Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his key ministers have malevolently associated the attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump with the ongoing demonstrations in Australia against the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza—declaring the protests to be an attack on democracy.

Even as many unanswered questions remained about the circumstances behind the Trump shooting, Albanese called a media conference in Canberra to proclaim it was an attack on the “democratic values that Australians and Americans share.” He then declared that demonstrations against members of his government for its complicity in the intensifying Gaza onslaught had likewise “crossed the line.” 

This was coupled with an expression of solidarity with the fascist ex-president. Echoing the US President Joe Biden’s concern for “Donald,” Albanese stated: “I’m relieved by the news that the former president is safe and doing fine, and I wish him and his family well.”

Albanese’s comments were in the same vein as those of Peter Dutton, the Liberal-National Coalition opposition leader, who posted on X/Twitter: “I send my best wishes to former president Trump after this shocking attempt on his life.”

Like Biden and the US Democrats, Albanese made no mention of the real threat to democracy presented by Trump himself. 

Trump has not only repeatedly incited or backed violence by right-wing forces, including armed attacks on state capitols by militia groups. On January 6, 2021, he summoned a mob to Washington, seeking to kill or capture members of the US Congress, attempting to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election and instal Trump as a dictator-president.

Like Biden, Albanese presented a fairy-tale image of the political situation. “In Australia, as in the US, the essence and the purpose of our democracies is that we can express our views, debate our disagreements, and resolve our differences peacefully,” he said.

These are governments that have threatened and attacked peaceful protests against the Gaza genocide. They have slandered participants as “antisemitic” and purveyors of “hate speech” for opposing a monumental war crime that has already killed nearly 200,000 Palestinians according to estimations published in the respected medical journal, The Lancet. 

These are governments that also have combined their support for, and assistance of, the Israeli genocide with dramatically escalating the war against Russia in Ukraine and stepping up the related confrontation with China. This a drive for US global hegemony even at the potential expense of millions of lives in a nuclear conflagration.

Declaring that the temperature of the political debate had to be lowered, Albanese said: “There is nothing to be served by some of the escalation of rhetoric that we see in some of our political debates, political discourse, around the democratic world.”

Albanese then identified his target. Answering a journalist’s question about right-wing extremism and “election-related violence” in the US and Australia, he turned his fire directly at anti-genocide protests, not the far-right. He ramped-up his repeated denunciations of protests outside Labor members of parliament’s electorate offices.

While claiming to accept “peaceful demonstrations” as “fine,” Albanese declared: “I’ve expressed my concern that people [who] just dismiss actions outside electorate offices. These things can escalate, which is why they need to be called out unequivocally and opposed. The sort of incidents that we’ve seen outside some electorate offices are inappropriate… They’ve crossed the line.”

In a speech on Monday, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil was even more explicit and ominous in accusing anti-genocide protesters of threatening democracy. She charged them with “terrorising politicians” and adopting the methods of “despots.”

Speaking at the Museum of Australian Democracy in Canberra, O’Neil said “denying access to government services, terrorising politicians and their staff, painting symbols of terrorism in public spaces, smashing windows, setting buildings alight—these are the measures of autocrats, despots and tyrants.”

Threateningly, as the minister in charge of “national security” and the domestic spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), O’Neil declared: “They have no place in our democracy.”

Her charges of “terrorism,” combined with unsubstantiated and inflammatory allegations, such as denying access to services and “setting buildings alight,” stink of preparations for political frame-ups and arrests. 

O’Neil could not point to any concrete instances of violence resulting from pro-Palestinian protests, because there have been none. Labor governments, however, have repeatedly threatened the demonstrations while directing major police mobilisations against them, some of which have involved groundless arrests and acts of police brutality.

Although ostensibly directed at events at electorate offices, O’Neil’s accusations have a wider logic, directed against the continuing far-larger demonstrations and marches across the country over the past nine months. Their slogans and banners, such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” have been similarly demonised by the Labor governments and Zionist groups as advocating terrorism.

