The Crikey fish stinks from the head
It is old fashioned bigotry to assert that Australia’s six Jewish MP’s are disloyal to Australia. This is what the anti-Israel online publication Crikey alleged in an article by its veteran writer Guy Rundle a couple of weeks ago…writes Michael Danby.
Michael Danby
Yet thanks to an AJN front page report, it is now clear that Sydney University Professor of Law Mary Crock repudiates Crikeys central conclusion -that openly identified Jewish MPs, like me ,have a Citizenship problem because of Israel’s Right of Return law.
Professor Crock explained that Crikey never spoke to her.
The Professor suggests in the AJN that Crikey took her quote out of context from a Daily Telegraph front page, where she was quoted on a different Issue.
Professor Crock, when contacted by the AJN was quoted on its front page, explicitly disagreeing with “Crikey “, strongly endorsing the view of the ANU Law Professor, Kim Rubenstein.
Crock told the AJN that the article does not in any way represent her views on the Right of Return. Indeed the exact opposite, she completely agrees with Professor Rubenstein.
Also the AJN published, in an important column Professor Kim Rubenstein, Professor at the ANU and author of ‘Australian Citizenship Law’, which highlights the flaws in Crikey’s baseless attempt to ensnare Australian Jewish MP’s in the current Section 44 citizenship mess that is before the High Court.
Professor Rubenstein highlights in her comment for the AJN, the difference between needing to apply for citizenship, as is the case for Israeli citizenship, and having citizenship automatically bestowed on you.
“…right to apply for citizenship does not constitute ‘the rights or privileges’ of citizenship itself”
Why would Crikey and Guy Rundle take the University of Sydney’s Professor of Public Law, Mary Crock’s words in the Daily Telegraph out of context?
Based on his false premise, on a quote plucked from a press cutting, Crikey’s Guy Rundle impugns my loyalty to Australia. A clue to why he and Crikey would allow themselves to say the same as the far right, who are always going on about dual loyalties, is that he recounts a dishonest version of my comments on the expulsion of the Mossad.
Disgracefully he claims;
“… relations between Australia and Israel are one of the places where the question of dual loyalties anticipated by section 44 exactly comes into play.”
He then links my public disagreement with then Prime Minister Rudd;
“Yet there was one MP who thought that though Israel’s act was wrong, expulsion of a diplomat was ‘unnecessary and an overreaction’ and said so in Parliament: Michael Danby, MP for Melbourne Ports.”
And suggests I did so because of some nefarious secret loyalty to Israel.
“…does it amount to an expression of ‘adherance’ to another power whose ‘rights or previleges’ of citizenship Danby enjoys?”
Of course this is a lie. And he and Crikey know it. Because as I said publicly at the time. Because of the invaluable information Australia gets from Israel on Jihadi terrorism I argued to Rudd, it was a mistake for our Australian interests to cut off our flow of info from the Israeli’s, by expelling their liaison guy in Canberra.
Why would Crikey be promoting this toxic bigotry as the leading article in their free weekend promotion, despite professor Crocks definitive repudiation & the exposure days earlier by the AJN?
None of this is a surprise to people familiar with the long despicable bigotry of Crikey’s Guy Rundle or Bernard Keane.
It’s frankly sickening that these otherwise unemployable fanatics are paid their shekel by “respectable” businessman Eric Beecher.
Sadly, this disgusting Crikey article attacking and undermining the loyalty of the six Jewish MP’s, Dreyfuss, Frydenburg, Freelander, Leeser, Senator Stirling Griff and myself, and the innuendo that Jews are disloyal to Australia is ultimately Beecher’s responsibility .
The fish stinks from the head.
Great point Michael. How could Rundle get it so wrong? Could it be because, he, like Bernard Keane, is obsessed with being anti-Israel that he can’t read? How could he not understand the difference between Jews having the right to apply for Israeli citizenship and actually having Israeli citizenship? Plus quoting entirely out of context so as to imply the exact opposite of the comments supposedly quoted? The responsibility for such shoddy, unprofessional agitprop goes back to Eric Beecher who at least tolerates such disgraceful journalism. Who can forget Rundle’s disgusting sledging of David Feeney and his wife Liberty Sanger last election? Even Crikey apologised but obviously did nothing to curb Rundle. I subscribed to Crikey for many years from the time that Christian Kerr and others offered edgy and informative pieces that were genuinely politically interesting and intellectually provocative. But that’s all over now. Will you do anything about the blatantly anti-Jewish innuendos Mr Beecher?