Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts’ planned Caulfield visit in November, 2016, which was organised by a far Right Jewish group, was cancelled due to a collaborative effort within the broad Jewish community. While the One Nation senators claimed it was the extremist Left that shut them down, as Michael Brull wrote in New Matilda, “It is hard to take those claims seriously. What really happened is that a small but diverse group of Jews intended to protest One Nation. Rather than face a few hundred protestors, One Nation cancelled the event. There is no evidence that any violence was being planned, let alone that the heavy police presence would have been unable to contain it.”
Jews Against Fascism, a broad spectrum of locals, organised the diversity picnic in place of the divisive planned talk.
In the week prior, on November 25 2016, the following was published as the lead letter in The Jewish News; its relevance hasn’t waned since the introduction of Trump’s Muslim immigration ban and the ongoing racism of Australia’s asylum seeker policy:
You were strangers
For a Jewish group to be hosting a meeting on the dangers of Muslim migration is a contradiction in terms. Let us remember that the injunction “do not oppress the stranger for you yourselves were strangers in the Land of Egypt” is repeated 36 times in the Torah, more often than any other injunction.
But we are told that Muslims pose a terrorist threat. Let us consider the case of the USA. The FBI has issued a report on terrorist attacks on US soil between 1980 and 2005. And it finds that Islamic extremists account for only 6% of these attacks, in other words 94% of the attacks were launched by non-Muslims.
Charles Kurzman, Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, has found that in the 11 years from 2001 to 2012, 33 Americans have died as a result of terrorism launched by their Muslim neighbors. During that period, 180,000 Americans were murdered for reasons unrelated to terrorism. Kurzman concludes that the Muslim rate of involvement in terrorism is less than 10 per million.
I suggest that Avi Yemini, who has called this meeting with One Nation Senators, inform Senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts that at the Evian Conference in 1938, called to discuss the issue of increasing numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, Australia’s Minister for Trade and Custom, Thomas White, said:
“It will no doubt be appreciated also that as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.”
Then Yemini should ask Hanson and Roberts to comment on this statement.
Robin Rothfield
Alphington Vic.