For the first time since the beginning of the conflict i have seen some reasonable reportage and opinions in the australian daily newspaper, which i must admit i very rarely read. Here's some snippets.

Brian Wimborne: Left in perversity
For leftists, Israel is the aggressor and terrorists are the victims, argues Brian Wimborne

IN her book The New Anti-Semitism (2005), American feminist academic Phyllis Chesler writes: "The American and European Left have made a marriage in hell with their Islamic counterparts. The same Left that has still never expressed any guilt over its devotion to communist dictators who murdered millions of their own people in the service of a Great Idea has now finally, fatefully, joined the world jihadic chorus in calling for the end to racist Zionism and to the Jewish apartheid state."
This is an especially interesting comment in view of the fact that, immediately after World War II, this same political Left lent support to the Jewish people and favoured the creation of a homeland for them in Israel. Even the Soviet Union voted in the UN Security Council for the establishment of the state of Israel, albeit for its own political ends. So what went wrong?

To understand why the Left has done a U-turn on this issue, one needs to appreciate that activists such as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Antony Loewenstein feed on a constant diet of victims and define the progressive cause by hatred of whichever group they hold responsible for victimisation. Hatred has always been an essential characteristic of leftist ideology, providing the motivating force for its theory of dialectical materialism.

Traditionally, the Left's favoured victims were the proletariat or working class who were oppressed by the hated bourgeoisie, aristocrats, landholders, factory owners, small businessmen and managers. Only recently, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the shrinking of the working class in developed economies, have numerous other groups become the Left's favoured victims. These include indigenes, welfare dependents, homosexuals, refugees (especially if they are illegal immigrants) and displaced populations of dysfunctional states primarily in Africa and South America. Failure, in addition to class, has become a desired prerequisite for joining the Left's brotherhood of victims. Through its support of those it deems less fortunate, the Left assumes a moral high ground from which it feels self-righteously justified in attacking those it designates as oppressors.

At the conclusion of World War II, the Jewish people were added to the Left's list of stereotypical victims.

After 1500 years of religiously inspired anti-Semitism that culminated in the Nazi Holocaust, Jews were an obvious choice; they were poor, mainly working class, discriminated against, often landless and powerless. Implicit in the Left's stereotyping of Jews was that, despite incidents such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising, they were incapable of defending themselves. Their history suggested that, although individuals could be successful, Jews might not be as a group.

The image of Jews being persecuted throughout Europe and being led finally into the gas chambers of concentration camps would touch the consciences of people everywhere. As a result, although the state of Israel owes its origins to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a more potent impetus for its establishment was the Holocaust and the need to find a homeland for the remnants of European Jewry. However, the odds of the new state surviving were not sanguine.

Designated a victim-state by the Left, Israel did not live up to expectations. To begin with (and despite being under constant Arab attacks from the day of its foundation in 1948), Israel has been internally stable and politically mature. Unlike most post-war emerging states that followed decolonisation, it did not experience widespread corruption, dictatorship or military takeover. From the beginning it was the only democracy in the Middle East, and through hard work, planning and foreign aid its people built a thriving economy. Worse still, the Left's stereotype of Jews was proved wrong. Jews were prepared to fight back and defend their lives and homes.

Paradoxically, the state's success has been the reason the Left turned against Israel. Within a few years of its foundation, Israel had broken the first commandment of the Left's ideology: "Thou shalt not succeed." Success is anathema to the Left because it puts an end to victimhood; without victims the Left has no reason to exist. In the eyes of the Left's supporters, Israel's great accomplishments meant that the country no longer qualified as a victim. Israel, through being successful, effectively turned its back on the role chosen for it by the Left.

From the Left's rigidly dialectical viewpoint, the world is made up solely of victims and oppressors, and if Israel is no longer a victim it has to be an oppressor. The consequence is that the mantle of victimhood once thrust on Israel now cloaks the Palestinians; it is a cloak they may come to regret.

The deep-rooted problems of the Palestinians are not attributable to Israel but to their own corrupt leadership, culture of mendacity, lack of foresight and duplicity of their supporters (originally Egypt, Jordan and Iraq; more recently Syria and Iran).

