The B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC), Australia’s leading organisation fighting hatred in all its forms, has denounced actor Sam Neil’s description of Australia’s off shore detention centres for asylum seekers as “concentration camps”.
Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the ADC, issued the following statement:
“Using the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust to criticise the government’s detention policy trivialises and cheapens the murder of millions of people, insults their memory and needlessly causes further pain to the survivors and to their families. Yes, we should have a debate about Australia’s detention policy, and Sam Neil is of course free to voice his concerns about the government’s actions. However, to suggest that these policies in any way equate to the circumstances of the Nazi concentration camps where millions were exterminated, and where children were torn from their mothers’ arms and pushed into the gas chambers, diminishes the deaths and the enormous suffering experienced, and shows a gross lack of historical understanding about the crimes that Hitler and his evil regime committed. In no way can the steps taken by the Australian government be equated to the Third Reich’s deliberate, systematic and mechanised annihilation of six million Jews and millions of others. As such debasement becomes common, I am increasingly alarmed about the coarsening of discussion in the public square and about the misappropriation of the Holocaust. I hope that there will come a point where celebrities will realise that invoking hurtful and insensitive comparisons to the Nazi death camps in order to make a point is misguided and unacceptable. We urge Sam Neill and others to choose their analogies carefully and to cease from invoking the Holocaust.”
The Anti-Defamation Commission, founded in 1979, is Australia’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through educational programs that combat bigotry, prejudice and all forms of hatred.
For further information please contact Dr Dvir Abramovich on (03) 9272 5677