COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

It was with a sense of disgust rather than despair that I read in The Jerusalem Post today [February 2024]: “‘Antisemitic’ UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese banned from Israel.” We’re being gas-lighted again and this is a chance to push back against the narrative that to support victims of Israel is to somehow be antisemitic.

Back in November 2023 as the Israeli exterminations of Palestinians were ramping up, I had the privilege to hear and speak to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

She visited Wellington as part of a long-scheduled visit to Australia and New Zealand and spoke to government ministers, relief organisations, journalists and packed halls of citizens who shared a sense of horror at what was playing out in Gaza.

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Her speeches were filled with knowledge and forensic clarity, only matched by her decency and sense of humanity — which extended to great courtesy shown to a lone and agitated Israeli supporter at a meeting I attended.

In issuing the banning order, two Israeli ministers stated: “The era of Jews being silent is over. If the UN wants to return to being a relevant body, its leaders must publicly disavow the antisemitic words of the special envoy.”

This is of course a vulgar lie told by ministers actively pursuing genocide. These two indeed aren’t silent: the scream, roar and boom of their shells, missiles and snipers’ bullets have shouted to the world how far the Zionist state has descended into the bowels of depravity.

The Jewish diaspora are anything but silent too — I have been immensely impressed by the courage and persistence of Jewish people worldwide who have shunned the fiction that to be anti-Zionist is to be antisemitic. I hear them loud and clear chanting with righteous indignation, “Not in our name!”

Francesca Albanese rejects false accusations            Video: Al Jazeera

Albanese’s riposte
What really steamed the ministers and momentarily deflected their attention from the slaughter of innocents was Albanese’s riposte to a casual lie by French President Emmanuel Macron: “October 7 was the largest antisemitic massacre of our century.”

Albanese responded, quite rightly, surely self-evidently: “The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism but in response to Israel’s oppression.” She also stated her respect for the victims of the attack.

When courageous people are attacked by malign and powerful actors, it takes moral clarity and steely determination to walk into a sea of troubles and oppose the true villains. We all need to do that now — and not remain silent.

In the past couple of months Israel has, with the complicity of the white-dominated Western countries, tried to destroy UNRWA, the primary UN organisation providing relief to the Palestinian people, as they endure this genocidal siege.

Because of Israel’s powerful allies, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has kept mum and ignored the vast number of human rights atrocities committed by Israel. (Editor: The ICC subsequently issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity on 21 November 2024).

The Israelis have also hoicked and spat out their contempt for the International Court of Justice. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir commented, “Hague Smague — The ICJ has only proven what everyone already knew, that it is only seeking to prosecute the Jewish nation”.

Traducing the ICJ in this way is another attempt to gaslight us all. If we can do one decent thing it would be to get our governments to raise their voices in defence of the brutalised and besieged United Nations.

Stuck in settler colonial regime
Albanese told audiences on both sides of the Tasman: “When I speak of human rights, I speak of both the Palestinians and the Israelis, who are stuck in a settler colonial regime; this is what we have to solve together.”

She went on to say, “ I will always stand with the victim.”

There is good reason to try to silence Francesca Albanese. She is an authority in the detail of the dehumanisation inflicted on the Palestinians. She has seen the daily lack of proportionality, the discourse of genocide, the military and administrative controls, the deprivation of sanitary services, food and medicine, the surveillance technology, the casual killings, the financial chocking of a people, the way the Israelis are eating up Palestine inch by inch as the West looks the other way.

In short, more than most people she understands the structural system of oppression that is denying the Palestinians the right to exist as a people — culturally, economically, politically. She is a humanist and the exact opposite of an antisemite.

Albanese is one of legions of good people besieged by Israel and its allies. The racist white elites in Europe and the USA are more than happy to adopt a definition that conflates anti-semitism with criticism of Israel, using the recently-minted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition as a tool to silence (that word again) defenders of Palestinian rights.

When the right-wing of UK Labour set to work to oust Jeremy Corbyn, they succeeded, deploying an antisemitic slur. By the time the purge had finished, thousands of Labour progressives had been eliminated from the party membership, including large numbers of Jewish progressives.

The Labour Files, a must-see Al Jazeera documentary, based on a data dump of internal Labour files, uncovered the astonishing statistic that if you were a Jewish member of the UK Labour party you were seven times more likely to be expelled for antisemitism than a non-Jew.

Dustbin of dirty tricks
It’s high time we kick this ghastly trope, this despicable manoeuvre equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism into the dustbin of dirty tricks. Jewish people have suffered persecution for their faith over the centuries. It does their memory a huge disservice — not least because now it is quite clear that genocide is the highest stage of Zionism.

For the record: I have Jewish friends who I invite to read and critique my articles before publication. They are not self-hating Jews, they are not antisemitic, and nor am I. We stand shoulder to shoulder with Jewish people worldwide who are appalled at what is being done in the name of Judaism.

