Scott Morrison (“PM slams anti-Semitism in Holocaust row”, 28/1) hit the nail on the head. Anti-Semitism is indeed a virus. Every virus needs vector carriers, and in the case of the Sydney Festival the carriers are the bourgeois left of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Educating students on the Holocaust is essential, but it is just the most monstrous example of persecutions of the Jewish people that have been carried out over the past 2000 years.
Anti-Semitism is an endemic social disease. Over the millennia, there have been banishments, massacres, pogroms and forced migrations, as well as lower-level discrimination across society. We should never forget how Jews trying to escape Nazi terror were turned away by many countries.
Tom Smith, Bowral, NSW
While it is an indictment on our nation’s general knowledge that only 25 per cent of Australians (“Deakin Uni survey reveals one quarter of Australians in the dark about Holocaust”, 26/1) are aware of the Nazi genocide, what is more of an indictment of our ignorance is that I would suggest barely 5 per cent of our population would be aware of King Leopold II of Belgium’s genocide of the native population of the then Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Reliable estimates put the deaths up to 10,000,000. Blacks and Indigenous peoples tend not to receive the acknowledgment they deserve.
Rob Park, Surrey Hills, Vic
Read the letters in The Australian.