The paradise known as Gaza

The Los Angeles Times on Gaza: Passing through the half-mile Erez checkpoint and emerging into Gaza, the contrast could hardly be more stark. In Israel, there are shopping malls and traffic lights. In Gaza, donkey carts and herds of goats cross the road. Young boys pick through the debris of bombed-out buildings to salvage construction…

No wonder Israel likes this man

Israel launches an “independent” investigation into the Gaza flotilla debacle and includes a few foreign observers, including Nobel Peace laureate and Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble. This man’s record on such matters? From 2004: [Trimble] called human rights organisations a “great curse” yesterday and accused them of complicity in terrorist killings. “One of the great…

Melanie Philips, unplugged

A very helpful “digested read” in the Guardian of the latest work by Melanie Philips: This book arose from a sense of perplexity that almost everyone in the world thought I was clinically mad. Everywhere I looked there were people who believed boarding a humanitarian aid convoy in international waters and murdering nine people was…

Inciting race hatred on Murdoch money

A helpful reminder of the kind of hatred that regularly appears in the pages of a leading Murdoch publication. Alan Howe is a senior figure in Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper who loves to demean Arabs and praise Israel (free trips to the Jewish state thanks to the Zionist lobby have certainly helped him hone his…

Red Cross calls the Gaza blockade illegal

Israel may be launching a far from independent investigation into the Gaza flotilla massacre but the real issue remains the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The International Red Cross has released a damning report: The serious incidents that took place on 31 May between Israeli forces and activists on a flotilla heading for Gaza once again…

Is the Aussie Zionist lobby in trouble?

One of Australia’s foremost academics, Scott Burchill, senses a change in Australian public opinion over Israel. The Zionist lobby will have noticed. As will the lobby’s closest backers (such support is always helped by regular free trips to Israel and a constant stream of press releases). Over to Burchill in an online exclusive: Sometimes government…

Branding the enemy as outcasts

Henry Siegman, former national director of the American Jewish Congress, returns with a powerful piece that questions the direction of the Jewish state: Who would have believed that an Israeli government and its Jewish citizens would seek to demonize and shut down Israeli human rights organizations for their lack of “patriotism,” and dismiss fellow Jews…

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