Concern over clash with Australia Day

JACQUI GAL, 4 November 2005

http://www.ajn.com.au/

AUSTRALIAN Jewish leaders have welcomed a historic resolution at the United Nations General Assembly, dedicating January 27 as Holocaust Remembrance Day, but are concerned about the date’s proximity to Australia Day.

It was the first time in UN history that a resolution initiated by Israel was approved by the UN. First introduced by Israel, the United States, Australia, Canada and Russia, by the time it was unanimously passed on Tuesday, the resolution had 104 co-sponsors out of the 191-member organisation.

But the positive reaction of Australian Jewish leaders was tempered by misgivings about the date because of its proximity to Australia Day (January 26).

Grahame Leonard, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), said: “Clearly it’s an issue for Australia because most Australians on January 27 are recovering from a hangover and sleeping it off at the cricket.” He had earlier said that the April date of Yom Hashoah [Nissan 27] is “the best commemoration for the [Australian] Jewish community”.

Leonard said the issue will be tabled at the ECAJ’s AGM, to be held in Melbourne in December. He hinted that the roof body may make submissions to the Federal Government to shift the day from January 27.

Downer slams Iranian tirade against Israel
Bernard Freedman

FOREIGN Minister Alexander Downer this week slammed home a message to Iran and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that the world would not tolerate attacks on Israel and threats to world peace.

In a powerful condemnation of Ahmadinejad’s call last week for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, Downer said: “This call from a significant nation state is one of the most appalling, dangerous and unacceptable views that we have heard for a very long time.

“Iran and especially its president — its head of state — needs to understand that the world will take it at its words and will not tolerate threats to international peace and security.

“We will continue to support the State of Israel and continue to fight against these extreme views that should not be tolerated at all in this day and age.

“We are united and unequivocal in our fight against antisemitism whenever and wherever it’s encountered.”

Did the Jews invent terrorism?
MARK BAKER

NOW class, who was the first terrorist in history?” One answer was given to me — or rather heckled at me — when I was speaking about suicide bombers at a public forum: “The Jews were the first to be suicide bombers!”

So guess who is being blamed for the scourge of suicide terrorism?

“Samson.”

“Who?”

“You know, the biblical guy, the strongman with the shorn hair who broke the pillars over the heads of innocent Philistines.”

Now Jews have been credited with many inventions — monotheism through Moses, Christianity through Jesus, psychoanalysis through Freud, and of course Karl Marx for communism. Oh, and Rothschild for capitalism. But I never realised that added to this pantheon would be our own Shimshon Hagibor, whose weapon was the DNA in his hair.

Bizarre as this accusation might sound, it repeats itself in scholarly guises. Is there really a difference between Samson and Mohammed Atta, Shadia Drury writes in the Arab Studies Quarterly, referring to one of the suicide pilots of 9/11. “In both cases, innocent victims were buried alive in the rubble — innocent people met a gruesome death that they could not have anticipated or deserved.”

From the Archives:

January 23, 2004
FEATURE
Holocaust denial: the state of play

HOLOCAUST denial decreased in the United States in 2003, but increased among Arab countries and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

These were two of the findings of Holocaust Denial: A global survey — 2003, a report released last month by the Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Philadelphia.

The report attributes the decrease in activity to “ongoing legal conflicts between the two major US promoters of Holocaust denial — the Institute for Historical Review and Liberty Lobby founder Willis Carto”. However, it noted that British Holocaust denier David Irving spoke in more than 25 US cities throughout 2003.

Other major developments include a visit by former PA prime minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) to the White House. Abbas is the author of The Other Side: The secret relationship between Nazism and the Zionist movement, which downplays the atrocity of the Holocaust.

In October, former Malaysian prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad sparked international outrage on the eve of his retirement when he alleged Jews “rule the world by proxy”. But Dr Mahathir conceded in his speech to the Organisation of Islamic Conference that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.

The following is a snapshot of Holocaust denial around the world in 2003.

