In Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2011 speech to the U.S. Congress, he said:

...They [the Palestinians] ...continue to educate their children to hate. They continue to name public squares after terrorists. And worst of all, they continue to perpetuate the fantasy that Israel will one day be flooded by the descendants of Palestinian refugees....My friends, this must come to an end.

President Abbas must do what I have done. I stood before my people, and I told you it wasn’t easy for me, and I said… “I will accept a Palestinian state.” It is time for President Abbas to stand before his people and say… “I will accept a Jewish state.”

Those six words will change history. They will make clear to the Palestinians that this conflict must come to an end. That they are not building a state to continue the conflict with Israel, but to end it. They will convince the people of Israel that they have a true partner for peace. With such a partner, the people of Israel will be prepared to make a far reaching compromise. I will be prepared to make a far reaching compromise.

In other words, once the Palestinian Arabs openly acknowledge the Jewish connection to the land, Israel will know they are a partner for peace.

In answer, Abbas said:

We say to him [Netanyahu], when he claims — that they [Jews] have a historical right dating back to 3000 years [BC] — we say that the nation of Palestine upon the land of Canaan had a 7000 year history [BC]. This is the truth, which must be understood and we have to note it, in order to say: “Netanyahu, you are incidental in history. We are the people of history. We are the owners of history.”

In other words, Netanyahu said: We have rights; you have rights. We recognize yours and when you recognize ours we can have peace. Your refusal to recognize our rights — to demand total annihilation of Israel — makes peace impossible.

And Abbas answered: We don’t recognize that you have any rights. All the rights belong to us! You are just a passing breeze.

THAT's why peace is impossible: because the Palestinian-Arab leadership continues to claim that Israel has no right to exist at all.

Bob Carr: Miles High and Hallucinating

  

Dear Bob
Why don't you don your silk pyjamas, drink a warm milk, and relax? We no longer need you to lie in your suit, nor to embellish our national opinion pages with your Persian-bazaar fantasies, as you did in yesterday's Centenary-ANZAC-Day edition of The Australian.

The key "neo-conservative" principle, which you discern in your hallucinogenic haze, and deride, is to emulate Ronald Reagan. It seems that, like Groucho Marx, you would quickly abandon your principles under pressure - and not much pressure at that.

However the self-contradictory punch-line to your far-fetched, interminably-protracted, self-congratulatory yarn, is that you would have us believe that Obama's treatment of the evil Iranian regime is analogous to Ronald Reagan's approach to the evil Soviet regime, and is therefore commendable after all. How droll and clever...

Are we to forget that the Soviet Union faced years of credible military as well as diplomatic pressure? Are you really suggesting that it succumbed to glib diplomacy and agreed "frameworks"? Or was it so stretched by its weapons program and economic nonperformance that it finally collapsed under its own weight?

Compare this to your (and Obama's) prescription for Iran. As Natan Sharansky has pointed out (and he should know):

The Obama administration apparently [like Bob Carr] believes that only after a nuclear agreement is signed can the free world expect Iran to stop its attempts at regional domination, improve its human rights record and ...behave like [a] civilized state...

The differences [between the US's treatment of Iran and the Soviet Union] are striking and revealing.
For starters, consider that the Soviet regime felt obliged to make its first ideological concession simply to enter into negotiations with the United States about economic cooperation. At the end of the 1950s, Moscow abandoned its doctrine of fomenting a worldwide communist revolution ...the Soviet government understood that it had no other way to get what it needed from the United States.

Imagine what would have happened if instead, after completing a round of negotiations over disarmament, the Soviet Union had declared that its right to expand communism across the continent was not up for discussion. This would have spelled the end of the talks.

Yet today, Iran feels no need to tone down its rhetoric calling for the death of America and wiping Israel off the map.

Just last week, the Iranian regime held another of its military parades with truckloads of weaponry, masses of goose-stepping zombies and repeated chants of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel". Would you have us ignore this, Bob? ... or perhaps join in the chorus?

Natan Sharansky continues:

...Over the past month alone, as nuclear discussions continued apace, we watched Iran’s proxy terror group, Hezbollah, transform into a full-blown army on Israel’s northern border, and we saw Tehran continue to impose its rule on other countries, adding Yemen to the list of those under its control [Lebanon, Syria and Iraq].

Then there is the question of human rights. When American negotiations with the Soviets reached the issue of trade, and in particular the lifting of sanctions and the conferring of most-favored-nation status on the Soviet Union, the Senate, led by Democrat Henry Jackson, insisted on linking economic normalization to Moscow’s allowing freedom of emigration. By the next year, when the Helsinki agreement was signed, the White House had joined Congress in making the Soviets’ treatment of dissidents a central issue in nearly every negotiation.

Iran’s dismal human rights record, by contrast, has gone entirely unmentioned in the recent negotiations. Sadly, America’s reticence is familiar: In 2009, in response to the democratic uprisings that mobilized so many Iranian citizens, President Obama declared that engaging the theocratic regime would take priority over changing it.

