An Aussie Journalist & the Palestinian Rabbit Hole

3,308 words

Arabic version here

John Lyons
Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir
Sydney: Harpers Collins Publishers, 2017

Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism’s Toughest Assignment
Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2021

John Lyons is an Australian journalist who pulled an assignment to Jerusalem and the Middle East for more than a half-decade. His two books about his stay in Occupied Palestine provide insight into how America would be if Jews such as Adam Schiff, Madeline Albright, or Max Boot ever fully got their way in the United States. They also show why it is critical for Americans to maintain the Second Amendment and acquire their own firearms and ammunition. Occasional school shootings are a terrible, but ultimately small, price to pay for maintaining the small hedge of protection from the J-Establishment in America.

Americans are like Palestinians: The same people who want the Palestinians to be destroyed also want our destruction.

Balcony is a memoir of Lyons’ six years in the Middle East, which coincided with the Arab Spring, the Libyan disaster, the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt, and the start of the Syrian Civil War. He saw firsthand the dreadful price the Palestinians pay for living so close to well-armed and well-funded Jews.

Lyons takes the reader into a balanced view of Israel rather than the usual Soviet-style utopian mirage that Americans get in their lying media. Within Israel itself, there is a simmering conflict between religious and secular Jews; when secular Jews go for a drive on Saturday, religious Jews will hurl stones at them. Children are given Ritalin by their teachers and parents to keep them docile, but when they’re off the drug over holidays, they lash out uncontrollably. Christianity is completely suppressed. The site where Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount doesn’t even have a marker. Christian clergy are abused everywhere. Gangs of Jews beat up lone Arab laborers. Lyons even tells the story of an Israeli who deliberately ran over an Ethiopian meter maid with his car and was then let off in a one-sided legal process.

Balcony shows the Israeli occupation’s ugly truth. Just a half a mile from where American evangelical tourists are separated from their money, Palestinians lose their homes. Nowhere is this more starkly apparent than in Jerusalem.

The dispossession works in the following way: the Jews are armed, the Palestinians are not. Jewish settlers will then go into a Palestinian neighborhood or apartment complex, and if a house or apartment is empty for any reason, armed Jews will occupy it. When they take over apartments, the Jews who now own it will knock down the walls and move into the next as well. If a Palestinian takes him to court, the Israeli judges will dither and drag the proceedings out until the settler eventually wins.

The Israeli army controls the Palestinians’ movements. They are subjected to endless checkpoints and must apply for a pass to go from one area to the next. There are 101 different types of passes. It hardly matters if a Palestinian has a pass, however, since no soldier is required to honor it. Palestinian ambulances are forced to wait with their patients inside, laborers cannot get to their job sites, and their farms are left untilled. The Israeli army also uses the Palestinians as unwilling training subjects. Israeli soldiers have been known to burst into their houses unannounced and throw stun grenades.

The Israeli army spends a great deal of time detaining Palestinian children. They are forced to wear prison garb, are chained together, and are then tried by the military. They are tortured into making confessions. Under such ferocious duress, most children plead guilty. Pleading innocence only heads to longer detention. The Israelis have developed other forms of nastiness to use against children as well: sewer pipes’ ventilation shafts will be deliberately placed next to Palestinian schools, for example.

Then there are the Jewish settlers. They started to populate the West Bank in large numbers shortly after the 1993 Oslo Agreement. For a time, Oslo was hailed as a great triumph for peace, but it hasn’t worked out that way. The agreement allowed the Israelis to build a parallel road system directly linking Israel to the various West Bank settlements. The Palestinians are forbidden from using those roads. The settlers are a powerful bloc in Israel’s domestic politics. Their concerns dominate everything.

Lyons estimates that the settlements’ costs to Israel have been in the range of $100 billion over the last 40 years. Those costs aren’t paid by Israel, though. The Jewish state gets piles of money from Australia, the United States, and other nations through Jewish lobbying organizations. Even individual US state pays out to Israel. One direct cost that is borne by the American taxpayer is the Iron Dome rocket defense system. It was developed in the United States, and each missile costs $90,000.

