And so it's back to self-abuse with Gerard Henderson ...

(Above: you can always find more Steve Bell here).

Not having read Gerard Henderson for a couple of weeks is a bit like an Emo giving up self-harm, or a fourteen year old boy giving up self-abuse, or a cigarette smoker tossing away the fags, or a chocolate eater abandoning the lower forms compound knavery, or perhaps simply giving up banging one's head on the floor like a spoiled terrible two.

Or so the pond is told, not having done all these things, but being Henderson-less does lead to a little gaiety and vitality, and perhaps a bold careless reckless derring do and light-headed sense of adventure.

What, take another puff, eat another wretched chocolate bar? Where'd be the harm? It's only one column, and so the wayward foolish pond clicked on UN vote unlikely to help Labor.

And then immediately regretted the folly.

First up there was this wonderful, astonishing bit of pedantry and obfuscation:

On Meet the Press on Sunday, presenter Paul Bongiorno put it to the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, that the “Israel lobby and the opposition are very unhappy you were rolled on Australia's vote in the United Nations giving the Palestinian Authority observer status”. 
The fact is that there are no Israelis in Australia who lobby for Israel. Presumably, what Bongiorno intended to say was that there are Jewish Australians who support Israel. 

Even on the most asinine level of pedantry, this surely takes the cake, since Henderson thereby manages to discount the Israeli ambassador and staff, and while we may count the Israel embassy as an Israeli home away from home, that plucky adventurer and his crew do on occasion step out the front door, on to Australian soil and lobby for Israel.

And was it only a few days ago that the ABC ran a puff piece about Aussie Zionists training to fight for Israel? And 'making Aliyah'...

Still, it's likely that actual military activity and dying for Israel - more than 400 have done it in the past four years according to the story - isn't actual lobbying in the Hendersonian sense of sitting in an armchair at the Sydney Institute making pronouncements on the virtues of the Vietnam war.

But it does allow for a follow-up bit of petty-minded yah yah sucks boo to you logic:

However, if it is proper to use the term “Israel lobby” then, presumably, it should be legitimate to refer to an entity called the “Lebanon lobby”. This would cover Australians of Muslim Lebanese background who are highly critical of Israel.

Ah those bloody Lebanese Muslims, bane of Hendersonian nirvana, perhaps worse than ABC or Fairfax types, and there they are lobbying for Lebanon, which is exactly the same as lobbying for Palestine, and perhaps Egypt and certainly Iran and maybe Iraq, because the fact is, they're all Arabs and they're all in it together, and on a dark night no one can tell them apart, even if some of them pretend to be Christian or Maronite.

And that's just a taster for the spectacular logic flip-flop towards the end of the piece:

Some voters, including Muslims, are attracted by Abbott's social conservatism. The fact that he is married with adult children is not a minus. Also social conservatives of all faiths – Christian, Hindus and Muslims alike – tend to support the Coalition's opposition to same sex marriage.

Yes, when it comes to bloody-minded prejudices, Henderson, Abbott and the bloody Islamics are at one. It seems those bloody Lebanese Muslims aren't so bad after all, when they're sticking it to gays and supporting a married man, unlike that sterile atheist hussy currently lodging in the lodge. Peace out ...

The point of course is that Henderson wants to spend an entire piece refracting western Sydney and its political allegiances through the conflict in the middle east - the dire implications for Labor, the oh so brief rightness of Gillard, the wrongness of the rest of the Labor party, the wrongness of the media and the Palestinian push, and the rightness and joyousness of being Abbott and Henderson.

And so we come to the head counting:

In recent times it has been fashionable for critics of Israel – on both the left and the right – to refer to the Jewish vote. In fact, the total number of Jews in Australia would not exceed 130,000. According to my contacts in the Muslim community, the total number of Muslim Lebanese in Australia is more than 400,000. In other words, the political weight of the Australians of Muslim Lebanese background far exceeds that of Jewish Australians. Then there are other Muslim minorities in addition to other Arab groupings.

Uh huh. Which perhaps explains why The Australian Jewish News started off a June 2012 story here in this fashion:

The official Jewish population of Australia has increased by 9.58 per cent in five years to 97,335 people, according to the latest census figures.

And why Bernard Salt - yes the pond is reduced to saltiness - using the same figures on July 5, 2012 in a story here, paywall limited, wrote:

The largest single "Muslim" ethnicity in Australia is the Lebanese community, which numbers 76,000. The issue with the Muslim community, as indeed it is with most non-Christian minorities, is that they cluster in Sydney and Melbourne, giving the impression they are far more numerous. The recent census shows there are in fact more Americans (77,000) living in Australia than Lebanese. But because Americans spread themselves throughout, and intermingle with the Australian-born population, the scale of their representation is far less apparent.

