Sunday, December 15, 2024

In which the pond must deal with the Angelic One and prattling Polonius, but still manages to slip in some cartoons for the Sunday meditation ...

 

Speaking of nostalgia, a kindly person dropped an anniversary copy of Just William in the local street library, and it's been the pond's easy toilet reading in the last few days.

The pond was first introduced to William by a Mr Rogers (Rodgers?) at Tamworth Primary way back when. 

Mr Rogers was something of a ham and delighted in reading Richmal Crompton's work to the class, thereby delighting his class. (The pond also recalls being dragged off to see an amateur version of South Pacific featuring Mr Rogers in a comic role, helping the pond to understand the nature of triple smoked pork).

Crompton's work still holds good, and she might be called the P. G. Wodehouse of children's literature. It's a simple enough menu - dialogue and incident driven - but executed with grace and good humour, and managing a remarkable fusing of classes. 

It was only in the re-reading that the pond realised that for all his Cockney-style dialogue, William lives in a house with a cook and a maid, and his dad took dinner at a mansion in need of butlers and boot boys below stairs (where dad and newly hired boot boy William meet up as the punch line to one story).

Mr Rogers and William helped set the pond off on an endless reading jag, helped by Crompton's refusal to condescend to her readers. 

Every now and then a simple line brings a frisson of pleasure, as when William is deep in thought: "Then to his face came the faint smile that inspiration brings to her votaries."

Votary wasn't a common word in Tamworth way back when, and it's deployed with a just so delicacy, and it no doubt sent many off to the dictionary to discover a joy in the adept use of words.

But why start with nostalgia? 

Well the reptiles' dismal weekend form slump continued. 

Sure they refreshed the far right commentary section of the lizard Oz, but to what avail? Things must be pretty dire when Polonius's prattle is suddenly top of the world ma ...




On the other hand, better Polonius than blow-in Brendan blathering on about the right of Israel to perpetrate mass starvation, mass displacement and genocide.

Truth to tell the pond would rather be buried in tales of the latest episode of Succession, which has a Just William tendency to pratfalls and disruptions to quiet family life ...

Anne Davies scripted Will a power shift at the top of the Murdoch family empire reshape News Corp - and Australian politics?

No need to quote it at length, it being Graudian paywall free, but a sub-plot did involve the lizard Oz ...

With Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch at the helm, News Corp’s outlets have spruiked climate-change scepticism for two decades. Commentators like Ian Plimer were regulars in the pages.
In the face of News’ strident position, Australian politicians wilted. While other countries introduced a price on carbon and long term strategies, Australia delayed and backflipped.
More recently, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that rising levels of carbon dioxide are affecting the climate, News Corp commentators, particularly those in the Australian and on Sky News, appear to have become visceral haters of renewables.
News Corp publications have united in their support for the Coalition’s policy of building seven nuclear reactors and increasing the use of gas in the interim.
A weakening of Lachlan’s control over News could dramatically affect not just this important debate but the face of Australian politics, because politicians fear the influence – real or imagined – of News, particularly in states like Queensland and South Australia where the group has a monopoly in text media.

The pond can only indulge in William-style dreaming about all that, before settling down to the task at hand ... 

And what better way to begin than with the Angelic one yet again whining about the Xians ... Christianity under greater threat in ‘liberated’ Syria, Religious minorities in Syria have serious reason to doubt the promises of new-found tolerance from the country’s Islamist rebel victors.

Naturally there was a terrifying snap designed to strike fear into the hive mind readership, Rebel fighters pose for a picture outside the mausoleum of Syria's late president Hafez al-Assad in the family's ancestral village of Qardaha in the western Latakia province on December 11. Picture: AAREF WATAD/AFP





The angelic one struck out in fine style by blathering about that mysterious entity, the West and its values ... (and we'll soon learn about her love of Assad values)

Today we hear a lot about politics and ‘‘cultural’’ rifts in Australia. So how can we in the ‘‘West’’ understand the situation in the Middle East? There is a problem. We see everything in dry strategic political terms. But are we just talking about politics?
People in Australia and in the West in general have forgotten that it is religion, not politics, that is the prime motivating force for the majority of people in the world – for good or bad. But you might say, not in the ‘‘enlightened’’ secular West. Well, think again. The latest wave of anti-Jewish persecution and harassment is partly political, sparked by antipathy towards Israel, but it is also religious, and religious hatred is quite different from political antipathy towards a state for its policies. Religious hatred is in the psyche, because religion is. This is the origin of Islamic fundamentalism.

