Jewish Council’s far-right slur
ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim said those who seek to play down the surge in antisemitic incidents clearly have no idea what they are talking about.
The left-wing Jewish Council of Australia has told a Senate committee on extremism that Zionist organisations are cooperating with right-wing groups.
Max Kaiser from the Council told the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee that the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) is a right-wing Zionist group that has been collaborating with the far right.
He told the senators that the most obvious example of Jewish leadership groups openly collaborating with the far right has been through the promotion of rallies organised by Never Again is Now, which he described as a Christian Zionist fundamentalist group.
“Key organisers behind this movement are openly Islamophobic and Christian supremacist. They work in league with far-right individuals and groups,” he said.
The chair of the committee, Queensland Liberal National Party Senator Paul Scarr, at that point informed Kaiser that he and another parliamentary colleague, MP Julian Leeser, had attended one of those rallies.
Sarah Schwartz, also representing the Jewish Council, criticised antisemitism statistics produced by the ECAJ, claiming the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism can be used to label criticism of Israel as antisemitic.
ECAJ co-CEO Peter Wertheim said those who seek to play down the surge in antisemitic incidents clearly have no idea what they are talking about.
“As we told the inquiry, we fully support the IHRA working definition as an analytical tool, but it plays no part whatsoever in defining what constitutes an antisemitic incident. We use the IHRA definition only in analysing general antisemitic discourse, which is dealt with in a completely separate part of the antisemitism report.
He said discourse that is not targeted at specific individuals or organisations is not included in the tally of antisemitic incidents.
“This is all spelled out in the report itself, for those who actually read it. So much for the rigour of these self-described ‘experts’,” Wertheim said.
Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) executive director Colin Rubenstein said, “With their appalling testimony, the Jewish Council of Australia representatives again demonstrated that it is a tiny, ultra-extreme fringe group representing at best a handful of individuals, and any attempts to portray it as otherwise are simply dishonest.”
He said their testimony showed they are irredeemably hostile to the mainstream Jewish community, and seemingly regard anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist and defend itself as unacceptably right wing.
The Jewish Council of Australia was approached for comment but did not respond by The AJN’s deadline.
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