The real terrorism is being perpetrated daily by the Israeli regime, armed and defended by the US and all the imperialist governments, including Albanese’s. The massacres in homes, schools, hospitals, refugee camps and aid facilities are taking to a new barbaric level decades of Zionist terrorism against the Palestinian population.

O’Neil did not stop there. She insisted that the anti-genocide protests are part of a wider threat to democracy by the spread of misinformation, rise of new media platforms and “foreign interference.”

In keeping with the increasingly unpopular government’s ever-more provocative scare campaign against Russia and China, O’Neil said the government knew the nation’s adversaries were using “information warfare and psychological methods to sow discontent and disunity in our community.”

Even as she threatened the right to protest, O’Neil claimed that Australia was becoming an “island of democracy in a sea of autocracy.”

Seeking to bolster her accusations, O’Neil tried to draw a connection to last week’s still-unexplained sudden arrests of a Russian-Australian couple of vague charges of “preparing for an act of espionage,” supposedly on behalf of Moscow.

“Just last Friday, two Russian-born Australian citizens were accused of obtaining Australian Defence Force material to share with Russian authorities,” she said. “This was the first time an espionage-related offence has been laid in Australia since new laws were introduced in 2018.”

As the WSWS has pointed out, from what has been reported, this is a threadbare and politically manufactured case, apparently seeking to cultivate a wartime atmosphere against Russia. 

Moreover, by insinuating the guilt of Kira and Igor Korolev, as Albanese did immediately last week, O’Neil has further prejudiced any chance of a fair trial.

Writing in the Murdoch media’s Australian on Monday, Albanese continued his pitch. He declared that “bringing people together” was important at a time of polarisation. “That has always been a driving force of my government, and in a moment like this, the project of coming together—of bridging our divides with respect and care—feels more vital than ever,” he wrote.

As with Biden’s pleas for “unity” in the US—which Trump has also raised—this is a political fraud. It is driven by a common fear of rising working-class disaffection with the bipartisan program of genocide, war, deteriorating living conditions and authoritarian rule. There can be no “unity” by workers and youth with this brutal ruling class.

In fact, the witch-hunting offensive by Albanese, O’Neil and the Labor government, which threatens basic democratic rights, demonstrates the necessity for a decisive working-class break from the entire political establishment. This means turning to a revolutionary socialist program to overturn the increasingly war-mongering, crisis-ridden and dictatorial capitalist order itself.

That is the perspective of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP). We urge all our readers to use the form below to sign up as electoral members of the SEP so that we can ensure that our party’s name is on the ballot for the coming federal election.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/17/qlpy-j17.html

By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

Israeli forces have massacred nearly 60 people in the Gaza Strip over just the past 24 hours, and the past week has been one of the deadliest since the war began more than nine months ago.

But you’d hardly know it by looking at the front pages of major newspapers in the United States, despite U.S. President Joe Biden fueling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault with diplomatic support and billions of dollars worth of weaponry.

While outlets such as Al Jazeera and Reuters have kept Israel’s onslaught at or near the top of their pages, coverage of the relentless war on the Palestinian enclave has largely been supplanted in the U.S. by presidential politics, particularly in the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday—the same day Israeli forces killed around 100 people in an attack on a southern Gaza town that was previously designated a “safe zone,” as Common Dreamsreported.

Fresh Israeli airstrikes across Gaza on Tuesday killed dozens of people—including children—but the massacres didn’t receive mention on the front pages of the web versions of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, each of which heavily featured coverage of the high-stakes U.S. presidential contest between two candidates who have backed Israel’s war on Gaza.

As of Tuesday morning, Gaza was entirely absent from the website landing pages of the Journal and USA Today. The Post‘s home page buried a story about the potential for an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah, while the Times‘ home page contained a piece about surging settler violence in the West Bank amid Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza.

In recent weeks, U.S. corporate media coverage of developments in Gaza has not reflected the extent to which Israel has intensified its aerial and ground attacks, even as recent cease-fire talks have sparked some hope of a pause.

