On 11 May 2017, under the auspices of Dialogue4Peace, I, together with Egyptian Copt, Nadia Ghali, were the main speakers at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre in a debate with Bishop Browning and his colleague, Saudi-Palestinian, Yousef Alreemawi. The subject was ‘Israel/ Palestine: Social Justice.’
Bishop Browning heads the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network and is a committed Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) supporter. Alreemawi runs the English language Palestine Remembered program on radio 3CR which disseminates anti-Israel propaganda.
In my opening speech, I challenged Bishop Browning to condemn the Palestinian leadership for abusing their children by inciting them to murder Jews, and using schools and places of worship to store weapons, as well as to condemn them for their treatment of minorities, such as gays.
Furthermore I asked him to condemn the honour killings of women, the destruction of Jewish holy places and the murder of rabbis at prayer.
I was disappointed that he declined to do so. He also declined to rebuff the brazen lies of Alreemawi who maintained, with a straight face, that it was the Mossad that killed the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Bishop Browning also declined to condemn the recent treatment of an Israeli backpacker in Cairns, refused service in a shop because she was Israeli.
Read the article by Ron Jontoff-Hutter in The Spectator.