The Armenian National Committee of Australia condemns the recent provocation of hate speech and racism against the Jewish-Australian community, where a group of protestors were recorded chanting offensive statements including “Destroy the Jews” and “Give us the necks of the Jews”.
Words which intend to demean, dehumanise or incite violence against a particular group, whether based on race, sex or religion, are absolutely unacceptable and undermine the harmonious co-existence of our multicultural society and Australian democracy as well as being against the core values of humanity.
Calling out and condemning such hate speech and incitement is the vital first step to protecting the nation’s multicultural fabric to mitigate the threats posed by prejudice and intolerance. Australia has a proud tradition of free political expression, discourse and dissent which should never be allowed to be replaced with hate speech and incitement.
As fellow descendants of genocide survivors the ultimate act of racial and religious intolerance, Armenian-Australians stand with Jewish-Australians in declaring that words matter today, as they did in the Ottoman Empire during WWI and in Europe during WWII, when the normalisation of such hate speech and incitement created the atmosphere and facilitated two of the gravest crimes against humanity in modern history.
