En Passant

Is there an alternative? The tens of thousands who marched this weekend against the Abbott government are a possible base from which to build a coalition against Abbott’s war on Iraq and war on Australians. If we are to go to war in Iraq then let the capitalists, parsons, politicians, landlords, newspaper editors and other stay-at-home patriots go first.

Australian supporters of Israel have reacted to the growing hostility to the Gaza war with a hysterical campaign of slander and suppression against anyone who dares to criticise Israel write Corey Oakley and Daniel Taylor in Red Flag. (The link may not work all the time because pro-Israeli forces have been attacking and shutting down the Red Flag site for the last 3 weeks. The Zionists do not want the truth about Israel’s crimes revealed.)

Education Minister Christopher Pyne labels Socialist Alternative, with no evidence whatsoever, anti-Semitic. This calumny is the last refugee of Zionist scoundrels who cannot rebut the evidence of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. In fact recent analysis shows that there has not been a global increase in anti-Semitism but rather in anti-Israeli sentiment, based on the reality of the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza. To conflate the two is a crude attempt by Zionists to bury the crimes of Israel alongside the bodies of the hundreds of murdered children in Gaza.

Labor senator Sue Lines stated the obvious. Tony Abbott is using national security (Iraq, Australian jihadists, beefed up numbers of border guards, ‘Team Australia’) to detract attention away from the Government’s unfair pro-rich Budget.

Israel did not win. The Palestinian Authority did not win. Hamas did. Palestine did. Gaza’s people did.

Operation Sovereign Borders stops innocent people who are fleeing war, murder and rape but Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison won’t stop fascists coming here. Says it all really.

I agree with Finance Minister Matthias Cormann. Taxing the rich and well off could easily address the Budget ’emergency’ and have enough left over to adequately fund better public health, public education and public transport as well as a move to a fully renewable energy society over the next decade.

Me in today’s Canberra Times letters. Scroll about half way down. http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/ct-letters/big-parties-cashed-up-20140824-3e7x5.html

SERCO detention guards are not armed with guns but they are not the only guards with whom children in detention have to deal. Many of the others are armed with guns, batons, sprays and other pieces of equipment.

Team Australia is an exclusive club for white Anglos, preferably Christian, who like footy, beer and meat pies. Good sorts are allowed in to this blokey paradise, but not Aborigines, non-whites, communists, dissenters, lefties, gays, or Muslims, and especially not women who think for themselves.

By creating and reinforcing the threat from the ‘other,’ that is those of us outside Team Australia, Abbott and co, like all previous governments, hope to bind the white Anglos to them and their capitalist system and divert attention from the very attacks the neoliberal politicians are launching on those self same white Anglos (and others) as workers or, like pensioners, the disabled and the sick, people in need.