We talked about the faltering global economy – why oh why is the IMF treated with such respect after years of failed forecasts and neo-liberal “reforms” that have only caused misery for millions globally? – and the proposed preamble for the Australian constitution that recognises the First Australians. Despite the fact that both major sides of politics support the racist Northern Territory Intervention (under the guise of “helping Aborigines”) the preamble should be backed as one small step towards equality before the law.

The question of racism in Australia is a live one and I argued that deep-seated mistrust of Muslims and minorities was rampant. Any more than other countries globally? Hard to say but it’s foolish to deny that media players and politicians regularly play the race card to draw votes. The Murdoch press are some of the worst offenders in this area, routinely demonising the poor and disadvantaged.

The main discussion was around Iran and its alleged nuclear weapon’s program (of which there is no evidence). I stated that most of the mainstream media, the Zionist lobby, Israel-firsters, many politicians and commentators are now leading us to yet another Middle East conflict. Few questions are being asked and White House and Zionist spin (both with a history of lies) are taken at face value. The regime in Tehran is a dictatorial outrage but military strikes against the country would be illegal, immoral, counter-productive and have nothing to do with nuclear weapons but to ensure the American/Israeli/Gulf state hegemony in the Middle East.

He recently spoke in Cairo (in between interviewing Muslims he didn’t think the West should bomb, yet), and found some people less than impressed with getting lessons in civility from a man who rather loves backing US-led wars in the Arab world (via Ahram Online):

Prominent American author Thomas Friedman spoke at the American University of Cairo (AUC) on Monday, where he expressed his views on Islamist political ascendancy in the wake of Egypt’s first post-Mubarak parliamentary polls.

“This country is very heavy for any political parties to lift it on its own,” Friedman said during a panel discussion, hosted by former Egyptian ambassador to the US Nabil Fahmy. “We need collective action.”

…

During a question-and-answer session, Friedman faced the ire of Youssef El-Korma, a member of AUC’s student leftist movement. “You can’t come here with a smile and preach to us on democracy when you’ve been demeaning Arabs and supporting war crimes in Gaza and Iraq,” said El-Korma. “We don’t welcome you here.”

El-Korma’s assertions were met with applause by the audience but failed to draw a response from Friedman, who replied to another student critic earlier by saying that, “In the Middle East everybody wants to own you, and if they can’t, they will try to destroy you.”

Middle Eastern migrants, except in exceptional circumstances, appear to be making little attempt to assimilate and are bringing in polygamy, honour killings and general religious intolerance.

It’s an issue covered in the book On Utoya in which I contributed this year and deserves far more scrutiny. This kind of alliance should concern us all (especially since fascism rises in Israel itself). Not long after the Holocaust, the idea that some Jews feel comfortable working alongside white supremacists in the fight against Muslims is a devastating critique of the disastrous effects of Zionism. Al Jazeera reports:

Right-wing movements previously associated with anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi ideologies are increasingly opting for a surprising tactic to garner legitimacy within mainstream politics: Forging alliances with extremist Jewish organisations under the banner of fighting “Islamisation”.

“Far-right parties are professing a new found love of Israel as a way of escaping their past anti-Semitism and racism, and to justify their prejudice towards European Muslims as not being racist,” Toby Archer, a researcher who studies far-right parties and the “counter-jihad blogosphere”, explained to Al Jazeera. “Parties like the British National Party (BNP) in the UK, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, and the National Front in France are all coming out from a neo-fascist past.”

These parties have stopped using anti-Semitic rhetoric, Archer said, which had prevented them from attracting support. It is important to distinguish between the traditional far-right, who are historically anti-Semitic, and the populist new-right, who have emerged in the last two decades and partake in an anti-Muslim discourse, he said.

The English Defence League (EDL) closely linked to the BNP, is a right-wing anti-Islamic extremist group based in the UK. The EDL has gained notoriety for its aggression against British Muslims and its links with neo-Nazi groups. Last year, it moved to garner support within the Jewish community by officially opening a Jewish Division open to “represent the Jews who are fighting against Islamisation,” according to a statement.

Tommy Robinson, a spokesperson for the EDL, said one of the group’s fundamental beliefs was that as a “shining star of democracy”, Israel has the right to defend itself. 

…

Signs of lingering anti-Semitism within the UK’s far-right have not stopped the Jewish Defence League (JDL), a group the US Federal Bureau of Investigation considers a “violent extremist organisation”, from eagerly accepting a partnership with the EDL.

In January 2011, JDL Canada organised a rally in support of the EDL. Meir Weinstein, national director of the JDL in Canada, defended its stance, saying the EDL is “taking issue with radical Islam” and supports Israel. Shortly after the rally, mainstream Jewish organisations in Canada publicly distanced themselves from the EDL.

James Clark, an activist with Stop the War Coalition in Canada, has faced the JDL at several rallies. He believes that Jewish groups are shifting towards far-right nationalists, rather than the other way around.

“The JDL has tried to move their politics to the right,” he told Al Jazeera. “They are quite a fringe organisation, but made a bit more respectable by more mainstream Zionist organisations that give them a platform; organisations who support them, but don’t feel safe saying the same thing in public.”

