Editorial (September 11, 2009)
Clamping down on hate
BANYULE Council in Melbourne’s north has removed anti-Semitic, anti-Indian and anti-gay graffiti, including swastikas, from the outside walls of a dilapidated house in Ivanhoe. Over the weekend, streets in Footscray, in Melbourne’s west, were reportedly daubed with hate graffiti.
The B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission is in talks with Darebin Council, also in Melbourne’s north, to remove swastikas and Stars of David scrawled on railway signal boxes.
In Sydney a few weeks ago, vandals graffitied neo-Nazi symbols on NSW Treasurer Eric Roozendaal’s home.
Last week, we commemorated a sombre milestone: the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, which brought the Holocaust to the world.
Photographs of pre-Holocaust Berlin and Vienna, under the grip of the Nazis, show scrawled Stars of David daubed on Jewish shops -— a harbinger of what was to come.
These images call out to us down the decades, reminding us that hate mail, whether it is sent through cyberspace, or applied with a spray can, is not inconsequential.
This year, Melbourne residents watched their nightly news with concern as images of bashed and bloodied Indian students were screened.
Sydneysiders need only look back at the Cronulla riots of 2005 to know just how close racial hatred bubbles beneath the veneer of Australian society.
It is incumbent on authorities to clamp down on hate graffiti the moment it is reported. It must not be allowed to linger on our streetscapes. A resident’s complaint about the graffitied Ivanhoe house was initially met with confusion over which instrumentality needs to remove hate graffiti.
In Victoria, public messages that constitute racial vilification are a police matter, but if they appear on an unoccupied property, the onus is on the local council to remove them.
Offensive graffiti is a crime prohibited under the Graffiti Prevention Act 2007 and councils have the power to enter a private property to issue notices to have graffiti removed if it is visible from a public place. If it is not removed in the required period, councils can arrange to remove the graffiti, but only with the owner’s written consent.
NSW this year introduced new legislation to control graffiti, with certain offences prosecutable under the state’s Crimes Act.
We believe the law against hate graffiti should be further strengthened and streamlined. Words may not be “sticks and stones” but they can hurt, and by inciting violence, they can kill.
It’s settled: resume negotiations
AFTER months of diplomacy, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government has announced a two-part plan that would bring about a semblance of the settlement freeze that US President Barack Obama has been demanding, following the approval of a limited number of building permits within a few settlements.
The European Union foreign ministers are unanimously in uproar. The US is apoplectic. One by one, world leaders this week played a game of one-upmanship as they sought new ways to criticise Israel.
Saeb Erekat summed up the Palestinian position with this sound bite: “The only thing suspended by [Israel’s] announcement will be the peace process.”
The inconvenient truth is that the settlement issue isn’t that simple. It is more complicated than its dog-eared entry in the diplomatic playbook would suggest.
Nothing is better evidence of that than the story of the 1929 Hebron Massacre, the anniversary of which was observed this week. That unprovoked attack, which killed 67 Jews, long predated Israeli settlements or even the State of Israel.
It didn’t predate Hebron’s Avraham Avinu synagogue -— built in 1540 -— or the soaring facade of the Cave of the Patriarchs building complex, which traces back to Herodian times.
The Jews have a continuous connection to these disputed lands -— immaterial to arbitrary ceasefire lines. Regardless if you agree with Israel’s decision to build homes there, their claim deserves the right to be aired in the framework of comprehensive peace negotiations.
To be sure, Netanyahu’s plan falls short of both Palestinian and settler demands. The Palestinians are now using the plan’s shortcomings as an excuse to avoid resuming peace talks.
World leaders must not pander to this sentiment. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who as recently as a year ago was willing to negotiate with a Kadima-led government in the absence of any settlement freeze, should be encouraged to accept the substantial concessions that Netanyahu was able to extract from his Likud government and return to the negotiating table.
For true progress to be made, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis should be placed in a position where refusing to return to the peace table could be construed as advantageous to their goals.
On the contrary, peace can only come when both sides understand that the only path to resolving disputes is through direct negotiations, and act accordingly.
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