I used to regularly host the Shire Network News podcast. That is on a break but I’m still a consumer of podcasts. There is one podcast that I listen to regularly that often does not  reflect my views and which therefore challenges me to think differently. The show is twice weekly, recorded (and broadcast) live “in the morning” on Thursdays and Sundays. It’s called No Agenda and is hosted by John C. Dvorak and Adam Curry, as you’d expect from a consummate radio professional like Curry, the production is extremely good. Time zones mean I rarely listen to the live stream and usually listen to the show within a couple of days of it coming out.

Last Sunday’s show included a brief piece of Adam and John discussing Israel. Here is a short audio extract from the show: 336 NA-336-2011-09-04_israellycool_extract. Now Adam veers toward some of the more outlandish theories of what is going on in the world, some I can broadly get behind (evil elites are running the world) and some I reject completely (the evil elites invent Islamic terrorism to keep us enslaved). John C. Dvorak acts as a foil to these ideas and the combination is usually informative and amusing. The central idea of the show, however, is to look behind the news – to “deconstruct” stories – and find out what’s really going on. They don’t claim to be right all the time, but their willingness to look for the reasons behind a story is a very important lesson.

Nevertheless the subject of Israel does come up from time to time; how can it be avoided, it’s pushed so hard to the front of the news? And this is, of course, where the grinding power of the main stream media meets people who know they’re being lied to but aren’t able to work out precisely why.

But this time Adam asked a very good question: why is Israel in the news so much? I completely agree with the reason for asking the question. Israel is in the news too much and I’ll give Adam my short version of the answer using terms from the No Agenda show and then follow it with the shortest history lesson I can come up with for 4000 years.

The Short Answer

Israel is in the news so much because, to the Islamic world, Israel isn’t just distraction of the week, it’s distraction of the century or more. Arab despots (primarily) need to keep distracting their (mostly) Muslim people from the truly atrocious conditions they live under because if they don’t the despots will end up dead (or running through the desert). Hatred of the Jews is baked into Islam not least because of numerous stories from the life of Muhammad: inciting Muslims to hate Jews starts in the cradle.

Whatever else you think you know about Islam, you’ve probably grasped, by now, that it’s not completely a religion of peace™. Islam can’t accept that any territory once conquered in the name of Islam is no longer ruled over by Muslims. Remember of course, Islam was only founded 1400 years ago so everywhere that is now Muslim, was either Christian, Jewish or Other as recently as 1500 years ago.

And Now The History Lesson

Israel is just such a place. It was “other”, then it was conquered by Jews (we’d say it was given to us), then a mix of Greeks, Babylonians / Persians and most emphatically Romans took it. The Romans were so pissed off with the Jews they wiped the name Israel off the map, replacing it with a word derived from the collective name of the already long dead peoples who’d been there before the Jews: Philistines.

After the fall of the Roman and subsequent Eastern Christian (Byzantine) empires it was conquered by Islam, Christianity (the Crusades) and Islam again and then held in trust briefly by the British until 1948. Some Jews did live here continuously enduring bad times, even worse times and intermittent slaughter and death. My wife can trace ancestors living in Israel back beyond the 1830′s for example.

The Jewish people had been talking about and praying about Israel and Jerusalem non-stop since the Romans had expelled and scattered them 2000 years ago: there’s a nice picture of this on the Titus arch in Rome. Both Israel and Jerusalem are mentioned frequently in all our scriptures and most of our prayers: this is the in-built desire that we call zionism. We never gave up wanting our home back.

Modern Zionism really started properly back in the mid 1800′s. Zionism is nothing more than a fancy name for Jews wanting their own state and to rule over themselves, as Jews, instead of living as a minority among the other nations. Jewish self determination if you like. It’s just a point of linguistic history that a word like Zionism exists: perhaps the Kurds or Tibetans would be doing better in their (very creditable and well established) desires for their own homes if they had succinct words for the ideology of desiring Kurdistan or a Tibet not ruled by the Chinese! Perhaps the world would be caring more about the 100s of Kurds killed in the last couple of weeks by Turkish bombing in Iraq.

