In which the pond tosses aside sundry reptiles to land on Joe and King Donald, and the Major in the grip of fundamentalist Zionism ...

 

The reptiles lead with sport this day, an easy pass for the pond ...

Anyone wanting more than a headline can follow up at the Graudian or in the Nine rags.

Meanwhile assorted reptiles kept assorted jihads alive...

There were expenses and budgets ...

It was within guidelines’: Anthony Albanese backs Anika Wells as travel bills rack up
Anthony Albanese says he approved Anika Wells’ $3000 trip to Thredbo with her family and $34,000 flights to a UN event, as new details emerge over the Communications Minister’s mounting travel bills.
By Noah Yim

Anika Wells's expenses puts the Albanese government to the test
A $34,000 return ticket to New York defies imagination. But it’s Anika Wells's taxpayer-funded trip to Adelaide that really pushes the ‘pub test’, the standard that felled Sussan Ley almost a decade ago.
By Simon Benson

That's what the crusaders are reduced to?

Pretty, pretty tragic, and there was an EXCLUSIVE rehashing of Jimbo as Satan's chief minion turned up to help the reptiles business model ...

EXCLUSIVE
Jim Chalmers eyes reform in next budget
Jim Chalmers has flagged major budget reforms to boost private investment while revealing spending cuts in next week’s MYEFO.
by Geoff Brown

Sauron's assistant was over on the extreme far right ...

Mid-year update will be sensible, not a spendathon
Private sector recovery means we confront global volatility and persistent price pressures from a position of genuine economic strength.
By Jim Chalmers

The pond couldn't get past the extraordinary banality of the opening illustration:

You deserved that Jimbo, helping out the flailing, failing reptile business model, and withholding your pebbles of wisdom by making punters hand over shekels to Lachy to read them is an unseemly affair.

Rice was on the boil yet again with an EXCLUSIVE heaven-sent opportunity to mingle TG bashing with a goodly dose of ABC bashing:

EXCLUSIVE
Point-scoring ABC embraces ACON to steer its trans coverage
The ABC has achieved platinum status from trans rights lobby group ACON, but critics say the national broadcaster has compromised its editorial independence by paying for ideological approval.
by Stephen Rice

Nah, not really, though the pond realises that's two favourite reptile Jihads combined, and another nah to Jennings of the fifth form, as he carried on another favourite reptile jihad:

SIS brides saga reveals Labor’s ‘instinct for secrecy’
Eventually the details of the jihadi repatriations will emerge. The real question is how long voters will tolerate a government that treats openness as a threat rather than an obligation.
By Peter Jennings
Contributor

There the clue was the sinister looking figure on the left, looking vaguely like Pauline:

With all that whittling, that reduced the pond to just two reptiles.

First up was Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang, having an anxiety attack about King Donald (*archive link):

Sorry, the pond is trying to defeat the bots which currently swarm the blog ...

The pond can assure correspondents nothing much as lost and there was no news that an aged, demented narcissist was in charge, and currently losing his marbles on a daily basis.

Instead there was a firm understanding of policies ... that wouldn't be changed the next day, after the small-hand authoritarian king had another fit of pique ...

...The good news for Canberra is the strategy’s commitment to preventing large-scale conflict in the Indo-Pacific – a sign there will be an enduring rationale for AUKUS in the Trumpian world view. Yet, the worrying news is Washington’s critique of Europe – a development that will heighten uncertainty among US partners about the changing character of American leadership and reliability.
By expressing open ambivalence and caution towards Europe and NATO – coupled with relative silence on the Russian threat – the strategy reads as a considered attack on the foundations of the post-World War II trans-­Atlantic partnership. “It is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter,” the strategy warns.
Washington is openly declaring one of its principal concerns to be the “stark prospect of civilisational erasure” in Europe while questioning the ongoing legitimacy of the EU project itself.
The 2025 strategy sounds the alarm on the “activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty”, while questioning “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife”.
It reserves the ability of the US to intervene in European politics, declaring “our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory”.
While The Hague Commitment, in which NATO members agreed to increase defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP, is touted as a new global standard, it is also presented as an American liberation from the security treaty.
Deep cracks are emerging in one of the most successful alliances in history, which has preserved peace in Europe for more than seven decades – an outcome likely to lead to heightened instability rather than improving future security.

The reptiles tossed in just one distraction: Crucially, ending the Ukraine war and ensuring its survival as a viable state are identified as key objectives in Europe. Picture: Sergey Bobok/AFP

Joe was entranced by high sounding verbiage ...

