In which Dame Slap takes over Polonial ABC bashing duties, Polonius sends the pond off on another cut and paste, and then the pond rushes past the Angelic one to get to the cartoons ...

 

The pond learned long ago that prattling Polonius had only one sacred duty, to rail at and rant about the ABC, with its failure to make him the centre of its current affairs coverage just one of the cardigan wearers' many heresies ...

The pond was therefore astonished to see that Polonius had dropped the baton, but luckily it was picked up by Dame Slap, famous ABC board member who instigated tremendous reforms while trousering taxpayer loot, as befits a jobs for the mates appointment ...

There's no need to dwell too long on the opening snap ...

It's perfectly obvious that this is a deviant intent on some sinister conspiracy, and Dame Slap is keen to discover what it is, though the pond has to admit that it couldn't quite work out what it was, and nor, it seems could Dame Slap, though she consulted many anonymous seers assiduously studying the runes ...

Clearly there's a major conspiracy at work here, but so thin is the crème Chantilly that Dame Slap whips up - never mind the cherry on top - that the reptiles were forced to hide it with a plethora of snaps of the usual suspects, which can be shrunk and pushed to the side very quickly ...

The pond really does despair at the graphics department in the lizard Oz. Visiting other publications, it's remarkable to see graphics departments still gainfully employed, instead of filling up space with that sort of snap of "glazed fish eyes staring into the conspiratorial distance" ... not to mention that snap of a promotional sign on a building

Never mind, the way has been cleared for Dame Slap to start asking questions ...

Thus far it's been a splendid litany, of the sort that Dame Slap once reserved for the Lehrmann matter, climate science, the mango Mussolini and the like, but we're still no closer to the heart of the conspiracy, its motivation and meaning. Luckily it's never too late to start asking questions of mystic anonymous seers ferreting through the chicken entrails to arrive at startling insights ... though of course given the potential seriousness of being involved in a frivolous Dame Slap beat-up, none of them wanted to be named ...

Indeed, indeed, what were they hiding? Why were all these experienced and highly respected directors and senior chairmen lurking in the arras? What were they hiding? 

The pond spoke to a senior journalist the other day, who confided to the pond that it would be most unusual for Dame Slap to be considered sane. 

"She's barking mad," he observed, "and that's why they fitted out planet Janet, so she could flit back and forth."

Of course the pond is not at liberty to reveal this confidential source, but the pond expects full weight and respect to be given to whomever it might be ... you don't come by this expert opinion simply by stopping a random dog in the street and giving them a pat ...

Meanwhile, the quest for the meaning and nature of the conspiracy continues, with another anon chairman ("distinguished") musing, as distinguished anons are wont to do...

Good old Donald, the pond had almost forgotten about him. The pond would have been keen for him to express a view on Chairman Rupert transitioning to Chairman Emeritus, whatever that might be, and the appointment of one of his spawn to be the new chair, but it seems these days that nepotism is simply a virtue to be celebrated quietly, without any unseemly fuss ...

Meanwhile, more inferences can be made and more questions asked, and who better to do it than Moorice?

The pond was so delighted to see Moorice consulted that it couldn't bear to separate his snap from his insights ...

Say one thing, Moorice at least puts his name to his idle speculations, which is more than you can say for all the distinguished chairmen, directors, and chook entrails lovers ...

Then it became clear what was really on the agenda. A chance to stick in the shiv about the ABC being a failing, flailing enterprise, with the corollary that the sooner it's taken over by the Murdochians and run in the style of the lizard Oz, the better for all concerned. Then Dame Slap's penetrating insights into sundry conspiracies can flood the land ...

Of course the pond has been doing its own research, and some senior ABC insiders spoke to the pond on condition of anonymity. 

They moaned and sighed and keened and wailed and threw ashes on the sackcloth and shouted "not another bloody hit job by that bitch doing the bidding of the Murdochs in that bloody rag I'd keep in the outdoor dunny if I still had one ..."

The pond refused to accept this response. The pond knew that there had to be some reason to explain why Dame Slap had been assigned the job of stepping on Polonial turf. Yet the reason had been kept a secret. Yet after all, it was just a standard hit job, so there was no reason for the reason to be kept secret. Drum roll maestro, if you please, while the pond adopts a sinister stance, and learns into the camera with a Colbertian flick of the eyebrow ... "Or was there?"

So Sarah Henderson's impersonation of a stunned mullet wasn't a secret in that snap above. It was because she was actually a stunned mullet ... or is that shocked like an electric eel, the voltage running through her skin as she teaches Dame Slap how to do the paranoid conspiratorial swim ...

As for the good old Beeb, is it time to invoke the Lineker clause? The aim of course is to turn public broadcasters into colourless cardigans with elbow patches, devoid of personalities and views, and it's one of the reasons that the pond no longer watches the ABC, except to catch up on the ambulance chasing news.

Angertainment is all the go, that's the way to boost circulation, and offering idle speculation on conspiracy theories - with all the usual suspects trotted out - is a surefire way to show that degutting the ABC means the reptiles can parade in their finery and nobody will mention their Chairman Emeritus follies ...

