“The mass murder of more than 50,000 civilians, from babies to the aged, is being perpetrated by the descendants of the tribe of Israel who escaped the holocaust,” writes The Gadfly columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.

It is painful beyond measure to be confronted every evening by the moving pictures of human beings in Gaza being bombed to death and shockingly maimed by the Israelis dropping American explosives on them. 

Their aircraft rule the skies. Their planes deliver death from well cushioned, air-conditioned cockpits. The crews never see the blood spurting from a decapitated child, nor hear the screams of the mother who will carry the image to her grave.

But now in a terrible extension of the horror, the Israelis, with American oversight, are bent on starving the Gazans to death as they scramble ever more weakly for the crumbs that only prolong the suffering. 

Now it’s face-to-face.

I would like to say it’s “inhuman” but alas, it’s what distinguishes us from the other animal life on our lovely blue planet. The law of the jungle is relatively benign by comparison. They kill to eat. We kill because we can. They don’t torture their own. We have normalised it.

This is what is particularly hard to understand: it is not like the Jewish holocaust because that was unknown to most of the world. Though many of the European nations invaded by the Germans collaborated in the collection of their neighbours for the death camps, perhaps they didn’t know their fate.

In our neck of the woods, the vile cruelty of the Japanese to the millions of Chinese at home and in their southeastern diaspora – as well as the several thousand western POWs – was not widely known until the end of the war.

In each case the unknowing and the fog of war might suffice for an excuse for the lack of action at the time. But that does not apply today to the mass murder of more than 50,000 civilians, from babies to the aged, being perpetrated by the descendants of the tribe of Israel who escaped the holocaust.

I suspect I know part of the reason for the silence. It is certainly why I have been mute until now. It is fear of the consequences, the chief of which is an attack on all sides by a relatively small but very active group of Jewish defenders with the baseball bat called “antisemitism”.

Semite is an odd word that I learned in first year Arts (Ancient History). It was coined in the 19th century to describe Arabs, Jews, Akkadians and Phoenicians. 

Since then, it seems to have lost its broad focus and turned its spotlight on the Jews alone. About the same time, I learned that my mother’s grandmother was Ruth Silverstein and her mum was Sophie Goldstein

I guess they were Jewish, but I never bothered to take it further because by then I could reason and regarded all religions as dangerous fables… a position I still hold today.

But here’s the thing. One of our distinguished soldiers General David Morrison recently said – in a different context – “the behaviour you walk by is behaviour you accept” and he was named Australian of the Year in 2016. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my adopting it in the cause of truth.

It is simply absurd to imagine that the people who protest the joint American-Israeli atrocities in Gaza are actuated by antisemitism. And if some are, it’s only because the Jewish authorities are defending the indefensible.

Much the same applies to the colonial Europeans – mostly British – who ran the slave trade, corrupted and preyed upon India, and South America, and stole an entire continent from an estimated 800,000 Aboriginal people who had settled every part of it for 65,000 years. And they exploited its treasure house of mineral riches without a hint of guilt or compensation.

Oh dear, wait one minute, is that anti-Australian? 

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