Whilst life under Tsars, Caliphs and assorted other despotic rulers around the world had not always been completely unbearable, it was often punctuated by cruel oppression and murder for the Jews. Obviously this Jew hatred reached its apogee with the Nazis. Modern Zionism had tried to establish Israel as a home for the Jews on the land described in the bible prior to 1939 but hadn’t succeeded. After 1945 there was probably no force left on earth that would stop the Jews. Not even the British Empire (exhausted and depleted from fighting Nazis) or the United States could stop it and the Arab and Muslim world was divided and conquered having largely backed the Axis powers in the world. Remember too, this is before the gift of vast oil wealth (with a hefty top slice for the oil companies) was given to the Arabs to use however they saw fit.

Many such as the Mufti of Jerusalem had made a huge effort blackmailing the British and others with violence and threats of violence to keep the Jews from their home as long as possible. In the end the 100,000 survivors of the death camps (yes, that is how many Jews were left in the camps at liberation) combined with the already substantial numbers of Jews in Israel and were joined by more than 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim lands.

So we arrive at today, forget 1967, it’s a side show apart from being a massive military defeat of Arab Muslim armies. Forget “settlements” they’re irrelevant: if Israel gave them all back Jihad and Islam would take it without thanks and carry on with the main aim of avenging all the wrongs Jews did to Mohammad by rejecting him as a prophet, and carry on trying to conquer the whole world for Islam.

Israel isn’t really unique: they want the whole world. It’s just that Americans and other Infidels aren’t mentioned hundreds of times in the Koran and Hadith by name as the bad guys: Jews are. So linking America with the Jews is really very useful for channeling the indoctrinated masses in their hatred.

If you think there is a Jewish conspiracy to control the media, it’s nothing compared to the vast amount of influence that the years of oil wealth have given to the Arabs. This gives us the comparatively recent creation of the Palestinian people, their “narrative” and their invented history supposedly pre-dating Jews. Which joins a false idea that there are no facts, only differing narratives.

But in the end, Jews now live in large numbers in Israel and thankfully we don’t really have to rely on anyone else for our safety anymore. We buy guns from America, with money they give and lend to us (that we must spend back in America) but this more than anything just pisses off the Europeans, at a push we’d be OK without it. It would be nice if we didn’t have to spend so much money on our army, maybe our taxes and the price of cottage cheese would be lower. But until the other side truly believes that Jews can live and run their own lives in Israel, we’ll keep defending our land.

Footnote

You’ll have to listen to a few episodes of No Agenda before you understand this: “I’m hoping that 33 or even 333 new readers will see this in the morning: may you all be hit in the mouth!” Followers of the show know that 33 is a code: John and Adam don’t know what it means, but every time they see it in a news story, they’re suspicious. Well Hebrew has a finely developed study of the numerical significance of letters called “Gematria“. From Joe Settler’s blog comes this study relating to the Palestinian bid for statehood this September:

הֵם קִנְאוּנִי בְלֹא אֵל כִּעֲסוּנִי בְּהַבְלֵיהֶם וַאֲנִי אַקְנִיאֵם בְּלֹא עָם בְּגוֹי נָבָל אַכְעִיסֵם.

Deuteronomy 32:21

They aroused my jealousy with a non-god and provoked me with their vanities; I will arouse their jealousy with a non-people and provoke them with a vile nation.

The Gematria of “בְּלֹא עָם” a “non-people” or a “non-nation” is 143. (A well-known and accurate description of the “Palestinians”)

As it happens, if they get in, the Palestinians will, more accurately, be the 143 member to join the UN following the original 51 founding members who founded it.

If you’re into Gematriot, then you’ll appreciate it, and you can then assume they’re likely to get in.

See if you can spot when a palestinian state existed.

(hat tip: Jewgle Perth)

Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Interviewer: What was your barmitzvah like?

