The following letter to the editor appeared recently in The Echo (Australia’s “North Coast’s Independent News)
Gareth W R Smith, Byron Bay
What I would call the ‘terrorist/apartheid’ Israeli embassy is desperate to artwash itself which is why it paid $20,000 to the Sydney Festival and got its Ministry of Foreign Affairs logo on all Festival paperwork.
Jennine Khalik, whose family land in the Galilee was stolen by Israel, has organised a boycott of the Sydney Festival and so far nine artists and organisations have rescinded agreements to participate.
She says, ‘…. this year’s Sydney Festival is being sponsored by a brutal regime, a state founded on the massacre and expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian people of the land it occupies. For decades, it has subjected them to a military occupation that controls every aspect of their lives and their freedom to move. It is currently engaged in a 14-year-long illegal blockade against a territory inhabited by two million people. It’s a state that demolishes homes and seizes the property of the people it occupies, has two legal systems, one civilian and one military, and exercises control over an occupied people’s water and resources’.
Shamefully, the Coalition and the ALP deny that Israel is an apartheid state and ignore Richard Falk and Virginia Tilly’s 2017 report for the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia which ‘…concludes, on the basis of scholarly enquiry and overwhelming evidence, that Israel has imposed a regime of apartheid on the Palestinian people as a whole, wherever they may be. A regime that affects Palestinians in Israel itself, in the territory occupied in 1967 and in the diaspora.’ Thanks to Israel’s clout the report disappeared from the UN website after two days.
Australia bleats its commitment to a two-state solution but Israel renders this impossible as it continues to perpetrate the crime of apartheid and persecution. Mr Morrison, Mr Albanese, Australia urgently needs to uphold international law!
This letter reveals that one of the organizers of the Sydney Festival boycott is Jennine Khalik, and sure enough, it checks out. And who is Jennine Khalik? You may recall she is the former ABC Australia journalist who I called out for ‘wiping Israel off the map’ (figuratively speaking) when she politicized the horrific murder of Arab-Israeli student Aiia Maasarwe, by referring to her as palestinian. Khalik threatened to sue me for the post, claiming defamation, but backed off after I got MY lawyer involved.
Khalik is not the only blast from the past in this letter. The letter’s author, Gareth Smith, has featured on here before as an “anti-Zionist-not-antisemite.” Here’s a reminder as to how he can bleat on about things like “international law”, “apartheid,” “indigenous Palestinian people,” and “two-state solution”, but at the end of the day, it is a cover for an intense hatred of the Jewish people:
In other words, this letter is a good educational tool in showing what type of people the Israel haters are.
Hat tip: Michael B
