March 6, 2016
The B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC), Australia’s leading organisation fighting anti-Semitism and hatred in all its forms, has denounced, in the strongest possible terms, the comparison by Pastor Daniel Nalliah (President of Rise Up Australia and Catch the Fire Ministries) of a mosque to a Nazi camp. The offensive comments were made in a story regarding the proposed building of a new mosque in Narre Warren.
Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission, issued the following statement:
“Pastor Nalliah has taken the shocking exploitation and abuse of the Holocaust for propaganda and shock value to new lows. For anyone to liken a house of worship to a Nazi death camp where millions of Jews and others were systematically murdered crosses many red lines and is an outrageous cheapening of the tragedy of the Holocaust. Such repulsive comparisons denigrate the memory of the victims and survivors, and trivialise the terrors that Hitler and his monstrous regime actually perpetrated. I am extremely troubled not only by Pastor Nalliah’s disturbing demagoguery, but also by the fact that he finds it acceptable to cynically manipulate this horrific tragedy as a tactic to gain support for his attempts to prevent the building of a mosque in Narre Warren. His remarks are not only deeply offensive to Jews who lost relatives in the Nazi death camps, but are also an affront to the Muslim community. I hope that political and religious leaders publicly repudiate Pastor Nalliah’s hurtful statements and anti-Muslim remarks, and make it clear that such disgusting analogies are totally unacceptable and coarsen public debate in Australia. As leaders in promoting pluralism and tolerance, we call on Pastor Nalliah to retract his odious expression and to apologise to the Jewish and Muslim communities.”
For further information please contact Dr Dvir Abramovich on (03) 9272 5677
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