AUSTRALIA

ON January 8, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock denied David Irving’s request for a visa on account of his “past and present criminal conduct and past and present general conduct”. Irving was previously denied entry to Australia in 1993 and 1996.

In June, Melbourne Underground Film Festival director Richard Wolstencroft came under fire over his decision to screen the 1993 documentary In Search of Truth in History which features a speech by Irving. The screening was eventually cancelled at the 11th hour.

In July, the Federal Court upheld a ruling against Adelaide Holocaust revisionist Dr Fredrick Toben ordering him to remove any material which refutes the Holocaust or the existence of gas chambers from his Adelaide Institute website.

In December, Tasmanian Holocaust denier Olga Scully resumed distributing anti-Israel and Jewish conspiracy material.

NEW ZEALAND

THE controversy over Joel Hayward’s Canterbury University thesis, “The Fate of Jews in German Hands: An historical enquiry into the development and significance of Holocaust revisionism”, entered a new chapter in 2003 when Canterbury lecturer Thomas A Fudge authored an article titled “The Fate of Joel Hayward in New Zealand Hands: From Holocaust historian to Holocaust?”

A 1999 investigation concluded that there was no evidence that Hayward’s thesis was motivated by racism or malice.

Fudge’s article was initially accepted for publication by History Now, the journal of the Canterbury University History Department, and printed in its May 6 edition.

However objections from faculty staff prevented the edition from being distributed. His article was published by the New Zealand Herald and other newspapers in July 2003.

PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY

IN June, the Palestinian Authority’s official newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, published an article which accused Zionist leaders of conspiring with Nazis to exterminate anti-Zionist Jews.

On July 25, former PA prime minister Abu Mazen became the first Holocaust denier to be invited to the White House. His book, The Other Side: The secret (relation)ship between Nazism and the Zionist movement, downplays the number of Jewish victims and accuses Jews of collaborating with their Nazi oppressors.

He wrote: “Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.”

In August, Hamas newspaper Al-Risala published an article by senior Hamas official Dr Abd Al-Aziz Al-Rantisi, in which he wrote: “It is no longer a secret that the Zionists were behind the Nazis’ murder of many Jews, and agreed to it, with the aim of intimidating them and forcing them to immigrate to Palestine.”

In September, Hafez Barghouti, editor-in-chief of the PA’s official newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida — which has published numerous articles denying the Holocaust — was part of a delegation of 10 journalists from the Middle East to meet British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

UNITED STATES

THE impact of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the leading Holocaust denial organisation in the United States, was diminished in 2003 due to ongoing financial problems, devoting much of its resources to assisting imprisoned Canadian Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel.

Consequently, the IHR was unable to publish its Journal of Historical Review. The last issue was published in late 2002.

In April 2003, the Barnes Review announced that it is the exclusive distributor for Jewish Supremacism, a new book by Holocaust denier and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

British Holocaust denier David Irving spoke to audiences in numerous cities. However, speeches scheduled in Louisville and Kentucky were cancelled due to “outside pressure”. Irving returned to the US in August to host his annual “Real History USA Convention”.

CANADA

ON February 5, Ernst Zundel, 63, was arrested in Tennessee, USA, and deported to Canada. Zundel, a German citizen, lived in Canada for more than 40 years but was unable to obtain Canadian citizenship, because he was regarded as a national security threat.

Zundel was convicted by a Canadian human rights tribunal in January 2001 of promoting hatred against Jews through his website, which was subsequently dismantled. It was reposted on a different server later in the year.

In November, Amnesty International denied requests from the IHR to adopt Zundel as a “prisoner of conscience”. The organisation said it did not “adopt persons who are imprisoned for ‘hate speech’”.

On August 8, the Canadian Jewish Congress petitioned the Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission, urging rejection of a request to include the Arab television network Al-Jazeera — which includes Holocaust-denial programs — among the satellite television stations available to Canadian viewers.

