ZFA responds to ambassador’s call for Australia to tell Israel home truths
The president of the Zionist Federation of Australia has responded to an article written by a former Australian ambassador to Israel entitled “High time Australia told Israel a few home truths”.
Ambassador Peter Rodgers
Within his article published in The Australian, former Australian ambassador to Israel Peter Rodgers wrote: “With depressingly familiar hype, Netanyahu slammed Abbas’s UN speech for its alleged deceit and incitement. He urged Abbas to accept the offer “to hold direct negotiations with Israel without preconditions”. That was a good one coming from a prime minister whose own preconditions include no Palestinian state ever, who plays godfather to the settlement movement, and who has now deemed it reasonable to use live ammunition against rock-throwing Palestinians.
Australia has long been susceptible to the line that the Palestinians are not ready for statehood. The Turnbull government, with seven others (including tiny island states such as the Marshall Islands, Palau and Tuvalu), opposed the raising of the Palestinian flag at the UN. The opposition is not much better. The ALP conference last July decided at last to discuss possible recognition of a Palestinian state if there were “no progress in the next round of the peace process”. As if there were a peace process or the faintest prospect of one.
Australian governments have often spoken proudly of their friendship with Israel.
It’s high time that friendship was put in the service of peace by telling Israel a few home truths about the Gordian knot that is occupation and violence.”
Dr Danny Lamm
Dr Danny Lamm, president of the ZFA, told J-Wire: “For a self-proclaimed advocate of “home truths”, Peter Rodgers plays fast and loose with the facts on the opinion page of today’s Australian. Per usual, the situation is far more complex than the simple ‘black-and-black’ narrative of Israeli immorality peddled by a semi-professional pro-Palestinian propagandist like Rogers.
Rogers recycles unsubstantiated third-hand media reports from anonymous sources to claim that Israel callously refused to prosecute the perpetrators of a horrific firebombing that killed a Palestinian family of four. Of course, he conveniently neglects to mention that Israel has imprisoned three suspected Jewish terrorists under administrative detention since that terrible crime.
And I use the term ‘suspected’ deliberately because there’s a vast difference between what security agencies might think they ‘know’ and what can be proved in court under the democratic safeguards that protect us all. Would Peter Rodgers prefer for Israel to dispense with the legal niceties of presumed innocence and valid evidence that are essential features of any fair judicial system?”
Peter Rodgers was Australia’s ambassador to Israel between 1994 and 1997.
“Jolly Roger” is the name that is traditionally given to the pirate flag that bears a skull and crossbones.
The picture of a beaming (or is it gloating) Mr Rodgers in this JWire article seems to tell us that Mr Rodgers is a jolly man.
We also need to do something about the emerging trend which equates politicised mohammedan claims to the Temple Mount with Jewish historical, biblical and archaeological evidence.
We also must get the Israeli MFA to kick out pseudo-journalists who publish lies. In Saturday’s SMH Ruth Pollard wrote that the IDF is using dum-dum bullets against rioting Arabs.
The crippling and sometimes fatal injuries inflicted by the IDF and Settler thugs on unarmed civilian Palestinians, protesters, stone-throwers, and school children alike, are largely due to the fragmenting bullets used in the standard issue Tavor assault rifle. Like the earlier M16, a US weapon introduced during the Vietnam War as a lightweight field rifle capable of inflicting maximum damage, the Tavor chambers the 5.56×45 mm NATO cartridge.
When the bullet impacts tissue at high velocity, it fragments, causing multiple internal injuries, much like those of the internationally banned dumdum bullets. Forensics experts confirm that x-rays of casualties show a pattern called “lead snowstorm,” the footprint of high-velocity military ammunition. Many of the wounded are hit at short range, less than 100 meters, compounding internal damage.
The reliance on these rounds is part of what human rights groups have denounced as excessive use of Israeli force against mostly unarmed Palestinians. As far back as 2001, Dr. Robert Kirschner of the Nobel Prize-winning Physicians for Human Rights observed in the context of the IDF that “shooting people with high-velocity bullets to wound them is a form of summary punishment being inflicted in the field”.
