Case in point, the letter that arrived today and provoked this column. A pretty pink envelope with a chirpy stamp, from a Sarah (I’ll spare you and her the surname) giving a return address in Sydney’s Double Bay. Inside the envelope, a pretty pink card: “Thinking of You”. And inside the card, in calligraphy suggesting a reasonable standard of education, a piece of anti-Semitism worthy of Julius Streicher’s Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. Insisting that “Hitler was right”, the lovely Sarah calls for the extermination of every Jew – and for the likes of me as a Jew-lover. (Odd, given that my views on the Palestinians have often led to me being branded an anti-Semite in the Jewish media.)
The Jews, whom Sarah describes with a fusillade of ugly adjectives, are responsible for “ALL wars!!” (Note the usual capital letters – heavily underlined in the letter – and exclamation marks.) She concludes with a cacophony of conventional obscenities aimed at yours truly, signing off, sweet as you like, with “Sarah”. How odd, by the way, that she chooses to live among so many Jews; Double Bay became home, after the war, to many Holocaust survivors.
Read this opinion piece by Phillip Adams in The Australian (subscription required).