Nazifying Israel returns to haunt the Labor Party

From The Australian: Glenn Milne: Nazifying Israel returns to haunt the Labor Party [September 26, 2005]: by Glenn Milne: September 26, 2005 ...

OPPOSITION Leader Kim Beazley is coming under increased pressure from Australia's influential Jewish community to publicly repudiate Labor MPs who are 'Nazifying' Israel, despite its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The latest bout of justifiable Jewish angst follows another ugly outburst by Labor backbencher Julia Irwin in federal Parliament two weeks ago.

Following the Gaza pull-out, Irwin told Parliament in part: 'Gaza is now a Palestinian ghetto; a prison for its one million people. All flows of people and goods must pass through Israeli border controls, which has resulted in the World Bank's reporting that unemployment and poverty will rise in Gaza. Now Israel will rule Gaza like a walled ghetto, a giant penal colony, a concentration camp.
'We are witnessing the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, the heart and soul of the Palestinian nation. The world must not allow this to happen.'
This is deliberately insidious stuff. Note the use of the words 'ghetto', 'concentration camp' and 'ethnic cleansing', all terms associated with the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany. An understandably furious Australian Jewish community believes Irwin is engaged in dangerous moral relativism, putting forward the phony proposition that Israel is acting in the same way as Hitler. "