In the Media

Canberra Times – 3 September 2025

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism has been adopted by 44 countries, including Australia and most other Western nations, and is supported by the UN, the EU, the Organisation of American States and the Council of Europe. Included in its examples of antisemitism are “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

It should be self-evident that it is particularly hurtful to Jewish people, and completely baseless. Yet this is the entire basis of Mark Kenny’s appalling column “The atrocities keep coming” (August 31). The Nazis industrialised their slaughter of the Jews, even to the detriment of their war effort. Israel is trying to defeat the genocidal terrorist group that attacked it, while evacuating and warning civilians, to the detriment of its war effort. It is not murdering them, as Kenny claims, nor starving them – Hamas causes starvation by stealing huge quantities of food, as UN figures demonstrate.

Kenny also claims it’s “the most imponderable of all” that the Jews would claim the “ground of others” for their state and force the Arabs out. They didn’t. They claimed the Jewish homeland, where Jews are indigenous and have lived for thousands of years. They accepted the UN plan to partition the land, but the Arabs refused, and it was the war the Arabs started that caused the refugees. The “right of return” of the many millions of descendants of these refugees, as Kenny calls for, would endanger Jewish self-determination there or worse.