Poor response to vilification review

Poor response to vilification review

The Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV) has admitted only around six submissions have been made to its review of discrimination against LGBTI people in the Jewish community.

Speaking on Melbourne LGBTI radio station JOY94.9 last week, JCCV president John Searle said he was disappointed with the response.

The JCCV’s GLBT Reference Group collected submissions over four weeks in August and is due to release a report in coming weeks.

Local gay activist Mannie De Saxe has criticsed the Reference Group for its secrecy.

“We expect that organisations such as the JCCV … would have the openness and honesty to announce who the members of this group are and who should be subject to the scrutiny of the GLT communities,” De Saxe told the Star Observer.

“Jewish members of our communities should be able to make submissions and obtain assistance from people who are activists in our communities.”

Searle said members of the reference group feared criticism from the LGBTI community.

“Most, if not all, of those people [will] sign the report with their names, but they’ve confided in me they’ve been reluctant to put their names out in the public domain for fear of some vilification, strangely not from the non-gay community, but rather from the gay communities and other people who perhaps haven’t yet appreciated the work we’re doing,” Searle told JOY.

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6 responses to “Poor response to vilification review”

  1. Dave, being Jewish and being Gay are two separate issues entirely. Why is it that you place them both side by side? As a Jewish Australian, I dont need to be accepted by the Gay Right. And Dave, there you go again with the camps, where you only beleive what you hear.

  2. I get the feeling John Searle is specifically referring to me in the last part of this statement:

    “Most, if not all, of those people [will] sign the report with their names, but they’ve confided in me they’ve been reluctant to put their names out in the public domain for fear of some vilification, strangely not from the non-gay community, but rather from the gay communities and other people who perhaps haven’t yet appreciated the work we’re doing,” Searle told JOY.

    Having been sidelined by the JCCV and ignored completely, in a hostile fashion, and being further marginalised I feel justified in making this assumption.

    The gay rights activist (me) is made out to be the big bad bully, when in fact it’s quite the other way around. John Searle is the one who doesn’t want to talk to me, and refuses to answer my questions of him.

    Sigh.

  3. It is not as though GLBTI organizations need to review people of the Jewish faith and decide whether to accept them. They are just accepted as they are.

    GLBTI people were in camps, and stood side by side people of the Jewish faith, as victims of the ideology of a master race. I would hope the eternal lesson is we are all deserving of the same dignity and respect, and the idea one group of people should be punished by birth is wrong, and diminishes all of us as a society.

  4. You would think not supporting the idea of a Master Race would be easy to understand, especially when your community was the victim of that ideology. The idea homosexuals are inferior to heterosexuals, and must have laws to punish their birth, is abhorrent. You would think for a moment, it would not be to hard to proudly stand up against hate crimes against all people. To give them the dignity and respect your people were once so wrongfully denied.