One prominent lobbying group in Australia is the Australia/Israeli & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC). Its executive director, Colin Rubenstein, is a big critic of John Lyons’ reporting. Rubenstein is part of an enormous media- and information-handling operation that is global in scope. Jewish journalists and media agents work tirelessly to keep Israel’s immoral actions out of the news or to spin them in a positive direction.

One such journalist is Noga Tarnopolsky. When Lyons reported on a middle-class Palestinian professional whose house was seized by Jewish settlers, Tarnopolsky went on a mission to prove that Lyons had misquoted the Palestinian. This turned out to be a betrayal: Noga and Lyons knew each other, but Noga was only feigning friendship. The story is illustrative of the trigger points in Israel’s attempt to shape its media image. As long as Palestinian concerns are generalized, there is no outcry, but if a Palestinians name and his story are described in depth, there is pushback from the organized Jewish community.

Media Manipulation & Control

Israeli and Jewish media manipulation and control is the focus of Dateline Jerusalem. It shows that in Australia, reporting on Israel is every bit as controlled and slanted as in the United States. The main agency organizing pro-Israel attacks on Australian journalists is the AIJAC.

No stone is left unturned when it comes to the AIJAC’s attempts to dominate the Australian media. When Jennine Khalik, an Australian citizen of Palestinian ethnicity, was hired, there was a furor that culminated in Israeli diplomats personally visiting newspaper editors to express their anger that a paper would hire a Palestinian. The hostility towards Khalik even extended to a hostile letter-writing campaign following her review of a play which depicted fictional events set in Gaza. Other Australian media outlets have been targeted as well. On November 9, 2011, the Israeli Ambassador to Australia, Yuval Rotem, wrote the editor of The Age, stating, “Under your watch your newspaper allowed the publication by an editor of Palestinian background . . .” Obviously, there is a double standard applied to ethnicity here.

Not all of what he describes is an iron fist of hostile e-mails and letters or visits from diplomats. Israel also sponsors journalists to go on junkets to Occupied Palestine to report on the shiny Israeli geegaws. Lyons himself even went on such a boondoggle. After his tour in Jerusalem, he came to realize that his trip was a mistaken form of collusion. His only justification for it was that he then knew for certain that Israel has one face it shows to up-and-coming professionals in the greater Anglo-Saxon world, and another face to the Palestinians under Jewish military control.

My Own Thoughts on Counter-Israel Efforts

The greatest domestic dilemma for American whites is the illicit second constitution that is the 1964 Civil Rights Act, along with the (legal and illegal) immigration crisis. In other words, “civil rights” is the king of our problems and immigration is its queen. But the Israel Question is the emperor that reigns above them all.

Foreign policy has important differences from domestic considerations. International affairs can get out of hand very quickly. While Congress will dither and bicker over the appropriations for a bridge in rural Alaska, a single tweet from a foreign leader might cause billions in military aid to be sent to a reckless ally. One day a third-rate nation topples another, and thousands of troops get deployed. Lobbyists for Israel ensnare America into the others’ ugly affairs.

American foreign policy has been enslaved by Emperor Israel since the day the Johnson administration whitewashed the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. The costs of this relationship have been staggering: a bloody deployment to Lebanon in 1983, deployments and expensive aid to Egypt, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — all of this adds up to a staggering total in excess of $3 trillion. This is not to mention thousands of dead and wounded American military personnel. American (along with Australian, British, and French) involvement in the Syrian Civil War likewise exacts a tremendous cost in blood and treasure and carries the moral stain of supporting jihadi savages who delight in broadcasting their cruelty to the world.

And that isn’t counting the direct financial aid to Israel.

For its part, Israel has destabilized the Middle East by pushing the Palestinians out of their native land. Perhaps the most tragic aspect of this situation is that there was a time when it was unthinkable for Americans, Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians to be at odds with each other. Yankee missionaries and businessmen established meaningful and profitable relationships with the people of the Levant prior to the First World War and the Balfour Declaration. So what to do about this great calamity?

Fruit-Juice Drinkers, Nudists, Sandal-Wearers, & Sex Maniacs

In doing research for this article, I watched videos and read the literature of pro-Palestinian activists. This changed the way I view the situation.

