What a time to be alive. Malcolm Roberts thinking 9/11 is a hoax, Pauline thinking Port Arthur is a conspiracy, and somehow with climate science a fraud, the world still managed a top notch heat record these past few months.
And the blessings go on, with mad king Donald promising each and every American $5,000 smackeroos, perhaps to make up for the $2k DOGE cheques they never got, and all in all, a joyous $1.2tn or $1.3tn payout - pick your own number - and that's the first time the pond has ever used 'tn' as an abbreviation.
What a way to help boost national debt, inflation and interest rates, as if events in Yemen and the strait weren't already doing their best, with oil prices on the rise.
Best of all, it's Our Henry day, but bear with the pond, because there are numerous distractions to hand.
There was the pond confronted by a choice between Pauline and Lambie and the pasty Hastie, and having to think that in a pinch, that the spawn of creationists was more ridgy didge than Pauline.
What's more, the pond found itself agreeing with the RSL, with the lizards of Oz sinking in the slipper...
Hanson’s ‘traitor’ attack on Hastie is ‘un-Australian’: RSL president
The RSL has condemned Pauline Hanson’s attack on veteran and Liberal MP Andrew Hastie as ‘extremely offensive’, intensifying pressure on the One Nation leader.
by Sarah Ison and Elizabeth Pike
Right on Jacqui, right on pasty Hastie, right on RSL ...
Say what? The pond can't believe it just typed that.
And yet more presidential language from Jacqui! It's not just Maggie Haberman that's a maggot.
What a day of wonders ...
Sadly the intermittent archive was intermittent again, so who knows if its links will work, but wot the hell, toujours gai ...
The High Court has refused Giggle for Girls founder Sall Grover special leave to appeal the Roxanne Tickle case, cementing gender identity as legally protected under Australian law.
By Stephen Rice
Just to be safe, the pond decided on a screen caps policy, so at least a little of the flavour would survive ...
Awe, and she looks so ... womanly, not like that other shameless harridan.
Oh there'll be hell to pay for that, with Dame Slap ready to be outraged ... but the pond must stick to its resolution, and not encourage the reptiles in yet more TG bashing ..
In other news, the reptiles were devastated by the way the government had failed to reform or improve them...
Leaked Home Affairs figures show 24 extremists became more dangerous under the National Support and Intervention Program.
By Noah Yim
Relax Noah, the extremism of the lizard Oz, that daily class of hate, can sail on unreformed ...
There's a man who knows his comics ...
Speaking of devastation, the pond was devastated by the swishing Switzer breaking ranks...
Did the swishing Switzer just accuse the beefy boofhead of aspiring to run an authoritarian state?
He did, he did ... how dare he attack the beefy boofhead this way!
And worse the swishing Switzer carried on this way to the very end ...
Foolish boofhead ... your foolish inability to understand your foolishness means you can't forgive the foolishness of others, and even that fool Switzer sees you as a fool...
The pond has been there before, and will go again ...
As for Cameron in solemn commemorative mode, what a disgrace...
The September 11 terror attacks claimed more than 3000 lives 25 years ago, yet the wounds remain so deep that Americans still cannot escape their shadow.
By Cameron Stewart
Not once in his peroration did he mention King Donald or his brave interventions or him being hustled away by two big, strong, incredibly burly and tall firemen, perhaps with tears in their eyes.
For that the pond had to turn to Parker Molloy, bringing much mirth and joy in Donald Trump Lies a Lot About 9/11
The pond would have loved to linga longa - so many tall stories, so little time - but other reptiles cried out for attention, and so the pond turned to Killer Creighton, carrying on yet again about the many ways that furriners were ruining the country ...
Say what? Those bloody furrin students are shipping their filthy lucre overseas and ruining everything, and what do we get in return? A little hard labour delivering food and a few tuition fees, as if that made up for them looting the country.
This is surely a case for Dame Groan, but in the interim the pond will settle for a final gobbet of Killer indignation ...
Damn right, those bloody furrin students are just a burden and a shame and what luck Killer was here to call them out...and what joy to see that mad king Donald hadn't affected the Canadian economy, though perhaps soon to be the 51st state ...
Of course all this has been just a preliminary, a lengthy detour, a little trolling, a build up to the arrival of Our Henry.
It's been a rough week for the Australian Daily Zionist News, what with Haaretz exposing Benji, yet gloomy about what had been achieved ...Netanyahu Was Warned About October 7. Will Haaretz's Exposé Change Anything?
And certain countries at last recognised ethnic cleansing was going down and the current government of Israel was the perpetrator, but they'd deployed a warm lettuce leaf ... The U.K.'s Sanctions on Settlements Matter. So Do Their Limits
Naturally Our Henry ignored all that, but then he is the leading contributor to the Australian Daily Zionist News ...