Crucially, ending the Ukraine war and ensuring its survival as a viable state are identified as key objectives. But the motivations for these include re-establishing “strategic stability with Russia” – the terms of which are not spelled out.
The elevation of US dominance over the western hemisphere as the pre-eminent foreign policy goal represents another major departure. The strategy describes this objective as “a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine” – a correction taking place after “years of neglect … to restore American pre-eminence in the West”.

Does that include a Trump tower in Moscow?And maybe a rare earths deal with Vlad the impaler?

A major endeavour, this shift will lead to the US enlisting neighbours to “stop illegal and destabilising migration, neutralise cartels, nearshore manufacturing and develop local private economies”. It will also involve a “readjustment of our global military presence”.
Amid intensifying global competition, the Trump administration is fortifying its dominance closer to home while signalling its intention to play a reduced role in fighting global tyranny. This will be seen as a new model of how the US projects power – doing so more brazenly and openly, but more often in its own backyard. Under this approach, the contentious attacks on suspected drug vessels in the Caribbean appear likely to become the new norm.
The most reassuring elements of the strategy relate to the Indo-Pacific, with the document outlining the need for military deterrence to ensure stability while upholding the importance of maintaining the status quo in Taiwan.
America will “build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain”. But the strategy makes clear that Washington “should not have to do this alone. Our allies must step up and spend – and more importantly do – much more for collective defence”.
The goal is to “win the economic future” while preventing military confrontation. In addition to lifting defence spending, this will see Washington pushing Australia harder to “counteract predatory economic practices” from China.
Rebalancing economic ties with Beijing is seen as a joint effort that can only take place if it is accompanied by an “ongoing focus on deterrence to prevent war in the Indo-Pacific”.
This position should provide great assurance to Australia by setting a key principle – improved economic ties with Beijing must not come at the cost of concessions being made on vital matters of national security.
Holding to this ideal will become one of the critical tests for Donald Trump in his second term as President, especially as he ­embarks on a new phase of high ­dialogue with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.

Says the mob currently conducting extrajudicial murders and doing their best to interfere in sundry countries, not limited to Venezuela.

Isolationism? Hah ...

Here, have a break ...

Finally it wouldn't be the Australian Zionist Daily News without a serve from the Major:

The header: How Nazi anti-Semitism shaped modern Islamist ideology backed by today's protesters;The Western world’s pro-Palestinian protesters don’t know it, but they are puppets for the inheritors of German Nazi racism and anti-Semitism.

The caption: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia Aftab Malik and Multicultural Affairs Minister Anne Aly address the media in Sydney in September. Picture: NewsWire/ Gaye Gerard

It was a five minute rant by the Major, designed to ensure him a place in Benji's cabinet, and with Nazi slurs flung around illiberally, though the pond last noted that the only party that had really put into effect a genocide in recent times was the current government of Israel, what with mass displacement, mass starvation as a method of waging war, mass destruction, and plans for mass ethnic cleansing:

The Western world’s keffiyeh-wearing, anti-racist, pro-Palestinian protesters don’t know it, but they are puppets for the inheritors of German Nazi racism and anti-Semitism.
The past century’s two greatest sources of disinformation, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, are as crucial as the Koran to the rise of the Islamism that now joins forces with the anti-racist left.
Western journalists are prepared to call out the Kremlin’s false claims that the Jewish President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is leading a modern resurgent nation of Nazis.
Yet much of the Western media has framed the victims of the Holocaust as perpetrators of a genocide. They accept false claims that the Middle East’s only genuine pluralist democracy – where Jews, Arabs, Christians and Druze all elect members to the Knesset – is an apartheid state.
Yet most Jews from the rest of the Middle East have been banished, and Christians, Yazidis, Kurds and other minorities are persecuted in many countries in the region.

Puppets? The pond guesses that the Major would know about that, being something of a puppet himself, as the reptiles tried to distract from the rampant Zionism with another matter: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks to the press in Kyiv in December. Picture: Genya Savilov / AFP

Then the Major trotted out a slur, as if conflating and confusing what's gone down in Gaza with other matters would seal the deal:

Chanting protesters in Australia, preaching hate for Israel, show no interest in the oil- and gas-rich oligarchies that surround it and keep their populations in poverty. They show zero concern for the millions who have died in Islamic violence in Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Syria.
They denounce as Islamophobic any criticism of Muslim violence against poor black Africans or Christian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria to prevent their education.

Not so, it's possible to chew gum, and deplore what's happening in many places, just as it's possible to deplore allegedly Xian violence, such as murder on the high seas, and what seems like another colonial adventure in Venezuela beginning to take shape (never mind that the current ruler should be replaced, it's just that US interventions always produce a mass of unknown unknowns which ruin things for decades, including the terrible fate of women in Afghanistan) ...