First, to my utter horror, I’ve realized that the pro-Palestinians are committing the same mistake that Thomas Jefferson made when he wrote that “all men are created equal.” Jefferson was only writing war propaganda. What he really meant was that Anglo-Americans were equal to Englishmen, especially the aristocrats in Parliament. But the logic of that statement is that if one says “A” and “B” is a sub-set of that, then “B” is equally valid. America was thus led into a terrible civil war and endless strife as a result of its former slaves.

Pro-Palestinian activists are validating a terrible “B” sub-set also. I have noticed that whenever an activist, usually from the Anglo-Saxon world, starts talking about what they saw in Palestine, they invariably start off by saying that they are on the land of the Jub-Jub Tribe that played the digeridoo made from the wood of the endangered Jub-Jub tree to the beat of a drum made from the skin of the rare albino pronghorn that is native to the prairies around Spearfish, South Dakota — or something along those lines.

This is a problem in that it ultimately invalidates every ethnostate in the world. Even the ancient Greeks arose out of the migration of the Dorians from somewhere else. Furthermore, the Turks originated in Central Asia, the English come from what is now Schleswig-Holstein, the Scots came from Ireland, the Arabs probably originated in Yemen, the Carthaginians came from Phoenicia, the Romans from Troy, and so on. In the case of the Americans, they built a civilization on Indian land, but in nearly every case they paid the Indians for it. Besides which, even the Indians came from somewhere else. The sacred homelands of the Sioux in the Dakotas are recent; the Sioux originated in Wisconsin and moved west after they received horses from European colonists around the turn of the eighteenth century. Likewise, none of these groups required funding from any other people to create their ethnostates, and none are doing today what the Israelis routinely do.

The Palestinians are also too aligned with the political Left. Every marginal victory that they eke out tends to be affiliated with fringe groups, like Welsh socialists who wish to make their nation a republic. To misquote George Orwell, “One gets the impression that the mere words [Free Palestine] draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist . . .”

The Israel Question is too big to be confined to a narrow portion of the political spectrum. The Americans who have undergone the most harm as a result of their country’s relationship with Israel tend to come from conservative backgrounds: working-class white men from deindustrialized mill-towns in the Heartland who aren’t into fruit-juice drinking and boys wearing dresses. This demographic is unharvested timber for Palestinian activists. The two groups’ struggle is the same.

Be Explicit & Have a Thick Skin

The pro-Palestine movement is not explicit enough. Using the term “settler-colonists” is missing the mark. As mentioned above, nearly every nation, including the Turks and the Standing Rock Sioux, can arguably be described as “settler-colonists.” The second problem is calling Israel an “apartheid state.” Apartheid South Africa gave the African tribes their own homeland, and white South African leaders took Bantu tribal concerns seriously. The apartheid pass system was nothing like the restrictions Palestinians are subjected to today.

One can cynically make the case that the South African drama was more closely related to lingering British and Afrikaner hostility from the Boer War than a genuine moral problem. Calling what the Israelis do to the Palestinians apartheid is a terrible slander upon the term.

SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett is on to something when she referred to the war in Occupied Palestine as the “Jewish-Palestine Conflict.” The statement was noted and hyped by Rachel Laser, President and CEO of Americans (sic) United for Separation of Church and State. Laser is Jewish. This sort of explicit statement is how the issue must be framed.

The organized Jewish community overwhelmingly supports Israel. Israel should be seen as a firebase with high-end, long-range weapons systems that can terrorize the world. It is a state which shelters Jewish criminals and is a menace to peace-loving people everywhere. Israel is not America’s “greatest ally,” nor is it much of an ally to Australia, England, or any other country.

The Israeli policy of dispossessing the Palestinians is supported by the Jewish community abroad. There is no real degree of separation between Israeli policy and the wishes of the Jewish diaspora. There is no people on Earth that is free of the possibility of becoming a Palestinian-like victim of Israel and the organized Jewish community.

All people concerned about Israel’s actions will be labeled “anti-Semites.” They should embrace the label or call themselves counter-Semites. There is no way out of this. Yes, you might be compared to Hitler, but there are many other historical figures from Emperor Claudius to King Edward I who dealt wisely with the Jews.