After a 20-year-old gunman attempted to assassinate Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, pictures of the former president’s bloodied ear and raised fist were plastered across the front pages of major newspapers in the U.S. and around the world while the far more numerous images of child victims of Israeli bombs—many of them supplied by the United States—faded from view.

Israel does not allow journalists with major U.S.-based media outlets to enter the Gaza Strip unless they are embedded with Israeli forces and agree to let the military vet their coverage.

Al Jazeera, a Qatari-funded outlet that Israel’s far-right government has repeatedly targeted, reported Monday that “Israeli forces have attacked five separate schools in Gaza in just eight days, killing dozens of people sheltering in them.”

One attack on Sunday, the outlet noted, “struck the United Nations-run Abu Oreiban school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 17 people and injuring about 80. Most of the victims were women and children, said Palestinian Civil Defense.”

Reporting from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Al Jazeera‘s Hani Mahmoud said he witnessed children “crying out in pain and agony” at the facility, which—like all of Gaza’s remaining hospitals—is under-resourced and only partially functioning.

“This is the result of incinerating bombs,” Mahmoud added.

The death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza is nearing 40,000—likely a dramatic undercount, given how many bodies are missing under the rubble that now dominates the landscape of the enclave and could take 15 years to clear.

Those who have survived Israel’s onslaught are now living amid sewage, decomposing bodies, and the ruins of their homes, shops, schools, and hospitals, with nowhere safe to flee. Famine and disease are spreading rapidly across the territory as the Israeli government continues to restrict the flow of humanitarian aid.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has urged the Biden administration to cut off all offensive weapons assistance to Israel, said in a statement late last week that “while much of the media is focused on the drama of the U.S. presidential election, we must not lose sight of what is happening in Gaza, where an unprecedented humanitarian crisis continues to get even worse.”

“We must end our support for Netanyahu’s war,” said Sanders. “Not another nickel to make this horrific situation even worse. I intend to do everything I can to block further arms transfers to Israel, including through joint resolutions of disapproval of any arms sales. The United States must not help a right-wing extremist and war criminal continue this atrocity.”

https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/17/with-media-enamored-by-presidential-race-israeli-massacres-in-gaza-get-even-deadlier/

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For those of us familiar with Mary Kostakidis’ untiring work for justice and human rights, the news that she has been accused of antisemitism beggars belief. And the attempt to silence her has alarming implications for all of us. That this is supposedly done to safeguard social cohesion in our multicultural Australia is difficult to believe. In fact, it will have the opposite of the claimed effect.

Mary Kostakidis is not only a fine journalist but she is also a principled one with the courage to speak up, when other journalists stay silent or meekly parrot the sanctioned version of events. Australia is fortunate indeed to have a journalist of her calibre and moral clarity. I wish we had many more journalists like her.

Accusing Mary of antisemitism brought to mind a brilliant talk on antisemitism delivered by the late Israeli historian Alon Confino, at the Italian Senate in Rome, in January 2023. Professor Confino served as the Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and a Professor of History and Judaic Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. In Learning the wrong lessons from the Holocaust, he says:

‘But this condition has been misused of late as a weapon of personal destruction against critics of Zionism and of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. This weaponisation of antisemitism is practiced against individuals, academics, journalists, professionals, and human rights organisations who dare to support equal national, political, legal, and civil rights for the Palestinians or to provide evidence-based reports about human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories.’

‘Accusations of anti-semitism in this regard are part of a clear strategy: to get us bogged down in discussions about whether or not certain words and idioms are antisemitic — or were articulated with antisemitic intent — in order to avoid the fundamental discussion about what actually happens on the ground; that is, how Israel violently denies Palestinian rights. The aim of weaponising antisemitism is distraction: to avoid speaking about how Palestinians live their life under occupation and instead to speak about Jewish victimhood.’

‘Accusing critics of Israel of being antisemites is such a distraction: it keeps serious people from doing their work to ensure equal rights to all the inhabitants who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and instead keeps these people having to explain over and over again that they are not antisemites. There will always be one more accusation of antisemitism when evidence will be provided of Israel’s denial of Palestinian equal rights. Who, we might want to think, is interested in weaponising antisemitism?’

