Macquarie University: Jew-haters of the world unite!

Staff of Macquarie University describe their blog on the Middle East:

Khaldoun is a site that places scholarly and informed perspectives into the public realm to promote understanding, tolerance and ultimate peace in the Middle East.

Let’s see how all that current of understanding, tolerance and peace is flowing, shall we?

The nonviolent protests of Palestinians, at any rate, generally receive no coverage unless the Israelis shoot and kill children at them…

The remainder of the coverage concerns Israel’s ongoing overt and covert war against the Palestinians on all its fronts: new settlements, water expropriation and theft, smashing of Palestinian villages, incursions into Palestinians cities and abductions of Palestinians (including civilians and elected officials), and the siege on the Palestinian economy…

But perhaps of greatest interest is the astonishingly vicious op-ed published by Benny Morris in yesterday’s New York Times. Morris goes so far as to justify an Israeli preemptive nuclear strike on Iran. The op-ed concedes Israel’s own possession of a nuclear arsenal but treats Iran’s alleged pursuit of the same as an intolerable threat to all humanity…

Fisk’s book is really an eye witness acount of the human cost of the betrayal and destruction of the Middle East by morally bankrupt governments in close collaboration with the “west”. Fisk’s challenge to his readers is to accept the burden of the US and UK government’s role in creating, and sustaining, a region that is wracked by violence, authoritarianism and intolerance…

Enough time may have passed since the events of 9/11 for further analysis of the causes of the attacks on that fateful day in 2001. It is certainly time to move beyond the banal rhetoric of a discredited US adminstration that has relied on that tragic event to launch the Middle East into another cycle of violence that only repeats the errors of the past….

The dehumanisation of war has been one of the most unfortunate aspects of the violence committed in the Middle East, including the Israeli violence in Lebanon and Palestine…

Today’s selection of articles largely skips over the coverage of the Israeli prisoner swap with Hezbollah while searching elsewhere for news of Israel’s continued practice of abducting Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and using them as bargaining chips of various kinds to pressure the PA, or Hamas, or to appease its own right-wing public. These abductions and kidnappings happen day-in, day-out, week after week, month after month, year after year, and are never called by their proper name: hostage-taking…

Today’s selection of media includes coverage of yet another round of Israeli raids in the West Bank. This time they attacked a shopping mall, yesterday it was a girls’ school and a medical centre….

Finally, by way of human interest stories are the last two items — one reporting on the battle by a 6-year-old girl and her family to remain in Israel for medical treatment after an Israeli attack left her completely paralyzed, and another story reporting on the decision of a Palestinian family who lost a teenage child to Israeli fire to donate organs to save the lives of Israelis…

Here are a couple of reports that describe, from different perspectives, an interesting phenomenon on Google Earth.  First, from the Jerusalem Post:

Anti-Israel activity on the Google Earth application has been stepped up this week, with the message “Nakba – The Palestinian Catastrophe” now appearing when users scroll over the orange dots that speckle locations across the entire map of Israel.

The Jerusalem Post, which explains the technology of how it works, condemns it as propaganda.

Then, from Palestine Remembered, the organization that has done this:

Our presentation includes the following:

All cities & villages that were destroyed and ethnically cleansed by the Israelis. 
All cities & villages in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. 
All refugee camps including the camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria… 
Several well known concentrations camps.

…

The BBC is covering video footage of Israeli settlers beating an elderly shepherd, his wife, and their nephew with a baseball bat, as they graze their goats on land near the illegal settlement…

Gee, the Jews seem pretty horrible, don’t they? And that’s only from reading the entries, not the comments, which are largely from people who think these Jews really are the cause of most of the world’s evils:

1-Without Israel, there wouldn’t have been the destruction and bloodshed resulting from the Israeli-Arab wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, the Invasion of Iraq in 2003, and 2006 war in Lebanon.

2-Without Israel, there wouldn’t have been Al Qaeda and its crimes and atrocities in America, Iraq and Afghanistan.

3-Without Israel, there wouldn’t have been “terrorist” organizations and ruthless suicide bombing and killing.

Etc, etc.

Excuse me, but why is Macquarie University publishing such a diatribe of hatred, barely indistinguishable from old-fashioned Jew-baiting? Where is any pretence, even, of presenting both sides of a critical debate?