Full Thread: The Apology
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Old February 13th, 2008 #10
Alex Linder
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Jews behind Australian apology to Abo monkeys

SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) -- In what could be described as Australia's
Yom Kippur, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd expressed Wednesday the one word
his predecessors refused to utter to indigenous Australians: Sorry.
Rudd's Labor Party wrested power from John Howard's Liberals Last
November on a platform that included apologizing to the "Stolen
Generations" -- up to 100,000 mostly mixed-blood Aboriginal children
who were forcibly removed from their families between 1910 and 1970.
The text of the motion on the Stolen Generations, which won bipartisan
support, acknowledged the "profound grief, suffering and loss"
inflicted on Aborigines.


Australian Jews, some of whom have been at the forefront of the
decades-long reconciliation effort, applauded the apology. "To the
mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the
breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry," Rudd said.
"And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud
people and a proud culture, we say sorry." In a historic speech that
drew cheers and tears, Rudd said he hoped the apology would remove "a
great stain from the nation's soul." Mark Leibler, the co-chair of
Reconciliation Australia, a national organization that promotes
reconciliation, said Rudd's apology marked a "watershed" in Australian
history but that this should be just the beginning of the
reconciliation process.


"The shame as far as this country is concerned will not be cleared up
until we bridge the 17-year gap in the life expectancy between
indigenous and non-indigenous Australians," said Leibler, who attended
the apology ceremony in Canberra on Wednesday. Leibler is also the
chairman of the world board of trustees of Keren Hayesod/United Israel
Appeal and national chairman of the Australia/Israel and Jewish
Affairs Council. "We've suffered 2,000 years of persecution, and we
understand what it is to be the underdog and to suffer from
disadvantage," he said. Jews have been at the forefront of pushing for
civil rights in Australia.


In 1965, Jim Spigelman, a cousin of the Pulitzer Prize-winning
cartoonist Art Spiegelman and now chief justice of the Supreme Court
of New South Wales, led 30 students on the first Australian Freedom
Ride -- a journey into Outback Australia to protest racial
discrimination against Aborigines, who were not entitled to vote and
were prohibited from swimming pools, pubs and other public places. In
the country town of Moree, a racist mob attacked the students and,
according to newspaper reports at the time, Spigelman was smacked to
the ground. The man most Jews and Aborigines hail as having made the
greatest contribution to the cause of Aboriginal rights is Ron Castan,
a Jewish Australian dubbed by Aboriginal leaders as the "great white
warrior."


Castan, who died in 1999, was the lead counsel in the landmark 1992
Australian Supreme Court "Mabo judgment" -- named for plaintiff Eddie
Mabo -- which overturned the legal fiction that Australia was "terra
nullius," or an uninhabited land, when white settlers first arrived in
1788. Aborigines now own more than 10 percent of Australia's land
mass.In a 1998 speech, Castan implored the government to say it was
sorry, citing Holocaust denial in his argument. "The refusal to
apologize for dispossession, for massacres and for the theft of
children is the Australian equivalent of the Holocaust deniers --
those who say it never really happened," Castan charged.
In 1999, Howard proposed a motion expressing "deep and sincere regret"
for the injustices suffered by Aborigines, but the then-prime minister
said Australians "should not be required to accept guilt and blame"
for the policies of previous governments.


Aborigines number about 450,000 in an Australian population of 21
million. They are the most disadvantaged group in Australia, suffering
high rates of infant mortality, unemployment, alcohol abuse and
domestic violence. More than 100 members of the Stolen Generations
were present at Wednesday's ceremony, which was broadcast live on
national television and on giant screens across the country. "Our
faith teaches and emphasizes the universal principles of coexistence
and respect for human dignity and rights," Rabbi Mordechai Gutnick,
the president of the Organization of Rabbis of Australia, said in a
statement. "It teaches the need to recognize and rectify any failings
we may display in our interaction between our fellow man. To say
'sorry' in a meaningful manner goes a long way in ensuring that
mistakes and discrimination will not be repeated."


In addition to their activism on Aboriginal issues, Jews were
instrumental in leading the crusade against the White Australia
Policy, a series of laws from 1901 to 1973 that restricted non-white
immigration to Australia. The president of the Executive Council of
Australian Jewry, Robert Goot, said he is proud of the Jewish
community's ongoing commitment to reconciliation. Rudd's apology
marked "the beginning in a new chapter in the quest by indigenous
Australians for complete equality with their fellow Australians," Goot
observed. Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence of the Great Synagogue in Sydney said
in a speech on reconciliation last week that Jews must not "deny nor
stand by nor stand silent in the face of the pain of the Stolen
Generations. It is incumbent on us to acknowledge the wrong, to
apologize for the damage caused."


Noting the importance to Jews of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in
Jerusalem, the British-born rabbi said Australia should have a similar
institution for Aborigines. "There ought to be a national place where
people who have suffered can come and identify with their past and
understand that the incursion of their culture and heritage has been
recognized and an apology has been made," he said. Rudd's apology
comes more than a decade after a 1997 inquiry in Australia's
parliament, called the "Bringing Them Home" report, concluded that the
Aborigines suffered "an act of genocide aimed at wiping out indigenous
families, communities and cultures." The report urged the government
to apologize and offer compensation to the victims and their families.
The apology offers no recourse to compensation, although the issue is
now being hotly debated. It also reignited the so-called "history
wars" between those who believe the Stolen Generations were kidnapped
in a sinister attempt to breed out their Aboriginality and others who
say it was a benevolent attempt to save half-caste children from the
ills of Aboriginal society.

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news...borigines.html