The header:Richard Flanagan’s dangerous ideas were intellectually lazy; His factual errors were not mere intellectual sloppiness: they contribute to demonising Israel and the Australian Jews.
The caption for the uncredited collage showing the fiend in his true light, imitating Mussolini: At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Richard Flanagan asked where the antisemitism was in the Bondi massacre and answered: "Nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere." Pictures: News Corp / Supplied
Our Henry's opening par contained a hot link:
Richard Flanagan’s speech at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas has one merit and one merit only: it crystallises the falsehoods, delusions and hypocrisy at the heart of the wave of hatred that has swept Australia since October 7, 2023.
Some might think that the reptiles were playing fair and providing a link to Flanagan's talk. Foolish "some", it was a link to the craven Craven, using the very same artwork, such is reptile indolence and laziness and lack of originality:
It was left to the pond to provide a link to Flanagan yet again, so he could speak for himself.
You could watch the full speech on YouTube... or you could read it here under the header The new McCarthyism: Gaza and Australia – Richard Flanagan; This is the full text of a powerful speech Flanagan delivered at the the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on August 22
Was it way back on 22nd August? Is it now September 11th?
And yet here we are, with Our Henry still ranting, clearly with nothing better to do, in full persecuted paranoid mode.
(Here the pond must warn that the reptiles refused to interrupt the five minute rant with a single visual distraction of any kind) ...
Flanagan equally presents the Bund – a Jewish socialist movement – as implacably hostile to the state of Israel, conveniently ignoring that in 1955, as the reality of the Holocaust and of Stalinist antisemitism sank it, the Bund’s Third World Conference clamorously reversed its position.
But the factual errors are not mere intellectual sloppiness: they contribute to demonising Israel and the Australian Jews who support its right to exist, in some cases by ignoring reality in others by not providing crucial context.
To take just one instance, Flanagan recycles the Committee to Protect Journalists’ contention that “more journalists have been killed in Gaza by the IDF than in the entirety of World War Two”. What he omits is that the comparison applies a far looser definition of “journalist” to Gaza than to World War Two.
Worse, as the scholarly source underlying the wartime tally acknowledges, it excludes journalists killed on the Soviet and Chinese fronts, where 80 per cent of combat fatalities occurred, as well as journalists reporting from the Axis forces. Making those adjustments shows the claim to be utterly baseless – a fact Flanagan either knew or should have known.
All that, however, merely prepares the ground for “exposing” a conspiracy of monstrous scope and ambition. There is, in Flanagan’s telling, an ominously amorphous “Israel lobby”, operating both directly and through the Special Envoy for Antisemitism, Jillian Segal. Aided by “sustained” yet “mysterious” pressure from the Trump administration, its aim is to control “every significant arena of Australian public life”.
The “lobby’s” not-so-secret weapon is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which it wants enforced by “oversight committees” designed to “cower civil society and curb free speech”, leaving “Australians silenced, fearful and divided”. The restrictions those committees impose are “certain to be (on) terms that please Israel, a foreign nation”, so that this country would be controlled not by “the Australian state, but essentially the Israeli state”. Australians would become vassals of a foreign power, denied even the freedom to criticise their overlords.
The pond realises what everybody routinely comes to Our Henry for ... some reference to Thucydides or other Greek or Roman author, or perhaps a legal or moral medieval philosopher, and in any survey of those ancient times, certainly getting no more modern than Hume.
Sadly the pond must report thin gruel, with Our Henry largely sticking to the Zionist present, with a brief detour back to 1964 ...
Hofstadter called this style paranoid, he explained, “because no other word adequately evokes its qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy”. And its archetypal expression is the malevolent fiction of a Jewish cabal plotting to bring the world to heel.
Little wonder then that direct references to “the Lobby’s” machinations account for almost a third of the words Flanagan utters. Yet what is most telling is not what Flanagan says but what he leaves unsaid. In a speech devoted to Gaza, Israel is mentioned 60 times; Hamas once. Jews are mentioned 43 times; Islam and Muslims, never.
At this point some might wonder what Our Henry leaves unsaid.
"Some" might answer, why real observations about the actual ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon, not to mention the current government of Israel maintaining its military presence in a considerable slice of Syria.
But give the guy a break ... no need to mention the unmentionable ...at best deserving of a "tsk, tsk" ...
And the hole in bucket man does manage to spray out his usual portentous array of references in lieu ...
Equally, he endlessly excoriates the “Israel lobby”. Yet he never mentions the lavishly taxpayer-funded Muslim lobby, with its own special envoy, which has coalesced a wide range of Islamic and pro-Palestinian organisations in submissions to public inquiries, including the royal commission, urging, among other things, for the terrorism legislation to be weakened.