‘Accepting the accusation of antisemitism directed at people who provide evidence of the violations of Palestinian rights — calling it by its proper name, apartheid, and demanding accountability — is built on the axiom that one of the Holocaust’s lessons is that Israeli Jews are always right. Regarding any human group as being beyond moral reproach and historical accountability is a form of worship wise people should avoid. Learning from the Holocaust that all human beings deserve a life of dignity and rights, except those whose rights are denied by Israeli Jews, is a moral travesty..’

The attempt to silence Mary Kostakidis has alarming implications for all of us. If a complaint can be lodged against a high profile journalist like Kostakidis, for publishing newsworthy information, what will this do to freedom of the press? How many journalists will self-censor? Will we be treated as children who are only allowed to read material deemed acceptable to the government or powerful vested interests? Will material freely available in the global media become off limits in Australia?

The complaint against Mary Kostakidis takes place in the context of the genocide in Gaza, a genocide for which human rights groups have no more superlatives, and against which many historians, scholars and journalists have written, across the globe, including in Israel. Offensive pronouncements are made by all sides and are reported, without the accusation of spreading hate rhetoric. I find the pronouncements made by the Israeli prime minister, a number of members of the Knesset, and some of the settlers’ leaders deeply offensive and downright genocidal. But I would never accuse those reporting them of spreading hate material and rhetoric. Such pronouncements, no matter how offensive, are newsworthy, and anyone who wishes to remain informed would want to read them. I do not want the government to curtail freedom of the press to spare my feelings.

As for social cohesion in our multicultural Australia, I fail to see how the complaint against Mary Kostakidis can help safeguard this. Australians with ties to the Middle East will see the complaint as an attempt to silence any voice that is raised in support of Palestinians. And those whose only tie to Palestinians is their common humanity will see it as an attempt to suppress their protests against a genocide. ‘Don’t bring an overseas conflict here’ we are told. But this is not a ‘conflict’ we can, or should, ignore. This is a nine-month mass slaughter that has continued unabated, with hitherto unthinkable impunity. And I think many Australians, like millions around the world, are more horrified by the unending images of starved, maimed, orphaned and murdered children than by a few supposedly offensive tweets.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-attempt-to-smear-and-silence-mary-kostakidis-is-both-shocking-and-alarming/

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The International Court of Justice ruled Friday that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian Territories is illegal and called on it to stop building settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas hailed the decision while Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said it cannot alter the “legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland”.

The top UN court said Friday that Israel’s presence in the Palestinian Territories is “unlawful” and called on it to end and for settlement construction to stop immediately, issuing an unprecedented, sweeping condemnation of Israel’s rule over the lands it captured 57 years ago.

In a non-binding opinion, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) pointed to a wide list of policies, including the building and expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, use of the area's natural resources, the annexation and imposition of permanent control over lands and discriminatory policies against Palestinians, all of which it said violated international law.

The 15-judge panel said Israel's “abuse of its status as the occupying power” renders its “presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful.” It says its continued presence was “illegal” and should be ended as “rapidly as possible”.

It said Israel must end settlement construction immediately and that existing settlements must be removed, according to the 83-page opinion read out by court President Nawaf Salam.

Israel, which normally considers the United Nations and international tribunals as unfair and biased, did not send a legal team to the hearings. But it submitted written comments, saying that the questions put to the court are prejudiced and fail to address Israeli security concerns. Israeli officials have said the court's intervention could undermine the peace process, which has been stagnant for more than a decade.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, called for "immediate" international action to end Israel's occupation of the Palestinian Territories after the ICJ issued its ruling.

A statement from the group, which has been fighting Israel in Gaza since leading the deadly October 7 attacks on southern Israel, said the ruling puts "the international system before the imperative of immediate action to end the occupation".

The office of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas welcomed a "historic" decision by the ICJ.

"The presidency welcomes the decision of the International Court of Justice, considers it a historic decision and demands that Israel be compelled to implement it," it said in a statement on its official news agency shortly after the ruling was made public.

