En Passant

1. These elections are the invitation we were waiting for the funeral of the two states solution.

Michael Brull in New Matilda has written a devastating response to the lies of the Zionists about the protest against Israeli war crimes and genocide at Sydney University on 11 March. Unlike the apologists for Zionist murder and dispossession Brull presents the facts based on videos of the event. The protesters were the victims of violence, not its instigators or perpetrators.

These latest Zionist untruths are a backhanded compliment to Socialist Alternative because fake leftists and Labor apparatchiks like Peter Baldwin know in the long run such revolutionary groups are attracting young idealists who want to change the world and who see through the lies of Zionism. This is very different to the Labor Party which attracts at best a few young careerists and hacks or turns the few idealists the Party does attract into careerists and hacks in a short period of time. Being rabidly pro-Zionist is almost a right of passage to greater things in the ALP.

As Omar Hassan in an article in Red Flag called Zionist students use lies, abuse to silence Palestinian solidarity activists wrote in August 2014:

There is evidence to indicate that this behaviour is a conscious strategy to undermine [Palestinian] solidarity activism on campuses.

Exactly, and the lie that Socialist Alternative organised this 11 March Sydney University ‘riot’, ‘violent protest’, in other words peaceful demonstration by the protestors, is just another untruth for that purpose.

Jeff Sparrow in Overland: It’s shameful to use bogus allegations of anti-Semitism to shut your opponents down.

If you support Palestine, and if you support free speech, I call on you to support Socialist Alternative at Monash University and across Australia in defence of Palestine, in opposition to Pyne’s higher education armaggedon and to join the fight against political repression.

Workers in Egypt do have the power to overthrow their own corrupt and reactionary dictatorship. It is that possibility that offers the ultimate hope for the region and for the liberation of all of Palestine and all of its peoples – Jews, Arabs, Christians, atheists and the rest alike.

A democratic and secular Palestine is only possible, in my view, if there is a working class revolution in Egypt showing the way for democracy and peace and setting the Arab masses across the region alight.

Now is the time for the world to stop words of pity and lamentation, but take action by doing what it did to apartheid South Africa when its policies were declared a crime against humanity. Indeed, apartheid remains a crime against humanity wherever it happens. If apartheid can’t outrage us, our humanity is called into question and our morality is hollow.

Urgent rally for Palestine Canberra 2 pm Sunday 13 July Parliament House. For more details click on this facebook event link.

This is an updated version of an article I sent to to the editors of Woroni, the student newspaper of the Australian National University. They refused to publish an earlier version of what is written below. I have submitted a cut down version of this to the Canberra Times for their consideration.

Socialist Alternative makes no bones about our opposition to the apartheid state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians, just as we opposed apartheid South Africa. We make a clear distinction (for anyone willing to see it) between Zionism as a political justification for the state of Israel, and the Jewish religion. We are critical of Zionism. Religion is a private matter. There are Jews, proud of their heritage, among our membership.

The Australasian Union of Jewish Students and its campus affiliates very actively and publicly support the Israeli state and its policies.

But the reality of Israel’s brutal actions, from the death of more than 1,100 as Israel bombed Beirut in 2006 to the massacre of 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza in January 2009 (to name just two examples found unavoidably newsworthy by the mainstream media), makes it ever more difficult to present Israel in a positive light.

By resorting to fabrications of racial vilification against those who oppose Israel’s crimes, our accusers merely reveal that they are attempting to defend the indefensible.