Mannie Blog, LGS, SPAIDS, InterSection, Israel/Palestine, Jewish Issues

The asylum seeker issue continues to be a source of media reporting which will eventually, hopefully, change public opinion from one of support for the Federal Government's policies, to doubt about the continued incarceration of men, women and children in concentration camps.
The latest reports from Nauru, the Australian government's equivalent to the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay - offshore, not in Australia, not our responsibility - is that there are now more than 40 hunger strikers, many of whom have sewn their lips together. This must be a vivid portrait for the world to see how "humanely" the Australian government treats asylum seekers, mostly from Afghanistan, to where the government wants to return them, while at the same time advising Australian citizens not to travel to that country because it is considered unsafe!!
The government has sent a delegation to investigate the reports - of course journalists and other visitors are denied access to the island because of course it has so much to hide, but one way and another the news has got out. And the delegation will just prove to be another whitewash. However, if the government sees it as a vote loser issue, there will suddenly be a change of direction before the next federal election, due in the next 11 months.
Unfortunately the opposition supports the government on most of the asylum seeker issues, because, as we have said before, it was the Australian Labor Party which set up the concentration camps in 1992.

Mannie De Saxe
2/12 Murphy Grove
Preston
Vic 3072
Phone:(03)9471 4878
email: josken@zipworld.com.au
Web site: http://www.zipworld.com.au/~josken
15 December 2003

Funny, really, I have never thought of myself as a self-hating Jew, sowing
the seeds of anti-semitism! Over the past nearly 80 years I have lived and
worked and toured in many countries, before, during and after the
Hitler/Stalin years. I always thought that anti-semitism was a Christian
construct, created so that blame could be laid on the Jews for having that
nice Jewish boy, Joshua, later named Jesus, crucified. As a Jew I have
encountered anti-semitism in all countries in which I have been, to a
greater or lesser degree. (Oh, that includes Australia of course!) What I
am looking for an answer to is why an estimated 2/3 of the world's Jews
live outside Israel, but take it for granted that every Jew should support
the state of Israel? One day when the United States finds it doesn't need
a strategic ally in the middle east Israel will become expendable. Will
those 8 million Jews now living in the Diaspora suddenly take off for
Israel to support ”our land”?

Mannie De Saxe, Preston, Australia

I was interested to note that a letter-writer to The Age newspaper on 23 November 2003 also called the places where asylum seekers are locked up and treated so brutally by the government concentration camps.
Let us not mince words over the issue. The government has capitalised on the issue of "border protection" and "who we let into this country" by stating, in George W Bush's words - "you are either with us or against us."
Whether this will make any difference at the next election we will have to wait and find out. In the mean time it must never be forgotten that it was the Australian Labor Party who gave us the concentration camps in 1992.
The most alarming thing about the issue of the asylum seekers is that they have been demonised by the government and so many of the population actually believe them or JUST DONT CARE.
The tortures being inflicted on these unfortunate people who have fled from terror and regimes that defy description, endured hell to get away and try and enter another country only to discover that they have entered a hell comparable to what they fled from.
It is hard to comprehend that this is happening at this time and age and place in modern history, where a few thousand people are being tortured out of existence!
There seems to be a slightly perceptible change in attitudes, but if a letter in Today's Sunday Age (21 Decmeber 2003) is anything to go by, we have a long way to go yet!!

To Geraldine Doogue and Julie McCrossin
at ABC Radio National's Life Matters programme after Geraldine interviewed Michael Danby, Federal Member of Parliament for Melbourne Ports, the only Jewish member of parliament and a fanatical Zionist, (you know, my Israel, right or wrong!!!).

Mannie De Saxe
PO Box 1675
Preston South
Vic 3072
Phone:(03)9471 4878
email: josken@zipworld.com.au
http://www.zipworld.com.au/~josken

Dear Geraldine and Julie

People like Michael Danby (Life Matters 09/12/03) make the assumption that
they speak for all Jews because all Jews "naturally" support Israel and
the Zionist cause. Unfortunately for Danby there are many Jews in this
country, myself included, who believe that a secular state where
Palestinians and Israelis live together, bound by one government, is the
solution to the ongoing violence in Israel/ Palestine. It is nonsense to
assert that the only solution is two states, one for Palestinians and one
for Israelis. I lived in South Africa for 50 years. That country under
apartheid was racially divided into little "bantustan" enclaves with their
separate tribal or national identities. South Africa is now one country
with eleven national languages and at least as many different
national/tribal identities. This can also be done in Israel/Palestine.
However, as the Ashrawi "affair" illustrates, many Jews in Australia,
Danby included, seem to think that this is "little Israel". If they are so
desperate to support Israel, nothing is stopping them from going to live
there. Incidentally, there are about 13 million Jews in the world, about 5
million live in Israel, about 6 million live in the USA and the rest live
in the rest of the world, 100,000 in Australia. Need I say more? Regards
and best wishes for 2004, Mannie De Saxe

I have just finished reading ASYLUM - Voices behind the razor wire by Heather Tyler.
I believe this is a book that every Australian ought to read - in fact it ought to be made compulsory reading in the schools throughout the country.
It is an indictment of the so-called fair go which Australians spend their time crowing about.
The tragedy of the whole story of asylum seekers is that everybody who came to Australia after 1788 was seeking asylum in one way or another - of course so many were forced to come here as convicts, and others were forced to come here to guard them.
But in all these years since then, countless thousands have come here seeking asylum as refugees of one kind or another, so the disgusting concentration camps set up to prevent the recent arrivals since 1992 being treated as human beings is amongst the most reprehensible things any government can do.
The camps were started by Labor governments and have been continued and strengthened by Coalition governments.
The conditions in these camps is not much less than death camps in Nazi Germany, but with different types of torture being enacted on the detainees.
This book shows just a small picture of the larger picture and it is sickening!

The Australian Labor Party (ALP), with its new leader Mark Latham, has already joined the Coalition to support changes to the ASIO legislation, thus helping to change Australia into a police state. Why would people even think for one moment of voting for a party which used to have some progressive policies but has become a party of the right as the governing party has become a party of the extreme right.
This is the party - the ALP - which supports border protection, stating that the government hasn't made it strong enough to keep out desperate asylum seekers and, if they succeed in getting almost within sight of landfall, turning them away to get locked in concentration camps in small countries which Australia bribes to lock them up there while they are being "processed".
One hopes this nightmare will end one day, as it did in South Africa after 46 years of police state control, and after damaging so many lives irreparably forever, and in which the regime murdered so many of its opponents and locked up so many others.
Australi will now, with its new legislation, also be able to lock up anybody the government decides it doesn't like - and with no one to argue the consequences.