And while denouncing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition in vitriolic terms, Flanagan passes over the far more sweeping restrictions on what they call Islamophobia proposed by those organisations and by the Islamophobia Special Envoy: restrictions advanced without even the sketchiest definition of the “Islamophobia” they seek to repress.
The double standard then reaches its nadir in his suggestion that the representative bodies of Australian Jewry benefit from inciting hatred against the very people they represent – a charge he would never level at their Muslim counterparts.
To describe those assertions as outrageous would be an understatement; and Flanagan is plainly aware of their enormity. He therefore moves to pre-empt criticism by adopting the manoeuvre notoriously associated with former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who dismissed every charge of antisemitism as an attempt to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.
The goal is simple: to avoid addressing the substance of the charge by impugning the accuser’s supposed motives. Critics are presumed to be acting in bad faith, fabricating persecution to advance their political ends. Hatred is thus rebaptised as legitimate criticism, while those who object become accomplices in a secret campaign to stifle debate.
And so, to prove his good faith, Our Henry deployed an abundant array of legitimate criticisms of Israel, including but not limited to cynical ethnic cleansing of the first water, and the current government's philosophy of a greater Israel, from the river to the sea, for which all Zionists must take responsibility.
You know, to quote Gideon Levy in Haaretz ... The U.K. Sanctions Are a Joke. Israel Is the Settlements, and the Settlements Are Israel
If Britain thinks that there is ethnic cleaning, elements of which are among the most serious war crimes and crimes against humanity, then what good is it to punish the settlers? The settlers are supporting actors in the horrors, and their responsibility is diminished. They are only the perpetrators — the soldiers carrying out the crime.
The settlement enterprise is an all-Israeli undertaking of the government and indeed the entire system. There is not a single official body not involved, directly or indirectly, either by action or by omission, undertaken with joy or with indifference. It is the state that should be punishing violent settlers, if it were a state of law; that is not the world's job. It is those responsible for the settlement enterprise who should be punished by the world because the Israeli government, like any government, cannot punish itself.
Therefore, Britain's decision to impose sanctions on the settlers provides the international community with a way to evade its responsibility. The world, which often deludes itself into believing that the source of all evil is Benjamin Netanyahu, must also remember that Netanyahu did not found the settlement enterprise. The entire Zionist enterprise stands behind the settlements, and with it the Zionist establishment throughout the world.
In terms of efficacy, sanctioning settlers will be of no consequence. The settlers are far removed from world culture, and nationalists believe Israel does not need the world. No sanctions on them will stop the extremists from running rampant over the stolen land.
Even the sanctions on imports of products from the settlements is of little consequence because only 2.3 percent of Israeli exports to Europe come from the settlements. At the Esh Kodesh outpost, the industry is hatred, not high-tech; at Adei-Ad, the leading product is violence, not cherry tomatoes. The wine from the settlements is tainted, made from the grapes of wrath cultivated on stolen land.
Israel is not interested in the sanctions imposed on the settlements. The settlers are not overly bothered either, and rightly so. Less than a day after they were announced, the Civil Administration on Wednesday discussed building 747 housing units in the West Bank. The main thing is that in Westminster there is glee.
Marvel at how Our Henry takes up that Zionist burden and lets loose a volley, a veritable fusillade of criticisms.
The pond keeds, it keeds.
No way was the hole in bucket man going to go full, or even slight Haaretz.
That was way too big an ask, and so legitimate criticisms disappeared into a concluding rant about Flanagan ...
But Flanagan’s evasive tactics do not end there. Aping the techniques that saturate social media, he repeatedly poses as merely asking questions. The rhetorical approach is puerile: “A question needs to be asked,” Flanagan declares, casting himself as prepared to ask what others dare not. Then the inflammatory allegations are smuggled in: “To what extent has the Israel lobby itself contributed to antisemitism in Australia”, because it would, “perhaps perversely”, “accord with their existential message that only in Israel are Jews safe”? The insinuation is left hanging, as though the answer were self-evident, allowing Flanagan to don the mantle of truth-telling without ever shouldering the burden of proof it entails.
Every one of those claims and tactics could and should have been ruthlessly demolished on the day. Yet the so-called Festival of Dangerous Ideas evidently considered that prospect too dangerous to countenance. Its lineup featured Israel haters, but it included absolutely no one who would take them on.
The imbalance is, unfortunately, completely unremarkable: it is now a deeply ingrained feature of this country’s increasingly mediocre cultural life. But that only makes it even more important that those who purport to care about the truth should restore the balance that has been destroyed.
It is therefore much worse than scandalous that the festival was sponsored by the Ethics Centre and the NSW state government. It is an unforgivable disgrace.
