Bob Carr accused of ‘wilfully lying’ as he compares Israel’s actions to Mao, Stalin and Hitler

Labor Friends of Israel co-convener Nick Dyrenfurth has accused Bob Carr of ‘deliberately stoking community tensions’ after the former NSW premier compared Israel’s behaviour with war crimes committed by Stalin, Mao and Hitler.

Bob Carr. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dylan Coker

Labor Friends of Israel co-convener Nick Dyrenfurth has accused Bob Carr of “wilfully lying and deliberately stoking community tensions with extremist language” after the former NSW premier compared Israel’s behaviour with war crimes committed by Stalin, Mao and Hitler.

Dr Dyrenfurth, a prominent ALP Jewish figure, said Mr Carr does not “speak for Labor” and declared that while “war is an awful thing … there is no genocide taking place”.

Mr Carr, a long-time advocate for Australia to recognise Palestine as a state, on Monday likened Israel’s actions in Gaza to “the worst of the last hundred years of Stalin’s Ukraine, of the Warsaw Ghetto, of Mao’s Great Leap Forward”.

Dr Dyrenfurth said he was “gravely concerned with the Netanyahu government’s actions in Gaza” but condemned Mr Carr’s provocative comments.

“Mr Carr is wilfully lying and deliberately stoking community tensions with extremist language and deliberately provoking his former friends in Australia’s Jewish community with Nazi slurs,” Dr Dyrenfurth told The Australian.

Nick Dyrenfurth. Photo: Supplied

“There is room for robust debate on Israel’s actions – it is instructive that Carr’s first response to the October 7 pogrom was to note ‘Hamas has won a tactical success’ and he has had little to say about this fascist terror group since – without resorting to equating a vibrant democracy that protects the rights of people of all faiths, minorities and LGBT citizens with past totalitarian regimes.

“War is an awful thing, but there is no genocide taking place.”

Dr Dyrenfurth called on Mr Carr to “promptly apologise to Australia’s Jewish community and to his fellow ALP members”.

“If Mr Carr has forgotten history, and lost touch with reality, that’s his issue. I, for one, am ashamed to be a member of the same great political party. He does not speak for Labor,” he said.

The prominent Labor thinker said Mr Carr, who “fancies himself as a historian of sorts”, should base his arguments on historic facts.

“During the systemic and cold-blooded extermination that was the Holocaust, the world’s Jewish population fell from 18 million to 12 million,” he said. “By contrast, since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Palestinian population in Gaza, the West Bank and Green Line Israel has grown from 1.2 million to some 5.5 million.

“A real genocide is what took place against members of my family during the Shoah in Bolechow (now western Ukraine). Forty-eight Jews of 3000 survived. Unborn babies were ripped from the bellies of pregnant women. Children’s heads smashed against poles. At a nearby forest, men, women and children were shot dead by the Gestapo and Ukrainian collaborators, 10 by 10, dumped into a mass grave. Wounded victims who survived were buried alive.”

A military transport aircraft drops humanitarian aid over the northern Gaza Strip on July 27. Jordanian and Emirati planes dropped food into Gaza on July 27 as Israel began a limited ‘tactical pause’ in military operations to allow the UN and aid agencies to tackle a deepening hunger crisis. Picture: AFP

Dr Dyrenfurth criticised Mr Carr for becoming the “Bill Hartley of his generation”.

“To quote a fine critic of Bob Carr from nearly a decade ago, he ‘is that rarest of occurrences, a reverse metamorphosis – a butterfly turning into a slug before our very eyes’.”

“This is the same Bob Carr who addressed the Israeli Film Festival in August 2009 praising Israel as a democratic beacon in a sea of autocracies – I know, as I was in the audience.

“The same man who once railed against the brutality of the Chinese communist dictatorship of Mao but now dutifully follows the CCP party line and invokes Mao to defame Israel. He has become what he once loathed – the Bill Hartley of his generation.”