Actually, if the pond might be so bold and before the wicked Islamics cop all the blame ... cue The Times of Israel ...




Awkward:

...“The ongoing shift towards the far-right, a growing sense of nationalism, and the emphasis on Israel primarily as a state for the Jewish population have collectively undermined both the legal and perceived sense of equality for any minority within the country,” said the report.
In 2023, according to the group, there were 11 instances of verbal harassment, seven violent attacks, 32 attacks on church properties, a cemetery desecration, and 30 formally reported cases of spitting at or toward clergy and pilgrims. The report noted that every clergy member the Rossing Center spoke to in 2023 said they were spit at multiple times a week.
The more violent attacks are carried about by young adults from “the marginalized part of ultra-Orthodox society,” Hana Bendcowsky, director of the Rossing Center’s Jerusalem Center for Jewish – Christian Relations, told The Times of Israel.
The harassment comes from a range of Israeli men — from children to adults, right-wing settlers to ultra-Orthodox — but all religious, she said.
There were other alleged violations as well. Religious figures were asked to remove crosses, and police sharply reduced the numbers of attendees allowed to the Holy Fire ceremony in Jerusalem on Easter, citing security concerns.
“When you address the authorities, usually, what they used to say back then when we initiated the project, is ‘We don’t know what you’re talking about, we don’t get any complaints,” said Bendcowsky.

And so on:

...Before the devastating Hamas attack of October 7 that started the ongoing war in Gaza, there were indications that Israeli authorities were taking the issue more seriously after years of complaints.
In August 2023, as part of his recent efforts to bring public awareness to the issue of the safety of the Christian community, President Isaac Herzog visited Haifa’s Stella Maris Monastery to meet with Christian leaders.
“In recent months, we have witnessed extremely serious phenomena in the treatment of members of Christian communities in the Holy Land, our brothers and sisters, Christian citizens, who feel attacked in their places of prayer and their cemeteries, on the street,” said Herzog in front of the 19th-century Carmelite monastery.”
“It is entirely unacceptable in every way,” said the president.
There was a “notable increase” in attacks against Christians and their property in 2023, according to a study released on Tuesday by an Israeli group.
Israeli authorities have been unable or unwilling to put an end to the phenomenon, said the Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue’s report, titled “Attacks on Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem.”
The NGO attributed the rise to “the broader socio-political climate.”
“The ongoing shift towards the far-right, a growing sense of nationalism, and the emphasis on Israel primarily as a state for the Jewish population have collectively undermined both the legal and perceived sense of equality for any minority within the country,” said the report.
In 2023, according to the group, there were 11 instances of verbal harassment, seven violent attacks, 32 attacks on church properties, a cemetery desecration, and 30 formally reported cases of spitting at or toward clergy and pilgrims. The report noted that every clergy member the Rossing Center spoke to in 2023 said they were spit at multiple times a week.
While there have long been periodic incidents of vandalism and harassment against Christian clergy in Jerusalem’s Old City, there was a noticeable rise in attacks in the lead-up to Herzog’s visit.
Pointing at the Jewish tradition that the Haifa monastery also houses the grave of the prophet Elisha, members of the Breslov Hasidic sect have been showing up at the Catholic complex and attempting to pray, leading to a number of physical altercations.
The local Catholic community has begun erecting a fence around the property to protect it.
“We must uproot this phenomenon from its roots,” said Herzog, referring to attacks on Christians and their holy sites across the country.

And so on:

In November 2022, two soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces’ Givati Brigade were detained on suspicion of spitting at the Armenian archbishop and other pilgrims during a procession in the Old City. In early 2023, two Jewish teens were arrested for damaging graves at the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion.
The next week, the Maronite community center in the northern city of Ma’alot-Tarshiha was vandalized by unknown assailants over the Christmas holiday.
Jerusalem’s Armenian community buildings were also targeted by vandals, with multiple discriminatory phrases graffitied on the exterior of structures in the Armenian Quarter. In January 2023, a gang of religious Jewish teens threw chairs at an Armenian restaurant inside the city’s New Gate. Vandalism at the Church of the Flagellation occurred the very next week.
And in March of that year, a resident of southern Israel was arrested after attacking priests with an iron bar at the Tomb of the Virgin Mary in Gethsemane.
Some, including the Rossing Center, tie the rise in aggressive behavior recently to the composition of the current Israeli government, which is made up of ultra-Orthodox and extreme-right factions fiercely protective of Israel’s Orthodox Jewish institutions and strongly opposed to public displays of Christian worship.

