In which the pond descends into the Murdochian gutter with Dame Slap and "Ned", but arranges some counter-programming ...

As happens far too often, in an idle moment the pond made a fatal mistake, and came across these closing lines from a column in yesterday's lizard Oz ...

...The phenomenon has been successful because it is coinciding with the denigration of everything that made the West great since the Enlightenment. This includes the slow removal of borders through the creation of anti-sovereignty constructs such as the “Global South” and mass migration. These debase the value of our citizenship. Even Afghans know not to, as they say, let snakes live in your sleeve.
Our own democracy is being cultivated, coerced, and co-opted to support one of the most anti-democratic, anti-Western, anti-Christian movements in the world. We have every right to question this Intifada movement in Australia. Because none of this came via Chinese, or Russian or Iranian cruise missiles, battleships, or drones. It is by our own ruling class of elites who are even making us question freedom of speech. Some people realise videos of priests being stabbed in our suburbs awakens the busy mums and dads and grandparents to the fact that something is not quite right.
The gut-wrenching irony of it all is we sent some of our best this country produces to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. We convinced ourselves the fight was over there. If only we knew a sanctuary for Islamist extremism was being built right here. A sanctuary to undermine all that is good, and decent and generous about Australia.

Author, author?! Why yes, it's one certain ...

Dr Jason Thomas teaches business strategy at Swinburne University of Technology and is director of Frontier Assessments.

Sidestep.

The pond recently scored a copy of Robert Fisk's epic (1300 pages and counting) book The Great War for Civilisation, The Conquest of the Middle East, from a street library (you can get it online as a pdf if you do the right sort of search).

In his preface, inter alia, Fisk wrote:

When I was a small boy, my father would take me each year around the battlefields of the First World War, the conflict that H. G. Wells called “the war to end all wars.” We would set off each summer in our Austin of England and bump along the potholed roads of the Somme, Ypres and Verdun. By the time I was fourteen, I could recite the names of all the offensives: Bapaume, Hill 60, High Wood, Passchendaele . . . I had seen all the graveyards and I had walked through all the overgrown trenches and touched the rusted helmets of British soldiers and the corroded German mortars in decaying museums. My father was a soldier of the Great War, fighting in the trenches of France because of a shot fired in a city he’d never heard of called Sarajevo. And when he died thirteen years ago at the age of ninety-three, I inherited his campaign medals. One of them depicts a winged victory and on the obverse side are engraved the words: “The Great War for Civilisation.”

Ah, the irony, perhaps beyond Dr. Jason's ken. A little later:

...If I feel this personally, it is because I have witnessed events that, over the years, can only be defined as an arrogance of power. The Iranians used to call the United States the “centre of world arrogance,” and I would laugh at this, but I have begun to understand what it means. After the Allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father’s war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career—in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad—watching the peoples within those borders burn. America invaded Iraq not for Saddam Hussein’s mythical “weapons of mass destruction”—which had long ago been destroyed—but to change the map of the Middle East, much as my father’s generation had done more than eighty years earlier. Even as it took place, Bill Fisk’s war was helping to produce the century’s first genocide—that of a million and a half Armenians—and laying the foundations for a second, that of the Jews of Europe.
This book is also about torture and executions. Perhaps our work as journalists does open the door of the occasional cell. Perhaps we do sometimes save a soul from the hangman’s noose. But over the years there has been a steadily growing deluge of letters—both to myself and to the editor of The Independent—in which readers, more thoughtful and more despairing than ever before, plead to know how they can make their voices heard when democratic governments seem no longer inclined to represent those who elected them. How, these readers ask, can they prevent a cruel world from poisoning the lives of their children? “How can I help them?” a British woman living in Germany wrote to me after The Independent published a long article of mine about the raped Muslim women of Gacko in Bosnia—women who had received no international medical aid, no psychological help, no kindness two years after their violation.
I suppose, in the end, we journalists try—or should try—to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least
must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: “We didn’t know—no one told us.” Amira Hass, the brilliant Israeli journalist on Ha’aretz newspaper whose reports on the occupied Palestinian territories have outshone anything written by non-Israeli reporters, discussed this with me more than two years ago. I was insisting that we had a vocation to write the first pages of history but she interrupted me. “No, Robert, you’re wrong,” she said. “Our job is to monitor the centres of power.” And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard: to challenge authority—all authority— especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.