But when you're a extremist Zionist, the world takes a very simple shape ...

The Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, last week in Senate estimates argued religious motivation should be removed from definitions of terrorism. Yet many terror incidents in Australia and around the world are perpetrated by radicalised Muslims.
Malik says Australian Muslims know terrorism is motivated by extremist ideology rather than religion. Yet for 100 years the extremist ideology of Islamist groups and Muslim anti-Semites has been at the heart of Muslim violence.
Many Muslim polemicists railing against Israel’s war to retrieve its hostages from Gaza peddle a discredited conspiracy theory against Jews pushed by the Nazis in Berlin in the 1930s and by the Communist Party in 1920 in Baku, Azerbaijan, during the first “congress of the peoples of the Orient”.
Nazis and Communists used the tsarist Russian-era conspiracy forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as the basis of their hate campaigns. The Protocols still underpin much of what is said by Islamist politicians and journalists in parts of the Middle East, especially Iran and Qatar.

The reptiles introduced another distraction, Tense exchanges when a pro-Israel protester walks past the pro-Palestine demonstration after a Burgertory chain-restaurant owned by Palestinian-Australian Hesham Tayah burned in Melbourne. Picture: Alex Zucco / SOPA Images/Sipa USA

It seems the Major uses as his sources the thoughts of cackling Claire, as if she's gospel ...

In a column in this newspaper on July 5, Quillette founding editor Claire Lehmann discussed how “beginning in 1967, Moscow launched a sweeping campaign of ‘active measures’ aimed at portraying Israel as a fascist outpost of Western imperialism”. The Soviets “embedded anti-Zionism into the moral DNA of the Western left”.
Undoubtedly the Soviets knew the actual fascist antecedents of radical Islam and were more concerned with using diplomacy to isolate the US’s main ally in the region. Even the Palestine Liberation Organisation owed more to Nazism than communism.
This column in The Australian on October 14, 2023 – the first Saturday after October 7 – traced the origins of Islamic fascism in Palestine to the mufti of Jerusalem, Sheik Haj Amin al-Husseini, who allied his people with Adolf Hitler and lived in Berlin pumping out Nazi propaganda to the Arab world from 1941 to 1945.
He was not tried for war crimes as his German hosts were. Instead he was held in France for a year before fleeing to Egypt on June 11, 1946, where he was welcomed by Hassan al-Banna, spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood and himself an avowed supporter of Nazi Germany.

Flinging around the Nazi slur is a common trick, much practised by Russian state media these days, where almost every state in Europe, especially Ukraine, is run by Nazis, likely in partnership with Satanism ... but it would be a lot simpler to judge the current state of Israel by its ethnic cleansing actions than on ancient propaganda.

The reptiles interrupted with another snap designed to enrage and inflame...A rally for Gaza in front of Israeli Embassy in October in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

It's true, for example, that you can find Ukranians who fought alongside the Nazis, gripped with the delusion that this would free them from the Russians, and it's true that Arab states joined in the second world war on the side of the Axis alliance, but the current governments of the middle east owe a lot more to absolute monarchies from ancient European times ...

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, for example, would think nothing of the absolute right of kings, princes and potentates to chainsaw a journalist, and then be welcomed back into the tent by King Donald, a regular abuser of journalists and of any media that refuses to kow tow ...

Meanwhile, the Major carried on slurring ...

Al-Banna had founded the Brotherhood in 1928. It is banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and most Gulf states but its leaders are welcomed in Hamas-supporting Qatar and Turkey. The Brotherhood is committed to a global caliphate and has been using a new generation of young Muslims in Western countries, especially the UK, France and the US, to build links with leftist anti-racist, pro-trans and gay rights lobbies.
Never mind such rights don’t exist in the Muslim world, and gays and trans people are murdered by Hamas and other offshoots of the Brotherhood. Islamists know us better than we understand them.
Welcoming al-Husseini, al-Banna described the mufti as a “hero who defied an empire (Britain) and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany”. Earlier, he said: “The mufti is Palestine and Palestine is the mufti.”
Al-Husseini went on to lead the 1948 Arab revolt against the partition of Palestine approved under UN Resolution 181 into a Jewish state by the Mediterranean and an Arab Palestinian state west to the border of Jordan.
Al-Husseini had earlier led the armed revolt from 1936-39 against the UK Peel Commission plan for a more sweeping partition that would have given most of the land to the west of what is now modern Israel to Transjordan, which was to be home to the world’s Palestinians.
The latest research on radical Islam makes clear al-Husseini’s legacy is the key to understanding modern Islamism. For Palestinians, he was the intellectual guiding light to both PLO leader Yasser Arafat and current Palestinian Association president Mahmoud Abbas.

