Australian Liberal senator, Eric Abetz, on 31 May, enthusiastically backed Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s letter to the Palestinian Authority asking whether Australian aid is channeled to the Martyrs Fund which Abetz repeatedly and falsely asserts funds terrorist activities.
Bishop’s Martyr’s Fund letter is cut from the same fake funds-diverted-to-terrorism-template as her fake accusations that World Vision’s Mohammed el-Halabi was channeling aid funds to Hamas.
The Martyr’s Fund, which Abetz labels ‘outrageous,’ similar to the Australian War Widows Pension “paid under the Veterans’ Entitlements Act to compensate widowed partners of veterans who have died as a result of war service or eligible defence service,’ is paid to families of Palestinians slaughtered by Israeli state terrorism.
The families of the 124 peaceful protestors slaughtered in Gaza since March 30th would welcome this help as the majority of the young men killed were loving fathers of young families already struggling to survive under Israel’s illegal and viciously cruel siege of Gaza.
It is easy to understand FM Julie Bishop’s inhumane indifference to the suffering of Palestinian families under the brutal occupation of the Jewish state when one considers her inhumane indifference in 1987 to the suffering of Peter Heys dying from the painful and aggressive asbestos linked cancer – mesothelioma, when, as lead lawyer she fought his compensation claims against CSR and its subsidiary Midalco.
Bishop has exonerated her actions that “caused extra suffering for people already dying with painful diseases, causing extra trauma for families of victims as well” along the lines of the Adolph Eichmann defense – that she was following her client’s orders.
Bishop is so adept at following zionist orders that her office could virtually be a subsidiary of the Jewish state’s National Information Directorate (Hasbara) within Netanyahu’s office. Hasbara is propaganda which, by blaming the victim, normalises Israeli crimes against humanity and war crimes. Bishop’s amnesia on international law and multiple UN resolutions regarding the illegality of zionist settlements/colonies is a hasbara asset.
In 2016, both Bishop and Abetz stated that Australia wouldn’t have supported UN Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlement expansionism as illegal. Furthermore Abetz had invested considerable energy in calling on the Australian government to move its embassy to Jerusalem in line with the USA which gave Israel a green light for further relentless colonial expansionism i.e. lebensraum on Palestinian land. And yet Abetz hypocritically warns China on its South China Sea expansion, “know that when they don’t play by the rules, there are consequences.” No consequences for Israel.
So what underpins the callous indifference and despicable hypocrisy of the ‘Christian’ Abetz who purports to believe that “Every human is of equal value because we are made in God’s image” while blithely collaborating with the Zionists to destroy God’s image in Palestine?
There is a popular TV documentary, Who Do You Think You Are? in which celebrities look into their family tree to understand what and who may have influenced their identity and so the answer to the above question may be found in Abetz’ family history.
Eric Abetz’s great-uncle SS-Standartenführer Otto Abetz, in his role as Hitler’s ambassador to Vichy France, was a self-made culture connoisseur of French works of art looted from Jews and freighted to Berlin.
Plus he was an elegant executioner; evidence of this was presented at the Adolph Eichmann trial, “The first is Prosecution document No. 438. It is a letter from Otto Abetz, the German Ambassador in Paris, to the German Foreign Ministry. In it he reacts to the plan of the Head Office for Reich Security to deport 40,000 Jews from France. He says he has no objection to the operation, he expresses only one request – that the deportations should be carried out in a manner that will cause anti-Semitism among the French population to increase.”
Otto was also responsible for turning down the “plea to prevent the last train of Resistance prisoners being shipped off to extermination camps”. (Barbara Probst Solomon)
At Otto’s 1949 trial, the ‘charges against him took 3 and a half hours to read’.