Who knows who Henderson's contacts in the Muslim community might be, but it seems they're as woefully ignorant as Henderson himself.

Now of course you can get into semantics about whether being born in Lebanon is the criterion, or being born in Australia of Lebanese parents will suffice, or feeling Lebanese on any given day depending which way the wind blows might actually be enough, or noting that certain items in the Census aren't obligatory, or that maybe His Statistical Saltiness is wrong, since in 2006, the census recorded 86,599 Lebanese-born people in Australia, and maybe some have been forced to go underground by Gerard Henderson's routine tirades against Lebanese Muslims and the way they're ruining western Sydney ...

But in any case the thing about playing with statistics is that it's a bit like playing with matches, and you never know where it might end.

You might even end up on Chris Bowen's site here:

'There are more than 200 000 Australians of Lebanese descent according to the 2011 Census and my visit will provide an opportunity to broadly discuss Australia's migration and temporary visa programs.'

Uh huh. So let's be kind, and say that Henderson and his Muslim contacts - would any Muslim contact Henderson? - only got it wrong by about 100%.

Now where were we, apart from loading up the data?

Well of course it's a simple case of Israel and Tony Abbott and Gerard Henderson right, and everybody else wrong, and then - having spent an entire column weighing up the domestic implications of taking a stance on middle eastern issues - coming to this astonishing conclusion:

... domestic politics is not a proper guide to foreign policy. 

The charge of course is that the recent overturning of Gillard on the Middle East was merely done with an eye to the Muslim vote in the west and south-west of Sydney, which won't in any case do the Labor party any good, since the west of Sydney hates the Labor party and loves Tony Abbott, yes even the Islamics, while everybody since Ben Chifley and Bert Evatt has been on board with Israel. And you know, once you're on a good thing, like Mortein, you must stick to it for ever and ever and ever, or at least until the twelfth of never ...

This is of course because Henderson can never lift himself above the gutter of votes and winning power - rather like Mr. Positivity himself - and consider some of the principles involved in the issue, or perhaps wonder why he struggled to come up with a few more names than the predictable USA, Canada and the Czech Republic, when in reality the vote on allowing the Palestinians to become a mini-Vatican was a comprehensive 138 to nine, with 41 countries abstaining, or thereabouts, since once again the figures depend on what you read.

And the response of the rabid right-wing Israeli government currently fear-mongering in a bid to get home in the January elections?

That's right, petulantly announcing a new bout of settlement building, which saw the UK, France, Sweden, Spain and Denmark summon ambassadors to express a view, and even the United States forced to take a negative tone.

The reality is that the Netanyahu government has no interest in negotiations, discussions, or a resolution by way of two states or any other solution which would impede its ongoing expansion, and the fear-mongering which will help it gain a coalition majority in the next parliament.

It has its own handy private ghetto, on which it can conduct raids, and which truth to tell is generally impotent, stomping up and down with a few rockets like a Monty Python black knight, and it comes complete with east German style wall, is a way to maintain the fear, while allowing Israel to expand into areas in a way which ensures East Jerusalem can never become the capital of Palestine. (And yes they even got down to doing a calorie count for their ghetto dwellers, as was revealed in a court case back in 2010, here).

Taking a view on this, on the intractability of both sides, most notably and equally Hamas, which does its best to maintain an extremism up there with Netanyahu, and which needs extremism from him to maintain their own extremism, helps explain why it is possible to take a principled step in relation to foreign policy - abstaining from supporting a rabid right wing government - without the cynical necessity of considering domestic politics.

But you can't expect to read about anything like this in the routine baying of Israel good, and Lebanese Muslims problematic, to be found in your standard, blinkered, cloistered, closeted Gerard Henderson column ...

So if you'll forgive the pond, it's time to get back to some of that compound chocolate, and some medicinal rum, and a bit of EMO self-harm, though it has to be said that imitating a petulant fourteen year old boy like Gerard Henderson remains beyond the pale ...

(Below: and now because thinking about the middle east gets the pond depressed, and because thinking about Gerard Henderson requires no thinking at all, and because a reader kindly sent in a photobombing by a squirrel, and because we've returned from Central Park with a squirrel mania, here's something to lighten the day. The pond is assured it's not a photoshop job, but where would the world be without social media? Is it the ultimate solution to everything?Will someone photobomb Gerard Henderson? Oh please make it so ...)