Could it be that the explanation for radical modern Zionism can be explained by the way that those who have been bullied early in life turn to bullying?

It's a well-known phenomenon, per Psychology Today ....

At 300 pounds, freshman Bryan Kohberger was an easy target (Fixler, 2023). He always had been. Classmates at Pleasant Valley Intermediate and Pocono Mountain East High School in Pennsylvania subjected him to the kind of systematic cruelty that can leave lasting scars. He was miserable, posting in online forums about feeling like "an organic sack of meat with no self-worth" (Fixler, 2023).
Then Bryan took charge. By the end of his junior year, he had lost over 100 pounds through a combination of obsessive dieting, punishing workouts, and kickboxing training (Fixler, 2023). His body transformed from soft target to hardened weapon. So did his psyche.
This could have been an inspiring success story: a bullied kid overcomes adversity, gets healthy, and helps others facing similar struggles. Instead, friends witnessed the formerly meek, withdrawn victim become someone they barely recognized. "It was like he'd decided that since he'd been the victim, now it was his turn to make others feel small," one peer recalled (Fixler, 2023). He didn't become confident; he became controlling. He didn't find peace; he found power.

There's an enormous amount of bullying gone down in Gaza...

The reptiles tried to distract from the carnage ... Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas waves as he arrives for the opening of the Fatah youth conference in Ramallah on November 27. Picture: Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP

There's also the alleged criminality of Benji, what with incessant war a convenient excuse for seeking a pardon, and never mind the way that he and his minions allowed for the funding of Hamas.

But as a rampant Zionist, the Major isn't that much interested in any of that ...

Jeffrey Herf, professor of Modern European History at Maryland University, discussed at length in Tablet magazine on July 6, 2022, the latest books on al-Husseini that confirm the mufti’s influence on the thinking of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s Hamburg cell of Islamist terrorists.
“Al-Qaeda’s Nazi lineage through the Muslim Brotherhood showed that the 9/11 attackers were not leftist anti-imperialists. Rather they were a product … of the … aftershock of Nazism in the Middle East,” Herf wrote.
Nazism had been defeated in Europe but “enjoyed a robust afterlife in the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, such as Hamas and al-Qaeda … motivated in large part by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories”.
Herf links this to al-Husseini’s writings widely available in the Middle East after the war.
Herf cites Stanford professor Russell Berman arguing “it was the ideological mixture of Nazism and Islamism that was the most important causal factor which led leaders of the Palestinian Arabs to reject the UN Partition resolution of November 29, 1947”.
After al-Husseini and al-Banna, the later books of Egyptian Sayyid Qutb cemented anti-Semitism at the heart of the Brotherhood.
Herf discusses author and journalist Paul Berman’s 2003 book, Terror and Liberalism, which focuses on the parallels between fascist totalitarianism in mid-20th century Europe and “Qutb’s reactionary attack on liberalism, the Jews, the United States and Israel”.
“Qutb, like al-Husseini, offered a paranoid construct of Islam under attack by the Jews, Christians and modern culture,” Herf writes. Qutb mapped out a modern “counter-attack that celebrated death and martyrdom in an effort to create a pristine Islamic State in which state and religion would be fused and liberal modernity banished”.
Journalists covering the Middle East should understand this is what modern Islamism wants for the world. These are the views of the movement that today’s rainbow coalition of anti-Israel protesters is supporting.

And what does the Major want? A complete take over of the West Bank, and the expulsion of residents from Gaza so that a great new Riviera could arise?

As usual, after a bout of Major zionism, the pond likes to purge with a reading from Haaretz ...(*archive link) ...

And in conclusion?

...Netanyahu has not taken an ounce of responsibility for October 7, and he never intended to. He identified an opportunity to take over the defense establishment after it had failed, and to replace its top figures with his close associates, thereby eliminating a powerful opposition force that had hampered him for years.

It's more than likely that today, Netanyahu would not have appointed Eyal Zamir as chief of staff. In this respect, Katz is but a useful proxy who profits personally along the way.

Instead of Israel's enemies, the IDF chief is forced to battle the defense minister's ego Yossi Verter

IDF chief spots the front where he can't give ground: Netanyahu and his defense minister Amos Harel

In his request to halt his trial, which he submitted to President Isaac Herzog, Netanyahu hinted that if his criminal indictments were lifted, he would involve himself in matters pertaining to the justice system and the media, both of which are currently under attack by particularly aggressive cabinet members.

One may assume that Netanyahu is broadening and improving his method: He would like to reach the election, or any other event endangering his continued rule, with defense agencies well-stocked with his own people.

And so to the 'toon closer, and for some reason that talk of bullies seemed to sit well with the Herbert of the day ...