But can we perform that task? This book will not provide an answer. My life as a journalist has been a great adventure. It still is. Yet looking through these pages after months of writing, I find they are filled with accounts of pain and injustice and horror, the sins of fathers visited upon their children. They are also about genocide. I used to argue, hopelessly I’m sure, that every reporter should carry a history book in his back pocket. In 1992, I was in Sarajevo and once, as Serb shells whiffled over my head, I stood upon the very paving stone upon which Gavrilo Princip stood as he fired the fatal shot that sent my father to the trenches of the First World War. And of course the shots were still being fired in Sarajevo in 1992. It was as if history were a gigantic echo chamber. That was the year in which my father died. This is therefore the story of his generation. And of mine. Beirut, June 2005

At the end of it, the pond took away a lesson for Dr. Jason. 

You sir are no journalist. You are a mindlessly moronic, bigoted academic, a disgrace to Swinburne, and exactly the reason that the middle east has been in continuous turmoil these past few thousand years. 

You're a disgrace because you sound like a parrot. The pond is well over Russian Orthodox Xians explaining how they're bringing civilisation to Ukrainians; the pond is well over Xians conducting a war on gays, current Pope included; the pond is well over Xians who preach enlightenment and then destroy worlds ...

A little learning would help fix it, but any fool who would scribble lines such as "It is by our own ruling class of elites who are even making us question freedom of speech" is perhaps beyond fixing ...

Please, in your own word in a short paper no longer than five thousand words, explain how two world wars and several holocausts are some crowning glory, "everything that made the West great since the Enlightenment".

The pond was reminded of a story by Allison Kaplan Sommer in Haaretz a few days ago:

It was inevitable. No matter how carefully planned an Israeli military operation against Hamas in Rafah may be, with over a million Palestinian refugees camped out, sooner or later there was going to be a mass casualty incident.
And so the inevitable took place Sunday night. An IDF airstrike wreaked large-scale destruction – killing at least 45 people in the southernmost Gazan city. Footage showed that civilians living in tents were trapped in an inferno.
The fallout followed the script of similar events in the Gaza war. The Israeli army – without denying that it was responsible for the airstrike and the ensuing fire – insisted it had done everything to avoid civilian injuries and deaths, stating that the action was carried out "according to international law, using precise munitions, and based on prior intelligence indicating the use of the area by Hamas." A senior official said that "the IDF regrets any harm to non-combatants during the war."
Any civilian deaths were, therefore, unfortunate and regrettable collateral damage.
Coming just two days after the International Court of Justice at The Hague ordered Israel to stop the Rafah offensive – organizations and governments seized on the timing in their condemnations, insisting that Israel be held to that decision, calling the events "horrific" and expressing "outrage."
As usual, Israel's leaders, citizens and advocates abroad were poised to defend Israel's "moral" army – to dismiss and decry any accusation that the aggression was avoidable, or to say that deliberately including the use of words like "genocide" or "massacre" was an inaccurate twisting of the truth at best and despicable antisemitism at worst.
But before they could do so this time, it became painfully clear from the outset that their efforts would be in vain.
Israel's far-right media voices quickly began celebrating the flames, and by extension the deaths of those engulfed in the fire, by jokingly comparing the images to commemorative bonfires lit on Lag Ba'Omer – the Jewish holiday that fell on the same day as the tragedy. They said with glee that the blaze was "the central bonfire in Rafah,'' wishing them "Happy Holidays" – in tweets that were deleted, but won't be forgotten, and will be pointed to as evidence that the fire was deliberately sparked and was celebrated.
The most prominent journalist who fed the flames of hate, Yinon Magal, is consistently proving himself to be the Itamar Ben-Gvir of Israeli media. Like the extremist minister, he appears to delight and take pride in shameless demonstrations of disregard for Palestinian lives, and denial of their humanity. While one could argue that both Ben-Gvir and Magal represent a minority of the sentiment of Israelis, they provide enough evidence of malicious intent to disrupt any attempt for the country to defend its military's behavior.
Some say this is the true ugly face of Israel. Those who believe in – and know – a different Israel face the impossible challenge of proving otherwise.

Jokes about bonfires? That's as barbaric as the behaviour of the barbarians who stormed a festival to rape and kill.