EGYPT

AN article in the November 17 issue of the Egyptian weekly newspaper Al-Usbu reported the opening of a manuscript museum in the newly-renovated Alexandria library. The article defended a decision to include an early Arabic translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the exhibit, positioned next to a Torah scroll. Museum director Dr Yousef Ziedan said: “In reality, an analysis of samples from the purported gas chambers has proven that these were sterilization chambers, without a sufficient quantity of cyanide to kill.”

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

THE Zayed Centre for Co-ordination and Follow-up — a now-defunct Arab League-sponsored think tank that promoted Holocaust denial — was at the centre of controversy in 2003 after Harvard Divinity School graduate student Rachel Fish launched a campaign against the university’s acceptance of a $US2.5-million gift from President Zayed to endow a chair in Islamic studies.

AUSTRIA

AUSTRIAN Holocaust denier Wolfgang Fröhlich was arrested in Vienna on June 21 in connection with the publication of his 368-page manuscript, The Gas Chamber Lie.

BELGIUM

ON September 9, Belgian Holocaust denier Siegfried Verbke was sentenced to a suspended prison term of one year and deprived of his civil rights for 10 years following his conviction for distributing pamphlets denying the Holocaust.

FRANCE

ON July 7, the European Court of Human Rights rejected an appeal by French philosopher Roger Garaudy against his conviction for Holocaust denial. Garaudy’s original conviction was based on passages in his book, The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, in which he disputed the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps.

Great Britain

ON February 18, Cambridge University Union revoked its invitation to David Irving to take part in its annual Free Speech Debate.

The Holocaust-denying magazine The Revisionist resumed its print edition in February. From 2001-2003, it had only been available online.

ROMANIA

IN response to international criticism, the Romanian Government issued a statement on June 17 acknowledging that Romania “was guilty of grave war crimes, pogroms, and mass deportation of Romanian Jews” during World War II. On October 22, President Ion Iliescu announced the establishment of a national Holocaust Remembrance Day.

SWITZERLAND

ON January 13, Swiss Holocaust denier Gaston-Armand Amaudruz surrendered to Swiss authorities over his 2000 conviction for violating the law that makes it illegal to “deny, grossly minimise or seek to justify genocide or other crimes against humanity”.

Holocaust denier Albert “Ahmed” Huber said in a July 12 interview that he now serves as the liaison between European neo-Nazis and Islamic organisations in Europe. “I am very happy that the right-wing world... understands that the Holocaust was a big fraud and the European neo-Nazi should join Islamic organisations to fight Israel, the Jews and America,” he told JTA. The Swiss Ministry of Justice is currently investigating Huber, following the inclusion of his name on United Nations’ terrorism lists.

August 13, 2004
FEATURE
Making a federal case
PETER KOHN

FORMED in the darkest days of the Holocaust, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) last week notched up 60 years as the roof body of the Australian Jewish community.

After six decades, the ECAJ, an organisation of community volunteers with no full-time professionals, has chalked up an impressive list of achievements but can hardly claim to be a household name in Caulfield or Rose Bay.

Jeremy Jones, serving the third and final year of his presidency, says relations with various government and non-government organisations (NGOs) are excellent and the body has “strong brand recognition” at that level, but concedes that grass-roots identification in the Bagel Belt might be lacking.

He attributes this to the fact that the ECAJ is a federal body, one step removed from daily communal life. Its officers are elected by the host state board. It operates through its constituent state groups — the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and other state and territory organisations — which report from the coalface.

Added to these are representatives from bodies such as the Zionist Federation of Australia and B’nai B’rith. The ECAJ formulates its policies on the advice of its constituent bodies.

Australian Jewry’s peak organisation is quite narrowly defined, says former Melbourne academic Dr Bill Rubinstein in his landmark book The Jews in Australia. It cannot, for example, comment on internal religious matters in the Jewish community or discuss the curriculum of a dayschool.

Jones lists a wide range of activities in which the ECAJ takes part — anti-defamation, Israel, multicultural relations. But it was the recent landmark court victories against Holocaust deniers Fredrick Toben and Olga Scully that were major ECAJ achievements.

