Jewish Groups Aren't Pleased With A One Nation Senator's Nazi Gas Chamber Analogy

    Update: Culleton says his comments were misinterpreted and he was talking about a mass gassing of sheep.

    UPDATE

    Senator Culleton has said his comments had been misinterpreted as a reference to the Holocaust, and he was instead talking about a mass gassing of sheep that occurred in Australia in the 1990s.

    "During senator Culleton’s press conference in Canberra last week – when he mentioned ‘gassing’ he was referring to the context of his maiden speech where 20 million sheep were gassed," a spokesperson for Culleton told BuzzFeed News.

    In the speech, Culleton spoke about visiting a farm only to discover a running petrol motor being used as "an improvised gassing plant" after the government ordered a cull.

    "The farmers were running sheep into the back of semi tippers, rolling the tarps over the top, shutting the back tailgates and gassing the young sheep to death—under instructions from the then government! I vomited over the fence, as a lot of the sheep appeared to be still clinging on to life," he told the Senate.

    Anti-Defamation Commission chairman, Dvir Abramovich, said he accepted the "very much needed clarification" but that he was still troubled by Culleton's remarks.

    "We hope that senator Culleton recognises and understands our earlier concerns and the hurt that his remarks caused, and call on him to use this opportunity to unequivocally denounce and speak out against the trivialisation of the Holocaust and all forms of bigotry."

    Alex Ryvchin, the public affairs director at the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told BuzzFeed News the explanation "strains credulity".

    "You don’t tell sheep to 'Come take a shower' ... unless the sheep in the senator’s story were miraculously endowed with the gift of human communication," he said.

    "We urge the senator to apologise for his remarks."

    Two high profile Jewish groups have criticised embattled One Nation senator Rodney Culleton for remarks earlier this week comparing an Australian bank's treatment of farmers to the mass killings of Jewish people during the Holocaust.

    At a press conference calling for a royal commission into banks on Tuesday, Culleton spoke after a number of farmers who said they had been led into financial and emotional ruin by Australia's big banks.

    Culleton brandished a heavy sheaf of files and said it was proof that ANZ misled a parliamentary inquiry earlier this year.

    He then said “This will show that the ANZ bank came in and misled the farmers. In actual fact, said, ‘Come take a shower’, and gassed them."

    The allusion to the Nazi gas chambers has been heavily criticised by Jewish organisations, who say it trivialises the Holocaust.

    The chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, Dvir Abramovich said the comments were "disgraceful and misguided".

    "Yes, we should have a debate [on] banking policy, and yes, Senator Culleton is of course free to voice his concerns," Abramovich said. "However, to suggest that the way ANZ treated farmers in any way equates to the circumstances of the Nazi concentration camps where millions were exterminated, and where children were torn from their mothers’ arms and pushed into the gas chambers, diminishes the deaths and the enormous suffering experienced, and shows a gross lack of historical understanding about the crimes that Hitler and his evil regime committed."

    "In no way can the statements or actions by a bank be analogised to the Third Reich’s deliberate, systematic and mechanised annihilation of six million Jews and millions of others," Abramovich added.

    He urged Culleton to apologise, and to not invoke the Holocaust in the future.

    Alex Ryvchin, Public Affairs Director at the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told BuzzFeed News the organisation "deplored" the remarks.

    "The history of the Holocaust is not a punch-line or a rhetorical tool to press home a point," he said.

    "Senator Culleton’s remarks trivialise the unparalleled horror of the gas chambers and will be deeply hurtful to members of the Jewish community and to all victims of Nazism and their descendants."

    The backlash tips off a trying week for Culleton, who attended the High Court on Monday for a hearing on the legitimacy of his election to the Senate.

    He also spent Wednesday in something of a cat and mouse game with his own leader, Pauline Hanson, and bizarrely skipped out on Senate Question Time on Thursday to instead sit in the House of Representatives.