Greed-based policy
The federal budget announced plans to subject disability pensioners, as a group, to an additional 61,000 eligibility reviews per year and the government still wants to change eligibility rules to force many onto the lower-paying and more demanding unemployment allowance. Support should go to the needy, not the greedy, declares minister Amanda Vanstone.
Need is far more prevalent than greed among unwell people surviving on a basic pension of only $223 a week. And what of the minister's philosophy when it comes to tax cuts?
The budget's $0 a year for those with incomes too low to qualify for income tax, but $573 for those on the highest incomes, is a very unconventional example of needs-based, rather than greed-based, policy-making!
Brent Howard
Rydalmere NSW
Silent on spies
Isn't it odd that the opposition is making a lot of noise about the size of the tax cuts but saying nothing about the increased funding for spies, assassins and secret police?
Col Friel
Alawa NT
Medicare
No wonder Costello looked as sick as a cat and Howard decided to go the dingo and run off to Tindal to count his souvenired weapons of mass destruction — not.
Crean said the magic words: "Corporate tax cuts do not have the same priority as saving Medicare" and the public gallery went wild.
I mean, join the bloody dots.
Peter Woodforde
Melba ACT
'Sovereignty issue'
I enjoy your online edition. Re: Northern Ireland: Murder most foul, by Dale Mills (GLW #537). An excellent article summarising the Stevens' enquiry findings was tarnished by political drivel at the end: "These conditions can be removed by granting the long-standing call of the republican movement: a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland and a waiver of any territorial claims to the island. Only when state-sponsored killings can no longer take place can it then be said that [Pat] Finucane and others like him did not die in vain."
Anyone who has followed the "Good Friday" peace agreement would know of the overwhelming wish for Irish people — north and south of the "border" to respect the wishes of 60%-plus of Northern Ireland inhabitants on the "Sovereignty issue".
John Murray
Ireland
{Abridged.]
US presence escalates violence
US Secretary of State Powell has spent the last couple of days in the Middle East telling us that post-war reconstruction in Iraq is going to plan and that the "Road Map for Peace" between the Israelis and Palestinians should be implemented.
If everything is rosy then why has the US withdrawn both Jay Garner, head of the military administration in Iraq, and Barbara Bodine, US co-ordinator for central Iraq, after only three weeks in office? If things are running so smoothly then why is there so much lawlessness? Why haven't basic services like water, electricity and garbage collection been restored in Baghdad?
Powell would also have us believe that those groups who use force to oppose the US are nothing but terrorists who are hell bent on killing innocent civilians. Following the car bomb attacks on expatriate compounds in Saudi Arabia, he claimed that those responsible were not motivated by anything other than killing. Surely, groups like Al Qaeda have already made it very clear what motivates them. They want the US and other foreign forces to get out of Muslim states in the Middle East.
If Powell thinks that US and other foreign civilians in the Middle East should be immune from attack, he is living in a dream world. Bush and Powell both knew that innocent civilians in Iraq would be maimed and killed as a result of their forces attacking that country. Why then should foreign expatriates in Saudi Arabia be immune from attack?
To deliberately target civilians in any military conflict is a breach of international law. But to invade a country without just cause in the full knowledge that it will result in innocent civilians being killed is just as culpable.
Adam Bonner
Meroo Meadow NSW
Brave ANZACs?
Two of my uncles and a teacher were WWI veterans and it annoys me to hear people saying, these days, how brave the ANZACs were laying down their lives so that Australia could be free. What rubbish!
Some were brave, no doubt, as were the wives and children they left widowed and orphaned, but they did not go to lay down their lives for freedom. They went because they thought it would all be a bit of a lark, because they wanted to be part in a great and glorious adventure, because they wanted to get away from the drudgery of the farm, to escape a harsh father: a dozen reasons. I suspect, too, they thought it would be like the Boer, the Maori or the Aboriginal wars, a matter of teaching a bunch of naked savages not to complain when we took over their country.
The ANZACs certainly did not count on being martyred by the tens of thousands by the cynical old men who ran the war, nor on being declared mutinous and shot when they objected.
Nor did they fix bayonets and charge because they were so fantastically brave. They did so because their officers had pistols to shoot them dead if they even hesitated.
What is more, the message that those men brought back, the message that was the impetus for the first ANZAC day ceremonies, was not that they were heroes and that war is glorious, but that it is a sordid mess and that we should never allow ourselves to be drawn into such a conflict again.
The ANZACs, too, were not fighting for freedom. They fought so that the British Empire could rule the world without German competition. Had the ANZACs really been concerned about freedom they would have joined the IRA.
And had that silly war not happened, there would have been no Versailles, no Hitler, no Stalin, no WWII, no Cold War and Europe could probably have been united 50 years earlier.
Lest we forget.
