Asylum Seekers in Australia and the Jewish Community.

Re Asylum seekers and boat-people in Australia today: the controversy in the Australian Jewish News.

I have all the sympathies for refugees and asylum seekers who enter this country legally. As a child,  I and my family were part of such groups.

The problem I have and many others probably have as well, is the fact that the majority of our uninvited ‘boat people’ these days come from cultures where they both experienced and were  inculcated with  a lack of respect for human rights,- as well as actual hatreds of others,- including Jews and women.

*Does Australia do enough to re-educate them once here about the different value systems operating in our society?

When one reads about the English experience of parents recently convicted of killing their own British-born daughter because she would not succumb to their particular traditional way of life, it is very worrying when one does not know who  the people coming to our shores are and what  value systems they bring with them!

*To put it bluntly, accepting all-comers on human-rights grounds without ensuring a reciprocal understanding and undertaking, is the risk that democracies everywhere face today for  their future harmonious community relations.

I do not think anyone needed to worry about us  Jewish asylum seekers on such grounds in the past and therefore there is no comparison to be made with today’s situation which Australia faces.

Why were Jews turned away when they were trying to escape from the impending, let alone the actual Holocaust enveloping them in Europe?
The free nations of the world were afraid of "these people"?
What a joke! Well, they have denuded Europe of the Jewish culture and now it has been replaced by many other North  African and Asian ones. 40+ million people are on the move in the world to try and gain a better life for themselves,- fleeing from many autocracies and theocracies to the democracies.
Can anyone really blame them?

In the process, in many parts of Europe, including in England, there is a change in the Western value systems and much bending to accommodate those cultural values from which the foreigners were escaping originally. For women and girls it is absolutely a tragedy!

Reeducation, without necessarily losing one's identity, should be the way to integrate newcomers.

Israel is not immune from this 'invasion' of uninvited foreigners from North Africa,- many of whom trekked for weeks across deserts and the Sinai to cross over illegally into Israel. It is a problem re what to do with them. Some 2 thousand young men demonstrated outside our hotel and the USA Embassy in June, against proposed deportations to their countries of origin,- mainly Sudan. They are in the main economic migrants and now that the war has ended, they are free to return home, but they like it in Israel and want to stay!!!

Unfortunately, there is quite a lot of unrest in the country due to this added burden to maintain law and order in an already overstressed nation!
MM