In response to the ruling, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said the West Bank and East Jerusalem were part of the Jewish people's historical “homeland”.

“The Jewish people are not conquerors in their own land – not in our eternal capital Jerusalem and not in the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria,” he said in a post on X. “No false decision in The Hague will distort this historical truth and likewise the legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland cannot be contested.”

The court's opinion, sought by the UN General Assembly after a Palestinian request, is unlikely to affect Israel's policy. But its resounding breadth – including saying Israel could not claim sovereignty in the territories and was impeding Palestinians' right to self-determination – could impact international opinion.

It came against the backdrop of Israel’s devastating 10-month military assault on Gaza, which was triggered by the October 7 attacks. In a separate case, the ICJ is considering a South African claim that Israel’s campaign in Gaza amounts to genocide, a claim that Israel vehemently denies.

Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek all three areas for an independent state.

Israel considers the West Bank to be disputed territory, whose future should be decided in negotiations, while it has moved population there in settlements to solidify its hold. It has annexed East Jerusalem in a move that is not internationally recognized. It withdrew from Gaza in 2005 but maintained a blockade of the territory after Hamas took power there in 2007. The international community generally considers all three areas to be occupied territory.

At hearings in February, then-Palestinian Authority foreign minister Riad Malki accused Israel of apartheid and urged the United Nations’ top court to declare that Israel’s occupation of lands sought by the Palestinians is illegal and must end immediately and unconditionally for any hope for a two-state future to survive.

The Palestinians presented arguments in February along with 49 nations and three international organisations.

Erwin van Veen, a senior research fellow at the Clingendael think tank in The Hague, said that a court ruling that Israel’s policies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem breach international law would “isolate Israel further internationally, at least from a legal point of view”.

He said such a ruling would “worsen the case for occupation. It removes any kind of legal, political, philosophical underpinning of the Israeli expansion project.”

It would also strengthen the hand of “those who seek to advocate against it” – such as the grassroots Palestinian-led movement advocating boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

He said it could also increase the number of countries that recognise the state of Palestine, particularly in the West, following the recent examples of Spain, Norway and Ireland.

It is not the first time the ICJ has been asked to give its legal opinion on Israeli policies. Two decades ago, the court ruled that Israel’s West Bank separation barrier was “contrary to international law”. Israel boycotted those proceedings, saying they were politically motivated.

Israel says the barrier is a security measure. Palestinians say the structure amounts to a massive land grab because it frequently dips into the West Bank.

Israel has built well over 100 settlements, according to the anti-settlement monitoring group Peace Now. The West Bank settler population has grown by more than 15 percent in the past five years to more than 500,000 Israelis, according to a pro-settler group.

Israel also has annexed East Jerusalem and considers the entire city to be its capital. An additional 200,000 Israelis live in settlements built in East Jerusalem that Israel considers to be neighbuorhoods of its capital. Palestinian residents of the city face systematic discrimination, making it difficult for them to build new homes or expand existing ones.

The international community considers all settlements to be illegal or obstacles to peace since they are built on lands sought by the Palestinians for their state.

Netanyahu’s hard-line government is dominated by settlers and their political supporters. Netanyahu has given his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a former settler leader, unprecedented authority over settlement policy. Smotrich has used this position to cement Israel’s control over the West Bank by pushing forward plans to build more settlement homes and to legalise outposts.

Authorities recently approved the appropriation of 12.7 square kilometres (nearly 5 square miles) of land in the Jordan Valley, a strategic piece of land deep inside the West Bank, according to a copy of the order obtained by The Associated Press. Data from Peace Now, the tracking group, indicate it was the largest single appropriation approved since the 1993 Oslo accords at the start of the peace process.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and AP)

https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240719-top-un-court-international-court-justice-says-israel-occupation-palestinian-territories-unlawful-west-bank-settlements

SEE ALSO: https://johnmenadue.com/by-failing-to-stop-the-gaza-genocide-the-icj-is-working-exactly-as-intended/

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