LETTERS OF THE WEEK

A wealthy Australian Jew died this week and that was enough to bring some of the vile anti-semitic vermin that infest the fringes of our society out of the woodwork.

The following two letters appear in today's Australian to counter the dross:

WHY was the letter from Frank Bonaccorso (Letters, 30/4) selected for publication? He opened with the offensive and totally unfounded inference that only the Australia-Israel Review would publish “gushing tributes to a man who admitted collusion in a cartel ...”. Richard Pratt was certainly a Jew and a supporter of Israel, but his philanthropy was remarkable both for the amounts he donated and for its breadth. Israel and Jewish causes were by no means the major beneficiaries of his largesse.

Ian Grinblat
Caulfield, Vic

SELF-declared “revolutionary socialist” John Passant’s hatred towards Israel and Jews has no bounds. Not content with routinely titling Israel a racist, terrorist state and peddling conspiracy theories about Zionism, Passant takes a cheap shot at a dead Jewish man (Letters, 1/5). Whatever one might think of Richard Pratt—he was a flawed man like the rest of us—his family and friends deserve to be spared comparisons with Somali pirates.

Therein lies the rub. The pirates, who happen to be largely Muslim, are to be obliquely lauded because Passant perceives them to be the enemy of Israel and the West. Sadly that’s the perverted logic of the modern-day far Left: is it any wonder that an overwhelmingly majority of the world’s population shun their vile, hate-filled politics.

Nick Dyrenfurth
Waterloo, NSW