Does This Look Like A Man Under Unhealthy Pressure From A Disproportionately Powerful Lobby?

geoffff

He should know

Bob Carr famously complained to the ALP caucus while in government about what was he expected to say about Israel the next time he was speaking from the steps of the Lakemba Mosque. 

Where else would you make a major policy statement affecting Israel and the Jews?

He could have kept his mouth shut I suppose given that his audience would have included supporters of Hezbollah and the PLO whose opinions about what should be done about Israel and the Jews would not suffer from ambivalence at least when expressed in private. Prominently it would have included the Mufti of Australia who was about to lead a delegation of Australian Muslims to Gaza to demonstrate solidarity with Hamas.

Instead he chose to say this.

   ” I’ve been to Ramallah, I’ve spoken to the Palestinian leadership, and we support their aspirations to have a Palestinian state in the context of a Middle East of peace. And that means respect for the right of Israel to exist. But we want that Palestinian state to exist, in the context of a peace in the Middle East, and that’s why we say, unequivocally, all settlements on Palestinian land are illegal under international law and should cease. That is the position, of Kevin Rudd, the position of the Federal Labor Government, and we don’t make apologies for it.”

Carr knows that the unanimous opinion of those with the power over the "Palestinians", and their supporters in the Middle East, is that all the land between the river and the sea is "Palestinian land" and that all of Israel is one big "illegal settlement". Carr knows that even the "moderates", if they can bring themselves to talk about Israel having a "right to exist" at all, for the benefit of a foreign audience only, mean an Israel that does not have sovereignty over its own borders or population. An interim step to swamping the Jewish population and once again subjecting it to dhimmitude, expulsion or death as is required by a political culture that demands subjugation and submission even of its own people.

Fat chance. 

This is why the Palestinian polities and those of almost all Arab Muslim countries and Iran are tyrannies. They always have been in one form or another.

Carr knows this. And yet it is the Jews living in Jerusalem and Judea, even in that tiny area that has been ear marked for Israel,  who are "illegal". 

Is this a man who was under an unhealthy pressure to signal to the world that Australia had jumped camps on the question of the Jews and their right to live peacefully and lawfully even in Jerusalem or in that tiny spit of land in Judea that will be part of Israel under any realistic two state solution? 
Very likely.  But there is something else in this picture.

From this angle this is  a man who looks and sounds very much like any other common garden variety bigot. The world is full of them. Either you resist them or you go along with them. That depends on what kind of a future you want for the world. 

cross posted

Israel Thrives

Jews Down Under