Has there ever been a reptile column so full of saucy doubts and fears and questions, only to end not with a bang, but a whimper about a stitch-up?

Of course it's a stitch-up, he stitched up the job. What isn't a stitch up is the singularly inept way that Dame Slap attempted a stitch-up and showed she needed to go back to do a 101 course on stitchwork.

And so to a more serious matter, because having abandoned his ABC bashing, Polonius this weekend strayed into territory that was likely to give him nose bleed ...

When the dog botherer ventured into this turf, the pond resorted to a cut and paste, and the temptation was irresistible. 

There was Jonathan Freedland in the Graudian ending his piece Too many taking sides in this conflict miss the true nature of Hamas – and Netanyahu  this way ...

...Borrell also called for “a political solution” – one excluding Hamas, which he described as “not a partner for anything” – to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to the two-state solution. Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and the rest say the same thing. But here is where they, too, are guilty of misreading one of the key players – in this case, the current government of Israel.

For Biden and co are overlooking the fact that Netanyahu and his coalition are utterly opposed to the very arrangement Israel’s western allies advocate. This is the most rightwing government in Israel’s history. It includes junior ministers who fantasise about flattening Gaza with a nuclear bomb or repopulating it with the Jewish settlements that were uprooted in 2005, and senior ministers who are, even now, wrecking any chance of cooperation with the only body that could plausibly fill the vacuum in a post-Hamas Gaza: the Palestinian Authority.

If it’s not finance minister and documented bigot Bezalel Smotrich refusing to transfer tax revenues to the authority, thereby denying officials their salaries and increasing the chances they will be recruited by Hamas, it’s the ultra-nationalist with a terrorist conviction, public security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, handing out guns to extremists known to be dangerous, all in the name of self-defence. The pair of them are heroes to the West Bank settlers who have been engaged in an under-reported campaign of violence and harassment against Palestinians – with at least 190 killed since 7 October – as if bent on igniting a third intifada in that occupied territory. Netanyahu does nothing to rein them in, because he needs their parliamentary votes to stay in power – and he needs to stay in power to be sure he stays out of jail, as he stands trial on corruption charges.

So Washington, Brussels and London currently back Israel because they agree that no peace is possible without the removal of Hamas. They are much less clear that no peace is possible without the removal of Netanyahu and his henchmen. Yet both can be true. Western governments, and those filling the streets to condemn them, need to be clear-eyed about the nature of their enemies – and their allies.

Well yes, and that link about Bezalel Smotrich in the original text led to a Haaretz story  (paywall?)  about a truly nasty piece of work ...

The story went on ...

According to the report, Shaarei Zedek, Hadassah Ein Karem and Hadassah Mt. Scopus in Jerusalem, as well as Tel Aviv's Ichilov and Kfar Sava's Meir all engage in such segregation. According to its investigation, all the hospitals denied such a policy but in some of them noted that they do accommodate mothers' requests for separate rooming. The reporter said that sometimes the separation is made upon request but sometimes as a matter of routine. Only Soroka in Be'er Sheva and Rambam in Haifa told the investigative reporters that segregation is out of the question.

"My wife is really no racist, but after giving birth she wants rest and not the mass feasts that are common among Arab mothers who give birth," he tweeted.

Several Knesset members across the political spectrum expressed disapproval of Smotrich's tweets.

Naftali Bennett, the chairman of Habayit Hayehudi, quickly responded on Twitter by quoting Ethics of the Fathers 3:14: "Beloved is man, for he was created in the image [of Gd]," adding "Jew or Arab."

Smotrich did not back down, answering Bennett: "Very true, on condition that he is not an enemy that wants to destroy me. Then he does not respect his image and he is really not beloved to me."

MK Zouheir Bahloul (Zionist Union) commented, "With such opinions, the way to hell is short." He asserted that Smotrich thinks that "all Arab men and women are potential terrorists and that at the very least they are not legitimate members of Israeli society."

Apparently they're smelly animals, best kept segregated in another stable ... but back to prattling Polonius reporting from his 'leet office in the heart of Sydney's 'leet CBD ...

Meanwhile, if the pond can revert to that interview by Isaac Chotiner with historian Omer Bartov in The New Yorker  ... (soft paywall?)

New Yorker: How do you think about a case where the intent may not be to destroy a people, but where those people are viewed as less human than you are, and you don’t care how many of them die. How do we think about that in the context of genocide?

Omer Bartov: Even if your intent is not to destroy the group as such, but functionally that’s what you’re doing, and much of your rhetoric is about treating those people as subhuman, then you are in that kind of gray zone between a well-planned, thought-out genocide, which is on the one extreme, and something that gradually becomes that. But it’s a fine distinction. I don’t think that the policymakers in Israel are actually thinking genocide. They’re using that language and they’re using policies that are pushing in that direction, but they’re not thinking of themselves as carrying out genocide.

Part of what is happening on the ground is if you displace large numbers of people from their homes, if you then cram them into a much smaller territory, you destroy the homes from which they came, if they receive not enough infrastructure, food, water, medical care, and they start dying in large numbers, your goal may have been to win a military campaign and to do it as ruthlessly and quickly as possible knowing that your political clock is running out, but the result begins to look more and more like genocide.

