You are an inspiration to all people, Jews and other alike, and you exemplify the most admirable and powerful traits of the Jewish identity – wisdom, compassion, humanism and forgiveness.

Shalom.

*Long live IAJV.

My heroes include Raoul Wallenberg (who saved many Jews in Budapest in 1944; he is remembered by a bust at Kew Junction in Melbourne), Polish hero Jan Karski (who tried to alert an unresponsive and unbelieving world to the on-going Jewish Holocaust), George Soros (who saved Jewish lives as a teenager in Budapest and who has recently demanded the “de-Nazification” of racist, violently Islamophobic and imperialistic Bush-ite America) and to outstanding Jewish intellectuals who have had the courage to rise above natural tribal loyalties to speak out for the human rights of Palestinians, such people including Professors Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Bertell Ollman (US), Tanya Reinhart and Ilan Pappe (Israel) and Stephen Rose (UK) and courageous Jewish writers such as Dr Jennifer Loewenstein (Oxford), Antony Loewenstein (Australia) and Gideon Levy and Deb Reich (Israel).

Over the last 3 years I have researched and written a book on global avoidable mortality (excess deaths, avoidable deaths, deaths that should not have happened). A very small part deals with the post-invasion excess deaths in the Occupied Palestinian Territory that total about 0.3 million. The Palestinian refugees total 6 million and 80,000 more are fleeing each year. In comparison, from the latest medical literature and UN data the post-invasion excess deaths in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan total 1.0 million and 2.4 million, respectively (and the refugees 3.8 million and 3.7 million, respectively) – largely due to Occupier war crimes and resolutely IGNORED by lying, racist, holocaust-ignoring Mainstream media (for details see my writings on MWC News, Counrtercurrents, Newsvine, State of Nature, Media Monitors, Crosswire and elswhere).

As documented and discussed in the nominated website article above, there are many ugly comparisons that can be made between Apartheid South Africa and Israel. The horrible injustices perpetrated by the Racist Zionists running Israel endanger not only Palestinians and Israelis – they also endanger Jews around the world who are tarred with the Racist Zionist brush. Indeed the largely Jewish US organization Not In My Name (NIMN) protests this highly offensive Racist Zionist conflation of themselves and de facto Apartheid Israel with Judaism and Jewry and the even more offensive Racist Zionist appropriation of the Jewish Holocaust.

Outstanding French Jewish writer Emmanel Todd in his best-selling “After the Empire” (English translation, Constable, London, 2004) warns of the dangerously tight identification of Israel and the Israel Lobbies with Bush-ite American imperialism in its dangerous last throes. A Google search now for the utterly obscene phrase “nuke iran” has yielded 185,000 URLs. This is the unimaginable nightmare to which we have been led by violent Racist Zionism and its intimate partner racist Bush-ite imperialism. I hope your organization of leading Australian Jewish intellectuals can help bring us back from the brink.