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Monday, August 04, 2014

Australian Government slams Sydney Morning Heralds Anti Semitic Cartoon......

George Brandis slams Fairfax newspaper over ‘anti-Semitic’ cartoon

Darren Davidson
Business Media Writer
Sydney
The Australian
August 4,2014

THE Attorney-General, George Brandis, has accused Fairfax Media of publishing anti-Semitic coverage of the Middle East, and denounced a cartoon in The ­Sydney Morning Herald depicting a Jewish man with an exaggerated nose as comparable to propaganda from Nazi Germany.

In an extraordinary attack, Senator Brandis said coverage in Fairfax papers of the Gaza conflict was “overtly anti-Semitic”.

“I thought the cartoon was deplorable,” Senator Brandis said. “I think that critics of Israel’s foreign policy of course have every right to express their views. But I would have thought that a responsible media organisation would have a very good look at itself when it publishes cartoons (of) the kind we haven’t seen since Germany in the 1930s.”

In response to criticism from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Herald editor-in-chief Darren Goodsir said the cartoon was not intended to incite racial hatred. He said it was modelled on a number of photographs published, including one with an old man sitting observing the conflict in Gaza from a hill near Sderot.

Today’s edition of the Herald carries an apology in its editorial. Senator Brandis’s intervention will ratchet up pressure on Fairfax, which is facing a reader and advertiser backlash over the cartoon.

The Australian Jewish News has called on readers to cancel subscriptions to Fairfax. The cartoon illustrated a column by Mike Carlton, which ran in the paper’s July 26 edition. ­Created by illustrator Glen Le ­Lievre, the cartoon also ran on the website of Victorian masthead The Age, which is also published by Fairfax. The cartoon features an old man with a hook nose sitting in a chair emblazoned with the Star of David on the back, 
pressing a remote to blow up a Palestinian area.

Asked if the cartoon amounted to racial vilification and could encourage or incite others to hate Jews, Senator Brandis said: “It certainly constitutes a racial form of stereotyping. I think The Sydney Morning Herald and Fairfax Media in general ought to be very careful about the almost overtly anti-Semitic tone some of their commentary, including their editorial cartoon, have adopted.”

It is understood Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull rang Goodsir to lambast him for running the cartoon, which he deemed anti-Semitic and offensive to many of his constituents in his eastern Sydney electorate.

Carlton’s column quoted Israeli journalist Gideon Levy accusing the Jewish state of fascism. “It is a breathtaking irony that these atrocities can be committed by a people with a proud liberal tradition of scholarship and culture, who hold the Warsaw Ghetto and the six million dead of the Holocaust at the centre of their race memory,” Carlton wrote. “But this is a new and brutal Israel.”

Goodsir declined to comment yesterday.

We apologise: publishing cartoon in original form was wrong

Why Labor Green Loon Independent "Co Party" now opposition sides with the SAVAGE

Wake up Labor, smell the threat

Andrew Bolt 
Herald Sun
August 4 2014





Andrew Bolt and Miranda Devine speak up for Israel and Christians in Iraq


A COUPLE of hundred men marched past the Lakemba Hotel in Sydney a week ago, chanting their support for Gaza, and with it a threat.

Here is what they shouted while waving black flags of jihad — and pray Labor finally listens:

Palestine is Muslim land

The solution is Jihad ...

You can never stop Islam

From Australia to al Sham (Syria)

One umma (Muslim community) hand in hand

From Lakemba to Gaza

One call “khalifa” (Caliphate)

That chant is a wake-up for a political class now too cowed or craven to judge between the civilised and the primitive.

Yes, we really do now have hundreds of people who feel free to demonstrate a common cause with terrorists waging the most hideous wars in Gaza, Syria and Iraq.

I can hear the usual “but but but” already, as in: but you’re ignoring that most Muslims are peace-loving, and saying such things risks alienating them or encouraging racists.

And there’s truth to that, which is why we’ve left the problem to fester to the point where we’ve had scores of jihadists fight in Syria and Iraq, including two suicide bombers and two beheaders.

But we’ve done more than simply ignore something that threatens our physical safety.

Our cultural and political institutions have also surrendered our values, or made them seem no better than some we’ve imported so recklessly.

Just last week, the NSW Community Relations Commission chairman, Vic Alhadeff, a Jew, had to resign for simply noting Palestinian terrorists were firing rockets at Israeli civilians, and Israel would naturally “do whatever is needed to defend its citizens”.

Yes, supporting a Western democracy against an Islamist terrorist tyranny now makes you unfit to foster proper community relations.

Sick, but what undid Alhadeff were the greatest viruses weakening our defence of Western culture — demographics and the cheapest form of democracy.

Import people and you import a culture. You also import voters, and Muslims now outnumber Jews here by five to one.

And look where those voters are — in the lap of a Labor Party now so debased that it will sell out our civilisation for seats.

BLOG WITH ANDREW BOLT

Labor frontbencher Tony Burke, for instance, represents the Sydney seat of Watson, which now has an astonishing 20 per cent of Muslim voters. In fact, of the 20 seats with the most Muslim voters, many in western Sydney, Labor holds all but one.

It shows. Two years ago, the Gillard government dropped support for Israel in the United Nations after foreign minister Bob Carr spent an hour with prime minister Julia Gillard, as The Australian reported, “explaining the electoral problems in Sydney”.

Added The Sydney Morning Herald: “Many MPs in western Sydney, who are already fearful of losing their seats, are coming under pressure from constituents with a Middle East background.”

Last September, the Mufti of Australia even wrote to Labor members warning that union boss Paul Howe had a “bias” towards Israel, and if he became a senator, Labor would lose the Muslim votes that helped “successfully retain the majority of ALP seats in Western Sydney”. Howes was stopped.

On the weekend came even more startling claims — that the Gillard government downplayed a report warning that homegrown jihadists returning from foreign fights could launch serious attacks in Australia.

Former judge Anthony Whealy QC chaired a 2013 counterterrorism review and said Labor sat on his report for two months before quietly tabling it on Budget night last year, when the media was too busy to notice.

Whealy’s report warned of exactly the threat the Abbott Government is now trying to counter, suggesting laws to force people returning from Syria and Iraq, for instance, to explain exactly what they’d been doing.

Whealy says “the response from the previous government you would have to say was slow”, but is Opposition Leader Bill Shorten embarrassed? Hell, no.

He’s still protecting Labor votes by talking out of both sides of his mouth, saying yes, something needs to be done about extremists, but no, the Government risks demonising innocent people.

Meanwhile, his party continues to appease what should be resisted.

The NSW Labor Conference a week ago overwhelmingly approved a motion criticising Israel more than Gaza over the current war.

It even warned Israel that if it “continues to build and expand settlements”, Labor would punish it by pushing for “recognition of the Palestinian state” — handing victory to the Hamas terrorists, from whom nothing of any consequence was demanded in exchange.

How Labor has sold its soul — and sold out our values and allies.

But Labor’s Muslim voters should be pleased. I can hear them in Lakemba — represented in Parliament by Tony Burke — already chanting:

From Lakemba to Gaza

One call “khalifa”.