Counter-Israel activists can expect to be slandered in other ways as well. Many Palestinian activists who are female and attending American universities are accused of sexual misbehavior. This often results in catastrophic personal costs. Others have been denied jobs for their activism. The remedy in cases such are obvious.

Lastly, terms like “cosmopolitan elite” hide the nature of the problem as well. Counter-Currents publishes articles in a number of languages; we are a cosmopolitan elite! But our concerns our and ability to forge compromises between groups are considerably different from those of Israel and the organized Jewish community.

Be Squared Away

All public figures opposing Israeli/Jewish interests must be very cognizant of their financial dealings. Dr. David Duke and congressmen James Traficant and Jim Moran were all counter-Israel activists to varying degrees, and all were ensnared by accusations of financial chicanery which may or (more likely) may not have been true. Tread carefully and stay well within the law.

Media outlets critically reporting on Israel should also avoid political cartoons. Although it is unfair, using political cartoons in such an instance leaves the outlet open to accusations that they are no different from Nazi propaganda. I humbly suggest that such outlets use photographs of actual events. Nothing says Jewish censorship quite like the Israeli Air Force bombing the media tower in Gaza.

All counter-Semites must avoid the example of Billy Carter, the President’s brother. During the Carter administration, Billy became something of an embarrassing sensationalist who had a kernel of truth at the center of his escapades. He became a lobbyist for the Libyan government. (This was before the Libyan bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.)

Billy Carter failed terribly at this. He behaved and dressed like a Georgia redneck and urinated in front of reporters. His most lasting accomplishment ended up being Billy Beer. When one has a large audience, one needs to look good, speak well, dress well, and dodge foolishness. Billy Carter’s antics helped make Israel look good in the minds of the mainstream American public for several more decades. For its part, Libya was poorly served and the potential for a profitable relationship between Americans and Libya was tragically lost.

Lastly, no pro-Palestinian activist can be true to their own beliefs while also being hostile to the society in which they live. One cannot support Palestinian aims and support riots, poor government policies, open borders, and so on.

Christian Zionists

Israel’s primary non-Jewish supporters are the Christian Zionists. They interpret the Bible in such a way that they see the Jewish state as fulfilling Biblical prophecy. Modern Israel has nothing to do with Biblical prophecy, however. The only theological work that supports this view is the Scofield Bible, which was first printed in 1909 and revised again near the end of the First World War.

The author of that work, Cyrus Schofield, was not in fact prophesying an improbable event. The Ottoman Empire, of which Palestine was a part, had been in turmoil for a century or more before Schofield published his version of scripture. Serbia began its revolt against Turkish rule in 1804, Greece had become an independent nation by 1829, and other Balkan nations reemerged afterwards as well. It didn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing for the Ottomans in 1909.

I find it impossible to believe that the evils which the Israeli government perpetrates could possibly be a fulfillment of Christian scripture.

Facts are Important Things

A great many good middle-of-the-road liberals and centrists support the “two-state solution.” Many might naïvely think that a handful of Jewish and Palestinian women can get together and come up with a compromise over tea and cucumber sandwiches. Neither the Jewish diaspora or the Israelis wish for a “two-state solution” or any other compromise, however. Why should they? Their expenses are paid by others, they dominate the governments of every English-speaking country, and their media enablers spin every story Israel’s way. They can hold on for a long time given the way things are going.

To solve the lion’s share of the Middle East’s problems and quickly cause America’s internal issues to evaporate is for there to be a major change to Israel’s position. To put it darkly and plainly, Israel needs to suffer a military defeat on its own territory. The only way to achieve that is to end support for Israel — especially in the Anglosphere.

White advocates need to move into key positions in the United States. Every judicial appointment, every city council, and every political precinct is an opportunity for us. Continuing to support America First ideas is paramount. It is critical to get American troops out of ongoing missions in the Middle East that are not directly supporting the defense of oil production and the free flow of trade. Any other mission ultimately becomes about defending Israel.

Understanding how the media works is also important. Facts are important things, and facts are what John Lyons presents.

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