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

The letter below was written to the Australian Jewish News (AJN) in response to a letter from a religious Jew who wrote in response to Jackie Stricker and her article on gay and lesbian marriage. It is so homophobic that she had to spew her religious hatred and prejudice out in a letter to the AJN.

To Danny Gocs in Melbourne (dgocs@jewishnews.net.au) or Vic Alhadeff in Sydney (valhadeff@jewishnews.net.au)

Subject: Gay Marriages

Date sent: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 00:05:48 +1000

Dear Marsha Foxman (AJN 25 June 2004), it really is irrelevant that your Torah considers homosexuality an abomination.

Nobody is flaunting their sexuality, merely homosexual people fighting for equal human rights with heterosexuals, rights which are denied because of the outdated, outmoded and homophobic religious biblical incantations spewed with hatred by the likes of you and your fellow fanatical fundamentalists.

You would probably be horrified to discover that members of your family or people who have been your friends have in their midst some -shock! horror!! homosexuals!!!

I do not believe in marriage as an institution, either for heterosexuals or homosexuals, but in order for people to have equal rights under the law, without discrimination of any sort, homosexuals are as entitled to marriage as heterosexuals.

As a matter of concern to you with your religious prejudices, you should be worried at the statistics of marriages, divorces, and the resulting effects of children ending up in single parent homes. I agree with your statement that God, Judaism and mankind have never consented to marriages - after all, didn't so many of your biblical heroes - males - have several wives?? and God is a male construct anyway!

Mannie De Saxe, Lesbian and Gay Solidarity Melbourne,

PO Box 1675

Preston South

Vic 3072

Phone:(03)9471 4878

email: josken@zipworld.com.au

web:Mannie and Kendall's Home Pages

I suppose it was once a great party, so it is all the more tragic to see how the Australian Labor Party, now the Alternative Liberal Party (ALP), is tearing itself to pieces. Today, Wednesday 23 June 2004 the parliamentarians of the ALP were trying to justify their latest backflip on the pharmaceutical price increase put forward by the government.
It would certainly seem, from the outcries, that this will have cost the ALP thousands of votes, and deservedly so!
The tragedy for the rest of us, who wouldn't have voted for them anyway, is that there is simply no hope of this ALP being in any shape or form an alternative government to the one in parliament that has been there since 1996, and looks likely to be re-elected for the next 3 years.
What was it that Alan Paton wrote all those years ago? "CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY", only he was writing about South Africa. With many countries in the world spiralling on a moral decline where so many countries govern without principles, it really is a sad situation for us all.

Well, the Alternative Liberal Party, better known as the ALP, has done it again!!
It has voted with the Liberal Party government to increase the cost of drugs to those who are in the lowest income groups so that we who are pensioners will proportionally be paying more for our drugs because of the sell-out by the ALP.
This is yet another issue of sell-out, and now they are coming thick and fast and are becoming almost too many to remember all.
One of the recent tragedies is the farce of the Senate ALP members having a go at the government and its defence minister about when they knew about the abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, what they knew, and why they didn't inform everybody about what they knew.
Now we all know, not least the Alternative Liberal Party, that the same abuses have been going on in the Australian concentration camps, set up by the ALP in 1992. These abuses have also been known about for some time, but they don't get talked about and discussed, because both parties in the parliament want to suppress the human rights abuses, degradations and suicide attempts forced on asylum seekers by the system.
It is all so appalling, and the worst of it is to know that even if there is a change of government at the forthcoming election, nothing will change -AT ALL!!!
At the rally for Refugees on Sunday 20 June 2004, the only bright spot on the horizon was the appearance on the platform, to speak to us, of the Palestinian, Aladdin Sisalum, who had been locked up on Manus Island, in solitary confinement. At least his appearance was a message of hope in an ever darkening world!

"Rocky's" Masada2000 web site now has an email address to which you can write, if you are crazy enough to want to argue with a sick, paranoid, delusional, lying, homophobic, hypocritical Israelophile, who is so afraid to tell you who he is, that he even has several pages of "responses" to his web site which he himself makes up as he goes along!! Now this is really sick!!!!
And they have pictures at the sides of each response which are caricatures and distortions which are also full of "Rocky's" fantasy world.
And he fakes the spelling mistakes and all the "Hitler"-like sayings and thoughts.
Now this wierdo is sick! He belongs in the same category as David Irving, "Rev" Fred Phelps, of Westboro Baptist church with is "godhatesfags" site, in which he glorifies the murder of Matthew Shepard.

