Australian Betar Condemns Likud’s Danny Danon

Friday, June 15, 2012

SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) – The Australian branch of the right-wing Zionist youth movement Betar condemned Likud Knesset member Danny Danon for his stance on Africans asylum-seekers, whom he has described as “a national plague.”

In an extraordinary open letter circulated this week, Betar Australia said the attacks on Africans in Israel have come as a “shock and an embarrassment to us as Jews.”

Stressing that they were not seeking to dictate policy from afar, Betar Australia urged Danon, a former chair of World Betar, to “reconsider” his stance on South Sudanese asylum-seekers following his withering descriptions of them and his proposal of a bill to deport them.

“As Jews and Betarim, we expect the political establishment in Israel to act decently and to approach this issue humanely,” the letter said. “To deport people to persecution and danger is not the act of a Jewish state.”