"Civilisation" isn't so simple when you're in the business of gulags and ghettoes...but do go on, Dr Jason, feeding the flames of hate. 

Everyday the pond reads in the lizard Oz how we must have all the readies to hand for the third world war, and only occasionally does the pond stand back and wonder how these religious cranks and nutters are supposed to exemplify the wonders of Western Enlightenment ... 

Okay, Dr Jason, you're only in the periphery of one centre of arrogance, but what a tragic, wretched, pitiful centre it is ...

And now after that almost Tingle-style rant, speaking of centres of arrogance, on with today's reptile offerings ...

The pond's heart sank. Not Dame Slap doing a Tingle rant, and over in the far right top of the digital world ma, they'd chambered a bullet to deal with Ed, but all the pond could promise was an immortal Rowe on the topic, and that right at the end ...and before that, much suffering, though not as bad as being burned to death in Gaza ...

The pond writhed on the Dame Slap hook. Perhaps an alternative down below the fold?

Dammit, not "Ned" doing the voice for the umpteenth time...

In a real newspaper, you might be reading this ...

In a real newspaper, you might be doing it live ... damn it, someone's channeling Bill and doing it live ...

You might be reading Al Jazeera or Haaretz about the latest atrocities ...

Instead, if you persist, you're stuck with Dame Slap on Planet Janet somewhere above the faraway tree, staging her usual fit of faux outrage ...

The ongoing presence of Dame Slap in the bubble-wrapped hive mind known as Murdochian la la land reveals how rotten things are at the lizard Oz ...

The pond doesn't even watch the ABC, nor Tingle, and yet confronted with the barking mad Dame Slap frothing and foaming, common humanity demands some sort of response ...

So, what happens next at the lizard Oz? Does anyone bother to read the Graudian?

Nope, instead the reptiles ran a couple of videos featuring their newest/oldest bête noire ...

Then it was on with Dame Slap's foam-flecked ranting ...

Many say that the reptiles are scared of Dame Slap, making her one of the lizard Oz untouchables and the allegedly national "newspaper" - the pond uses the term loosely - a farce, but still ...

It's a classic lizard Oz style pile on and beat up, with all sorts doing the beating, but then came a moment of genuine comedy ...

Never mind the gutless "former ABC journalist" unwilling to out themselves by revealing that they fellow travel with Dame Slap, it was that talk about Tingle being the reason why people vote for the mango Mussolini that did it for the pond.

Dame Slap is the sort of journalist who shows why people vote for their orange Jesus ... apparently now some sort of slur, except that ...

Sorry, the pond can't resist slipping in that reminder, when it probably should have been wrapping up the Graudian report ...

The articles in the Australian did not mention comments made on the same panel by the ABC News Breakfast co-host Bridget Brennan, a Dja Dja Wurrung and Yorta Yorta woman, who said “there is so much racism embedded in this country” when she was asked about the failure of the voice.
“So it was no surprise to Aboriginal people because we know what exists in Australian society,” Brennan said at the festival. “We see it every day.”
The commentary in the Australian which sparked Tingle’s comments were that Dutton was selling a “simplistic migration fix” that would damage Australia’s prosperity. “The Opposition leader’s sound bite of a policy is as foolish as it is simplistic, regrettably bringing into his fold the dumb and desperate in the provinces.”
The Australian newspaper’s criticism of Tingle comes as Murdoch outlets are heavily promoting a Sky News documentary, The Fight Against Antisemitism, which airs claims antisemitism is “spiralling out of control”, including comments from Sir Peter Cosgrove that “Hitler would be proud” of what is happening in Australia today.
Presented by the former Coalition treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the documentary was promoted on the front pages of the Murdoch papers on Tuesday.
The ABC managing director, David Anderson, will appear at Senate estimates on Thursday.

Anything to distract from the current genocide and the ongoing war crimes, and so to the last Dame Slap gobbet ...

Each day the lizard Oz brings itself into disrepute, but then enough has never been enough for the Orange Jesus worshipping Dame Slap ...

And so to a cartoon pause to refresh, celebrating a deeply racist country and its racist ways, past and present ...

Frankly the pond would have passed on "Ned" today, if it hadn't been for an esteemed correspondent drawing the pond's attention to a story in the Graudian ...