However, Realpolitik cuts no ice with the Left, whose preference for ideology over reality means Israel is judged to be the cause of all the Middle East's problems.

For instance, in his 1983 essay Fateful Triangle, American polemicist Noam Chomsky portrayed Israel as a terrorist state similar to Nazi Germany. Chomsky's central premise is that Israel should cease to exist because it is "a state based on the principle of discrimination". That only in Israel have Palestinians enjoyed full citizenship rights for more than a half-century is something he conveniently ignores.

Closer to home, Australia's counterfactual journalist John Pilger argues that Israel's "brutal subjugation of the Palestinians is, under any interpretation of the law, an epic injustice, a crime". This is despite the historical evidence that the real subjugation of the Palestinians has occurred in Arab countries and in Gaza and the West Bank, under the tyranny of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

In short, Israel has become the aggressor; terrorists or so-called insurgents, by contrast, are the darlings of the Left.

In addition to Israel's failure to play the role of victim-state, there is another reason for the Left's about-face in respect of Israel. The Left has long been permeated with anti-Semitism. It should not be forgotten that the Nazis (an acronym for National Socialist German Workers Party) had strong left-wing antecedents. The Nazis' doppelganger, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, not only supported traditional Russian anti-Jewish movements but organised pogroms for its own political purposes.

Socialist parties in Britain, France, Australia and many other countries, despite having Jewish adherents, had a strong anti-Semitic thread running through them. It is not surprising that as the Left's support for Israel faded, a latent anti-Semitic ideology replaced it, with the result that the centre of world anti-Semitism is now firmly rooted in the Left.

If there is a lesson to be learned from this, it is that where morality is concerned, the Left is value free. It draws no distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice. Hence, in the minds of leftists, the terrorist becomes a freedom fighter and murderers are transformed into heroes. This should surprise no one. In the past century the Left gave rise to national socialism and international socialism; today it continues to function without a semblance of moral rectitude, offering support of any group it designates as victims.



Visiting columnist Mark Steyn, on ABC radio's PM on Monday, on why stability is the enemy of the Middle East
YOU have to understand that stability is the big enemy in the Middle East. We have had stability fetishists. Almost all foreign policy experts in the Western world become stability fetishists.

They don't want to update their Rolodexes more than once every couple of decades. So they stuck with the house of Saud, they stuck with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, they've stuck with Syria's Bashar al-Assad. And they were quite content in that sense with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. They believe stability is the big thing. "Stability uber alles" is basically the watchword of foreign policy establishments.

Question: But what's the choice? I mean, look at Baghdad now.

Steyn: Because there is no stability. Because you see what's happening in Lebanon, that in fact Hezbollah has better rockets that can reach deeper into Israel, that even the Israelis - who have a much better intelligence service than the US and the UK and most other countries - even the Israelis didn't know they have. So every time you bet on stability, there is no stability.

Underneath it's like a pond with a very thin layer of frozen ice in winter. Underneath the ice it's always moving. And if it's not moving in your direction, generally speaking, things are going the other way. And that's what has happened with Hezbollah, that the more you freeze the Middle East, the more you say: "We have to keep these same regimes in place", the more the technology and the demography and the general situation favours the darkest forces in that region.

Question: But seizing the day means the possibility of anarchy and appalling bloodshed.

Steyn: I think you have to look at the Middle East in zero-sum terms in a way. The US has given billions of dollars per year to Mubarak in Egypt and, in return, what did it get? It got Mohammed Atta flying through the window of the World Trade Centre at 8.30 in the morning.

Question: I'm just going to stop you there. Surely, Mohammed Atta doesn't come out of Mubarak? Mohammed Atta comes out of Mubarak actually trying to repress the Muslim Brotherhood.

Steyn: Exactly. And that's my point, that in a sense once you do what the US did for 40 years, which is bankroll and sustain in power these authoritarian and rather squalid and unlikable regimes, they in effect licence anti-Americanism as a distraction from what might otherwise be more locally focused grievances. In other words, it's in their interests to encourage their people to shout death to the "Great Satan" rather than complain about the Mubaraks, and the house of Saud, and the other local regimes ...

