RUTHFULLY YOURS

Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, Australia, was founded in 1835, and Jews, of English origin, were among its earliest inhabitants.  Immediately before, and following, the Second World War, the Melbourne Jewish community  – by that time highly assimilationist and eroded by apathy and intermarriage – was transformed by the arrival of large numbers of refugees and Holocaust survivors, who turned the community into the “shtetl by the [River] Yarra,” ensuring the domination of communal affairs by Jews of Polish rather than Anglo- heritage, and orienting Melbourne Jewry into a decidedly Zionist stance.

The period immediately following the Second World War wrought other changes on Melbourne, the staid financial capital of Australia.  The immigration of large numbers of continental Europeans, predominantly Greeks and Italians, helped to turn the city into the diverse, cosmopolitan hub that it is today.  The process continued with the dismantling, from the 1960s onwards, of the “White Australia” policy that had been adopted by the newly federated Australia in 1901.

Designed principally to stop the arrival of “cheap labour” from South-East Asia, the “White Australia” policy had its origins in New South Wales and Queensland during the 1880s, when legislators bowed to pressure from working men worried about competition from Chinese “coolies” and Pacific Islanders, as well as merchants fearing economic competitors from Japan.

At Federation in 1901 a language test was instituted for intending immigrants, to be administered by immigration officers at the ports of entry.  Non-British immigrants had to satisfy officers that they spoke English or another approved European language (which until the intervention of communal leaders did not include Yiddish).

The language test proved to be a useful device to keep out political undesirables – as when the prominent Czech (Jewish) Communist Egon Kisch arrived in the 1934.  Since he spoke good English, he was given the test in Gaelic, of which he obviously knew not a word!  (This led to a celebrated test case, which Kisch, thanks to his barrister, Joan Rosanove, the first female barrister in the state, won.)

The end of the White Australia policy – which had also discriminated against Sephardim from the Levant and Middle East – led to the arrival of many non-Europeans, including Muslims.  Most of Melbourne’s Muslims are Turks, but in recent years there have been Muslim arrivals of other origins, and a branch of the notorious Hizb-ut Tahrir organisation was recently set up.

During Operation Cast Lead, an anti-Israel rally in the city centre saw the manifestation of overt antisemitism, as in the accompanying photographs – one in particular staggeringly vile.  As well as as Muslim anti-Israel protesters, there’s the usual crowd of leftwingers. One source of virulent antisemitic propaganda used to be a centrally located bookshop run by a nutty far-right group called the Australian League of Rights, founded in 1946, but most of its members would seem now to be settled in that land from which no traveller ever returns.

Now, as I’ve said, Melbourne’s is a strongly Zionist Jewish community, and on Yom Ha-Atzmaut members of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) at the University of Melbourne – the oldest and most venerable institution of higher learning in the state of Victoria – were celebrating Israel’s 63rd birthday.  It was not a political demonstration – it was a lunchtime event of singing and dancing on the campus lawn, and the Student Union, to which AUJS is affiliated, had given permission for it.

But a flyer, it appears, had gone out from two anti-Israel groups – Students for Palestine and the Federation of Australian Muslim  Students and Youth (FAMSY) – calling on members to “rally against Zionists’ apartheid celebrations”.

According to the current edition of the Australian Jewish News (Melbourne edition), someone from the “counter-rally,” wielding wirecutters, apparently attempted to vandalise the stereo that was playing Israeli music, and then attacked one of the Jewish students with the wirecutters, causing him injury.  Two individuals were arrested by police, who were standing by with campus security guards.

A spokesman for the students is reported as saying that he doesn’t understand why permission for the “counter-rally” was granted – the two groups involved are not affiliates of the university – and that the AUJS members had taken “all the right precautions”.

John Searle, president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV), is quoted by the newspaper as saying:

“What AUJS was doing was a quiet, peaceful celebration.  They ought not to be scared to express their passion for being Jewish and being Zionist.”

Like the AUJS, he’s called on police to lay charges against the attacker, for possession of a weapon, vandalism, and assault

Noting that this violent incident has been reported nowhere but the Melbourne Jewish press (and that tardily, it would seem), some Aussies have been muttering darkly about a deliberate cover-up.

I’m not going to link to one online source of that nature (where other related material can be found) since when I did earlier today the link turned my post headings and other labels ghastly  shades of violet and cobalt!  Just suffice it to say Australian Islamist Monitor …

(Hat tip: reader Shirlee)