Peter Gilet
Albany WA
Zionism
I think Craig Milner (letters, GLW #536) is a bit confused about Zionism. He cites the first Zionist conference (1897) to argue that the aim of the movement was not the creation of a nation state of Israel, but then persists in the claim that opposition to that nation state is anti-Zionist (hence "anti-Semitic"). You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I wouldn't know the details of the Zionist ideology, myself. I just know that the rights of the Palestinian community, who've been living there since God knows when, are considered inferior to the rights of Jews whose ancestors stayed there briefly two millennia ago. Contrast, if you will, the rights of any Jewish person to "return" to Israel with the standards we have set for Aborigines to make a land claim in Australia.
It does illustrate sloppy thinking on the issues when we are sucked in by labels — especially political labels. The Palestinians are also a Semitic people; lexically, persecution of them by the state of Israel is also anti-Semitism. Israeli sympathisers would like us to sit around arguing the meaning of "anti-Semitism" and "zionism" while their army completes the expropriation of Palestine and the brutalisation of the Palestinians.
Nazi monstrosities have been used to justify Israeli oppression and theft. It is a racist justification which says that the suffering of some people 60 years ago justifies the oppression and theft of today — because today's thieves and oppressors are of the same race as the former victims.
Stephen Davey
Torrens ACT
Anti-Semitism?
The word "Semite" means Jew, Arab, Phoenician, Assyrian and probably others. The Semitic family of languages include Hebrew and Arabic. It is a misuse of language to equate "anti-Semite" with "anti-Jewish".
If, for example, one admires the many stunning achievements of Arab civilization and deplores the Nazi tactics of the state of Israel, one is not anti-Semitic. So Martin Luther King was in error stating, "anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people" and further "anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic". Anti-Zionism is possibly not even anti-Jewish: the letter published in your May 7 issue states that the aims of the "first Zionist conference" were to create a Jewish homeland in "Eretz-Israel". To oppose the creation of this state is not to be anti-Jewish.
The Bible (Genesis 11 27-32) says: "they went forth from Ur of the Chaldees to go into the land of Canaan". About 1900 BC according to Funk & Wagnall, Vol. 26, p. 355. The great historian Gibbon, writing about 1790, says "the conquest of the land of Canaan" (Israel) "by the Jews was accompanied with so many ... bloody circumstances, that the victorious Jews were left in a state of irreconcileable hostility with all their neighbours", and again, "the conquest of the land of Canaan" (by the Jews) "and the extirpation of the suspecting natives", others "were at a loss how to reconcile with common notions of humanity and justice".
There was a diaspora of Jews, under the Macedonian empire of Alexander the so-called Great, in which many thousands of Jews left Judea (Canaan, Israel) voluntarily, to pursue "commercial opportunities" (F&W, Vol. 15, p. 58) in Alexandria and other parts of the empire. About the time of Yeshua (Jesus, Christ), the Roman empire began to oppress the Jews, who were banned from Jerusalem at one stage, and dispersed throughout the available world, leading to their minority existence in so many countries.
In view of the evidence, there could well be an opinion that the Jewish people do not have a legitimate claim to Israel at all, and therefore it would be quite possible to be, resultingly, anti-Zionist, without being anti-Jewish, in the sense of being against every individual Jew (which is nonsense).
They left the place further east where they originated and invaded Israel, conquering it violently and "extirpating" the indigenous people. Many left that area on their own initiative to pursue commercial opportunities. They were dispersed from Judea in the early Christian centuries by the Roman administration, and settled in many countries.
Throughout the centuries, they suffered persecution, culminating in Nazism last century. This led to the creation of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, but, as a distinguished Jewish leader of the time said, "The bride already has a groom" (Arab peoples had lived there for perhaps thousands of years). These people have been thrown out of their homes without compensation, denied Israeli citizenship and treated with Nazi tactics by Israel in the areas to which they have been forced.
So history has repeated itself.
Lastly, finishing on Craig Milner's letter (GLW #536), "violent ... attacks against Jewish individuals" (which are despicable) should not be equated with "blaming Israel for Bush's war". One can loathe many of the actions of the state of Israel and at the same time condemn harming an innocent Jew living in this country (or anywhere else) — or any other innocent person.
Marie McKern
Kings Cross NSW
[Abridged.]
[More letters at <http://www.greenleft.org.au>.]
Zionism II
Zionism is understood to mean the official ideology and practice of the "Israeli" rulers, who are closely linked both with the financial and industrial oligarchy of other countries.
Furthermore, Zionism possesses several aims: ideological, political, organisational, religious, financial, economic. However, it pursues two distinct aims before anything: the first one is to turn against Marxism those Jews who address themselves to it for answers to vital issues, who think that Marxism can help humanity find the road of true freedom and genuine democracy. The second, it exploits anti-Semitic sentiments among intellectuals in capitalist class societies, where people are looking agonisingly for an explanation of the complications and conflicts that are hounding humanity through the fault of imperialism.
No matter how many aims, world Zionism is in deep crisis. And it surfaced in "Israel", where it is the official ideology shaping the political practice of the ruling elements, and in the Jewish communities in the capitalist (class) societies.
One more thing, Eretz means Greater as expressed on the "Israeli" flag — the two blue horizontal lines, one represents Euphrates River and the other the Nile River — the area will be conquered to be "Greater-Israel".
Vic Savoulian
Mt Druitt
[Abridged.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 21, 2003.
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