Dad: Naturally I had to have a cold so it was a blessing because I haven’t got a voice. I croaked my way through it. I had a reasonable teacher, the Chazan of the synagogue.

Interviewer: What did it mean to you, that barmitzvah, that special day, particularly given that you and your father weren’t hugely religious?

Dad: In reality my appreciation of it was, it just meant more obligations. I didn’t really appreciate what my parents had gone through to let me have a barmitzvah the way I did, and to follow it to the letter. It’s only when you become a parent you realize just you know what parents go through, and they kept me on the straight and narrow.

My father was religious in his own way. He actually was known as being a bit strange to people who decided to drift or wanted to be considered atheist out of convenience or people who criticized the Jewish religion – me being one of them – and used to lay down the law. He said if you criticize the Jewish religion it is a sure sign of your lack of knowledge. Criticize something that you know about, don’t criticize something you just don’t like. And he had a reputation that people better steer clear of him if they’re going to be anti-Jewish.

My father was also a man’s man. In 1946 our air-raid shelter had to be filled in, it was in the practice. Across the road there was a truck driver and he offered a load of sand for £5. When he delivered the sand and he said, “That will be £10,” my father said, “You said £5.” Now the truck driver was a really tall, strong truck driver. He said “You bloody Jew,” and my father went into him. He ended up in hospital.

Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

Interviewer: In relation to mixing within the community obviously that’s an issue to be faced today with people like John Howard saying that they have to learn English.

Dad: Yes.

Interviewer: Was that something that you experienced here in Perth in relation to there being an obligation to blend with the wider community, to become more Australian?

Dad: No, it was different in those days. Much different. I was going to Hale [School], and I had enough problems. I wanted to do boxing in school, Saturday morning but no go, synagogue, okay. Then when I became friendly with boys at Hale and we’d go out together. The boy I was most friendly with – his parents were clients of my parents – explained to me said, “Look, we’re friends, we’re together but I don’t go to your house and you don’t get invited to ours.” That was the attitude, the feeling.

Interviewer: How did you sense the wider community?

Dad: Not like that. I took it to be typical Hale School. I even discussed it with Mr Johns. For instance when I first went to Hale School after being there a couple of weeks, Mr Johns asked me “Have you got a tennis racket?” I said, “Yes, I got one from my Barmitzvah.” I had never played tennis in my life. He said, “Bring your tennis racket and shorts to school.” And he arranged for a couple of boys, Lloyd and Irvine, (and there was supposed to be a fourth but he couldn’t make it), and we played tennis. And I was very friendly with Michael Perry. We’d go fishing on the Swan and stay overnight. He came to my barmitzvah and he was very happy.

Interviewer: So there was no sense of an, ‘us and them’ scenario?

Dad: No, no we lived the same life.

Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

Interviewer: How were you finding Perth? How were you as a young bloke finding Perth, Western Australia as opposed to where you’d come from?

Dad: It was pretty tough. I hadn’t done English at school, I hadn’t been to school in Germany. In mathematics I was okay because my father had taught me on the boat coming here, several months of mathematics. I went to Highgate State School and there most kids were handicapped in that they were either Greek, Italian, Maltese, you name it. But I was a German and a Jew. Gradually, all that faded. There were a few school bullies because with the war going on several of the bigger boys in primary school were about 15 or 16 – they were repeating years because I don’t know whether they were that low intellect or because they wanted to stay out of doing what they were supposed to be doing. And Brisbane Street was very close to Highgate Primary School and we went to Hebrew School there, three times a week.

Interviewer: What was Hebrew School like?

Dad: I didn’t like it much.

Interviewer: Why not?

Dad: I got picked on. When Rabbi F was alive he took exception to me because I was taught to read or do Hebrew by my mother’s grandmother’s brother and it wasn’t the same as our very formal rabbi. He said, “I want you to read Hebrew by the stop watch.” Then when Rabbi Rubin Zachs came it all changed because he was very easy going. Wasn’t run like an army institution like under Rabbi F. I gradually got the message that you had to do a bit of work to learn your Hebrew. So by the time I was 12, I was able to cope. I got along with most kids, although I got into a couple of fights, mainly in connection with this Polish thing.

Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

Interviewer: How though did you settle into this Jewish migrant community here in Perth?

Dad: After that episode with the boarding house – one room – things dramatically improved. The committee handling it couldn’t do enough to make up for what had occurred. One of them bullied her relation who at that time had a luxury car, and he drove my parents -  and sometimes I was included – around outside Perth to find a suitable location for my father’s practice. My father had been brought out with that permit because they wanted qualified veterinarians. Anyway, we went as far as York and the people my father met, the dinkum Aussies, were very friendly and most helpful. They told my father – mainly through my mother because her English was close to perfect (and my father was partly deaf from the war, and hadn’t learned English at school) – that it was all a matter of money.

We gradually narrowed the field back to the city. Through friends my parents had made – both Jewish and non-Jewish – we came to this practice in Stirling Street run by a Canadian who had come out here. It was pretty rough compared to what my father had left in Germany. But the Canadian was very eager to sell because war was coming, everybody with eyes could see it, and he wanted to go back home. The Canadian got on very well with my father, they talked the same language, he was a proper veterinary surgeon and he showed my father a few tricks which a private veterinary surgeon practicing in the city knew or had to know, and which my father hadn’t learned while he was practicing in country Germany. He had come straight from university and from an abattoir to a large animal practice, and now we had small animals included in the city practice. Anyway, through the help of the Breckler family who guaranteed a loan, my father bought the practice.

The practice was at 74 Stirling Street and consisted of a very rough area which had been stables for horses in the days where horses were used for transport. The front was a very old house which had been condemned. We couldn’t move into the house after the sale because it needed urgent repairs. We moved into a one bedroom unit, in Pier Street, within walking distance. It was the next street parallel to Stirling Street. And we had friendly neighbours. One was an Irishman, and he took to me. My parents were busy in Stirling Street, and he would take me fishing down Barrack Street at night and tell me stories how he and his crowd in Ireland fought the Black and Tans before they came out here. He was especially good to me. And there were others like him.

My parents were occupied trying to improve the practice aesthetically with practically no financial resources. They bought the practice but they were renting the house from a landlord. The landlord was also especially nice, and she immediately became friends with my mother and helped my mother as far as advice as to how to go about repairs and how things are done in Australia. And out of the blue appeared a gentleman by the name of Smith, who was at a loose end. He’d studied engineering up to third year, had to toss it in, and had no money. Then he earned some money and went into medicine. He got to third year, ran out of money and got married and now his wife was earning. They lived in quite a nice unit down at Mount Street. Well, he went to work for my father as assistant or yardman. When war broke out, he was a reserve officer and went into the army.

All this had happened with mainly non-Jewish people. It was only when my parents were settled – working that is – that it was time to mix. Out of the blue we got an invitation in 1939 for “First night of the Jewish New Year and family” from Harry Cohen and his wife Bessie.  Bessie is a relation of my wife. From then onwards word got around and another family – the Adler family – became one of my parents best friends. Then  it boiled down to the practice, and our first clients were a few Jewish families who had a cat or a dog. We could see they were doing it to help us and the same with a few non-Jewish families who we’d run into.

Stirling Street and Pier Street was a very tough area. We didn’t know it but later on Eric Cooke (a Western Australian serial killer and burglar who was later hung -ed.) lived there with his family almost directly behind us. But they stuck together. Way down the street there was the ice man and he had a truck. Then on the corner of Stirling and James Street, two Greek brothers opened a steak house. But it was a communal meeting place as far as most of the people from around Stirling Street went, and we got to know one another.

Money was the main reason why people were reasonably close in those days. They needed one another. For example, in summer which was very hot due to the tin roofs and badly built places, everything was left open. I mentioned who lived behind us without us knowing it, and there were others around, but nothing bad happened.

