Twenty questions for Universities Australia.
The answers are mine – Ian Curr, Editor WBT, 14 Mar 2025
What penalties will be imposed on staff and students if they ask:
1. Was the Sir Mark Sykes who arranged with French diplomats throughout 1915 to split the Ottoman Empire between them, Czarist Russia and Italy, the same Sir Mark Sykes who negotiated the 1917 Rothschild-Balfour Declaration of Britain’s support for a Zionist homeland in Palestine? Yes
2. who blew up the King David Hotel on July 22, 1946, killing ninety-one people? The Stern Gang a break away from Hagannah led by Menachem Begin, later PM of Israel.
3. Who assassinated the U.N. Mediator in Palestine, the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, on September 17, 1948? Stern Gang
4. who joined the French and British invasion of Suez in October 1956 in the expectation of seizing Egyptian oil fields on the Sinai Peninsula? Israel.
Israeli forces advanced across the border, overcoming the Egyptian army in the Sinai, seizing Sharm al-Sheikh and thereby securing Israeli strategic control over the Straits of Tiran.
5. Which Zionist terrorist became prime minister of Israel in 1977? Menachem Begin
6. Who assassinated the Israeli prime minister Rabin on November 4, 1995? Netanyahu encouraged ultranationalists to kill Rabin. The assassin was Yigal Amir.
7. Who boasted in 2019 about funding Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank? Netanyahu
8. In the Israeli television documentary The Gate Keepers (2012), why do the five successive heads of the Shin Bet agree that the Occupation has meant the destruction of Israel? Israel is not a democracy.
9. Why The Invention of the Jewish People (2008/9) by Tel Aviv professor of history, Shlomo Sand, is not on a reading list? Sand’s book argues that the concept of a unified “Jewish people” is a recent fiction.
10. What the IDF did and did not do during the September 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila while Christian militia were massacring as many as 2,000 Palestinian refugees? The IDF fired flares into the camps so that the Christian militia could kill more Palestinians. They wouldn’t let anyone in or out to help.
11. What happens to the primary school in the Oscar-winning documentary, No Other Land? Israeli soldiers bulldozing the village school and fill water wells with cement to prevent people from rebuilding. The teacher gets out just in time.
12. How a herd of dairy cattle owned by Arab Christians could become the enemy of the State of Israel, as shown in the Canadian documentary, The Wanted Eighteen (2014)? The Wanted Eighteen and animation of a true story about how a Palestinian dairy poses a threat because of its independent milk production.
13. What fraction of the West Bank allocated to Palestinians in 1948 is theirs today? Israell was given 77 percent (??) of the territory of mandate Palestine, including the larger part of Jerusalem. Netanyahu is cirrently annexing the West Bank.
14. Which government helped Israel to build its non-existent bomb? France
15. How ‘the Six Million’ was calculated? ???? Dr. Wilhelm Hoettl, an Austrian-born official in the Third Reich an historian who served in a number of senior positions in the SS first came up with that figure.
16. How many non-Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis and their collaborators? There were 11 million victims of the Holocaust (or 6 million Jewish victims and 5 million non–Jewish victims), this does not take into account that more than 20 million Russians were killed.
17. why Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote in The Australian (July 2014) against making it a crime to deny the Holocaust? Dershowitz says he prefers education rather than punishment. Do you believe him?
18. Why Sir Isaac Isaacs in 1943 called political Zionism ‘Undemocratic. Unjust. Dangerous.’? He believed it placed an unwarranted interpretation on the Balfour Declaration, aroused antagonism from the Muslim world, and would negatively impact Jews globally, potentially endangering peace and the Empire’s safety
19. Why did the 1916 refurbishment of the Sydney Customs House incorporate Swastikas into the entrance hall? They were classical ornamentation and did not become associated with the Nazis until the 1930s.
20. What percentage of Jews are Semites? The majority of Jewish people are considered Semites
and what percentage of Palestinians are not semitic? The majority of the population of historic Palestine was Semitic, including both Arab, Jewish and other communities. By the way I do not believe in the concept of race … we are all part of the human race.
Peter Curtis
13 March 2025