Tom Elliott: Bring your culture, not your hatred
THE fact Donald Trump shifted the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem shouldn’t anger Melburnians. This week’s local protest had the potential to raise foreign tensions that have no place in Australia, writes Tom Elliott.
Tom Elliott
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THE demonstration outside the State Library was stupid and ill-conceived. The fact that US President Donald Trump shifted the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem shouldn’t anger Melburnians.
These kind of protests have the potential to raise foreign tensions that have no place in Australia. And let’s face it, there’s nothing local demonstrators can achieve that will influence events in the Middle East. These placard-waving demonstrators need to grow a brain before they engage in such un-Australian behaviour.
It’s time we realised that imported ethnic rivalries have no place in this country.
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For decades we’ve happily welcomed migrants from all corners of the globe — but we need to take a stand against public displays of historic friction based on religion, race and culture.
And that’s why Wednesday’s antagonism between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian demonstrators deserves condemnation. If those who took part in this protest are so keen to re-fight the wars of the Middle East, let’s deport them overseas where they can hate each other to their hearts’ content.
Conflict between Jews and Muslims goes back a long, long time. Members of those two rival religions have hated and killed each other on a regular basis since the 7th Century. Right now the well-organised Israelis appear to have the upper hand against Islamic rivals such as the Palestinians.
That may change in the future, indeed as it has on many occasions in the past.
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Australia has very little to do with such an ancient Middle Eastern conflict. We neither caused its many hatreds, nor can we prevent them from recurring.
So why do groups led by the pro-Palestinian Antifa (Anti-Fascist) and Avi Yemini (former Israeli soldier now aligned with the Australian Conservatives) feel the need to protest on our streets? Just what are they trying to prove?
Most Jewish refugees who made their way to Australia after the end of WWII came to Australia because this nation offered a peaceful haven from the horrors of Nazi-decimated Europe. Many Muslims arrived here for the same reason — to avoid the bloodshed in places such as Iraq and Syria.
Yet for reasons that are unfathomable to the rest of us, some members of both groups seem determined to continue their violent rivalries down under.
Of course, such ethnic anger isn’t limited to migrants from the Middle East.
For a long time in Australia, relations between Catholics and Protestants were tense as their relatives in the troubled British province of Northern Ireland bombed, shot and kneecapped each other.
A good friend of mine’s Protestant father regularly marched through Belfast’s Catholic neighbourhoods during the late 1960s and early 70s. After receiving death threats from Irish Republican Army-affiliated groups there, he migrated to Australia, only to find Northern Ireland’s tensions repeated here.
Until the late 1990s, for example, the now-defunct Normandy Hotel in Clifton Hill displayed a plaque proclaiming that the pub was “Proudly sponsored by the Sinn Fein Gaelic Athletic Association”. At the time, Sinn Fein was the political arm of the IRA — and “proudly” active in Melbourne’s inner-north, half a world away from troubled Belfast.
Other foreign rivalries also have made their presence felt here. At the 2007 Australian Open tennis, for example, groups of Croatian and Serbian supporters clashed in Garden Square.
Flags were waved, insults hurled, bottles smashed and punches thrown. “Die Croatians, die,” chanted Serbs at their opponents. All because dozens of young men, most of whom had been born and raised in Australia, thought it appropriate to reignite the vicious Yugoslav wars of the 1990s at a local tennis tournament. What idiots they were.
Australian soccer also has a chequered past of hate-filled ethnic antagonism. In the old National Soccer League (1977-2004), just about every Victorian club identified with one Southern European country or another. Fans of teams such as South Melbourne Hellas (Greek), Brunswick Juventus (Italian), Footscray JUST (Yugoslavian) and Preston Makedonia (no translation required) often required separation by police because of violence at games. Sometimes matches had to be played before empty grandstands to avoid nationalistic grandstanding.
There is no room in Australia for such imported hatred. A significant number of migrants come here because they’re fleeing racial tension in their homeland. The last thing any of them should want to be confronted by is the vicious rivalries of the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Balkans — or anywhere else — being replayed on the streets of Melbourne.
The solution is simple. Masked protesters should be thrown in jail. Ditto for any demonstrator who assaults police. Extra costs associated with law enforcement at protests should be levied against those who cause the problems.
And for any troublemakers who aren’t Australian citizens? Deportation to their foreign conflict of choice. Sadly, there are plenty from which to choose.
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