Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff says: “This is a country where there was no anti-Semitism. The greatest hero of WWI was General Monash, a proud Jew.”
“Australia is not what it used to be because of the Arabs. Who could believe that a member of the Israeli consul walking home from shul on Friday night a few months ago, there was a big attack in the heart of Sydney. He was injured. Others were injured. Luckily no one was killed. It is beyond comprehension what has happened to Australia.”
It is only beyond comprehension if you bury your head in the sand. Some non-Jewish observers in Australia predicted this very problem in the 1930s. Australian Jews are in danger in Australia in Sydney and Melbourne, the two most multi-cultural Australian cities where Australians have the most first-hand experience with Jews. In places where Australians don’t know Jews, there’s much less anti-Semitism.
ESSAY: When the Australian government announced in December 1938 that 15,000 more refugees would be admitted over the following three years, the Catholic Advocate warned that:
“If the present policy of admitting large numbers of Jewish immigrants is continued, we are likely to be confronted by a rapid increase in anti-Semitism. … The Jews are not simply an international religious body like the Catholics: they are a nation with well-marked characteristics, both mental and physical, with their own virtues, vices and talents, and with their peculiar loyalties. … It is the sense of this difference which has caused friction between the Jew and his hosts throughout the ages, and which has constantly brought tragedy to the Jews.”
Deeply concerned at increasing Jewish power and influence in Australia, Stephensen [of Australia First] declared:
“The answer to Semitism is anti-Semitism; and when Jews gain too many advantages for themselves, by their practice of self-segregation, they invariably find (and surely should expect to find!) that the majority of non-Jews will resent, and eventually will curb, the privileges which the Jews have won for themselves by concerted sectional action. That is what will inevitably occur in Australia sooner or later, if a large colony of self-segregating Jews is allowed now to establish itself in our community.”
For Stephensen, Jewish ethnocentrism and endogamy were at the heart of the Jewish problem, and the solution to this problem was simple:
“It is well known that there are many Jews who are good citizens, honest and cultured, despite the reputation of the generality of their kind of being financially “tricky”, unscrupulous, and parasitical. That there are intellectual and sensitive Jews is also as well-known as that there are many “Flash Yids” who degrade and debase public culture. No case can be made against Jews generally, except … that their insistence on racial self-segregation is anti-social, considered from the point of view of the community as a whole. We cannot concede to them in Australia a right which, if conceded in perpetuity to other types of immigrant … would lead to the sectionalizing of the community and its disunification. … The remedy is that the Jewish Race should abolish itself, by becoming absorbed in the common stream of mankind. [Otherwise] we others, who are so strictly excluded from the Jewish community, have at least a reciprocal right to exclude them from ours.”
