Only morons and ghouls could possibly believe the Israeli Ambassador’s Press Club narrative

Allow me a confession and a brief moment of weakness: summoning the will to wade back into the darkness is hard at times. There are only so many horrors, so many injustices and mutilations of a dead, better world that any thinking, feeling person can handle. Even if that dead world was more illusion than reality, the grief for it is real. 

Yesterday, the National Press Club of Australia, an institution sponsored by a variety of weapons, media and fossil fuel corporations, hosted the new Israeli Ambassador. This is the same organisation that last year cancelled Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges for calling out the silence and complicity of Western journalists in the mass targeted slaughter of Palestinian journalists. 

Figures vary on this. The Committee to Protect Journalists asserts Israel has killed at least 259 since October 2023, making Gaza the deadliest place in the world – ever – to be a journalist. Israel counters this by claiming, interchangeably, that they were all Hamas, Hezbollah, human shields, anti-semites, tragic accidents, or stepping stones on the path towards Iranian nuclear weapons, perpetually a few weeks away. As the narcissistic adage goes: Nothing justifies October 7, but October 7 justifies everything.   

The National Press Club did not follow its standard practice of advertising this talk on their website in advance. The ABC, likewise, broke long established patterns, burying the address on News 24 instead of also broadcasting on their main channel. 

I cannot think like a person trying to manufacture consent for atrocity, nor do I want to, but I find it implausible that this half-baked, half-cocked, semi-covert approach was about anything other than avoiding accountability and protest. Backlash for hosting a talk that would inevitably be riddled with genocide denial and narrative building for both the further violent annexation of Lebanon, and the carpet bombing of Tehran, an ancient, beautiful city of 10 million people.

Weighing the options between automotive auto-violence and tuning in for another round of Complicity TV, I again confess duty won out only by the narrowest of margins. Most of my being wanted to get high, play PlayStation and nurse an ice pack in my lap. But you can’t win them all. 

Low expectations were immediately met. In introducing the Zionist entity mouthpiece, club president Tom Connell noted that a “ceasefire in Gaza had been in effect for five months”, “despite some continued bombings”, proving that amongst the corporate shills words can be redefined however we like. You can just say any old bullshit (except “From the river to sea”, which is very, very illegal in Queensland, and very, very naughty.)

Hillel Newman, the new Ambassador, arrived in Australia a month ago. He was born in South Africa. He told the heartwarming story of how his parents left because they didn’t like apartheid. For some inexplicable reason, this brought them to Israel, “a beacon of progressive values and democracy”, Hillel claimed of a country that has just this week instituted the death penalty for Palestinians but not Israelis, to tears of joy inside the Knesset. A more literal example of apartheid I could not think of. To my knowledge, this is the first death penalty based on race codified into law since Nazi Germany. 

(Fun historic fact: Did you know Zionists were the only Jewish groups that Hitler had active relations with through the Nazi reign of terror?! Why? They both shared a common goal of removing Jews from Europe and putting them… somewhere else.) 

From there, the predictable onslaught of gaslighting, lies and genocide denial began in earnest. Newman repeated the debunked lines that “children were mutilated” and of “mass rapes” on October 7. “It became clear that such threats cannot be maintained, they have to be eliminated…. Israel entered a war it did not seek but could not avoid.

“This is not a clash between civilizations. It is a battle between extremists and moderates. By targeting the regimes, we are opening the space for moderates, reshaping the Middle East… bringing the world together. We can dream.”

We can dream… 

The Western world is truly upside down if we are meant to accept that refusing to be exterminated is “extreme” and a 360 square kilometre moonscape of rubble is the work of “moderates”. 

Newman spoke to the hip pockets of “ordinary Australians”, petrol today fluctuating as high as $2.60, “condemning Iran’s actions for closing the Strait of Hormuz”. He also tried to claim that Iran had been attempting to close this Strait before Israel attacked it, through its “proxies”. 

Proxies is a term Westerners use for “other countries’ allies”, in this case, the Houthis from Yemen. In reality, prior to the Israeli aggression, the Houthis were specifically targeting ships to Israel, claiming to be acting under their responsibilities of the now destroyed international law, in which all of us are obliged to do everything we can to stop genocides in action, not just pontificate and sell books about them after the fact.

The Ambassador repeatedly turned history on its head. “Five Arab states invaded Israel and swore to annihilate it… Today, the Arab League refuses to acknowledge Israel’s borders, wherever they are.” 

Which is half a good point. Where are those borders?! 

When asked about Smotrich’s gleeful admission that the IDF is seizing land in Lebanon, the Ambassador replied: “Israel’s actions in Lebanon are 100% defensive. The idea is to distance the rocket launching from the people of Israel. Now, there are many opinions in Israel, from far-left to far-right. Smotrich represents constituents of a specific kind, and he as a minister is allowed to voice his opinion… The idea is to take up forward defensive positions, in order to prevent attacks as much as possible.”