He added that the JDL is obsessed with Muslims and the Muslim community, and preys on the irrational fear that Canada might soon be run by Sharia Law.

The JDL also purports to have significant influence over the Canadian government, who Clark describes as “far and above the US government as Israel’s best friend”.

…

The erosion of Israel’s image and credibility among world leaders and global public opinion is presented as “that same anti-Semitism in other garb.” The process of delegitimizing the booming settlement enterprise and the opposition to continued Israeli control of the territories are termed “wild incitement.” The latest excuse: The upheavals in the Arab world will lead to an anti-Israeli Islamic Winter not dependent on our actions, since, after all, “the Arabs are the same Arabs and the sea is the same sea.”

When I bumped into far-right politician Baruch Marzel in Hebron recently, he explained the shift in Israeli perception succinctly. “The truth won out,” he said, against the backdrop of a Shuhada Street shockingly empty of its Palestinian residents. “The evidence for this is the ever-smaller number of people who attend the memorial for Rabin as opposed to the ever-growing number who attend the memorial for Kahane.”

Radical Jewish colonists in the occupied Palestinian West Bank have been attacking Arabs for decades. In the past these incidents barely rated a mention in the Israeli press, let alone the global corporate media.

It was only this month after a small group of Zionists rioted at an Israeli army base that the Israeli government expressed outrage over their behaviour. The violence “shocked” Israel, wrote the New York Times, while the torching of mosques has now become a regular event.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed his military to apply administrative detention orders to Jewish extremists, as is routinely done with Palestinians in the territories. Aside from the fact that such a change in policy highlighted the apartheid nature of Israel’s matrix of control in the West Bank – different laws apply to Jews and Arabs – even the Israeli army claimed it would make little difference.

Successive Israeli leaders since 1967, across the political spectrum, have indulged, funded, supported, defended and armed hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in the West Bank (and Gaza until 2005). The effect of this mass colonization project, condoned by Western powers, has been the impossibility of a viable two-state solution and growth in ultra-nationalism. Acceptance in a post Arab Spring Middle East is a remote dream.

On countless occasions I’ve seen young Israeli soldiers standing idly by while settlers hit Arabs in the West Bank and destroy their fields. The main job of the army in the territories is to maintain and enlarge the Zionist hold on valuable land.

The Israeli government and the vast bulk of the Zionist Diaspora have remained silent for years when colonists attack Palestinians in “price tag” missions. Indeed, public fund-raising events in America, including those held by the Hebron Fund, openly collect tax-exempt donations for the very people the Israeli government now claims to be against.

In Australia similar fund-raisers are held for the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization directly complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian properties. A JNF board member in America quit this month after the organization launched eviction proceedings against a Palestinian home in East Jerusalem.

The rot has well and truly set into the Israeli political establishment. A columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, Yossi Sarid, argued that all the settlements were illegal and damned the horror currently felt by the Israeli army (no mention of the Arabs, of course, with violence against them seemingly less important than harming Israeli soldiers):

“So there is no need to be overly impressed by the orchestrated shouting about the Frankenstein that has gotten out of hand, because the denouncers are the ones who created him. They were warned a thousand times about creating a state within a state, an army within an army, but they didn’t want to listen. They were too scared of the settlers and their rabbis. We see them in their disgrace, dancing in front of Zionism’s coffin, and despise them.”

The depth of the problem was revealed by right-wing Zionist publication, The Jewish Voice, who proudly published tips for settlers keen to sabotage army equipment. One read:

“The engines of vehicles, especially armoured vehicles, are highly sensitive to sand or sugar. The same is even more true about the vehicles’ oil and gas tanks. Carelessness about that could do serious damage to the unit’s ability to carry out destruction, just because of a little inattention, wouldn’t it be a pity?”

It would be a mistake to presume Israel’s democratic deficit simply occurs in the occupied territories. The current Knesset has revealed the dark authoritarianism that beats inside the Jewish state.

I recently spoke to a leading independent American journalist Joseph Dana, currently living in Ramallah, who told me that it was impossible to find more than a select few Israelis who understood the depth of the problem and what was required to force an ideological change on the population.

Liberal Zionism is in crisis, pushed into silence by its cherished two-state dream disappearing and far happier to demonise boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) than propose any serious alternatives to Knesset-backed fascism. Importantly, few Israelis chose to enter the West Bank and witness the creeping apartheid against Palestinians living there; the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem bubbles are far more comforting. The vast bulk of the Israeli media class see no evil and remain on the establishment drip feed.

An increasing number of pieces of legislation aim to disenfranchise Arabs, liberal Jews, secular Jews, Palestinians and the Jewish Diaspora without which the nation would not survive.

The Financial Times, in a scathing essay in early December, highlighted the myriad issues. Hagai El-Ad, the director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, repeated the mantra that I hear amongst the real activist Left in Israel. “This is not just about anti-democratic bills, this is about anti-democratic society,” he said. “It is about the idea that human rights are somehow synonymous with treason, and about creating an atmosphere of suspicion.”