When I read Rodgers’ article, apart from the lies and obvious bias and ignorance, the question that sprang to mind was: how could a person like that ever rise within our Foreign Office to become an ambassador?
How did Adolf Hitler rise to become fuhrer of an apparently civilised, cultured Germany?
How did Jimmy Carter and Barak Obama and Richard Nixon rise to become US presidents?
History poses many such fascinating questions.
Baiting Jews has been a traditional sport among the nations for many centuries.
Its traditions are bequeathed by means of religion and / or national culture from generation to generation.
The nations who for centuries have treated not just the Jews, but even one another with appalling barbarity, have suddenly become “humanitarians,” caring for “the poor ‘Palestinians.”
Yeah, right!
On Mr Rodgers’ doorstep are teeming populations who have no or very few human and civil rights; where residents belonging to minority ethnic populations are severely discriminated against, populations who would give anything for the sorts of freedoms and opportunities which ‘Palestinian” Arabs enjoy, and Mr Rodgers, the “ambassador,” has nothing better to do than this in his spare time, which no doubt is very generously lubricated by a fat pension and perks.
Mr Rodgers is hilarious.
As a former diplomat, his propaganda piece could have been far subtler than this blatant piece of mendacity and foolishness, which can easily be torn to shreds. That he somehow managed to become an ambassador should make sensible Australians cringe with shame.
He needs to read what the Palestinian Arab scholar, Bassam Tawil, recently wrote for “The Gatestone Institute,” where he asserts that his people’s racism is reminiscent of the Germany of the Holocaust era, and that they deserve nothing, let alone a state.
It’s clear that some Australian Foreign Affairs types are zealous for a terrorist state in Judea-Samaria solely because they know that it would compound the threats to Israel’s security. There can be no other explanation since such an Arab state would be detrimental to Australia’s interests as it would aggravate Middle Eastern instability, and because there is no potential for any material benefit for Australia in it.
Could it be that some of Mr Rodgers’ best friends are Jews?
These types are quite happy to cuddle up to the settler state of Jordan, an imperialist implant from the Hedjaz, but begrudge the Jews an independent statelet in the eternal Jewish National Home.
why did Danny Lamm only respond to that element of Rogers’ hype? His whole narrative was tainted with lies & hearsay, and should be pulled apart, paragraph by paragraph.
GO Rachel!
Do it.
I have my hands full!
GS
Can Peter Rogers explain why Ararat refused Clinton and Barack offer of statehood in 2000 or Abbas refusing Olmerts Offer in 2008 of a State including East Jerusalem? Can he also explain why the PLO refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state? Can he explain the call by Hamas to kill all Jews everywhere on earth?
There was no written offer by Barak, merely a verbal offer for a de-militarized canton without control over its borders, air space and Electronic network. Tanya Reinhart’s “Israel Palestine Ending the War of 1948”, has documents and reports from the summit.
Ben, you
1) fail to address the points to which your comment purports to respond
2) Arafat signed on to the autonomy that Rabin offered in 1993 and promised faithfully to abandon terror.
There should be a TRUTH – AND – JUSTICE COMMISSION to which outrageous propagandists like Rodgers could be held to account to.
The Salem witch trials could be the modus vivendi – but we prefer shame and financial penury being the implication of being found guilty of repeated lies and distortions.
It could perhaps take also a Royal Commission format.
And errant journos will be able to unreservedly apologize when found guilty – once and promise to never lie or deliberately distort anything again.
Failures would be expensive.
Socialists, Jew haters and those who cost the community real money – like supporters of climate lunacy – would end up retrospectively funding their own prosecution when found guity!
otherwise those who propose improper causes of action pay to ensure frivolity is not manifested.
There could be an expensive sub – clause; those who espouse any form of socialism or hatred of democracy would have to leave and live in Cuba and give up their riches.
Elegant non?
A SELF – FUNDING DEFACTO LEGAL SYSTEM!