Furthermore Otto was an enthusiastic master mobiliser of collaboration from the Vichy French through Propaganda Abteiling which “subsidised smaller dailies and weeklies that made a point of denouncing known or suspected Jews”, promoting Nazi causes and referring to the resistance as ‘terrorists’. ( And the Show Went On, Alan Riding)
Senator Abetz has publicly distanced himself from his SS right-winger anti-semitic relative, and yet with paradoxical enthusiasm the senator embraces islamophobia and aids and abets his Liberal Party’s nailing its political colours to the zionist mast and wholeheartedly collaborating in the Zionist Nazi-like policy of genocide and lebensraum through ethnic cleansing and deporting indigenous Palestinians to wretched camps including the vast unliveable concentration camp of Gaza.
The Senate Estimates Show
While not as artful in propaganda manipulation as Uncle Otto, watch the senator smugly (albeit clumsily) addressing the Australian Foreign Affairs Department with loaded questions and inferences designed to canonise Israel, to undermine the Palestinian Authority (PA), and to denounce Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
Well, contrary to the senator’s flights of fancy, Israel is not the only democracy in the Middle East, it is viewed by the UN as a brutal apartheid state. Also contrary to his pathetic juggling of shekels, the PA definitely does not divert funds to, support or encourage terrorist activities as its security agreement with Israel, forged in the Oslo Accords, makes the PA a far more deplorable collaborator than Australia. Nor is Hamas a terrorist organisation – its right to resist is sanctioned in the United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/33/24 of 29 November 1978:
“2. Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle;”
In response to the senator’s presumptuous question that there has been no Israeli soldier or settler in Gaza since 2005, the facts belie the senator’s and the Foreign Affairs department’s inept ignorance or cover-up – hundreds of Israeli soldier/settlers invaded Gaza in 2008/9, in 2011 and in 2014. Every Israeli, according to Israeli dissident Miko, the son of Israeli General Matti Peled, is a settler.
As Abetz manoeuvred the confirmation that Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar did threaten to “tear down the border and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies,” he oozed pro-Israel bias by dismissing the inconvenient truth of the Israeli sado-psychopathic mindset:
- Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s call for genocide: “They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
- “Deputy Knesset Speaker Bezalel Smotrich after he posted on the weekend that a Palestinian teenager who slapped an Israeli soldier should have been shot in the kneecap.” Haaretz
- Defense Minister Lieberman on the Land Day Massacre of unarmed Gaza protestors: “Israeli soldiers did what was necessary. I think all our soldiers deserve a medal”
- “Likud MK Moshe Feiglin called for Israel to reconquer the Gaza Strip and for the military to set up tent encampments for Gaza civilians near the Sinai border, “until relevant emigration destinations are determined.” Times of Israel
- Education Minister and Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett: ““The two words – Palestinian state – are a historic disaster. They must not be said. This is our test.”
- “Palestinian residents in the occupied West Bank woke up this morning to hostile threats following a spree of violence by Israeli settlers calling for “death to Arabs” and for the expulsion of Palestinians from their land.” MEMO
- General Amiram Levin: “most of these people are born to die anyway, we just need to help them to it.”
Seemingly, the Abetz boys have a talent for fanciful myth-making and a talent as apologists for the indefensible. According to Eric’s brother, Peter, a member of the Western Australian parliament, Uncle Otto wasn’t all bad: he singlehandedly saved Paris by negotiating “with the Americans to, and the Wehrmacht, that the Germans would vacate Paris and not booby trap anything if the Americans gave them I think three or four days to withdraw and the French were incredibly grateful for that because that way Paris wasn’t actually destroyed.”
Nice try, but France gives credit to General Dietrich von Choltitz, the Nazi general in charge of Paris who disobeyed Hitler’s final destruction orders.
Collaborators and Christian charlatans, like Abetz and Bishop along with May, Trudeau, Merkel, Haley, Macron, Trump by selling out Palestinian rights and lives for trade and arms deals have also sold out their nations’ honour. These moral losers and Israel will inevitably lose out to the adamant destiny of Palestine’s freedom backed by international law.
Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters and editor of a volume of Palestinian poetry, I remember my name. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was convenor of Australia East Timor Association and coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.