Then head off to Israel andtry being gay or an atheist or a secularist and see how you go ...

Any talk of the outrageous behaviour emanating from rampant Zionism would lead to immediate charges of anti-Semitism in the lizard Oz, and so the Angelic one took to the safer ground of Islamophobia.

All over the world, the most persecuted religion is actually Christianity, especially today in Syria where the fault lines between Christianity and Islam have opened after the fall of Damascus with the fear of renewed Jihadist Islamism. Western political analysts have been wrong about the Middle East time and again. Why? Perhaps they do not really comprehend the religious mentality of the Middle East. They do not understand the real driving force behind Islamism. They often simply do not ‘‘get’’ the fact that religion is in your psyche, your very being. They believe in political reasons and always talk in geopolitical terms, but in the Middle East and particularly in Syria right now, jihadism is appearing in its most fundamental guise, so we lack comprehension of the motivations of the confusing warring factions. Many westerners want to swallow the Islamic Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) PR in Syria. No wonder that the Christians of Syria looking around at the dwindling number of their co-religionists in the Middle East are terrified.
John Eibner, International President of Christian Solidarity International, a Christian human rights organisation promoting religious liberty and human dignity, recently put out a lengthy statement warning of this naive ‘‘wishful thinking’’ approach after the fall of Damascus. Recalling the “Arab Spring” uprisings that were being projected in the Western media as the harbingers of a new peaceful, prosperous and democratic era for the Arab world, Eibner said:
“Thirteen years later, Syria, once a place of refuge for over a million escaping conflict in Iraq and elsewhere, where 40 per cent of the original population were members of protected religious minorities, has been transformed into one of the world’s worst man-made catastrophe zones. HTS’s ideology and history give religious minorities in Syria serious reason to doubt the promises of new found tolerance for religious minorities. The Alawites, Druzes, and Christians, the three primary religious minorities under threat. Both Alawites and Druzes are Muslim minority sects that the jihadists consider heretical …” and worthy of death.

If the pond could be bothered, it would turn to listing the ways that Xians have made life miserable for gays, trans people, readers of books and atheists in Africa, the United Staes and elsewhere ... with this story striking a chord ...




The pond loves it when the persecutors, the promoters of the Inquisition and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum began to moan and wail ... as if Xians were the only ones to suffer in Syria ... as if the Alawite Assad spared anyone ...

He listed the Islamic atrocities against Christians:
“HTS has often targeted Christians throughout Syria in violent attacks and kidnappings, bombing churches and confiscating property. September 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra, the precursor to HTS, overran the Christian city of Ma’alua north of Damascus, kidnapping nuns and driving out the Christian population. They occupied the Christian town of Sadad in October 2013, killing at least 41 Christian civilians and using others as human shields. Aleppo, one of the Middle East’s most Christian cities, has been literally decimated. Out of a prewar population of 200,000 Christians about 20,000 Christians live in Aleppo today. When al-Nusra conquered Idlib province in 2015, nearly the entire Christian population of 10,000 fled. Others were killed or kidnapped, and their property confiscated. Only 300 Christians remain in Idlib today.”

How low can the Angelic One go? Limbo lo ...

It is easy to blame everything on the intransigence and brutality of the dictator Assad, as the propaganda of HTS has done. But although there was no political freedom under Assad, there was much personal and religious freedom and high educational standards. 

FFS ... does the Angelic One ever get out and about and read all the horror stories? 