He dismisses the notion that there is confusion in the Jewish community and in the working media between the ECAJ, the elected national representative body, and the politically proactive Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), a privately-run think tank.

To the extent that there is confusion, it fuels speculation in some sections of the mainstream media that the Jewish community is being run by the unelected AIJAC. Jones himself is also an employee of AIJAC.

Jones, 45, who has been involved with the ECAJ since his days as a graduate intern there in 1981, says he has “100 per cent approval” from his colleagues. “Nobody comes to the ECAJ without having worked in some related field,” he argues.

The ECAJ’s arrival in the 1940s marked the federation of various disparate state-based organisations in an attempt to straddle the parochial interests of a tiny Jewish community clinging to the rim of a vast continent.

In 1944, the imperative to federate came from the greatest catastrophe in the Jewish people’s history and the need to make a unified approach to the Australian Government to help with the intake of refugees.

Sydney historian Dr Suzanne Rutland, who is writing a history of the ECAJ, says the push to draw together the Jewish communities of Australia had been growing throughout 1944.

Finally, the ECAJ was born at a Melbourne meeting, held over the weekend of August 5-6, 1944. Alec Masel, president of the Victorian Jewish Advisory Board, became the first ECAJ president.

Dr Leon Jona of Melbourne and Gerald de Vahl Davis of Sydney represented their respective states. Representatives from the smaller states also attended that first meeting. Taking the minutes as honorary secretary was a young army officer, Lieutenant Zelman Cowen, a future governor-general.

AFTER its formation, one of the ECAJ’s first tasks was to ask Canberra to issue 8000 permits to help rescue Hungarian Jews after the Hungarian Government exempted Jews with immigration visas from deportation to the death camps. It was the start of a campaign for landing permits that continued in the postwar period.

Significantly the first meeting also endorsed the Jewish Agency’s policy “of securing the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world”.

It was a move described by Dr Rutland as a statement of Jewish unity in the wake of former governor-general Sir Isaac Isaacs’ opposition to Zionism, which was seen as contradictory to the feelings of the broader Jewish community.

It was decided that Melbourne would be the ECAJ headquarters for the first year, with a rotation to Sydney to follow. Two-year terms remained until very recently. But even with three-year terms, the Melbourne-Sydney rotation system, as much as any budget restraints, have kept the ECAJ from acquiring a full-time secretariat, out of step with many national Jewish bodies around the world.

The federal roof body has been presided over by some of the titans of the Australian Jewish community. Two of the biggest came from Melbourne. Maurice Ashkanasy, a notable jurist and the second president, was also a pioneer of Mount Scopus College, Australia’s first Jewish dayschool. Isi Leibler is now senior vice-president of the World Jewish Congress. Ashkanasy and Leibler share the record of longest-serving president, 10 years apiece.

Sydney Einfeld became the youngest president at 43 and served for a total of eight years. He later became a minister in NSW premier Neville Wran’s government and a federal Labor MP. Two women have been president, Sydney’s Diane Shteinman and Melbourne’s Nina Bassat.

Restitution from Germany and Austria through the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany has been a continuing initiative.

Through its links with the World Jewish Congress, the ECAJ took a strong stand on persecution of Jews in the former Soviet Union and the refuseniks of the 1970s. It also stated the Jewish community’s position to government and media outlets during crises like the Six-Day-War, Yom Kippur War, Lebanon incursions and two intifadas.

As the only organisation in Australia to collect and table Australian incidences of antisemitism, it has also led the fight against antisemitism and racism in Australia.

Today the ECAJ plays a key role on many fronts — combating racism, advocating justice for Aborigines, building bridges between Jews, Muslims and Christians, and lobbying the federal government and NGOs.

Jones sees a wider role for the ECAJ. It was a founding member of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress which promotes Jewish dialogue with Muslims and Christians throughout Asia.