The reason for the Q and A was a piece that Bartov had written for the NY Times, What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide ...

As some might be stopped by the paywall, here's a sample ...

Up against all that Polonius really is out of his depth ...

The old Godwin's Law routine, but to balance that, another quote from the New Yorker q and a ...

New Yorker: Why did you want to write this piece now? You’ve explained why you think it’s morally important to recognize genocide as distinct from other things, but is there some more practical reason?

Bartov: Yeah, look, the obvious reason is that when you study genocide, you always look back and say, “There were all these signs that it’s going to happen, and why was nobody doing anything about it, or at least warning that it’s about to happen?” And usually there were people issuing warnings. Instead of waiting until something happens, it’s better to warn.

The violence is on a very different scale from anything that has happened before in Gaza. The mentality is different. The rage is different. And once you start speaking about it, it may actually have an effect, both on those who can stop it on the outside, especially the American Administration, and on some people on the inside, who say, “Wait, I mean, we are getting ourselves into something that we didn’t intend to do.”

And so to a final gobbet from Polonius ...

Meanwhile, in another country ... it seems only fair to end with the end of that NY Times' piece ...

...None of this happened in a vacuum. Over the past several months I have agonized greatly over the unfolding of events in Israel. On Aug. 4, several colleagues and I circulated a petition warning that the attempted judicial coup by the Netanyahu government was intended to perpetuate the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. It was signed by close to 2,500 scholars, clergy members and public figures who were disgusted with the racist rhetoric of members of the government, its anti-democratic efforts and the growing violence by settlers, seemingly supported by the I.D.F., against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

What we had warned about — that it would be impossible to ignore the occupation and oppression of millions for 56 years, and the siege of Gaza for 16 years, without consequences — exploded in our faces on Oct. 7. Following Hamas’s massacre of innocent Jewish civilians, our same group issued a second petition denouncing the crimes committed by Hamas and calling upon the Israeli government to desist from perpetrating mass violence and killings upon innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza in response to the crisis. We wrote that the only way to put an end to these cycles of violence is to seek a political compromise with the Palestinians and end the occupation.

It is time for leaders and senior scholars of institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust to publicly warn against the rage- and vengeance-filled rhetoric that dehumanizes the population of Gaza and calls for its extinction. It is time to speak out against the escalating violence on the West Bank, perpetrated by Israeli settlers and I.D.F. troops, which now appears to also be sliding toward ethnic cleansing under the cover of war in Gaza; several Palestinian villages have reportedly self-evacuated under threats from settlers.

I urge such venerable institutions as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to step in now and stand at the forefront of those warning against war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and the crime of all crimes, genocide.

If we truly believe that the Holocaust taught us a lesson about the need — or really, the duty — to preserve our own humanity and dignity by protecting those of others, this is the time to stand up and raise our voices, before Israel’s leadership plunges it and its neighbors into the abyss.

There is still time to stop Israel from letting its actions become a genocide. We cannot wait a moment longer.

Sorry, if you read the likes of Polonius, you can wait forever ...

And now, despite being well over length, the pond must turn to the Angelic one, if only because the pond yesterday promised that it would take a look today at her playing the 'womyn who care about men' card ...

Enough already. The pond has long been at war with the remnants of the lizard Oz graphics department, reduced to penury ... and offering meaningless, all purpose graphics to match the meaningless text ...

And so on, and on, and so now on to the meaningless text, confusing and conflating domestic violence with male suicide ...

Yes, indeed, the pond will say that confusing and conflating domestic violence, and male suicide, is not useful or meaningful in relation to either issue, nor is peddling the old canard that domestic violence can't affect men, though statistically in fewer numbers, and then blaming feminists for ignoring the issue.

Lurking behind all this is of course the old Catholic church yearning for the return of the patriarchy, where women could get themselves to a nunnery and men could get on with running the church and the world ...

The pond's main irritation is that as a result of all the reptile gibberish this weekend other issues have to be left to cartoonists ...

If the pond wanted to sum it all up in a few words, it would be not helping Angelic one, not happy ... and a personal anecdote doesn't excuse or exculpate all the disingenuous confusion and conflation ... and neither does the deployment of very big billy goat butts ...

And there you have it, and it's made explicit. It's all the fault of women up and leaving.

Apparently it's better, with a deep sigh, to stay hitched, and suffer in silence, than end a marriage, because it's the fundamentalist Catholic thing you know ...

And then we can all live as happy families ...

Oh wait, scrub the Rockwell happy families routine, these days it looks like this ...

Sorry, the pond needed a little light relief, what with the Angelic one doing diddly squat for domestic violence or male suicide, and yet with a gobbet still to go, blathering on about divorce in the fundamentalist tyke manner - it was always going to be a tough sell to a proudly divorced pond, who likes marriage so well it has been tried several times ...

The only regression to the past here has been the shades of Catholic fundamentalism lurking in the background ...

Worse, the pond was denied the fun of a cartoon festival and so must make do with a batch of them for a closer ...