By Tim Anderson, 31 May 2021
Suzanne Rutland, the woman who told Australian television that her son’s dog was terrified by Palestinian rockets from Gaza, has been a conduit of secret Israeli money to Australia’s oldest university, the University of Sydney.
Her recently redacted online CV noted her role as “Chair of the National Advisory Committee on Jewish Education for Australia, for the World Zionist Organization”, an Israeli group which each year contributes about half a million dollars to the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. That gives Israel some influence.
Suzanne’s Australian-Israeli son Benjamin Naftali Rutland, whom she said worked for the Red Cross, is also a commander in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
Of the IDF’s 2008 massacres in Gaza Captain Benjamin Rutland, then “a senior IDF spokesman”, told The Age: “The majority of the casualties have been uniform-wearing members of the Hamas terror organisation responsible for attacks on Israel.”
In fact, UN sources have repeatedly confirmed that most of the Palestinian victims in Gaza are civilians, many of them children.
After the IDF Gaza massacre of 2014, Suzanne Rutland invited former British Army Colonel Richard Kemp, to the University of Sydney to defend the Israeli slaughter of more than 2,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians.
When students protested and effectively shut down Colonel Kemp’s planned talk, Suzanne Rutland denounced them as vicious racists, saying “when they stand there chanting, ‘free Palestine’ what they mean is the dismantling of the Zionist entity which means genocide against Israel’s Jewish population”.
Awarding her the title of ‘Emeritus Professor at her retirement in 2015, Provost (now Vice Chancellor) Stephen Garton, said Suzanne had been “resolute and courageous in reaching out to others in an effort to bridge the cultural and political divide to promote tolerance and understanding”. He said nothing about the Israeli money she had provided.
Meanwhile the ABC bleeding heart headline appears all for Suzanne and her family’s ‘trauma’, while the Murdoch Gutter Media claims the show was stacked against her.