The reasons then will become clear enough ...

"Ned" is of course just regurgitating the thoughts of another, in classic "Ned" style, bolstered by a few bland snaps ...

Following "Ned's" methodology, the pond thought it might quote from that Graudian piece, what with having started off with a loon from Swinburne.

Is there something in the academic air in Melbourne? 

It would seem so if ‘Denying history is simply lying’: how the University of Melbourne honoured racists, thieves and body snatchers is any guide ...

Nazi apologists, massacre perpetrators, grave robbers, racists and eugenicists were hugely influential across the entire history of the University of Melbourne, according to its own research.

The university has published a shocking account of the dark side of these erstwhile heroes of Australian academia in a book it hopes will tell a greater truth about the institution and its dealings with Aboriginal people.

Some of Australia’s most celebrated scientists, including a Nobel laureate and others of world renown – along with doctors, historians, anthropologists and other academic staff – advocated breeding out “lower” and “deficient” “races”, particularly Aboriginal people; others exhumed, collected and later concealed Aboriginal remains; while yet others supported nazism, even after the second world war.

In one account a university graduate, Daniel Murnane, whose name until March this year graced a veterinary science scholarship, was among a group of men who perpetrated a 1926 massacre of Aboriginal people at Forrest River in the Kimberley. A subsequent royal commission into the killings confirmed that at least 11 Aboriginal people had been killed and their remains burned in three purpose-built stone ovens.

Dhoombak Goobgoowana – translated as “truth-telling” in the Woi Wurrung language of the owners of the land on which the university was built – is the first of two volumes. The second is due early next year. With more than 60 contributors from architecture to zoology, its editors say it is a book about “some of the worst failings of our intellectual leaders”.

“The university has supported injustices called progress, half-truths presented as facts, and prejudices pretending at objectivity,” they write, adding: “Although many things have changed, the stain of the past remains. The land has not been returned; racism persists in the institution.”

Dhoombak Goobgoowana is the result of three and a half years of research and is the first work of its kind in Australia. It grew out of “the vision, commitment and activism of Indigenous leaders inside and beyond” the university, its vice-chancellor, Duncan Maskell, says, and it will shock those who have “too rosy a view” of the university’s origins.

“We can no longer look away from this difficult history and its legacy, we need to face up to the effect this history has had and continues to have on the Indigenous community,” Maskell says.

This is difficult but necessary, says the university’s official historian and one of Dhoombak Goobgoowana’s three editors, James Waghorne.

“University historians have tended to glide over and to tactfully avoid discussing certain elements of peoples’ past. I don’t think overlooking the most difficult parts of a person’s career and work is honouring them.

“One of the questions I have received about this book is: is this somehow diminishing people? This book doesn’t aim to take down or diminish these people from the past. Rather, it hopes to explain their work, their priorities, the activities they undertook, in a more complete way.”

His co-editor and fellow historian Ross Jones says no restrictions were placed on their research by the university leadership, though their findings have been troubling to some. The result, he says, is “good old-fashioned scholarship”.

“Historians get very nervous when you talk about truth-telling because what is truth in history?” Jones says. “What I think is a better line, and I keep saying this all the time, is: this is not revisionist history. We are repairing revisionist histories of the past.

“I see this as a restoration job, to a degree. History has left stuff out. We’re putting it back in.”

Well indeed, indeed, but back to "Ned" leaving stuff out and not putting it back in ... notably the role that the reptiles played in doing down the Voice ...

Back to that Graudian story, and readers of the pond will know what's coming ...

The book will shake the foundations of a revered sandstone institution, often voted the best in Australia, and ranked 27th in the world. But, the foundation chair of Australian Indigenous studies, associate provost and the third co-editor, Marcia Langton, says racism, dispossession and “racial scientism” have been at the core of the university since the first stone was laid in 1853, two years after the colony of Victoria was declared.

The university’s luminaries have included “racists, thieves and body snatchers”, the authors say. The book pulls no punches in naming these men and their deeds.

Racists, Nazi apologists and eugenicists

Eugenics – the now-discredited belief that the social ills of modern society stem from hereditary factors, and solutions involve breeding out the “defective” – took hold at the university from its early days, Jones says, and persisted until into the 1970s. At Melbourne, this “science” was deeply infused with racism.