Whatever happens in the Middle East, it has to become something other because the post-war Middle East, if you like, put it in rough terms, the post-Suez Middle East, has been a spectacular failure.



Editorial: Facing facts about Hezbollah
August 08, 2006
Israel's destruction is the name of the militants' game

THE quest for peace in the Middle East is one of the most frustrating stories of the modern age. Unlike the Cold War, which was decided by the hard and demonstrable realities of economics, conflicts in the Middle East are conducted and judged in a far less objective arena, where values of religion and honour are very often the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong. This makes it very difficult for Western observers to take the measure of the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict, despite it being a battle between competing world views – medieval theocracy versus secular, liberal democracy – that are the political matter and anti-matter of the 21st century. Understood as such, the impasse at the UN over the wording of a resolution calling for an end to hostilities in the conflict was inevitable. Certainly, no one wants to see a continued loss of life on any side. But present efforts at the UN were doomed to fail. The fact is, the UN's track record in southern Lebanon is abysmal. Its mission to southern Lebanon, UNIFIL, consumes $133 million a year and has consistently failed to enforce UN Security Council resolution 1559. That document, a binding Chapter 7 resolution, explicitly calls for the disarming of all militias including Hezbollah within Lebanese territory. In pursuing and rooting out Hezbollah, Israel is not only protecting its own citizens – who have been subject to routine and often fatal harassment actions against it since pulling out of southern Lebanon in 2000 – but it is also enforcing international law where others have been unwilling or unable to.

But the second and broader problem behind any treaty is that for Israel, a tiny, liberal democracy surrounded by fascist autocracies, there can ultimately be no peace with Hezbollah – just a securing of a buffer zone. Created in the turmoil of the Iranian revolution with the goal of spreading radical Shia influence throughout the world, Hezbollah (aka the Party of God) is devoted to the destruction not just of the state of Israel but Judaism everywhere. Hezbollah will treat any deal as little more than an excuse to rearm and hope for better luck next time. In 1994, the group committed the deadliest act of terrorism ever on Argentinian soil, blowing up the Jewish community headquarters in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and wounding about 300 more. Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah whose picture is triumphantly carried by baying mobs at rallies around the world, has said that if Jews "all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide" and that "the Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win because they love life and we love death". Despite these lunatic ravings, Hezbollah is winning the propaganda war in the West, where decades of postmodernism have atrophied the culture's moral musculature and accorded the terrorist group privileged victim status. That Hezbollah loves death can be seen in its barrage of the past weekend, which hurt Israeli Arabs most of all. But if Hezbollah does not care about people, it does care about history and its place in it. As Nasrallah himself said in a recent rant in which he called Israel a temporary country: "By God, you will not succeed in erasing our memory, our presence or eradicating our strong belief." Middle Eastern broadcasters help by connecting the conflict to a much broader sweep of Arab and Muslim history that goes back to and beyond the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and portrays victories against Israel as evidence of a supposed rising tide of Islam. As such, those in the West who believe that world peace would be achieved were Israel to retreat behind its pre-1967 borders (or disappear entirely) are mistaken. Such a move would only embolden the likes of Hezbollah and its backers in Syria and Iran. Here those who truly care about the future of the Middle East and believe in the values of secular, liberal democracy and all the freedoms that they entail should gain the confidence to speak up for them in the present conflict. For, in the long run, there is nothing less that is at stake.

In the present conflict, all Hezbollah needs to win is to not lose. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acknowledged as much on the weekend when he said it would not be possible to completely destroy such a guerilla organisation. But that is not to say that Israel should not fight Hezbollah and respond to its provocations. For until Hezbollah and its backers in Tehran are deposed or have a change of heart, and the rest of the Middle East sees the Jewish state as a neighbour with whom to coexist rather than a cancer to eliminate, Israel has no choice but to defend itself. Any peace that does not secure Israel's borders in the short term while also communicating to its foes that attempts to destroy the Jewish state will be met with overwhelming force will be a mortgage on future lives and a peace of the dead.