AUSTRALIA must set an example in the West by its continued refusal to appease Israel’s enemies, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told a Jewish audience in Melbourne.

Addressing more than 200 people at the official reopening of the rebuilt Beit Chabad Ohel Devorah in St Kilda East earlier this month, Downer said Australia must continue to actively oppose, rather than merely abstain from, anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations, a number of which he had signed off on earlier that day.

“We are always being told the best thing for diplomacy is to ... abstain ... And I say, ‘Let’s vote against it because it is wrong.’

“The more we and other countries stand up to this sort of behaviour, the more we stand a chance of success the more we try to appease, the more [anti-Israel resolutions] we will encourage.”

Speaking on the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Downer said the horrific consequences of the appeasement shown to the Germans in the 1930s must encourage us to “confront evil when we find it and deal with it and not find excuses to walk on the other side of the road and do nothing about it”.

“This very day we confront the ideological scourge of extremist Islamist terrorism. I don’t think the world should forget that these people want to eliminate Israel. It’s not as though they never say they do it’s not as though they keep it a secret.”...