RUTHFULLY YOURS

Melbourne’s newspaper “The Age” is part of a stable of Aussie journals that are really down under in their bashing and bias on Israel. The Editor met with a Jewish community group….rsk

More than 100 members of the community, among them Peter Kohn, flocked to the JCCV plenum on Monday night as Age editor Andrew Holden sought to defend his paper’s coverage of Israel.

LIKE a cautious tourist on safari, Andrew Holden, editor-in-chief of The Age, initially kept his distance from the elephant in the room – in a 16-minute address to the Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV) plenum on Monday night, he avoided all mention of Jews and Israel.

Perhaps anticipating his audience’s inevitable questions on a widely perceived anti-Israel bias at The Age, he deliberately focused his speech on social issues important to his readers – same-sex marriage, end-of-life ethics and homelessness.

But then came the questions from members of the community – and the elephant lumbered in for a close-up. For the next 40 minutes, Holden responded to stiff questioning from more than 100 attendees over his newspaper’s treatment of Israel.

The editor batted away an opener by J-Air radio commentator Michael Burd – whether he thought Jews were “naive” enough to believe The Age is objective on Israel while it has, according to Burd, pro-Palestinian activists on its editorial staff. “There is no group-think or mindset within The Age or The Sydney Morning Herald that says we are anti-Israel,” declared Holden. “Let me say categorically The Age has never doubted Israel’s right to exist.”

Eight years ago, the current US president’s supporters were given to describing him as the smartest thing since the microchip, a mind of such insight and acuity all the world’s problems would soon be solved. His inability to read and understand the Koran is further proof to the contrary
The American President’s speech at the Islamic Society of Baltimore mosque on February 3 was yet another exercise in countering the made-up malady of Islamophobia. Credit where credit is due, President Obama puts the case with conviction. Some right-wingers on the fringe think that this comes from him being a covert Muslim. However, it is much more likely – in having a Muslim father and then stepfather – that his view of Islam is drawn from his own personal experiences, which may well have been amiable.

To wit, when it comes to Islam he concocts his own insular narrative. He gives every impression of being blinkered, unread and self-absorbed. Call me a Democrat lackey, if you will, but I like this explanation better than thinking he is practicing taqiyya, like one of those unctuous imams that troll around compliant media outlets. After all, he is the US Commander in Chief. That he would knowingly deceive the American public about his true religious faith during these troubling times is unthinkable. Is it not?

Let me present some evidence of his disengagement from Islam to back my point. First he has no idea what the word ‘Islam’ means.

Last week, I reported on the appearance at Vassar College, co-sponsored by their Jewish Studies program, of Jasbir Puar, a Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Rutgers University. As I noted then, Puar accuses Israel of deliberately maiming Palestinians, rather than killing them, out of some combination of cruelty and greed. At that time, I did not have a record of the speech, which took place last Wednesday. But members of Fairness to Israel, a group of Vassar alums and parents organized to counter the propagandizing that passes for academic discourse about Israel at Vassar, were present and recorded and transcribed Puar’s talk. Assuming the accuracy of the transcript, Puar did not disappoint.

Much of it was evidently incomprehensible. Here is a sample, a part of her description of her project “How Palestine Matters”: “How Palestine Matters situates the geopolitical that has been obliviated in the resurrection of the ecological and the geographical in emergent fields of new materialisms and anthropocene studies.”

Mae West, the famous philosopher of the boudoir, would hardly believe her fortune today. “So many men,” she once complained, “so little time.” She was the kind of girl who set out to “climb the ladder of success, wrong by wrong.”
Now there’s such an abundance of choices in that even Mae would be overwhelmed. The educationists are taking inventory of what’s available and finding a sexual proclivity to suit every taste. They’re encouraging children to take stock and if they don’t like what they’ve got, not despair. Sex, like global warming, is always changing.

Typical of the search is a school in the English seaside resort of Brighton, a favorite of the politicians, leading the way. The kids at Blatchington Mill School were assigned, as part of their homework, to choose from a list of 23 terms to describe their “gender.” (Even the English, like their American cousins, no longer understand that “gender” is none of your business unless you’re a noun in pursuit of a hot pronoun.)

After years of urging the University of California Board of Regents to take a strong stand against campus antisemitism, the regents will soon be issuing a statement that will hopefully address the problem in a meaningful way.

But, as regent Bonnie Reiss eloquently stated at the board’s November meeting, the hostile climate for Jewish students will not change unless UC chancellors act immediately and respond to threats and intimidation directed against Jewish students in the same way they would — and should — if Muslim, African American, Latino, or gay students were being targeted.

If only UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks would heed this plea.

Last October, Berkeley’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held an anti-Israel demonstration in the center of the campus. After almost an hour of speeches attacking Israel, the SJP leader took the microphone and began chanting, “Intifada, intifada, we support the intifada!” This is the same as chanting, “Violence and murder, violence and murder, we support violence and murder against Jews!” The SJP leader riled up the crowd, encouraging them to repeat his terrorist threat against Jews. The scene was chilling, especially for Jewish students.

One Jewish student named Nathaniel, who had come to support a peaceful pro-Israel rally at the same time and place, was shocked — and afraid — when he heard the SJP’s leader call for violence against Jews. Holding an Israeli flag and a sign supporting Israel, Nathaniel was suddenly confronted by an SJP supporter who told him that he should be ashamed as a Jew to support Israel, and accused Nathaniel of being a “child murderer.”

Aghast at these accusations, Nathaniel was nevertheless determined to reply constructively and peacefully. Before he could, the SJP supporter told him to “f–k off,” stating that Nathaniel “disgusted” him. He demanded that Nathaniel leave the rally.