These trends caused Philip Weiss, founder of the influential American website Mondoweiss, to write, “Israel isn’t good for the Jews anymore.” He railed against mainstream Israeli opposition to multiculturalism, pluralism and tolerance.

It is something growing numbers of liberal Jews worldwide are rejecting. Even former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in his Atlantic blog, “I think we’re only a few years away, at most, from a total South-Africanization of this issue.” The one-state solution is happening by default, whether those bleating about maintaining a Jewish majority like it or not.

Israel has always relied on unlimited Western largesse to fund its racism. When arguably America’s most influential columnist, New York Times’ Thomas Friedman – a man with a long history of defending Israeli extremism, explains a new book by Belén Fernández – starts denouncing the “Israel lobby” for buying the US Congress and blindly acquiescing with discriminatory policies towards Palestinians, the mood is shifting:

“If the 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians are not a real people entitled to their own state, that must mean Israel is entitled to permanently occupy the West Bank and that must mean — as far as Newt is concerned — that Israel’s choices are: 1) to permanently deprive the West Bank Palestinians of Israeli citizenship and put Israel on the road to apartheid; 2) to evict the West Bank Palestinians through ethnic cleansing and put Israel on the road to the International Criminal Court in the Hague; or 3) to treat the Palestinians in the West Bank as citizens, just like Israeli Arabs, and lay the foundation for Israel to become a binational state. And this is called being “pro-Israel”?”

None of these attitudes concern the pro-settler Jerusalem Post who this week editorialised in favour of a Republican front-runner, Newt Gingrich, who didn’t even acknowledge the existence of Palestinians as a legitimate people. Other measures to delegitimize any opposition to Zionism include this recent essay published by the neo-conservative haven American Enterprise Institute that argues, “How Israel’s defence industry can help save America.”

The Western liberal love for Israel ended many years ago. What remains less accepted, however, is what has been taking place instead of the myth. Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken enlightened his readers that the ideology of [settler movement] Gush Emunim has dominated Israel for decades. It is irreversible. It is Israel:

“This is a strategy of territorial seizure and apartheid,” he despaired. “It ignores judicial aspects of territorial ownership and shuns human rights and the guarantees of equality enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.”

The wilful ghettoization of communities is now endemic.Take the example of a religious school in the town of Afula that recently discovered that their children had seen a Muslim wedding during class. They were so appalled – under the influence of an NGO that aims to prevent any Arab and Jewish mingling – that a Rabbi had to be called to “purify” the facilities before they could return.

Such racism is not reserved for a few extreme communities on the fringes of society. They are views shared and enacted by leading members of the Israeli government.

It is the natural outcome of over 60 years of global Zionist indulgence.

Antony Loewenstein (http://antonyloewenstein.com/) is an Australian journalist, author of My Israel Question and co-editor of the forthcoming title After Zionism.

Meanwhile, in mad Zionist land, where another Holocaust is always around the corner, the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick (a woman who makes a good living scaring Jews about a litany of Muslim “threats”) is back today with another piece that praises the increasingly paranoid and aggressive tactics of hardline Zionists who want to shut down any debate over Israel/Palestine. This is her ideal future:

For decades New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman balanced his substantively anti-Israel positions with repeated protestations of love for Israel.

His balancing act ended last week when he employed traditional anti-Semitic slurs to dismiss the authenticity of substantive American support for Israel.

Channeling the longstanding anti-Semitic charge that Jewish money buys support for power-hungry Jews best expressed in the forged 19th century Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in John Mearshimer’s and Stephen Walt’s 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Friedman denied the significance of the US Congress’s overwhelming support for Israel.

As he put it, “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

It would be nice if Friedman is forced to pay some sort of price for finally coming out of the closet as a dyed-in-the-wool Israel hater. But he probably won’t. As he made clear in his column, he isn’t writing for the general public, but for a very small, select group of elitist leftists. These are the only people who matter to Friedman. And they matter to him because they share his opinions and his goal of indoctrinating young people to adopt his pathologically hostile views about Israel and his contempt for the American public that supports it.

It doesn’t matter to Friedman that overwhelming survey evidence, amassed over decades, show that the vast majority of the American public and the American Jewish community support Israel. It doesn’t matter to him that the support shown to Netanyahu in Congress last May was a reflection of that support.

As he put it, “The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away.”

Embedded in this statement are two key points. First, Friedman assesses that the prevailing view on US college campuses are his own radical views. And he is convinced that college students share his views.

As he sees it, if college students share his views, then it doesn’t matter that Congress supports Israel today. Through the youth, he and his anti-Israel colleagues will own the future.

The key question then is is Friedman right? Do he and his friends on the Israel bashing Left own the future? Are their efforts to convince young Americans in places like University of Wisconsin to embrace leftist dogmas, including rejection of Israel’s rights working? Is support for Israel diminishing? A plethora of data indicates that while the picture is mixed, the dominant trends do not favor Friedman’s views. This is true not only in the US but in Israel as well.

Thank you.

Elie Wiesel, Mr Murdoch, is a Holocaust survivor but he has used his fame to care about all kinds of causes (including, according to Norman Finkelstein, exploiting groups and firms involved in the genocide) and caring little about the Palestinians.

His supposed love and affection for humanity has its limits.