..Mr. al-Assad’s ouster, and his troops’ abandonment of their bases as rebels stormed through Damascus, has exposed the black boxes of one of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes. While some Syrians have wandered through his luxurious palace, many more have combed through the vast network of detention centers whose repression helped keep him in power.
An untold number of Syrians disappeared into the maw of that security apparatus over the decades. As the rebels broke into prisons and freed prisoners over the last few weeks, many Syrians hoped that their missing relatives would soon return home.
In Damascus, families have set out to look for their loved ones. All week, they have been driving around the city, asking at hospitals and clawing their way through dirty cells in now empty detention centers, hoping to find some trace of their relatives, alive or dead.
One of those notorious facilities — a security complex known as Branch 235, or Palestine Branch — was run by military intelligence in southeastern Damascus. The complex sits behind forbidding concrete blast walls on a main boulevard and contains nearly a dozen buildings, including offices and barracks for soldiers and officers, many of them just a few floors up from the prison.
In 2012, Human Rights Watch said inmates there were regularly beaten, electrocuted and hung upside down. Three years later, the group found that conditions inside were so bad that prisoners often died from gastrointestinal infections, skin diseases, torture and starvation.
Now, the complex stands empty. Guarded by rebels, its buildings have been ransacked by looters or charred black and gray from fires.
During a visit this week, reporters from The New York Times found entire rooms packed with munitions — hand grenades, bullets, explosives and tear gas canisters — indicating a heavily armed force.
In the basement below a soldiers’ barracks were a dozen underground cells that were barely long enough for a tall man to lay down. They had low, concrete ceilings and no light source other than small holes in the heavy metal doors.
Graffiti on the wall of one cell included a bouquet of flowers and a pack of Hamra cigarettes, a Syrian brand. Drawings in another cell included large female eyes and a heart with an arrow piercing it.
The main prison, however, was on the two underground floors of an unimposing seven-story building nearby.
There, large cells once held many dozens of prisoners who shared a pit toilet with no door and most likely slept close together on the floor. Cockroaches ran across the walls, and the smell of sweaty bodies still hung in the air.
Other cells were smaller, likely for isolation. In a separate wing, women’s clothing was strewed across the floor next to tiny plastic sandals, indicating mothers jailed with their children.
“I was here, in this room!” screamed a veiled woman in a long black dress who was peering into a cell by the light of her cellphone flashlight. “This is where they put me for four and a half months.”
She said she had been locked in the small, windowless room in 2020 with dozens of other women. She did not say what she had been accused of.
“We slept on top of each other,” she said. “They did not feed us, they beat us.”

Oh yes, under Assad, there was much personal and religious freedom and high educational standards, and the chance to lie with the cockroaches and enjoy the lack of skin cancer causing sunlight.

There were any number of other sources of horror stories, as at PBS:

Human beings treated like waste. With thousands of inmates crammed within these walls, prisoners say there were daily executions, sometimes just to make space.
In the bowels of the complex, more horrors await. Many who were kept down here did not see daylight for years. Prisoners say this hole was for daily humiliation. The guards filled it with urine and feces and would force them into it. On the walls, the fevered scratchings of those who tried to keep a sense of time and life outside.
For years, we have searched for evidence of what exactly was happening in this place they called the human slaughterhouse based on snippets of information that came from the few people who managed to make it out alive. It's utterly haunting now to walk these halls and know that these tiny cells are where so many thousands of human beings endured unimaginable suffering.
The minds of the thousands who survived these torture chambers remain haunted.

And yet under Assad, there was much personal and religious freedom and high educational standards

Say what, next week an apologia for Vlad the impaler, on the basis that under Vlad, there is much personal freedom for Assad (is that likely? Better stay clear of windows and tea ceremonies) and religious freedom for the Russian Orthodox Church, fellow travelling with mayhem and murder, and high educational standards, at least for those wise enough to kowtow to, bend the knee for, and kiss the ring of a sociopathic war monger?

How contemptible these Xians are, but even in the lizard Oz the pond hadn't expected to discover an Assad apologist, but then the pond always underestimates how contemptible the Angelic One can be ...