Francesca Albanese said something else memorable that evening: “History is also made of watershed moments, when things change. Let’s make this one of them.”

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Scoop on 14 February 2024.

With the rapid spread of the dreaded Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic across the Pacific and Asia many people naturally seek online assurance and news they can trust.

Facebook has seen a nuclear explosion of posts and misinformation, especially in countries like Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.

In PNG’s case the flow of quality information slowed with the lone foreign correspondent in Port Moresby, Natalie Whiting, recalled “temporarily” by the ABC although competent local journalists are striving to fill her shoes.

The small nation of Timor-Leste (East Timor) was awash with foreign correspondents during the bloody period from 1999 to 2002 when it emerged from brutal Indonesian occupation after being invaded in 1975 after the Portuguese colonial empire collapsed.

This sparked the first wave of bloodshed and violence that claimed 200,000 lives. It gained independence in 2002 under UN supervision and life has improved significantly for its current 1.5 million citizens, most still living in villages.

Through all this turmoil one Timor-based foreign correspondent, Antonio Sampaio, continues to play an outstanding role in providing timely and accurate information reporting for the Portuguese newsagency Lusa.

So timely and accurate, I was told by some local journalists earlier this month, they were positively envious. Too many scoops,

Fact check training
I met Antonio this month for a 45-minute session of fine Timorese coffee and Portuguese snacks at his favourite haunt in the gleaming new 6-storey Timor Plaza in the capital Dili. I had been in the country running fact-check training for Timorese colleagues.

During our conversation his phone rang four times. Tips from high-ranking Timorese on the ongoing political crisis before the first confirmed case of Covid-19 set the cat among the pigeons.

Sampaio apologised for the phone interruptions but agreed when I suggested his endless scoops were the result of accurate, balanced reporting and a high level of trust.

His CV, when he was honoured by Timor-Leste, is impressive.

“Antonio Sampaio been covering Timor-Leste since the end of 1990, having written thousands of news stories about the situation in the territory. He wrote about Timor-Leste for Lusa, Diário de Notícias, Publico, Expresso, Jornal de Notícias and most of the Portuguese written press.

“He followed the situation in Timor-Leste for RTP, TVI, RDP, Radio Renaissance and Radio Nova. In Australia he reported on the situation in Timor-Leste during the Indonesian occupation in the newspapers of the group News Limited, including The Australian, on SBS radio and television, including with reports on the Indonesian campaign in which the massacre of Santa Cruz on 12 November 1991 occurred.

“The work in the period earned him the Correspondents Prize in Portugal in 1991 when he was 20 years old. In 1994/1995 he won two journalism awards in Portugal, the Gazeta Prize and the Press Club Award for a television documentary on oppression during the Suharto regime in Indonesia.

First permanent foreign journalist
“He arrived in Timor-Leste in March 1999 and was the first permanent foreign journalist based in the territory – as a bureau chief for Lusa agency – until 2004.

“He opened Lusa’s first delegation in Timor-Leste and despite been placed elsewhere (Geneva and Spain) he continued to be asked to help at times of crises, such as 2006 and 2008. He returned as a bureau chief to Timor in 2014. In 2019 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Timor-Leste. He continues to write daily with an extensive coverage of Timor-Leste.”

Yes indeed. We discussed a common link. A dual citizen, he was born in Portugal and emigrated to Australia in 1987.

First job was a copyboy on The Australian newspaper in Sydney. Sampaio wrote page one reports on the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre by Indonesian troops of protesting students in the now infamous Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili.

In my case, I started much earlier than him as a second year cadet journalist on The Australian’s Brisbane bureau (I was half the bureau).

Today Lusa. the official Tatoli news agency, TempoTimor and the Timor Post are the most popular news sources in the country while all of them provide a limited English service.

Facebook followers
In my case lately I’ve posted on Facebook (420,000 FB followers locally) a lot on Timor-Leste after my 38th trip to the wonderful country (since my first trip to help launch the first daily Timor Post in February 2000 with computers and other equipment donated by News Limited, Reuters and Fairfax).

Timor’s lone ranger correspondent has corrected me on more than one occasion for errors (not deliberate) in my Google Translation of various reports during the ongoing Covid-19 case confirmation.

I unashamedly join Antonio Sampaio in a chorus hoisting a local cold Bintang beer: Viva Timor-Leste!

Bob Howarth is a veteran journalist with a career that spans working in Australia (Fairfax, News Limited), London (The Times), Hong Kong (South China Morning Post) and as managing director and publisher of the PNG Post-Courier daily. He is currently country correspondent for Reporters Sans Frontières (Paris) and media training adviser to the Timor-Leste Press Council and UNDP Timor-Leste. He is also a research associate with the Pacific Media Centre.