The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council's journal "Review" which defamed Scott Balson in early 2000 by calling him anti-semitic is at its very best again when having a go at the Prime Minister of New Zealand. (See bottom of this page for more). This pathetic excuse of a magazine is owned by Mark Leibler - a member of the extremist Zionist movement.
This trashy outfit headed by tax cheats and wealthy Australian Jews is a sacred cow as far as Australia's media are concerned - but New Zealand's media. as you will see in the article below spill the beans on its sick agenda.
New Zealand Herald
27.07.2004
COMMENT
It must be pretty evident to most New Zealanders that the attack on Helen Clark by Ted Lapkin, of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council's (AIJAC) journal, Review, was founded on a series of factual misrepresentations, false comparisons and unsupported inferences.
Mr Lapkin condemned what he perceived to be a contrast between the Prime Minister's casual attitude to the trafficking of faked New Zealand passports in Bangkok and her fury at the attempt by Israeli agents to obtain a genuine one here.
If he has any evidence for his assertion that the Bangkok forgery ring is being run by al Qaeda, Mr Lapkin would do a service to the war against terrorism and international crime by revealing it.
According to information made public, the 23 faked New Zealand passports seized in Bangkok, along with faked passports of other countries, were produced for the black market by a criminal ring and available to all comers.
It is possible that some had been acquired by al Qaeda terrorists, but no one apart from Mr Lapkin has affirmed publicly that the forgery operation is being run by al Qaeda. His complaint that our Foreign Ministry treated the matter dismissively in saying it had no confirmation that al Qaeda may be using them is nonsensical, given that the Thai police quoted by Mr Lapkin made clear this was only speculation.
The attempt by a group of Israelis to obtain a genuine New Zealand passport under false pretences is in a very different category. This was not a "rather amateurish" plot by "a couple of errant Israelis", as Mr Lapkin would have us believe. It involved at least four people, one of whom is known to have been a long-time Israeli diplomatic "attache" (usually a non-diplomat operating under diplomatic auspices).
Only through a minor slip was it detected, and it is reasonable to suspect the same methods may have been successfully used on previous occasions.
The authorities in Israel have not denied that the men caught were Mossad agents, and, in fact, the respected newspaper Ha'aretz has reported they were.
But, according to the same newspaper, Mossad managed to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to stop his Foreign Ministry providing any apology or explanation to New Zealand.
If the plotters were just a couple of "errant Israelis", why did they go to such extraordinary lengths to get a New Zealand passport in Auckland when they could have obtained one for a tiny fraction of the cost and effort in Bangkok? Obviously, the Bangkok ones are inferior imitations, but would this matter to a couple of "keystone cops", as Mr Lapkin portrays them?
There is a rather large difference between an Asian criminal gang passing off faked passports and the intelligence service of a sovereign state trying by criminal means to obtain a genuine one. There is also a difference between the co-operative attitude of the Thai Government and the refusal of Israel to confront the truth.
Mr Lapkin's suggestion that Helen Clark has portrayed Israel as being a physical threat to New Zealand's national security is nonsense. But there are obvious security implications for New Zealand in having Mossad agents travelling round the world on New Zealand passports.
Equally ridiculous is the attack on the Prime Minister for her failure to "rebuke" the Taleban over an alleged al Qaeda plot hatched from a "virtual command centre" in Auckland in 2000 against the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney.
Despite initial reports of such a plot, it turned out to have little substance. Certainly the men involved were Afghans and were engaged in organised crime, but they were actually anti-Taleban, and after investigation it seems that neither New Zealand nor Australian police concluded they presented a terrorist threat.
And Mr Lapkin's statement that Helen Clark has "made common cause with bedfellows" in the Hamas terrorist organisation is both false and reprehensible.
No only did the Prime Minister state publicly that her criticism of Israel should not give comfort to Hamas but her Government has long been on record as repeatedly condemning Hamas terrorism.
It has also (along with many other governments round the world) criticised some Israeli actions, such as the construction of "the wall" on Palestinian territory, and this perhaps accounts for Mr Lapkin's condemnation of what he sees as the "moral bankruptcy" of her Middle East policy.
If Mr Lapkin's logic is accepted, no one can ever make the least criticism of Israel without being accused of making "common cause" and being "bedfellows" with its Hamas terrorist enemies.
This tactic of intimidation by smear, designed to silence criticism, is utterly repugnant in a democracy.
