Rambam Israel study group reports
Indigenous member of a recent AIJAC Rambam study program visiting Israel says the Jewish community has been a major friend to Australia’s First Peoples.
Piers Akerman
Sean Gordon told an Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) supporters luncheon last week: “The Jewish people have done more to advance our cause as Aboriginal people than any other group in the country”. Gordon, a Wangkumarra/Barkindji man and managing director of the Gidgee Group, was one of several recent returnees of AIJAC’s Rambam study program to Israel, who conveyed how impressed he was with the ongoing resilience he saw in Israel.
Speaking alongside him about their respective trips and related issues, including antisemitism in Australia, was Fiona Buffini, editor of the Australian Financial Review; Daily Telegraph columnist Piers Akerman; Sky News presenter Gabriella Power; and the Australian’s legal affairs correspondent Ellie Dudley.
Akerman, who had been to Israel before, said he was still shocked from this trip by the IDF footage of October 7, , “…so vicious, so determinedly barbaric.”
Referring to Iran as “the spider in the middle of the web” and a member of “team evil “alongside other anti-Western states and groups, Akerman argued the Government needs to list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation.
He also stressed the need to crack down on antisemitism and Islamist extremism in Australia, and not just for the sake of the Jewish community, but all Australians. “This is the message you have to say to the current Government: you’re not keeping Australia safe,” he said.
Buffini said she went there in part due to her confusion over the “moral inversion” following October 7, with many, particularly on the progressive side of politics, “openly siding with Iran and with its proxies.”
When describing the trip, Dudley said, she was struck most by the unedited video of October 7 footage. “It wasn’t until that video that I got a much better understanding of the massacre that saw hundreds of men, women and children slaughtered, families ripped apart and people taken from their homes.”
Power, who is working on a special report for Sky News based on her experiences during the trip, spoke about meeting some of the survivors of the Nova massacre and said when she visited the site, “it was as if I could still feel parts of the shock and the trauma and the grief that was still there. I’ve never in my life felt anything like that.”