“The university was very important in propagating this view that Indigenous Australians were the lowest of the low,” Jones says. “Some people thought they really weren’t even on the same evolutionary tree.

“[But] there were activists, right through history, who said this was wrong. We talk about them in the book. And I think it’s important to emphasise those people because that totally cuts away the ground from the argument that everyone thought like that, and we can’t blame anyone.”

The anthropologist Sir Walter Baldwin-Spencer, a eugenicist who in 1912 was appointed as the guardian of every Aboriginal child in the Northern Territory, believed that “half-caste” Aboriginal children were genetically superior by virtue of their white blood and could be saved by removal. Views like these, widely propagated on campus for almost a hundred years, underpinned almost a century of law and the policy of forced removals of children that unleashed generations of pain and anguish on Aboriginal families and resulted in the stolen generations.

In the early 1930s Augustin Lodewyckx, who taught Teutonic studies and languages at Melbourne, called himself a “proud Aryan”, said Hitler was a “German hero” and wrote about eugenics as the answer to the overbreeding of low-intelligence people.

Lodewyckx wrote in the Argus newspaper in March 1933 that Germany “may yet be the educator and perhaps the saviour of the white world”, unless Hitler’s successes were “eaten away by the mass of small human vermin”.

The scholar and his family left Melbourne to spend eight months in Germany in 1933. His wife, Anna, told readers of the Argus in May that year: “It is worthwhile, and perhaps advisable, to give Adolf Hitler a chance of proving his worth.”

Eugenicists, says Jones, persisted at the university even after the Holocaust. The Eugenics Society of Victoria was “effectively an offspring of the university”.

“I found all these characters like Agar [Wilfred Agar, geneticist and dean of the science faculty],” he says. “They named the Agar lecture theatre in the 1990s. He was praising Nazi sterilisation laws after Churchill and Truman said that the ‘final solution’ was in progress. Agar was a Nazi sympathiser, and he was president of the Eugenics Society (from 1936 to 1945).”

Its membership reads like a who’s who of the academic, judicial, scientific and educational elite of Melbourne society.

In the society’s surviving subscription lists from the 1930s to 1947 are the names of such eminent individuals as the journalist and newspaper proprietor, Sir Keith Murdoch; the chief executive of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (the precursor to the CSIRO), Sir David Rivett; the university vice-chancellor Sir John Medley; the president of the Royal College of Physicians, Sir Sidney Sewell; the chief justice of the Victorian supreme court, Sir Edmund Herring; the university’s head of pathology, Sir Peter MacCallum; the supreme court justice, John Barry; and the founder of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the Rev GK Tucker.

Sir Keith himself and his wretched spawn and grand spawn didn't fall far from that bigoted tree ...

These days they assemble in a society known as the lizard Oz.

Meanwhile, back with "Ned" ...

The pond can't quote the Graudian story in its entirety, but this piece was particularly haunting ...

The most disturbing tale of all is the revelation that a university researcher working in the Kimberley was involved in perpetrating the brutal massacre of Aboriginal men, women and children at Forrest River in 1926.

A station owner, Frederick Hay, had been murdered by an Aboriginal man named Lumbia for the rape of his wife, Anguloo. In reprisal, police constables Graham St Jack and Denis Regan led a posse of 13 police and local white people to find Hay’s killer, taking along an arsenal of Winchester rifles, shotguns, 500 to 600 rounds of ammunition and 42 horses. They inflicted ruthless reprisal attacks on Aboriginal men, women and children.

A royal commission into the killings confirmed that at least 11 Aboriginal people had been killed and their remains burned in stone ovens.

One of the volunteers who rode out with the posse was Murnane, a veterinary scientist who had graduated from the University of Melbourne and was in the area researching buffalo fly for the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. The university’s Ormond College offered a scholarship in his honour to support a rural or remote veterinary science student.

Prof Kate Auty writes in Dhoombak Goobgoowana that Murnane was evasive during questioning at the royal commission, saying: “I don’t know”, “I have no knowledge”, “I have never heard” and “I cannot tell you”.

The commissioner concluded that Murnane, like all the whites in the police party, had lied about the mass killings.

Murnane found a staunch defender in a university professor, Alfred Ewart, who later joined Murnane in the Kimberley to research horse disease, according to Auty.

