Hot Chocolate Support

July 14, 2011 Agencies
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The Max Brenner chocolate store in Melbourne targeted by anti-Israel protestors last week had a more welcome guest today….Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd.

Michael Danby welcomes Kevin Rudd

Michael Danby MP the new chairman of Australia’s Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd today shared a hot chocolate at Max Brenner’s CBD shop in solidarity with Israel and the Australian Jewish Community. The Max Brenner’s shop had been the target of an anti-Israel protest by BDS militants which turned violent and led to 19 arrests in Melbourne two weeks ago.

At Michael Danby’s invitation, the Foreign Minister joined the Member for Melbourne Ports in a symbolic act repudiating attempts to disrupt the popular café by the pro-Hamas Boycott Israel campaign.

Mr Danby said Kevin Rudd was shocked at the historical precedent of the protests against Israeli and Jewish shops. He was moved by Dr Gerard Henderson’s column in the Sydney Morning Herald ( Jews know acceptance still has its exceptions, 12/7/2011),  which pointed to precedents of anti-Jewish commercial boycotts in the mid-1930’s Germany.

Danby explained to Rudd that the violent  BDS protesters chanted ‘from the river to the sea”, Hamas’ slogan that supports a Muslim state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

“ These people are not in favour of a Two State Solution. Hatred motivates these calls for elimination of the Jewish State,” Mr Danby said.

Danby added that the governing  Labor Party had a series of pro-Israel manifestations to show the views of mainstream Australian’s “90% of whom were sickened by the fanatics attacking police and the Israeli franchise. These will be rolled out over the next weeks.”

Max Brenner’s management pointed out that the BDS activists were not having much success with 26 of the Israeli franchise operating around Australia and queues of people waiting in line to get into some of the new stores in Qld.

Comments

5 Responses to “Hot Chocolate Support”
  1. Tink says:

    Thanks, Shirlee and Jack. It’s nice to see some people actually know what they are talking about. As a human rights activist and someone who cares deeply about peace I am angered by how often people come out with all kinds of manipulative, incorrect tales about how evil Jews are in order to prop up their own messed up political beliefs. Soon, hopefully, there shall be a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one, with land swaps, in order to secure self-determination for both peoples, which is a solution that actually might work, as opposed to the thinly veiled anti-semitism of these BDS activists.

  2. Shirlee says:

    James,

    I would suggest that you look up the definition of a refugee.

    Your Gazan Arabs, are not refugees. Refugees are the first first generation of people evicted from their country. These people are the 3rd.

    The Arabs of Palestine weren’t evicted from their country. They fled at the insistence of their leaders, who promised a quick return, when the Jews were annihilated.

    Jordan is the ancestral home of these people, not Israel.

  3. James Crafti says:

    Yes Omar Barghouti wants to follow international law and allow all refugees to be able to return to their homes… what a horrible person (note: sarcasim)! If Jews are the minority on Palestinian land then yes it doesn’t make sense to have the land as a Jewish state. This doesn’t mean that Barghouti is anti-Jewish. We seek to live in peace Jews and Palestinians side by side in democracy in the same way that black South African’s sought this with white South African’s. A Jewish state only undermines the rights of non-Jew’s who live there (or who were forced out of there). The land “from the river to the sea” cannot be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druze or anything else. The land is too precious and democracy too important for it to be subordinated to any one religious or cultural grouping.

    The comparrison with Nazi’s is not valid. Jewish centres are not the target of BDS. If you want to see what actually ARE targets of BDS check out the website http://www.bdsmovement.net/. Max Brenner is targeted not for being “part of a Jewish-owned franchise thousands of miles away from the conflict,” it is targeted for being a company whose parent company gives “care packages” to sections of the Israeli army guilty of human rights abuses accourding to the Goldstone report.

    Lastly where is your proof that we were violent? Not a single protester has actually been charged with assault. The charges we do have range from “besetting” to “trespass” to “riotus behavior” all of which are catch all charges and we expect to have them thrown out in court. The footage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTrX8sxZv6c shows no violence on the side of protestors and the police arresting people just for speaking on megaphones.

  4. Jack Chrapot says:

    The BDS campaign founder Omar Barghouti made it clear many times that his prime objective is to force Israel, the only Jewish State, to cease to exist by accepting any and all Palestinian refugees into her borders. That is his clear end game and this can only be played out by the use of deception and by force.

    His campaign misrepresents reality in Israel and in Palestine and, in addition, he seeks to deflect criticism by playing the “we’re not anti-Semites game”.

    However, the comparisons between Nazi boycotts and anti-Israel protests by BDS militants remain valid. 

    Witnesses say they heard cries of “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” coming from the demonstrators. 

    Israel alone is singled out in this way at a time when violence is engulfing Arab lands. Last night Assad butchered 16 more of his own people, yet we see falsely self-styled “peace activists” and Gaza grannies pulling costly stunts like flytilllas and others proudly crowing about being arrested for bullying patrons and abusing police outside a chocolate shop that’s part of a Jewish-owned franchise thousands of miles away from the conflict.

    Jewish voices like those of James Crafti are often heard in the most obnoxious way.

    What we really need to hear are the voices of those Jews and those Arabs who silently work for peace and reconciliation and not war and more misery as is the case with violent, aggressive BDS thugs.

    I congratulate Kevin Rudd and Michael Danby for what they have done to highlight the stupidity of the boycotters. Let the chocolate revolution begin!

  5. James Crafti says:

    It is sadly unsurprising that J-Wire presents such absurd comparisons between Palestine activists and Nazi’s made by Rudd as legitimate while at the same time having the good sense to delegitimise the comparison made by his sister in relation to the same-sex marriage campaign.
    http://www.jwire.com.au/news/jewish-gays-denounce-lorree-rudds-nazi-inferences/17540

    The reason for these radically different reactions has nothing to do with the campaigns or any real historic understanding of what the Nazi’s did. Rather it is because you are simply promoting Zionism in whatever form possible even if that means making false claims of anti-Semitism.

    P.S. when is J-wire going to run a story with the opening headline “Jewish Palestine activists have reacted strongly to Kevin Rudd’s accusations that we were on the push for same-sex marriage committing atrocities like the fascists did on Kristallnacht.”

    For the record I was one of the 19 arrested on July 1 outside Max Brenner and it would be good if Jewish voices like my own were occasionally featured on this website.

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