???

Yes, he's a wingnut Zionist who committed to write a biography of mad settler-supporting gold miner Joe Gutnick and began his carrer as Washington correspondent for the SMH with a panegyric to the 'impressive' Condi Rice who at that stage was being jeered thru Europe. He's an insider, or rather 'on-sider'.

Gerard Henderson's column yesterday mentions the cartoon as evidence of Leunig's racism without bothering to mention (a) the clear anti-racist intent of the work and (b) the fact that IT WASN'T EVEN BLOODY PUBLISHED BECAUSE OF THE INTERVENTION OF ONE OF HIS COLLEAGUES!

How is that for rank hypocrisy? He writes a column pretending that the media's new buzzword of 'respect' is really only extended to Muslims and that poor oppressed Christians and Jews have to wear the liberal media's taunts. His evidence being respectively the Age's acceptance of Serrano's Piss Christ and the Leuning cartoon – and he fails to mention that the damn thing wasn't published because a member of the group who might be offended was the editor of the paper!

How many of Mr Gawenda's co-religionists hold senior Aust media positions like those he has occupied in recent years? And how many Muslims would you find in the same cohort? To most people with eyes and a pulse and a living not dependent on corporate handouts, the 'respect' deficit in the Aust media unfairly targets Muslims and Jews (providing they toe the Likudnik line) do very nicely thank you.

More issue-evasion from the Little Master. Strong on motherhood statements and the subtle pressing of hot buttons, utterly incapable of addressing fairly any issue that might upset his paymasters.

No-one is saying that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is equivalent to the Nazi solution, but, what they are saying, as are many Israeli human rights groups, is that Israelis are heading down the same path, with the same attitudes and the same fears and the same sorts of power.

No, Israel can't carry out genocide on the same level as the Nazis. Times have changed. But, in the current day and age they, come as close to it as they can.

Israel uses collective punishment on an imprisoned people to maintain an illegal occupation and illegal colonisation. It also seeks to maintain a high level of suffering and misery because it wants to make life so unbearable the Palestinians will leave. They won't of course but many have.

Fanatics in Israel do call for ethnic cleansing in Palestine and given the level of destruction, violence and murder that Israel has inflicted upon the Palestinians as it is, there is every reason to believe that if they could impose a 'final solution' they would.

Talking about similarities between Nazi Germany, government and citizens alike, and Israel today, is done only to try to make Israel wake up to what it is and what it may yet become.

The Nazis may have been able to be more organised but Israel's bombings, shootings, torturings, sonic booms, and sheer wilful and venal destruction of Palestinian infrastructure, homes, orchards and farms is merely another form of the purest kind of evil.

The Nazis used torture, they used collective punishment, they used humiliation, they used checkpoints and prisons, they used imprisonment without trial, they used assassination, they used home demolition, they used snipers …. they used the things that Israel uses. The only difference is that Israel's concentration camps are not equipped with ovens. At least not yet although the ways of killing are many and varied.

It's not enough to cry horror because Jews are seen to have similarities with Nazis; it is time for all Israelis and Jews of conscience to know what is being done in their name.

There are many Israelis and Jews who say exactly the same things that I have said here. The testimony of the dissenting IDF reservists says it all.

And to try to brush it all away with the fly swat of anti-semitism is moral bankruptcy of the worst kind. Anyone who cares about Israel, anyone who wants it to survive, should be talking more about these things, not less.

You have to know who you are before you can become who you should be.

Your correspondent Michael Gawenda seems to be still attempting to justify his decision not to publish Leunig's cartoon in the first place ("Aggrieved cartoonist's…", SMH, 16/2/06). It might interest Herald readers that in a case of life imitating art, the human rights group Jews against Genocide recently spray painted the Nazi slogan 'Arbeit Macht Frei' (Work Makes You Free) on a sign reading 'The Hope of Us All' at a degrading Israeli Army checkpoint in the Gaza Strip. Why? Not to simplistically equate Ramallah with Auschwitz, but to highlight what they saw as the "many disturbing parallels between the tactics used by the occupation (of Palestine by the Israelis) and those used by the Nazis".

There is probably little chance of that being published!