A few observations on this anniversary of 9/11:

• Seven years on, and people still don’t get what this war is about. Heck, most people still don’t get that we are in a war at all.
• Nice to see how Google has commemorated this day:

• Al Jazeera (predictably) reports a poll which suggests that more than 50 per cent of people “reject the official belief that the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, were carried out by al-Qaeda.” Of particular interest:

Of the countries surveyed, Egypt and Jordan had the highest percentages of people who believed Israel was behind the attack, polling 43 and 31 per cent respectively.

Ain’t peace grand?

G-d bless America and the free world.

Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Interviewer: You hear of things like the Free Loan Society and those things later on. But my sense is that there was this sort of global community that was helping the Jewish migrants…

Dad: Organised.

Interviewer: It was strong here in Perth?

Dad: Yes. When I say strong you could count them on the fingers of both hands. My parents insisted that they received nothing but kindness in that article in the Maccabean.

But for example, when my father opened up his clinic with my mother’s help because not only could she speak English but she had been registered as his assistant in Germany, my father became the Police Veterinary Honorary, the RSPCA, Veterinary Honorary… I’ll explain about the number of clients he had. Anyway at the RSPCA, there was a Jewish fellow named Hertz, and he was old, skinny and pretty irascible. He had a horse which was older and skinnier than him and he had a mikvah (Jewish ritual bath – ed.) in his backyard. The horse fell into the mikvah and resisted being removed by Hertz. He couldn’t have removed a fly if he tried. So the neighbors got the RSPCA and my father went out there and inspected it, examined the horse and realized why the horse was resisting – it had broken or damaged its leg. My father said, “It has to be put down.” So he made an enemy for life. Hertz then organized his family to put forward a petition to jail this Nazi war criminal, ex-soldier who was proud about his medals. And they went out of their way to be nasty for years, even when the war finished. That was one of the reasons my mother had trouble getting my grandmother in the quota.

Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

Interviewer: What were your initial impressions of Perth on your arrival?

Dad: Not good.

Interviewer: Why not?

Dad: Well I was restricted. It was bad enough on the boat. My father went out of his way, nearly bored himself to death looking after me. But here my parents had no time.

Interviewer: But literally as you were getting off the boat what did you see? Obviously the Fremantle wharf.

Dad: We were met. They were getting organised here and we were met with a car and a committee of ladies. And were taken to this boarding house in Norfolk Street, Highgate or North Perth. I hated it there. We had one room.

Interviewer: Why?

Dad: Well the story had started here in Perth that all German Jews, apart from being arrogant and all being professors and all having this and that, were very rich, and they ripped us off. Normal rent for a flat was about 10 shillings and my parents, who didn’t want to cause any waves, paid over the pound and then everything was extra. And it was only when the parents met other people who had arrived earlier than us that they learnt what was going on and they complained.

Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Interviewer: What were you being told about Perth and why not stay in Adelaide?

Dad: Rabbi Rubin Zachs had contacts and he said Perth was small and more migrant friendly, a very large German colony in Adelaide’s Barossa Valley, and a very small, practically non-existent Jewish community in Adelaide. So Perth it was.

Interviewer: You told the story off air about needing £50.

Dad: With 50 English pounds you could have bought an acre block in Applecross. It was a lot of money. Basic wage in Perth at that time in the depression was £3. People used to go to Kalgoorlie to work. Why? Because the basic wage there was £3.10. The first place we lived in here – a rooming house – rent, £1 for a room!

Interviewer: You mentioned that you needed this £50 but your father didn’t have it. Where did he get it from?

Dad: It was given to him by Rabbi Ruben Zachs. It had been arranged. Organisations stretched from Berlin to other parts of the world.

Interviewer: You mentioned a chap jumping a barrier to do this.

Dad: That was the reverend who became Rabbi Rubin Zachs.

Interviewer: You likened him to a particular chap.

Dad: Yes, he reminded me of one of the movies I saw of Douglas Fairbanks junior. The moustache, build, agility.

We learnt as we lived here that there were some families here who gave permits. In other words, they would put up the bond for people to come out….One permit that I will never forget was given by the Catholic Archbishop of Perth.