Christensen’s pitch plumbed new lows this week when he posted on Facebook – wittingly, unwittingly, or half-wittingly – an anti-Semitic meme prominently featuring an image of the Jewish Holocaust survivor and billionaire George Soros, who, despite his wealth, is well-known for his support of progressive causes. (Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign ran similar images of Soros as have extremist right-wing Hungarian politicians).
Tropes of this kind are redolent of the Nazis against German Jewry and their allegations that Jews secretly controlled global finance and were responsible for Germany’s economic hardship. You don’t need a PhD in history to know where it led.
Remarkably, Christensen subsequently claimed on Facebook he was unaware of Soros’s Jewishness and made a bizarre claim to his great grandmother’s “1/4th” Jewish heritage.
Right-wing identity politics must be repelled. After all, in economic terms, what really separates an underemployed single mother from Mackay with convict heritage from a battling first-generation Sudanese male factory worker in western Melbourne?
How can Morrison, Deputy Liberal leader and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, or friends of the Australian Jewish community such as Tim Wilson and Dave Sharma, or any decent Liberal MP keep shtum? Christensen is arguably unfit to sit in Federal Parliament. At the very least, the Prime Minister should rebuke his divisive, dangerous rhetoric.
Read the article by Nick Dyrenfurth in The Sydney Morning Herald.