Octopus protest goes swimmingly
"I wish we didn't have to do something like this, but the antisemitic slurs [from Greens MPs] keep surfacing, and this one was the worst, Ofir Birenbaum told The AJN.
“Jenny, my tentacles are purely for pleasure, nothing nefarious … I promise!” Jack Pinczewski cheerfully remarked to passersby, with tongue firmly in cheek, in front of the NSW Greens MP’s Newtown electorate office last Sunday, while dressed in a giant orange squid costume.
Protest organiser, Israeli-Australian Ofir Birenbaum, sported a blue octopus outfit, and joined about 15 others, who sang lines from The Beatles’ hit Octopus’s Garden, and displayed signs with messages including “Dear Jenny Leong, Jews do belong!”, and “Octopus is not kosher”.
The colourful protest was a direct response to Leong’s vile antisemitic slur, which surfaced in a leaked video the week before, in which she told fellow members of a Palestine Justice Movement meeting that, “The Jewish lobby and Zionist lobby are infiltrating into every single aspect of what is ethnic community groups,” and “their tentacles reach into the areas that try and influence power”.
Leong was not in her office during the protest.
Birenbaum told The AJN, “I wish we didn’t have to do something like this, but the antisemitic slurs [from Greens MPs] keep surfacing, and this one was the worst, as Jenny [Leong] knew what she was saying [was antisemitic], and it was unmistakable.
“We thought we needed to do something [in response], in a very visual way, and it got some good exposure here, and even made the TV news in Israel.”
Of using elements of theatre, slapstick and entertainment in a protest, Pinczewski said, “I used to do a fair bit of improv, and I couldn’t think of a better way, really, to take stock of, and put a spotlight on this issue.”
Pinczewski said he does not accept Leong’s public apology, “because I think it was disingenuous, and that it was [more like] a political statement [in its delivery]”.
“I think it’s pretty clear that she fundamentally doesn’t like Jews, and from what I can see, she hasn’t undertaken to do anything to remediate the damage she’s done, from saying something so abhorrent and damaging about Jews.”
He added, he still has not received a reply to a letter he wrote to Leong in October, in which he specifically advised her to keep in mind that “the language she chooses to use has real consequences”.
“And what’s just as disappointing is that not a single one of her NSW Greens colleagues has condemned Leong for making such a vile antisemitic slur on Jewish Australians.
“Their silence is deafening.”
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