I have not and will not defend killing innocent people under the name of any religion. No sane person would, either. I would not accuse anyone of doing some nasty thing only because they are from this nation, or that ethnic group. No. It is fascism, as we all know. I found out that neither would Dave Zirin, the sports editor at The Nation. (“Sports” editor! Not politics!) Listen to his outcry: “They are relentless in their message that standing for Palestinian existence in the face of annihilation makes you party to this atrocity, which is an obscene lie.”
“They” that Zirin refers to are those condemning the condemnable Bondi Beach massacre in Australia. The “outcry” he refers to is the global condemnation of this vicious act, and the “obscene lie” is what some actually spew when they, under the pretense of condemning the Bondi Beach killings, actually voice their own racism against the Palestinian people.
It is really awesome to see how Zirin, the Jewish sports editor, noticed the twist within a twist that he could not stand. He could not stomach the exploitation of his religion under the disguise of Zionism. Noting carefully how fast Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the massacre on the Australian government’s recognizing a Palestinian state, and the chorus of Netanyahu’s bootlickers at The New York Times, The Atlantic and the National Review began, in unison, howling that “The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach,” Dave warns, “Don’t buy their b*******. They are exploiting our dead. They are tying this tragedy to their own nationalist project for personal gain.”
Not only Zirin, but “many Jews have shouted from the hills that Judaism and Zionism are two separate sets of ideas.” Not Judaism, a religion with 5,000 years of history, but Zionism, an expansionist, supremacist ideology “propping up a state that’s younger than Goldie Hawn” (Zirin’s words) is killing the Palestinians. So, that father and son, the Akrams, committed to not one but two crimes: They acted with the delusion that faithful Jewish people were responsible for the leveling of Gaza and the mass killings of children; and playing into Zionism’s hands, they rekindled the cries of “Islamofascism.”
I don’t know which “ghouls” Zirin had in his mind when he penned his article titled “Don’t Listen to the Ghouls Exploiting the Tragedy of Bondi Beach,” but one of the inventors of the term “Islamofascism,” Norman Podhoretz, became a candidate bogeyman when he died a week later.
One of the few coldhearted neocons remaining, Podhoretz cruelly defended U.S. President George W. Bush's mass killings in Afghanistan and Iraq; he wrote a book about the fourth world war (the Cold War was the third): “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.” The Zionist par excellence claimed that 9/11, as well as America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, should be seen in a broad historical context of “the war of ideas.” Podhoretz’s dislike of or prejudice against Islam or Muslims was so immense that he portrayed the Islamic world “as a political force,” and he said, “he was trying to attempt to steel us for the years of conflict to come.”
I wish each and every political leader would read his book and understand what steeling themselves up meant in the neocons’ playbook, how Netanyahu and his neocon goons made Trump put Israel first instead.
Podhoretz defended the idea that the West’s cultural tolerance of Islam emboldened the terrorists who used it to put together the “Jackal bins” against Western values. The American media, Podhoretz believed, “resolutely tried to ignore any and all signs of Islamofascism” and created “a domestic insurgency against the Bush Doctrine.” As the editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995, he contended that the global war against Islamofascism was vital and necessary, and thanks to the Akrams father and son for their help the thugs in the media to revive Podhoretz’s thesis mentioned in relation to their nefarious Bondi Beach murders of 15 people two rabbis, a Holocaust survivor and a 10-year-old girl Matilda among them.
The father and son were simple “brick-layers” who helped the ghouls Zirin mentions now yet again put up not brick but stone walls around Islam when the “Australian police say Bondi Beach mass shooting was terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State group” and whey opined in columns of The New York Times that, “This is not emotion; it is data: Antisemitic incidents across the West have reached post-World War II highs, driven not by lone extremists but by sustained ideologies governments refuse to confront.” Likewise, for the National Review, “The atrocity at Bondi Beach was all too predictable” because it was fed by religious extremists, and the Israeli Times proclaimed that, “The Bondi Beach attack was not an aberration; it was confirmation.”
Thanks to the Akrams, both U.S. political parties, organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and a university system are (in Zirin’s words) now equating pro-Palestinian protest with anti-Semitism.