He says there will be no special event to celebrate the ECAJ anniversary this month because of the impending federal election but plans are underway to mark the milestone at the annual general meeting in December.

http://www.ajn.com.au/pages/archives/feature/feature-01w.html

May 6, 2005
EDITORIAL
Sixty years on

IN 40 years time, when the centenary commemorations of the liberation of the Nazi death camps are held, there will be no Holocaust survivors left alive, no-one who witnessed first-hand Hitler’s heinous crimes. All that will remain will be their testimonies, archived by the likes of Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, as well as scores of Holocaust museums and memorials, tomes of memoirs, books and manuscripts, reams of newsprint and catalogues of photographs — but no living eyewitnesses, no tattoos on frail, wrinkling arms.

The real litmus test, however, will not be how we Jews continue to remember the Holocaust, but how the non-Jewish world does. The answer to this question lies largely in our hands today, as we commemorate Yom Hashoah.

If the AJN investigation this week into Holocaust education in non-Jewish schools across Australia is any measure to go by, we have every right to be concerned. History teachers across NSW, for example, expressed dismay at the reality that many pupils could go through most, if not all, of high school without ever learning about the Holocaust.

Paul Mansell, a history teacher at Rose Bay Secondary College, said the lack of Holocaust education taught through the syllabus was “a reflection of the education system failing the students. It’s an indictment that it could occur.”

It appears that even though children are learning about World War II, they are not being immersed in Holocaust education at school. And even though many students visit the Holocaust museums in Sydney and Melbourne, and B’nai B’rith’s Courage to Care exhibition travels far and wide in rural and regional Australia, this dearth of Shoah education helps create a fertile breeding ground for the Fredrick Tobens and Pauline Hansons of this country to exploit.

ONE of the most serious questions raised regarding Holocaust education is the issue of Jews monopolising the term “Holocaust”. The fact is, the Jewish Holocaust was unique, not just from a statistical point of view in absolute terms, and not just because of the systematic, industrial nature of the mass murder, but because the Nazi perpetrators belonged to one of the most educated, modern, civilised societies on earth.

But — and this is the crux — by defending the uniqueness of the Holocaust, we are, in a sense, impairing to some degree our ability to ensure its legacy prevails long after the last survivor has departed this earth.

If we resile from comparisons of the Holocaust with other genocides that have ocurred in Cambodia, Rwanda or Sudan, for example, we are actually reducing the possibility of others learning the lessons of our past.

Indeed, so many of the lessons of the Shoah are not unique, but universal. The SS, as Eichmann so infamously put it, was simply “obeying orders”. However much we find this “excuse” offensive, this is a human response, the dangers of which offer a universal lesson about obedience to authority.

Equally, if we describe Hitler, Eichmann and their henchmen as barbarous, sub-human tyrants then we explain away what they did, thus suggesting that ordinary humans are incapable of perpetrating such crimes against humanity. But if we accept that they were not only human, as the film Downfall has done, but highly-educated Germans, then we begin to understand how mass murder can be repeated to this day. While there are obvious differences, Robert Mugabe and Saddam Hussein are two chilling cases in point.

What about the Poles? They stood by — along with the rest of the world — and allowed the Nazis to carry out Hitler’s Final Solution on Polish soil. Today, 60 years on, we too are guilty of bystanding in Darfur, where at least 300,000 people have already been slaughtered and up to two million are fleeing their homes in fear as the world once again turns a blind eye. In addition, the fact that Bill Clinton apologised for not intervening to prevent the genocide that took place in Rwanda just over a decade ago, when more than 800,000 Tutsis were massacred in some 100 days, suggests that the cry “never again” has, regrettably, fallen on deaf ears.

When challenged about the Nazis’ ability to get away with the Final Solution, Hitler reportedly asked: “Who now remembers the Armenians?”

Today, 90 years after the genocide of more than one million Armenians by the Turks, and 60 years after Hitler, it is in our hands to ensure that the world does remember, and that we never allow tyrants to get away with mass murder. Only then will the term “never again” have been transformed from a hollow catch cry to a meaningful injunction.

http://www.ajn.com.au/pages/archives/editorial/editorial-2005-25.html