* Nick Turner is a Wellington writer on international affairs. He is responding to Ted Lapkin's view that Helen Clark has been deliberately selective in the direction of her outrage against passport fraud.
When Scott Balson exposed the dubious methods of the men running the AIJAC in the book Murder by Media (published in early January 2000) Mark Leibler used his contacts within the Zionist Anti-Defamation League, an extremist Jewish organisation, to have Balson branded as anti-semitic.
They set the wheels in motion by writing defamatory articles in January and February 2000 and an article in March 2000 headed "Always Conspiracy" - all published just weeks after Murder by Media was published. These defamatory claims by the AIJAC's Review magazine owned by Mark Leibler are now perpetuated as fact on the Internet - through a sick page by the Tel Aviv University and subsequently by the "Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs" at this link. (Both confirm the source as the AIJAC). Not much different to the branding of Jews imprisoned by the Nazis during World War Two.
And another view on the issue that stirred up the AIJAC - that was exposed in Murder by Media...
Page 95:
A search of "Arnold Bloch Leibler" (ABL) on the Australasian Legal Information Institute website at: http://www.austlii.edu.au/ provides a revealing insight on the dealing of the two Leibler brothers, Mark and Isi, and why they are so paranoid about the "populist" policies of Pauline Hanson and One Nation. (For Leibler see also: "The anti-One Nation extremists")
ABL's cases include: tax avoidance, trusts, alleged income tax fraud, native title claims, foreign takeovers and withholding documents sought by the tax office. Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson is also noted as "joining ABL staff".
Page 178:
As for AIR chairman and tax lawyer Mark Leibler, he is perhaps best known for inventing tax havens to get his super-wealthy clients off with little or no taxes. When ABC's 7:30 Report did a story on July 8 1996 asking "Where is the missing $800 million?" that the government had promised to collect from ultra-wealthy tax dodgers, it answered its own question, stating "All roads to Leibler--Mark Leibler." Indeed, the 1984 McCabe LaFranchi Report on Tax Avoidance named Leibler as a director of seven companies, and an advisor of many others, which went to the "bottom of the harbour" in the well-known scam of that name.
Mark Leibler is a senior partner in the specialist tax business Arnold Bloch Leibler which is based in Melbourne. It reportedly boats about 30 of Australia's top 200 wealthiest families as clients. He is also a director of Coles Myer Ltd and Jetset Tours Pty Ltd and a former president of the Australian Zionist Organisation which is directly funded by the openly racist state of Israel. He has also been allegedly associated with Israel's secret service, Mossad.
Page 182:
The Australia/Israel Review (earlier name used by Leibler's "Review") overstepped the mark when it unilaterally published a list of names of some 2,000 One Nation supporters under the banner cover "Gotcha!" in the week of the 9th July 1998 .
The source of the list, illegally copied from the Manly office computer files of One Nation was unknown. It was later discovered that a former One Nation supporter in Victoria, who apparently managed the office computers, had taken copies of computer files when he left the party in early 1998. This is the most probable source.
The unauthorised and intimidatory publishing of the list of names and their suburbs smacked of Nazism - it was the very intimidation that Jewish people complained of and warned about.
Incredibly the Murdoch media, with one exception outlined below, did not condemn the bastardry of the men and women who were behind this appalling behaviour. The vilification of One Nation has been so intense only people with courage 'came out' as supporters. It was not paranoia to be alarmed at the prospect of exposure. Showing his contempt for people's rights to privacy the editor of the magazine Michael Kapel said, "We believe in a healthy democracy... (allowing us to publish the list)".
Fortunately some prominent people publicly rebuked the Australia/Israel Review. In The Courier-Mail of 18th July 1998 Ron Brunton condemned its callous disregard for people's safety and its hypocrisy :
The magazine also claimed that it had withheld the addresses and telephone numbers of members "in the interests of privacy". But the magazine did not care tuppence about anybody's privacy. It is very easy to work out the details of many people on the list, especially those with less common names or who live in small towns. Using a sample of 250 names as a test, I was able to discover the full addresses and telephone numbers of about 30% in only a couple of hours.
Given the physical violence that has already been directed against One Nation supporters, publication of the list can only be seen as intimidation - not against the extremists who have infiltrated the party, or its autocratic leaders - but against a rather haphazard collection of ordinary people who have joined One Nation for a variety of reasons. Had an Arabic newspaper, or a magazine of the anti-Israel hard left, published a list of members of a Zionist organisation, there would have been much justifiable outrage and anxiety in the Jewish community and the Australia/Israel Review would have led the condemnation.