Nazi comparison rife in Australia, says ADC
A LANDMARK European report on anti-Semitism has important implications for Australian Jewry, according to the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission.
PETER KOHN
A LANDMARK European report on anti-Semitism has important implications for Australian Jewry, according to the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC).
The report, “Understanding and Addressing the ‘Nazi Card'”, examines the increasing tendency by anti-Semites to compare Israel and its Jewish supporters to Nazis.
The report was released by the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, a British-based independent think tank.
The authors said their report “attempts to shift the focus of analysis of contemporary anti-Semitism onto new ground -— away from labelling and defining the problem, to an understanding of the consequences of particular discourse.
“By unravelling and dissecting various manifestations of the phenomenon, the report reveals how the playing of the Nazi card scratches deep wounds by invoking painful collective memory of the Holocaust. It also offers some recommendations as to how the problem might be addressed.”
The ADC is pushing for the report’s recommendations to be adopted in Australia.
ADC research director Deborah Stone said that during Australian protests over the war in Gaza in January and in media coverage, “there were a great many examples of the use of Nazi symbolism and Holocaust comparison. These occurred on billboards and websites, in cartoons and in opinion columns.
“It was quite a common discourse in the Australian media at the time and in the protest movement and there seemed to be no sense that anything was inappropriate,” she said.
Stone added that the ADC had taken action and the mainstream media “has, by and large, been responsive on this issue”.
“But the same cannot be said for the protest movement or for websites, bloggers and the kind of media that makes up an increasing proportion of what people are exposed to.”
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