Today's (Sunday 20 June 2004) rally in support of refugees worldwide had a reasonable turnout in Melbourne, where the weather was not very propitious. It was cold and windy, with rain and hail forecast (which didn't eventuate!) despite which between 1000 and 2000 people came to tell the government what it thought of the concentration camps and the asylum seeker policies of the government and its loyal opposition, the Alternative Liberal Party (ALP!).
Amongst the speakers was Aladdin Sisalum, the Palestian who had been locked up on Manus Island on his own with only a cat for company. He was brief and to the point and very interesting.
And still on Palestine, the Israelis are now embarking on the second section of the apartheid wall, and as day succeeds day, the Israelis are behaving as a fascist state and the world does nothing to stop them.
The Israelis are stealing land from the Palestinians and their latest plan is to build a moat between Gaza and Egypt to stop supposed smuggling of arms and equipment with which to blow up Israelis.
It really is time to crush the strength of Israel, but with the USA propping them up and their being the USA's client state in the region, the first of many, no doubt, no end is yet in sight of the slaughter and disaster.
And here I must publish a letter which David Glanz wrote to The Age in Melbourne, published on 16 June 2004, in response to an item in the paper the previous day on a report of Professor Andrew Markus and his comments about anti-semitism:
As someone who has valued Andrew Markus's books, I was saddened by his simplistic and inflammatory remarks on anti-Semitism in Australia. It is insulting and just plain wrong to equate the left's critique of Israel with the hateful anti-Semitic myths of Jewish well-poisoning.
Historically, the Zionist project - the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine - was based on an accommodation with anti-Semitism. Theodor Herzl, Zionism's founding father, talked of his acceptance of anti-Semitism as a permanent feature of gentile society.
By contrast, many Jewish socialists like myself have rejected such defeatist talk. Anti-Semitism, like any other form of racism, is a social construct and so can be fought and defeated.
Founding a Jewish state by ethnically cleansing it of 750,000 Palestinians and turning it into an armed camp complete with nuclear weapons does not free Israeli Jews from anti-Semitism. Pointing this out has nothing in common with the racist project of the far right. It is a prerequisite if we are to move towards the peaceful coexistence of Jews, Muslims and Christians in a secular, democratic Palestine.

HYPOCRISY, HYPOCRISY!!
There is no end to the Alternative Liberal Party's unbelievable hypocrisy, and today's events in the Senate were just another "feather in their caps".
John Faulkner, Opposition (sic) leader in the Senate was ranting and raving about the minister of defence and what the Howard government knew and didn't tell the Australian public about the goings on in the Baghdad Abu Ghraib prison, with the torture, abuse, and general human rights violations of Iraqis in US custody.
The goings on in the Australian concentration camps, which were started by the ALP in 1992, are no different from the tortures being inflicted on the Iraqis, and those are now coming into the public arena because of photos and videos taken there.
However, no photos or videos - or very few - are emerging from our concentration camps because they are strictly controlled and visitors are not easily able to gain access.
Maybe some of the people in Australia some of the time believe our politicians, but it is to be hoped that more and more of them will realise how they are being lied to by politicians on both sides of the so-called political divide.

Now this is real bravery and honesty - from a coward who is actually called Rocky and does NOT live in his favourite country Israel! And why does Rocky choose anonymity and choose not to live in Israel, his chosen country? Well, you would have to ask him that yourself, but this cowardly "hero" has a web site in which he attacks about 7000 Jews who don't agree with his views on the country he doesn't live in, but he is too cowardly and doesn't identify ANYBODY who is part of his web pages.
Ask Rocky who he is and where he lives - email him at:
Masada2000
Don't hold your breath waiting to find out the names of Rocky and his colleagues - they are too afraid to allow themselves that amount of public knowledge in case they are attacked by those they feel so free to attack!
Heroes one and all!

14 June 2004
Mannie De Saxe
2/12 Murphy Grove
Preston
Vic 3072
Phone:(03)9471 4878
email: josken@zipworld.com.au
web: http://www.zipworld.com.au/~josken

Let's get our facts straight! (Reagan and AIDS villain - The Age, 09/06, 10/06).
On 17 September 1985 Reagan, at a press conference, announces that he can understand why parents do not want their children “in school with these kids” who have “AIDS”. It was the first time he publicly uttered the word. (Kinsella - Covering the Plague, Rutgers 1989).
As for the Reagan AIDS budget (which set the scene for George W Bush's strings-attached AIDS expenditure in the 2000s) and spending on HIV research, maybe it would be a good idea to do a little research of one's own before springing into print. Two of the writers who did extensive research on the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, Dennis Altman (1986) and Cindy Patton (1990), explain what Reagan's AIDS budget was and how it was delivered to the American public, and it reads very differently from how The Age letter-writer (10/06) explains it.
There is not enough space in a letter to make all the arguments, but it may well be rewarding to understand the implications of what one is saying before one says it!
Mannie De Saxe M.HSc. (HIV Studies).