Nor was this conflict instigated by Syrians simply wanting freedom, as the propaganda would have us believe. In 2014 I interviewed sister Agnes Mariam, an erudite Syrian Carmelite nun who was part of the democracy movement which sparked the war. She said that Syrians wanted a new constitution and were hopeful Assad would bend. For a while it seemed as if he would and the demonstrations were organised and peaceful. But then, she said, “we started to see the foreigners at the demonstrations. They were foreign agitators who became Jihadist fighters, not the freedom-loving rebels of western media”.
Jihadists were used as proxies for the West to remove Russian and Iranian influence. The US backed a wide array of armed rebel groups, including jihadist groups such as HTS. While the Assad regime allowed more social freedom than in any other Arab country with a Sunni majority, HTS’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is recognised by the US as a terrorist, and for good reason. According to CSI his loyal jihadists have killed, raped, tortured, looted and desecrated and al-Jolani has called his conquest of Damascus “a victory for the entire Islamic nation” – a development that was welcomed by the Taliban in the ‘‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’’.
Sadly, in the Middle East, where Christianity began, it is being snuffed out, which seems a secondary issue for the great Western powers. We have lost our own religious wellspring, and we do not understand our enemies’

The sooner all religions are snuffed out the better, perhaps with Assad's left over chemical weapons, and the sooner that the Angelic One's bizarre version of Catholicism bites the dust, the sooner the pond will be spared columns like this ... though she does provide the excuse for a 'toon ...




And so to prattling Polonius, producing his usual set of dissembling, disingenuous piles of disinformation in If Jewish Aussies are being targeted it’s anti-Semitic, Jews have been in Australia since European settlement in 1788 – and so has anti-Semitism. But there has been nothing like the events of the past 14 months.

Just to set the tone, the reptiles offered an opening snap to begin the FUD, Part of the anti-Semitic attack in Sydney’s eastern suburbs this week. The suburb of Woollahra has a high Jewish population. Picture: Rohan Kelly





Not wishing to downplay it, but has Polonius seen the tags in the inner west? The pond keeps a can of spray paint handy just to wipe out each week's work ...

Never mind, Polonius seizes the moment to do what has become the usual reptile holy war jihad in the past few weeks...

The firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in the Melbourne suburb of Ripponlea in the early morning of Friday, December 6, is without question the worst example of anti-Semitism in Australian history. But this might not have been the case if the fire lit on June 19 outside the Melbourne office of Josh Burns, the federal Labor MP for Macnamara, had penetrated the building – since the apartment above Burns’s office is inhabited.
A 17-year-old and an 18-year-old allegedly hit the building’s glass with a sledgehammer, started fires and defaced Burns’s image. “Zionism is fascism” was spray-painted on the building. Burns is Jewish.
The term Zionist is used to describe individuals who believe Jews have a right to a Jewish state – Israel – and that they are entitled to establish and maintain it within secure borders. In other words, I am a Zionist but I’m not Jewish. Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. But anti-Semitism is directed at Jews.
It was reasonable to expect the Victorian Labor government and Victoria Police would have reacted immediately with the establishment of a taskforce to investigate the attack on Burns’s office, along with other anti-Semitic actions in Victoria that have increased dramatically since Israel’s defensive war in Gaza following Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. But Victoria Police did not treat the arson incident with the gravity it deserved.
Then there was the attempt to destroy a Jewish place of worship in Melbourne, sending shockwaves across the world primarily because – until recently at least – Australia was widely perceived to be an accepting and tolerant nation with a high level of intermarriage across ethnic groups and a low level of ethnic-motivated crime. Not any more, it would seem.
Interviewed in Perth in the aftermath of the attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue, Anthony Albanese was asked: “This is the next in a long list of increasingly aggressive anti-Semitic events across Australia; is there anything you think could have been done earlier to address this rising tide of anti-Semitism?” The Prime Minister replied: “Well, anti-Semitism is something that has been around for a long period of time, of course, but anti-Semitism has been on the rise; we call it out whenever we see it.”
This was an inadequate response with respect to Australia.

That's when things start to get awkward, as Polonius attempts his usual history lesson:

Jews have been in Australia since European settlement in 1788 – and so has anti-Semitism. However, there has been nothing like the events of the past 14 months.
Sure, some Jews were denied employment because they were Jews and some were excluded from what were called gentlemen’s clubs. However, Jewish Australian John Monash was head of the First Australian Imperial Force in the final years of World War I and played a significant role in the defeat of Germany on the Western Front in late 1918.
And Jewish Australian Isaac Isaacs moved from the High Court to become the first Australian-born governor-general in 1931. If anti-Semitism had been all-pervasive in the decades after Federation in 1901, such appointments could not have occurred.
The most prominent anti-Semitic organisation in Australia in the 20th century was the League of Rights, a far-right group. Its leader, Eric Butler, wrote the anti-Semitic tract The International Jew in 1946. Butler had scant influence on Australian society. Moreover, the League of Rights was not into violence. In other words, something quite dramatic has taken place concerning anti-Semitism in the past quarter of a century.

