On the wrong side of history

Some people never learn. Catherine Delahunty, a Green Party member of Parliament, and bearer of a renowned name in the New Zealand protest movement, dragged along a 93 year Gunther Warner, who fled Germany before the Second World War to address a Palestine Rally in Auckland. I don't imagine that Gunther Warner is an expert on Middle-Eastern politics, his grasp of the meaning of dog-whistling words such as "Fascism", "Final Solution", "Pogrom", "Humanity",and the "Elimination of Arab people" is tenuous. Perhaps, being 93 years old, he spent a life-time protesting and supporting evil causes. He may be old enough to have supported the communists in the Spanish Civil War, he might have been a member of the USSR - New Zealand Friendship Association, with Joe Stalin as its pin-up boy, or perhaps he split with the Soviets and joined the supporters of Communist China and switched his allegiance to Mao Tse Tung. With the misuse of words he could save himself from the necessity to think, to analyze, to explore the reality behind his words. The louder he shouted these words the less he had to think. No one, even the most ardent supporter of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas group, implied that the aim of the Jews was the elimination of the Arab people, or that the Israeli politics with its heated debates and controversies is anything like a fascist government. It is chutzpah, and I hope that Mr Warner, even if he drifted away from Judaism knows this word, to support a fundamentalist Islamic movement and preach to the Israelis about human rights. The fact that members of Mr. Warner's family were murdered by the Nazis does not qualify him as an expert on the politics of the Middle-East. But then, at 93, he may be excused for being in his dotage and perhaps a little meshugah. But Catherine Delahunty, a member of Parliament and a political party that has a reasonable chance of having an input in New Zealand's foreign policy in the future ought to know better. She doesn't have to like Jews, she can have her own views on Zionism, but aligning herself with total misrepresentations of the tragic events of the Arab Israeli conflict through the misuse of emotive words is quite irresponsible.