“Ewart wrote that the ‘larger question’ was not whether Murnane and the police patrol had perpetrated mass murder, but ‘whether the blacks are to be allowed to render large tracts of country useless for white settlement’.”

Aboriginal people’s actions made pastoralist retaliation inevitable, in Ewart’s view, as station owners must “either starve to death or leave the country”. The “solution” Ewart advocated was the removal of Aboriginal people to offshore reserves.

He wrote: “We make reserves for native animals and surely we might also do the same for the black [since ‘genetic inferiority’ meant they were] bound to go.”

Meanwhile, "Ned" finishes up, apparently blithely unaware of the role that the Murdochian reptiles played, in association with Captain Spud, in taking down the Voice.

The very same rag that denies Australia has a racist past and a racist present, while Captain Spud roams the country terrifying people with tales of dastardly furriners, or confusing and conflating anti-Semitism with news of an ongoing genocide ...

The country has always had two cultures. One is a loathsome reptile culture, the other consists of people trying to retain their sanity when confronted by wretched reptiles ...

You know the culture ...

“Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stop moving — forever? If I offered you twenty thousand for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” Harry Lime in The Third Man

And so to that immortal Rowe cartoon starring Ed and Ed ...

Usually that would be a wrap for the pond but because the reptiles keep on ignoring the genocide, the pond would like to mention Amira Hass's piece for Haaretz, The Only Ones Still Buying the Israeli Army's Version of the Rafah Strike, Israel's media has been concealing the unbearable figures and pictures of the Gaza war. The latest announcement from the army about the Rafah strike should also be taken with skepticism. Unless you are a devoted consumer of Israeli media.

On one level, it's deeply dispiriting, if only because Haaretz at the moment is a voice in the wilderness; on another level, it's encouraging, to see a paper and its journalists talk truth to power ...

It was reported on Monday afternoon that the Israel Defense Forces did not expect or estimate that civilians would be hit in the strike on Rafah. Such a disingenuous announcement can only be issued to consumers of the same media that for seven months has been hiding the unbearably high figures and choking photographs of toddlers who were killed or injured in every Israeli strike on the Gaza Strip. Such a statement can only persuade Israelis that this time too, the targets of the strike and the kind of munitions selected were scrupulously chosen by the Shin Bet security service, Military Intelligence and the IDF.

It's very possible that Israelis who don't support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also would like to believe that this time, he was completely sincere when he said that this was a tragic mistake. It's also very possible that they won't suspect that he referred to it because the recent order to halt military operations in Rafah, issued by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, is hovering above his head and the heads of the Israeli judiciary.

According to the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, this strike had two targets: Yassin Abu Rabia and Khaled Al-Najjar. Abu Rabia was said to be Hamas' West Bank staff commander, and Al-Najjar was a senior staff officer. Both men were said to have carried out attacks in the early 2000s and transferred funds for terrorism. It was stated that Abu Rabia's attacks killed soldiers and Al-Najjar's attacks murdered Israeli civilians and wounded soldiers. By the way, it's the IDF Spokesperson's Unit that made the distinction between "killing soldiers" and "murdering civilians."

The announcement did not disclose that the two men were released in deal to release kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011 and that both were West Bank residents – Abu Rabia from the village of Mazra'a al-Qibliya, west of Ramallah, and Al-Najjar from the village of Silwad, east of Ramallah – who had been deported to Gaza. The announcement also did not share with the public that another man released in the same deal and deported to Gaza, Khuwaylid Ramadan from the village of Tel, south of Nablus, was killed – as was reported by the Palestinian media. Was he also marked as a target, or just happened to be staying in the same tent encampment in western Rafah? We don't know.

What we know is that as of Monday afternoon, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, the number of dead has reached 45 and the wounded about 250. A partial list of the dead includes three members of the Al-Najjar family: Huda, 15; Arkan, 12; and Ahmad, 2. Were they the children of Khaled Al-Najjar from Silwad in the West Bank or the Al-Najjar family from Khan Yunis? We don't yet know. When scores of people are killed every day, the ability of journalists to track the background of each of them and write about it is extremely limited.

Among the 25 last names of the dead in the list, like al-Attar, Zayid and Hamed, we know that families from the northern Gaza Strip lived in the encampment: from Beit Lahya and apparently also from Beit Hanoun. Like the refugee camps established in 1948, where refugees from each village chose to live together in the same encampment and then the same neighborhood, the displaced people in contemporary Gaza try to live near their relatives and neighbors in the new encampments.

