A rally in Sydney against Israel's military campaign in Gaza on, August 3, 2014.
A rally in Sydney against Israel's military campaign in Gaza on, August 3, 2014. Photo by AFP
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Anti-Semitic flyers were dropped in the mailboxes of private homes in Jewish suburbs in Sydney.
Residents of Bondi Beach and Double Bay, which contain large numbers of Sydney’s 40,000-plus Jewish community, found the flyer in their mailboxes on Monday.
“Wake up Australia,” reads the flyer. “Jews have been kicked out of countries 109 times through history. … Could it be that having them in a European country is harmful to the host?”
The flyer included an invitation to join Squadron 88, a local white supremacist group, and included a reference to Stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi website.
“The flyer is an appalling litany of racist stereotypes, all too predictable from neo-Nazi organizations,” said New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive Vic Alhadeff. “It’s no coincidence that 88 – which appears on the flyer – represents HH, which stands for Heil Hitler.”
The flyer also reads: “The Jews own all Hollywood studios & 97% of US newspapers and media. Any movie or tv show you watch may well be coming straight from Israel.”
Malcolm Turnbull, the Communications Minister whose electorate includes the two suburbs, condemned the flyer as “a crude and vicious attempt to intimidate and insult the Jewish community.”
He added: “We are the most successful and harmonious multicultural society in the world today…Racism must be opposed, called out and condemned wherever it is found.”
Alhadeff said his organization had registered a complaint with Facebook, but the social media platform said it had reviewed the Squadron 88 page and it “doesn’t violate our community standards.”
“It is very disappointing that Facebook fails to grasp the import of what is expressed in the flyer,” Alhadeff said. “If the people at Facebook who are tasked with monitoring its standards don’t consider this flyer to be hate speech, what is?”
The flyers – which are being investigated by police – are the latest in a spike of anti-Semitic incidents recorded in Australia since the start of the war in Gaza over two months ago.