November 13, 2015
The B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission has expressed its profound dismay about an opinion piece penned by United Future leader and New Zealand’s Minister of Internal Affairs Peter Dunne for The Age in which he labels Australia’s detention and treatment of people awaiting deportation on Christmas Island as a “concentration camp approach”. Later in the op-ed, Mr Dutton states that Israel today is running a concentration camp policy.
Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the ADC, issued the following statement:
“I do hope that there will come a point where politicians will realise that using inappropriate and painful comparisons to the Holocaust to score a political point is misguided and odious. Invoking the Holocaust to criticise a government stance diminishes and trivialises the genocide of millions of people and insults their memory. The debate about the treatment of people on Christmas Island, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a legitimate one. However, to suggest that these policies are in any way similar to the circumstances of the Nazi concentration camps where millions were murdered shows a gross lack of historical understanding about the terrors that Hitler and his monstrous regime actually perpetrated. In no way can the measures taken by the Australian government or Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians be compared to the Third Reich’s deliberate and systematic extermination policy. I am increasingly concerned about the coarsening of public discussion, and by the ignorance demonstrated by public figures about the Holocaust which leads them to think that it is acceptable to employ this unprecedented tragedy as a way to bring attention to the issues that they are passionate about. We call on Mr Dutton to refrain from employing Holocaust analogies in the future and to retract his hurtful remarks.”
For more information, please contact Dr Dvir Abramovich on (03) 9272-5677