The terrible overcrowding, the hunger and thirst, the food shortages and the death that's waiting at any moment give rise to frequent friction and fighting. The experience of the past seven months and the forced cohabitation of several families in one crowded house or apartment have taught people that it's easier to resolve conflicts when the two sides are from the same extended family, the same town (such as Beit Hanoun), or even the same village of origin (from before 1948). Who knows how many times the victims of this Sunday's IDF attack were uprooted in the past seven months and how many kinds of shelter they exchanged until they were killed or burned to death in this encampment in west Rafah?

Many more details are unknown and may never be known; for example, why Al-Najjar and Abu Rabia were staying near or in the large encampment in the dunes. We don't know whether they were targeted because the IDF and Shin Bet had solid proof that they were still operating in the Hamas military arm, or if these were only assumptions, or if they were targeted in revenge for their attacks in the early 2000s. We don't know what these men would have chosen to do had they been released to their homes in the West Bank. Maybe they would have preferred to change their paths? We don't know if the alleged money transfers were intended for armed attacks against Israelis, or to help the families of dead Palestinians.

What we know is that in the IDF wars against the Palestinians since the early 2000s, and in particular in the past seven months of the current Gaza war, a number of norms have been formed that enable and facilitate the mass killings of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza. We first learned about these norms from Palestinian reports and through testimonies, and then from investigations by independent journalists about the rules of engagement and the soldiers' conduct.

* The definition of "collateral damage," which has become increasingly lenient over the years; in other words, the number of Palestinian civilians whom military advocate general jurists (and the state prosecutor's) permit be killed as the result of killing a single marked target (a senior military commander from Hamas or another Palestinian organization, a political figure or moneychanger, official or junior armed men, a tunnel shaft or an empty command post) and that they are prepared to defend in international judicial forums). According to an investigation by Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine, the number of "permitted uninvolved" civilians who may be killed ranges from 20 for each targeted junior member in a Palestinian armed organization to 100 "in exchange" for a senior member.

* The "targets bank" – the members of armed Palestinian organizations who may and ought to be killed (or arrested, especially in the West Bank), according to the army and the intelligence – is a bottomless pit that includes former members who are no longer involved in military or even political activity, and also includes out-of-date addresses.

* Strike location: The targets bank not only permits the killing of Palestinians during battle and exchanges of fire, when they are about to launch a missile or are wearing an explosive vest, but also when they are asleep in bed, even in a hospital bed, or while visiting a sick relative, and even if when they are in the company of their children and parents, or engaged in an activity defined by the army as "suspicious" – standing by a window or on the roof of a home, riding a motorcycle or lighting a fire to boil water.

* Use of the AI program Lavender, exposed by Abraham in +972 Magazine, which allows for a much shorter interval of time between identifying a target and hitting a person as a result of the minor human involvement in the process.

* A climate of disobedience in the army's lower ranks, and the lower ranks' lack of interest in the immediate political contexts, that attract global attention, like the famine in Gaza did. Low ranks' decisions led, for example, to the lethal strike on World Central Kitchen employees on April 2, and to IDF tank fire at "suspects" who were among the hundreds of starving residents waiting for an aid convoy and who had rushed to the food trucks on February 29.

* An Israel-wide climate of ignoring the facts. Under the cover of sterile words like "evacuation of the residents," "the IDF is operating" and "humanitarian area," the reality of the tent encampments with no infrastructure or protection from natural hazards and bombs doesn't sink into the Israelis' consciousness at all. The same is true for the various ballistic experts who apparently don't bother to calculate the potential of a missile striking adjacent civilian areas.

* An extreme dehumanization of the Palestinians among broad swaths of both the Israeli public and IDF soldiers. The disregard for the Palestinians' right to live, and their right to a decent life with dignity, has fallen in recent years – and not just since October 7 – to a nadir the likes of which we have never known. This process, consciously or unconsciously, willfully and wholeheartedly or not, has since long permeated the professional echelons at the Justice Ministry, IDF war rooms and army headquarters.

And so on and on and on, but the news apparently has yet to hit Swinburne... 

At least the pond can lighten the mood a little by ending with a cartoon ...