Furthermore, as Clifford D. May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, recently pointed out:

..The unsigned, non-binding “understanding” announced [in early April] dismantles none of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure — not even Fordow, the facility built secretly and illicitly under a mountain. 

It does nothing to slow the Islamic republic’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, whose only conceivable purpose is to deliver nuclear warheads to distant targets. 

It does not authorize “go-anywhere-anytime” inspections — the only kind of inspections likely to uncover whatever prohibited activities Iran undertakes over the months ahead.

It doesn’t even require Iran’s rulers to stop lying — to acknowledge that their nuclear program has not been strictly for “peaceful purposes” as they have claimed.
And, of course, it doesn’t address

• Iran’s support for terrorists, 
• its holding of innocent Americans hostage, 
• its power grab in Iraq, 
• its military support for the brutal Assad dynasty in Syria and Houthi rebels in Yemen, 
• its continuing threats to

1. topple Arab regimes with close ties to the United States, and 
2. to “erase Israel from the map” (that is “non-negotiable,” a commander of Iran’s Basji militia declared ...) and, 
3. in due time, bring “death to America.”

But you would dismiss all this, Bob, with another of or your mile-high fantasies: 

"If there are violations, sanctions are snapped on again...."

Such colourful language! Just lift the sanctions, like a seat-belt clasp, and we're free to take our pants off in exchange for smooth-as-silk deceit. Then if we're disappointed, snap-click, and we're securely strapped in again... Do you expect us to forget that the sanctions are an economic edifice (a UN version of the Tower of Babel) that took years to erect? ...and to believe that, once destroyed, it can be re-instated with a snap of the finger?

Clifford May continues:

...the agreement being finalized is likely to lead to the spread of nuclear weapons (with a serious risk that some of those nukes will end up in the hands of terrorists), ... further fuel jihadi fires (Sunni and Shia alike), [and] ....heighten our enemies’ contempt for us (while further depleting our allies’ trust in us)...

...21 years ago, President Clinton announced the conclusion of a “framework” with North Korea, an agreement he described as “a good deal for the United States” because North Korea would henceforth be obligated to “freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program.”
“The United States and international inspectors will carefully monitor North Korea to make sure it keeps its commitments,” he vowed.

North Korea’s chief negotiator, Kang Sok Ju, provided further reassurance: The agreement will resolve “all questions of the so-called nuclear weapons development by North Korea” that have raised “such unfounded concerns and suspicions.” He added: “We have neither the intention nor the plan to develop nuclear weapons.” 

He was lying. And we were choosing to believe him... 

Natan Sharansky concludes:

...in today’s postmodern world [and Bob Carr's diplomatic fantasies], when asserting the superiority of liberal democracy over other regimes seems like the quaint relic of a colonialist past, even the United States appears to have lost the courage of its convictions. 

We have yet to see the full consequences of this moral diffidence, but one thing is clear: The loss of America’s self-assured global leadership threatens not only the United States and Israel but also the people of Iran and a growing number of others living under Tehran’s increasingly emboldened rule. Although the hour is growing late, there is still time to change course — before the effects grow more catastrophic still.

Jewish leaders question benefits of Julie Bishop's Iran talks

From The Australian, April 21, 2015, by Pia Akerman:

Australian Jewish leaders have questioned the benefits of Julie Bishop's visit to Iran.
                                
The Foreign Minister has left Tehran after talks with President Hassan Rouhani, highlighting a new agreement for the countries' intelligence agencies to share information on terrorism.

Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council executive director Colin Rubenstein said there was a clear risk Iran had received all the benefits of the changed relationship with no apparent change in its aggressive stance towards its neighbours.

"From where we sit, there are lots of loose threads here," he said. "If this proves to be a step in genuine moderation of Iran, this will be seen in hindsight as a constructive visit, but there's no evidence whatsoever that that's the case."

Dr Rubenstein said Australia's allies may also hold concerns about the new intelligence-sharing arrangement and that the issue of returning Iranian asylum-seekers - a primary goal of the trip - had seemingly been rebuffed.

"It's not a revelation to say the Iranians know a lot about what's happening in Iraq, obviously they do, but my point would be that defeating a barbaric form of Sunni Islamic extremism in the form of Da'ish or Islamic State is not likely to be all that effective in terms of ultimate outcomes if you're relying on the foremost sponsor of Shi'ite radicalism and terrorism in the region..."...

"If that's who you're depending on and collaborating with, I'd say we're in a dangerous zone."

Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Robert Goot said it was unclear if Ms Bishop had raised anti-Semitism incited by Iran, but the intelligence-sharing needed to be seen in a broader context.

"We have confidence that the government will do everything reasonably possible to safeguard the interests of Australian citizens at home and abroad...If that means co-operating with the Iranian regime in relation to intelligence, we're not in a position to gainsay that."