It's impossible to understate just how disingenuous all that is, beginning with Polonius failing to mention that Monash himself had to decline membership of a prominent Melbourne club because it had a rule barring Jews and he didn't want to be the exception to the rule.

If you want an idea of just how all pervasive anti-Semitism was in Australia, try the wiki on the subject or Suzanne Rutland's informative piece in The Conversation, The long, dark history of antisemitism in Australia.

Much like the United States, Australia wasn't too happy about taking refugees from the Nazis - a death sentence - and dumping it all on Eric Butler is just to rely on a straw dog and a convenient patsy.

Politicians were also keen to keep Jews out. 

Per Rutland:




Oh heck, a cartoon, and this being Sunday, the pond is itching to drop in a few cartoons, even if not related to the topic. 

Where's the harm if they're in the seasonal spirit?





Okay, that was just the pond trying to avoid returning to Polonius. 

You see, inevitably it's all the fault of the ABC, and the only relief is that Polonius forgot to hit his short cut key about there being no conservatives in the ABC:

Despite the anti-Semitic violence that has occurred since October 7, 2023, this message has not got through to some Australians who should know better. Two examples illustrate the point.
On December 11, NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns was interviewed by Chris Taylor on ABC Sydney Radio 702. As readers will recall, Taylor is one of the original Chaser boys made famous by the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster. The interview took place in the aftermath of a second arson attack on property in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra, which has a high Jewish population.
The most recent attack not only firebombed a car but also sprayed anti-Israel graffiti on buildings, cars and fences. Taylor’s first question was: “What’s your reasoning for branding the attack anti-Semitic and not anti-Israel?” Minns was not impressed. The Premier pointed to the location of the crime along with the suggestion that Australians should “kill Israel” and made reference to recent attacks in Melbourne and Sydney. Soon after Minns said he had a “busy morning” and had to “keep moving”. The NSW Premier’s handling of this matter has been very professional.

At this point the reptiles revered to Lord Downer, as a way of confirming that Polonius was down with being an ally of Hungary when it came to the vote:

Former foreign minister Alexander Downer says the United Nations is becoming “increasingly anti-Western". Penny Wong has again called for a ceasefire in Gaza after Australia backed a United Nations resolution demanding an “immediate, unconditional and permanent” end to the fighting in the Palestinian territory. The former foreign minister claims UNRWA “can’t stand” and has called for the relief agency to be “dismantled”.





The pond had the urge to dismantle Lord Downer, but feared getting entangled in fishnet stockings and high heeled shoes.

Instead why not a couple more cartoons?





At this point the reptiles gave up the notion of distracting from Polonius, as he kept on ranting about the ABC and eventually turned to Sharri, disrespect intended:

The following morning, Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman was given a soft interview on ABC Radio National Breakfast by presenter Patricia Karvelas. Like Taylor, Sivaraman did not want to focus the discussion on anti-Semitism.
In response to a question as to whether there had been a specific level of harassment that Jewish Australians were being subjected to at the moment, the Race Discrimination Commissioner responded that “there’s definitely an increase in anti-Semitism”.
But he then spoke about “anti-Asian racism”, “First Nations racism” along with “Islamophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism”. In short, according to Sivaraman, “the reality is that we continually have racism operating in our society”.
This is just denial. 

Well no, it's not just the river Nile, it's the reality. 

Never mind the general population, the amount of bigotry and bile that streams forth from News Corp publications alone is unquantifiable and unmeasurable, so vast it is ... and if it isn't racism aimed at difficult, uppity blacks, or strange, weird, swarthy, furrin alien Arabs and Islamics, then it's assaults on gays, trans folk, feminists and such like...

Is there a concept for a plan to fix all this, apart from selling off News Corp?





