Josh Frydenberg has condemned anti-Semitic protests on the Sydney Opera House steps as an “abomination”, warned of the deep fears of Australia’s Jewish community and praised the “piercing moral clarity” demonstrated by the US, UK and Germany in standing with Israel in its hour of need.
In his first comments since the Hamas terror attack on southern Israel, the former treasurer and prominent member of the Jewish community said he never believed he would feel as his grandparents did amid the rising tide of Jewish hatred that heralded the Holocaust, nor as his parents did amid the threat to Israel posed by the Yom Kippur War in 1973. “But now I do. I stand before you anguished and anxious about the future,” Mr Frydenberg said in a speech in support of victims of terrorism, an extract of which is published in The Weekend Australian.
“When fears over safety see Jewish students afraid to attend lectures on campus, Jewish parents feel the need to keep their children home from school, and Jewish schools advise students not to wear their uniforms that makes them identifiable outside school grounds we know we have a problem.
“And when hundreds of demonstrators in Sydney chant ‘f..k the Jews’ and ‘gas the Jews’ we know just how dangerous and serious that problem really is. What happened last week outside the Sydney Opera House was nothing short of an abomination. A national disgrace that has become an international embarrassment.”
Read the article by Rachel Baxendale in The Australian.