Labor MP’s Nazi Germany comparison apology welcomed by ECAJ
Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon likened recent police raids on the offices of the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU) to Nazi Germany in an interview on Sky News this week.
Joel Fitzgibbon
But Joel Fitzgibbon has apologised for the remark and the ECAJ has welcomed the apology.
“When challenged about the inappropriateness of the remarks he did not withdraw his remarks, and broadened the analogy to include North Korea and Stalinist Russia,” explains The Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Anton Block.
“Mr Fitzgibbon’s remarks are unacceptable and should be withdrawn. There is a common temptation to discredit political rivals by associating them with symbols of evil, the most striking and extreme of which is Nazism.”
“However, where the comparison is wholly without basis, it does nothing more than lower the discourse and diminish the speaker, in this case Mr Fitzgibbon.”
“We appreciate that the remarks were off the cuff and delivered in the heat of political debate, but the effect of making such false comparisons whether they be with Nazism or with other brutal totalitarian regimes such as North Korea and Stalin’s Soviet Union, which Mr Fitzgibbon also evoked, is to trivialise the horrors of the darkest chapters in human history and anaesthetise the public to the unique suffering of the victims.”
Get over it ECAJ and other similar groups.
The use of Nazi or Gestapo or Commo or KGB is part of modern slang to refer to right and left wingers.
Is Mr Fitzgibbon aware that his own party has effectively recognised, i.e., tried to legitimise Hamas?
And what is Hamas? Well, its Charter tells us: a genocidal and politicidal entity.