Is Corbynite anti-Semitism taking root in the left wing of Australian politics? There have been disturbing rumbles for years in leftist politics, as the anti-Semitic “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) has become practically an article of faith.
Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi has appeared at rallies where placards depicted Jews as monkeys and pigs, while others advocated the murder of Israelis. Greens leader Richard di Natale denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. When a Greens activist left a bag of “shekels” on a Melbourne Jewish councillor’s desk, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry stated that “A toxic anti-Jewish culture has become well entrenched in the far left of the Greens”.
Now a disturbing campaign is being waged by leftists against Australia’s most prominent Jewish politician.
A senior government frontbencher has accused failed independent candidate Oliver Yates and Greens-aligned lawyer Julian Burnside of being “pathetic extremists”, labelling the campaign against Josh Frydenberg’s eligibility to sit in parliament as anti-Semitic.
Housing Minister Michael Sukkar also rounded on Kooyong resident and climate activist Michael Staindl who has mounted a High Court challenge to the Treasurer’s re-election on the claim that Mr Frydenberg was entitled to Hungarian citizenship through his mother, a Holocaust survivor…
Frydenberg’s mother, Erica Strausz, was officially designated “stateless” on her arrival in Australia. As a Jew, she had been stripped of her Hungarian citizenship.
Trevor Poulton — a lawyer who has written a book called The Holocaust Denier — had previously told The Australian he was working with Mr Yates’s “Kooyong Independents Group” to test the Treasurer’s citizenship status.
To be fair, Poulton insists that the book doesn’t reflect his own views. Yet its story of a Melbourne policeman who is “woken” to the “truth” about the Holocaust often comes across as a thinly disguised polemic.
In an extraordinary attack under parliamentary privilege, Mr Sukkar, the member for the Melbourne-based seat of Deakin said the campaign against Mr Frydenberg was driven by “a small number of disgruntled, debauched political activists”.
He described it as “so offensive, so disgusting and so abhorrent…True to form, the citizenship challenge has also been supported by the other failed candidate in Kooyong, the Greens’ Julian Burnside.
“Burnside is on the record as supporting the BDS, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, movement against Israel, which is of its nature anti-Semitic.
“Burnside has also trivialised the Holocaust by equating Peter Dutton on social media to a Nazi officer — something which Holocaust survivors have said publicly is deeply offensive to them.
“What is with these pathetic extremists?”
Burnside has also denied any association with Staindl’s High Court challenge, although he has also questioned Frydenberg’s eligibility, and continues to support BDS.
After a long history of promoting Jewish interests, the left in Australia has now been skirting dangerously anti-Semitic territory for years. Is it because prominent Jews like Frydenberg have dared cross over to conservative politics? Or is something more sinister infecting left politics in this country?
Some at least in Labor have been wary of holding hands with leftist Jew-haters.
Speaking in 2017, then Labor deputy leader Tanya Plibersek warned the questions about Mr Frydenberg’s eligibility for parliament were “getting into pretty disturbing territory”.
theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/sukkar-calls-out-frydenberg-challengers
Yet Labor’s new leader has proudly posed for selfies with anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn.
Labor needs to take a long look at the company it is keeping.