1.2 million Lebanese people have been displaced from Southern Lebanon. The IDF has destroyed bridges over the Latani River, which is now serving, apparently, as the northern tip of Israel.

Hey! Did you know Israel is the only country in the world that doesn’t declare fixed borders? They keep moving outwards, mysteriously, along the trajectory of the Greater Israel map, most recently into Palestine and Lebanon. In fact, in the last few weeks, Israel has claimed a similar percentage of Lebanon as Russia has of Ukraine since 2022. Only one of these aggressions has been met with international condemnation; the other has seen police assaulting protestors and charging artists like Queensland’s Nordacious. 

Newman, entirely predictably, equated all such anti-zionist sentiment with anti-semitism. “In modern discourse, some disguise this hatred as anti-zionism or criticisms of Israel. This is anti-semitism. Slogans such as from the river to the sea and globalise the intifada are expressions of this hatred.” This contortion of reality, terrifyingly, is becoming the official Australian government line.

If he hadn’t already jumped the shark, he then accused opponents of Israel’s multiple and expanding genocides of “having lost their moral compass”. 

“Israel and the USA are falsely cast as the oppressors. Some support Hamas even though they hang gay people! The hypocrisy and bias of self-professed human rights advocates is clear.

“There was no genocide in Gaza. Israel should be commended for the low number of civilians that were killed in the end. People marched on bridges and shouted genocide and they don’t know what they are talking about.”

As I sat there again absorbing familiar, malleable talking points, still half yearning for the distracting, soothing comfort of the car door and the crushing of my own nads, it occurred to me debunking each nugget of bullshit would only play into their hands. This was a flooded zone of effluent if ever there was one. The quantity of lies is as much the point as the quality of them. Essentially, each utterance fell into a few categories:

• We’re the victims (always), and never responsible for anything
• History and context begin when convenient (Oct 7, Hamas, Nazis, whatever works)
• “Terror groups”, “proxies” or “regimes” want Israelis dead because of Islam and an innate terrorist gene, nothing else going on here, no sir!
• Iran wants nuclear weapons (Israel has them, but we don’t talk about that)
• Ground laying for a potential false flag attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque, claiming the Iranians were carelessly targeting the area 
• Fear, fear, fear
• Some sucking up to the corporate journalists in the room
• And that ol’ chestnut, “it’s complicated”

With advances in modern psychology and trauma theory, plus readily available indie debunking efforts of misinformation, you’d have to be wilfully gormless not to notice what’s happening on the macro level. Because it is transparent. And you are a dipshit if you haven’t clocked it yet.

If you grow up being told you’re special, chosen, more human than your neighbours, righteously justified in atrocity, besieged by savages that want to kill you, not because you’re stealing their land and killing their kids, but because of some mysterious ancient hatred, you turn out to be a violent narcissistic psychopath with a victim complex. Shock, horror! And apparently that works on a national level, not just an individual one. In that facet, Israel chose their ambassador to Australia appropriately: a speech like this could not have been made by someone that didn’t embody Israel’s evil, twisted id.  

“The truth is that Hamas and Hezbollah disguise themselves as press, and remain terrorist operatives,” Newman spat. “I can send to any journalist here interested lists of dozens of so-called journalists who were, or are, operatives of Hamas and Hezbollah. They dress up as ambulance drivers [why would that help them, Israel targets those too!?! – ed]. They know Israel will be very careful not to hit anything, ambulances, schools, mosques, just in order to disguise themselves. This is actually a war crime.”

In response to the NPC talk, Australian Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) President Nasser Mashni said, “It is disgraceful that the National Press Club has chosen to platform a representative and an apologist for the genocidal state of Israel, particularly as it expands its war crimes from Gaza to Lebanon and neighbouring countries… That is not balance, it is propaganda, and sadly, this is the ongoing state of the mainstream Australian media… At a time when Palestinians are still being slaughtered, this decision sends a clear message to Australian Palestinians and their allies – you do not matter, and those who speak for you will be silenced.

“The National Press Club cannot claim to uphold journalistic integrity while platforming oppressors and silencing voices for the oppressed.“

Over the course of its slaughter in Gaza, Israel has killed hundreds of journalists. I know this to be truth because basically all my sources for two and a half years of reporting have been murdered by the IDF.

Israel committed this journocide because the brave, fearless, tragic reporting of Palestinian journalists was breaking decades of Western propaganda. Because of their sacrifice, much of the world now sees clearly, even within the Evil Empire. All those emulsified children didn’t seem so much like terrorists. All those flattened cities didn’t look like “defence”. All those trapped, hunted Palestinians were finally being understood as human, rather than “human shields”. For a National Press Club to host a man spitting on the fine work of our murdered Palestinian colleagues is unforgivable. This is an illegitimate sham of an institution, filled with shills, hacks, ghouls and dickheads that ought to do some reading into the Nuremberg trials before they decide to further platform such grotesque genocidal complicity. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got a date with a car door.