Probably not, and so to the Polonial final word, thanks to Sharri (disrespect):

Liberal senator Dave Sharma (who is not Jewish) explained why in a Sky News interview with Sharri Markson on December 10. Sharma said he had “seen synagogues being firebombed … I haven’t seen mosques being firebombed”. Sharma added that the attacks on Jewish religious organisations, institutions and business were “not happening to any other religious community in Australia”.
Quite so. The feeling of Jewish Australians has been well described by singer-songwriter Deborah Conway and writer Michael Gawenda, both of whom have a left-wing background. In short, many Jews feel scared.
The recent announcement by the Prime Minister of the establishment of Special Operation Avalite to investigate anti-Semitism – to be led by the Australian Federal Police – may not be too little.
But the Adass Israel Synagogue firebombing demonstrates that is too late.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

The pond regrets that none of this allowed the pond to cover other newsworthy issues, but these cartoons will do as place holders ... 

... and what do you know, a Jewish stereotype set the tone ...




Luckily the sans-culottes were also on hand ...




And where would we be without a drinking joke ...





15 comments:

  1. Before I forget.I am a votary of the pond.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ah, young William Brown (and he managed to remain about nine years old from about 1920 until 1970; Richmal Crompton turned up her toes a year or so earlier). I also have fond memories of the “William” books DP (introduced by my mum, who had grown up a fan), and they’re still surprisingly popular, with new editions of several volumes in just the last couple of years. I read a biography of Crompton some time back, and was a mite surprised to find that she was an active member of the Conservative Party for much of her life. Still, this was in a time when you could be a Tory without necessarily being a rabid Thatcherite or a barking mad Brexiteer. Her works are certainly an antidote to Reptile ravings; though I suspect that Violet-Elizabeth Bott, with her constant threats to “Thcream and thcream unilateral I’m thick!” may have grown up to become a Dame Slap……

    ReplyDelete


  3. DP; "in the lizard Oz, and so the Angelic one took to the safer ground of Islamophobia."
    One eyed Angelic one: "All over the world, the most persecuted religion is actually Christianity"

    So. I asked prompted intertubes with.... "the most persecuted religion in 2023 study edu"

    3rd hit (after Cato at #1 referencing the same cyclops like 'report')...

    This "Research Briefing" contains some research, and is very brief about anything other than xians.

    Religious Persecurion Game.
    Step 1. See if you are able to find a specific mention of any other faith than xian.
    Step 2. Count how many times the bait & switch fig leaves from xians to "Prioritising freedom of religion or belief (FoRB)" appear.
    3. Statistics. Remove dictators, crazy dudes, dictatorships such as "North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, and Yemen had the highest rates of reported persecution against Christians.", then redo the - I was going to call this an analysis, but how do you convey half an analysis? Anal...? Cyclops? Fact without the F so it's dog whistle makes it sound like ACT in this Anal. In The House of CommAnal?

    "Religious persecution and the World Watch List 2024"
    Research Briefing
    Published Tuesday, 23 January, 2024
    https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2024-0017/

    As our esteemed host notes "... the persecutors, the promoters of the Inquisition and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum began to moan and wail ... as if Xians were the only ones to suffer".

    "Former foreign minister Alexander Downer says the United Nations is becoming “increasingly anti-Western" but won't mention the Commons has lost an eye. Nor fouge his our from his head.
    Matthew 18:9 
    King James Bible (of course)
    "And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire."
    No wonder we get The House of One Eyed half aan Anal.

    Maybe the Koolaid just blinds one eye, a modern paganistic sacrificial votary's wine effect of "pluck it out, and cast it from thee".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Here is a song for Angela and the poor Xian's.

      https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=TXK03FHVsHk&si=9pKwXJ9gvMR1yQRn

      Maybe inappropriate for some viewers.

      Delete
    2. Sharma drank the chemical eye plucking potion too.

      "Maybe the Koolaid just blinds one eye, a modern paganistic sacrificial votary's wine effect of "pluck it out, and cast it from thee".

      Delete
  4. "Sharma said he had “seen synagogues being firebombed … I haven’t seen mosques being firebombed"

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/apr/17/toowoomba-mosque-damaged-by-second-suspected-arson-attack?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

    A Queensland mosque has suffered its second suspected arson attack this year, prompting a spokesman to appeal to Australians to condemn anti-Islamic sentiments that are “polluting” public discussion."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nice try, Anony, but just the same "Sharma hasn't seen it".