This afternoon (Sunday 13 June 2004) I posted a blog which has disappeared into the ether!!! I am at a loss to understand what happened to it, but I will try and recreate some of it as best I am able to remember it.
First I discussed the issue of Jackie Stricker and the articles she has written about gay and lesbian marriage, and comparing the assault on gay and lesbian rights in Autsralia to the things perpetrated by the Nazis and the South African apartheid regime.
Her comments aroused extreme indignation in Jewish - read zionist - circles, and they would like to stop her from making further comments!
Then there is the Terry Lane article on anti-semitism which appeared in The Sunday Age on 6 June 2004. Today there were responses in that paper, and some of them - indeed the zionist ones - were most indignant at what Terry had written.
I wrote to Terry Lane after his article last week, but have had no feedback!
And on a completely different topic, the Alternative Liberal Party is trumpeting its success at getting Peter Garrett as the endorsed candidate for the seat of Kingsford Smith, but in the mean time there has been rising comment and adverse criticism from the community protesting at the way a candidate is thrust upon them in a particular electorate. I hope he is soundly defeated!

First, censorship: the ABC has shown the whole of Tony Kushner's film version of his stage play, "Angels in America". Did they show the whole of it, or were the sex scenes between the two young men too hot to handle and so were cut? The middle episodes, parts 3 and 4, seemed to be somewhat shorter than their schedule, and it would appear that, unlike the rest of the film, there were sudden changes of scene when the two young men got busy with each other.
Now, other forms of censorship: such as zionists and anti-zionists and allowing voices to be heard which state opposition to zionism and the Israeli assault/genocide on the Palestinians. How much of the dissident voices are getting through to the media? Is the Israel lobby so strong that all opposition is to be silenced? Leo McLeay, ALP stalwart in the Federal parliament goes to Lebanon and meets members of Hezbollah, and hysteria breaks out in the Australian Jewish media and other media as well!
Jackie Stricker, well known for her Jewish "marriage" to Dr Kerryn Phelps, writes articles in the Australian Jewish News comparing the gay marriage issue in Australia as the thin end of the Nazi wedge and making comparisons with apartheid South Africa and all hell breaks loose.
It seems that zionists and their allies may say what they like and get quoted everywhere, but dissident voices need to be silenced!
Well, it is necessary for those of us opposed to the zionist/Israeli machinations to speak out at every possible opportunity, and this blog site is the most useful medium for this to happen.

Research indicates there are some fertile grounds for writing about zionists vs anti-zionists/non-zionists,
Yiddish vs Hebrew,
Nazis vs Germans.
As I discover more and more web sites which show how zionists hate Jews who are anti-zionists, the more I am led back to what happened in Nazi Germany between the zionists and the Nazis and what happened to the Jews who were not interested in Palestine as a homeland for the Jews.

This has been another strange, extraordinary, maddening, frustrating week in Australian and international politics.
Peter Garrett, a long time activist for progressive social and political ideals, and the Midnight Oil singer of "revolutionary" ballads, has joined the Alternative Liberal Party (ALP), formerly known as the Australian Labor Party in some previous incarnation.
So Garrett has compromised all he has stood for for the last 30 or 40 years and is standing for election to Federal Parliament in the safe Labor seat of Kingsford Smith as their endorsed Labor candidate! I do hope that those who are opposed to this sort of ALP gerrymandering will record their objections at the next federal election.
Another disgraceful episode was the ABC's repeat of a segment in Play School which showed a young girl and her two mums. The outcry from the hypocrites in Parliament and the churches could be heard from one end of Australia to the other!!There was no outcry the first time the show went to air!!
And now, Australian David Hicks of Guantanamo Bay fame, is to be charged by a US military court on a lot of trumped-up charges, compounding the US government's hypocrisy of the issues of those held at Guantanamo Bay and all those ghastly Baghdad Abu Ghraid prison degrading scenes showing the conduct of US interrogators acting on instructions from the top, who will make scapegoats of those at the bottom.
And of course the death of Ronald Reagan and all the outpourings of more and more hypocritical grief over his "greatness as a US president, forgetting his government's 8 year neglect of the AIDS issue at a critical time in its growth in the USA and around the world.
Dare one say - 'THAT WAS THE WEEK, THAT WAS!!!