Peter Boyle
With columnists for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian attacking Green Left Weekly in the same week, we must be doing something right.
On August 8, Gerard Henderson, SMH columnist and executive director of the Sydney Institute (a right-wing think tank) had a go at GLW for promoting the Hiroshima Day anti-war rallies, which raised calls such as: Stop the war on Lebanon and Palestine; No nuclear power, no uranium mining; Troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan; No attack on Iran. According to Henderson, these were not anti-war rallies because "those rallying oppose only one side in a two-sided military conflict".
Then he went on to attack the aid organisations Anglicord, Caritas and World Vision for running newspaper advertisements calling for "an international cease-fire immediately" in Lebanon. "This was consistent with the position of Israel's critics", Henderson ranted, proving his inability to run a consistent argument.
More significantly, he betrays the total opposition of the Israeli and US governments to the call for an immediate ceasefire. They want to mete out even more serious killing and destruction before any ceasefire.
Novelist John Birmingham had a bash at GLW in his column, "Righteous lefties lose out on the laughs", in the August 11 Australian.
"For a long time there has been a dreadful predictability of thinking on the Left, a lack of originality that means a thousand monkeys hammering away at a thousand typewriters could very quickly produce a whole issue of Green Left Weekly without even stopping for an expensive banana. The reflexive anti-Americanism is probably a Vietnam War-era relic, but what's new, and nearly as debilitating, is the lack of any sense of proportion or humour. It is possible to make a case in favour of prosecuting the war against al-Qa'ida and its franchises while arguing that Bush and his cohorts have comprehensively bungled the conflict from day one."
It is true that this monkey hasn't had a banana for months, and it pleads guilty to not seeing much humour in the massacre and destruction by US-backed Israeli armed forces in Lebanon and Palestine. Birmingham's Muslim-bashing jokes on his blog <http://birmo.journalspace.com> don't rise above the sophistication of smutty schoolboy humour and certainly won't kill anyone with laughter (with or without a banana or felafel their hands).
When a lefty-bashing columnist in the big-business media makes a suggestion, it's probably best to do the opposite. So when right-wing hack Miranda Devine attacks Al Gore's global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth as "alarmist", as she did in the August 10 SMH, that should convince any sane person to go along to one of the Green Left Weekly fundraising previews of this film being held around the country (see page 27 for details).
Events like these helped raise $1093 for the Green Left Weekly Fighting Fund last week. This brings the total raised so far this year to $108,234. If you can help make our Fighting Fund target of $250,000 (we are only 43% of the way there!), please send your donation now to PO Box 515, Broadway 2007, phone it through on the toll-free line 1800 634 206 (calls from within Australia only) or donate online at <http://www.greenleft.org.au/fogl.htm>.