      Delete
  5. MM's gag writer is the ghost of Yogi Berra.
    "“It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” Trump told Time this week"

    "Trump Promised No Wars and Lower Prices. Now He's Walking That Back
    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-promised-no-wars-and-lower-prices-now-hes-walking-that-back

    ReplyDelete
  6. Keeping promises is getting real hard:

    "Trump was asked if his presidency would be considered a “failure” if he didn’t deliver on his promise to slash Americans’ food bills.
    'I don’t think so. Look, they got them up,' referring to the Biden-Harris administration. 'I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard,' Trump said.
    "

    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-now-bringing-grocery-prices-promised-hard/story?id=116763207

    Could Albanese get away with that ? Or would it only work for Dutton ?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Peter Lalor, Cricket Et Al: 
    "... Everyone is searching for attention and shouting. Col Allan, of all people, said to me 30 years ago that if you have a good story, you don’t need to shout. I recall when Chris Mitchell licensed a few of us to blog on The Australian — he called us in and warned us against chasing clicks. These days, unfortunately, your performance is judged by those clicks."
    https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/12/12/movers-and-shakers-australian-media-journalism-biggest-threats/

    Click.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Gosh, I bet all those poor bastards who rotted in Assad’s dungeons for decades - if they survived that long - were grateful for their personal and religious freedom.

    As for Polonius - . >>The feeling of Jewish Australians has been well described by singer-songwriter Deborah Conway and writer Michael Gawenda, both of whom have a left-wing background.>>
    Conway was a rock singer who, long ago, probably did a few benefit gigs for the likes of anti- Nukes. I suppose that’s sufficient evidence for Polonius of a “Leftist background”. In recent years she’s become an ardent Zionist, a big fan of the MM and an anti-vaxxer who opposed lockdowns. But in Hendo’s book if you don’t have an active subscription to Quadrant then you’re probably a bit of a pinko.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Inspired by this comment, the perennially lazy pond looked up news of leftist Debbie and found this from February 2024 ...

      Festival slammed for promoting Deborah Conway after Palestine comments

      An open letter signed by more than 500 writers and arts workers has criticised Writing WA for including musician Deborah Conway on Perth Festival’s Literature and Ideas program which runs across the weekend (Friday 23–Sunday 25 February).

      Conway, who questioned whether Palestinian children killed by the Israeli Defence Forces were actually children when she was interviewed by Patricia Karvelas for ABC radio, is programmed as the opening event.

      The letter is signed by writers including Randa Abdel-Fattah, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Sarah Ayoub, Yves Rees, Jennifer Mills and Laura Jean McKay.

      The letter states:

      The programming of Deborah Conway risks the safety of the Festival and platforms beliefs that should be comprehensively rejected.
      Conway’s recent comments on ABC Radio, particularly her dehumanising refusal to acknowledge Palestinian children as innocent victims, seek to normalise the ongoing genocide enacted by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people.
      Perth Festival and Writing WA’s decision to platform Deborah Conway causes suffering for Palestinians: an open letter from Australian writers and artists.https://t.co/qHFWeUaGHk#freepalestine #istandwithpalestine
      — Prof Anita Heiss AM (@AnitaHeiss) February 14, 2024

      Conway was earlier named as one of the contributors to the “creatives” WhatsApp group which was organising campaigns against Overland literary magazine and other pro-Palestinian writers such as Clementine Ford.

      The publication on social media of names from that WhatsApp group was the catalyst for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to propose new anti-doxxing laws.

      And so on and on ... what a rampant leftist ...

      https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/festival-slammed-for-promoting-deborah-conway-after-palestine-comments,18359

      Delete
    2. It's intriguing to encounter people who get at least some things right from early on, then get a little bit older and turn around and get everything wrong. Much more diverting than those who, like Polonius, get everything all wrong from day 1 on.

      Delete
  9. "Is there a concept for a plan to fix all this, apart from selling off News Corp?"

    Nour Hayder outlines why a fix for Australian media in general is absolutely necessary. "Silver of news" only, if your media diet is Australian.

    "Who gets to shape the story? Reporting on the conflict in the Middle East — with The Guardian’s Nour Haydar

    Thu 5 Dec 2024

    https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/bigideas/reporting-on-israel-gaza-lebanon-middle-east-war-nour-haydar/104453442

    ReplyDelete

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