Remember all the hubbubs that Dr. Mahathir's OIC speech generated when he mentioned how the friends of Israel 'run' our world? Forgotten then was the fact that in Oct. 2001, an Israeli radio station reported that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in a moment of pique towards his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, bellowed, "Don't worry about American pressure (on Israel). We (the Jewish People) control America, and Americans know it." Hyperbole aside, Sharon revealed that even the darkest suspicion about the U.S.-Israeli alliance is not without some merit.

Looking at the events in Sydney, one cannot be too surprised. There, the NSW Premier Bob Carr's decision to present this year's 'Sydney Peace Prize' to the Palestinian activist and founder of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH), Professor Hannan Ashrawi, was challenged by pro-Israeli Jews and their friends in Australia.

The Sydney Peace Prize jury unanimously awarded the prize to Hannan Ashwari in August. Ashwari gave her Peace Prize Lecture on November 5 and received the prize from Mr. Carr in NSW Parliament on November 6.

Mr. Peter Wertheim, a past president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, was quite upset about the Premier's decision. Fearing Jewish backlash, the Sydney University withdrew the use of its Great Hall for the presentation of the peace prize. The lord Mayor of Sydney, Lucy Turnbull, dissociated the City of Sydney, sponsor of the prize, from the presentation. One can guess the reasons behind her decision: Lucy's husband Malcolm is trying to get a nomination for a parliamentary seat and without Jewish support it is impossible to get elected in Sydney.

Wertheim's disgruntled voice (Sydney Morning Herald, Oct. 23) was not unexpected given the fact that people like him have not been able to rise above their 'boxes' and see the world as it is from a neutral point. As far as the Palestinian-Israeli crisis is concerned, his views are arrogantly partisan and myopic. For years, the leaders and diehard supporters of the rogue state of Israel have tried everything to obliterate the Palestinian identity. To their dismay, however, nothing seemed to have worked. The Palestinians are a bunch of 'difficult' and 'uncompromising' people: neither would they go away nor would they give up on their rights to statehood on the 20% of historical Palestine! Nearly 80% of their territory was snatched away from them, hundreds of thousands uprooted from their ancestral homes, basic human rights denied, schools, colleges, commercial centers, homes and hospitals demolished, Palestinians killed like 'vermin' and 'cockroaches;' still they like to hang on to that tiny piece of land Ð the pre-'67 West Bank and Gaza, truncated by settlements and settler-roads, road-blocks and Apartheid walls that have reduced the territory to 'Bantustans.'

Image is an important weapon in the battle for winning neutral hearts. Only an adept craftsman who is able to draw a hideous image of the villain wins that battle. The Nazis and Fascists were brilliant in their demonic portrayal of European Jewry before Hitler and Mussolini collaborated for a 'Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.' And it worked, millions of Jews were killed and others were forced to immigrate to Palestine. The propaganda against these Holocaust victims was so successful that during the climax of 'Final Solution' (1939-45), (if I am not mistaken) even a paper like the NY Times had no more than half a dozen coverage on this sad saga. For years, none of the Allied Powers (including the USA) came to rescue these victims. (Britain at one time even thought of allying with Hitler's Germany.) The Zionists have learned this tactic only too well from their one-time persecutors to practice it upon their uprooted hosts. They have even perfected this tactic by exploiting the politics of 'anti-Semitism.' Anyone (even a believing Jew) who questions the Zionist savagery, the God-given right to discriminate non-Jews in God's real estate, ought to be an anti-Semite! So when Gideon Levy of the Ha'aretz reports that pregnant Palestinians are stopped in Israeli checkpoints and are sometimes forced to give birth in open fields without proper medical help, and that new born babies sometimes die, the journalist is labeled as an anti-Semite.

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Character assassination (outside physical assassination - a tactic employed by Mossad, IDF and the armed settlers) has, therefore, become a powerful arsenal to muffle the Palestinian resistance movement. None is immune from such caricaturisation Ð from its farmers to intellectuals to leaders. When it comes to depicting Palestinians, it is always an angry mob bent on revenge and when it comes to Israelis, it is an Israeli hospital with wounded settlers or a Jewish graveyard with a sobbing Israeli family. The western media won't show daily Palestinian humiliation, the cold-blooded murders of children like Muhammad al-Durra and a peace-activist like Rachel Corey among them. They won't publicize the UN report, which blames Israel for causing starvation in the Occupied Territories. Palestinians are depicted as 'terrorists' and the Israelis as the ones whose 'security' was at stake. Forgotten are the facts that it is the state of Israel which is terrorizing the people of the Occupied Territories and violating the charters of the Geneva Convention, committing war crimes. It is the Israeli Zionists who are and have always been against the notion of coexistence, who are against peace, who want the full piece of the pie. No one questions: why are the settlers there to begin with in the Occupied Territories? Does not Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention clearly state: "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies?" The root causes of the Palestinian unrest are ignored and symptoms are treated. Thanks to Goebbles and his spiritual children!

Wertheim accused Ashrawi of not supporting the Oslo Accord and Palestinian Roadmap to peace. Having read Ashrawi's speeches in various nets and newspapers over many years, I believe Wertheim's claims are unjustified and belong to similar campaigns, orchestrated by pro-Sharon/Israeli groups that try to smear the images of leaders and intellectuals of the Palestinian community.

Prof. Ashrawi, like late Prof. Edward Said, has been a very articulate spokesperson for the Palestinian cause. In an article 'Anatomy of Racism,' Dr. Ashrawi wrote, "Blaming the victim has been the common resort of the guilty in rationalizing and distorting the horror of the crime itself. ... The essential prerequisite, of course, is the total dehumanization of the victims and the elimination of their most basic rights and attributes as well as claims to protection. Inevitably, the resultant compound victimization is further enhanced by increased vulnerability, distortion, and exclusion from the protection of human consideration and moral imperatives. Hence, the latest eruption of confrontations between the Israeli occupation army and civilian Palestinian protestors became the playing field for the full force of the Israeli spin machine in a most deliberate, concentrated, and racist exercise of deception and dehumanization directed against a whole people."