Gun seized over anti-Semitic views
A Victorian man who claims Israel was behind the two World Wars and Islamic State has lost his appeal to have his firearms licence reinstated.
A VICTORIAN man who claims Israel was behind the two World Wars, a number of global terror attacks and Islamic State, and that Jews were key players in the slave trade has lost his appeal to have his firearms licence reinstated.
Michael Mazur had his gun taken away by police earlier this year on account of his extreme anti-Semitic views.
The 72-year-old who also writes regularly in the newsletter of the Adelaide Institute, founded by Holocaust denier Frederick Toben, has claimed Israel was responsible for the Bali bombings in 2002 when 202 people were killed and the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 when 35 people were killed.
He also said that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was “under orders from Israel to disarm Australian (sic) so that Muslims can get guns from Israel and exterminate all Anglo-European Australians”.
Mazur claimed that during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, when more than 2000 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel, there were in fact no rockets fired.
“The Iron Dome was not used at all during your Operation Protective Edge for the reason that there were NO rockets out of Gaza,” he posted on Facebook.
And he claimed that Hamas was “founded by Israel in 1975 … to ensure that Hamas never had any rockets to launch on Israel”.
He went on to say that there was no Hamas military activity and that Israel fabricated footage because he says there is no vision of impact from the Hamas rockets.
“Just somebody having messed up a room, or having dug a small hole in the road surface, or having dishevelled the ceiling structures of a sinagogue (sic) – but somehow the roof is intact.”
Writing in an Adelaide Institute newsletter last year, Mazur claimed, “there were more Jews worldwide after 1945 than there were before 1939”, and that “nearly all the slave ships plying the Transatlantic slave trade were Jew owned”.
Mazur, who is not considered a direct threat, had his gun licence taken from him and then appealed to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT).
VCAT member Elisabeth Wentworth noted that Mazur refused to undertake a mental health check and she was not satisfied that he was a fit and proper person to hold a licence.
Mazur told Fairfax this week that there was no reason to persecute him.
“I am not threatening anyone,” he told Fairfax .
When Mazur was interviewed by the Australian Federal Police he stood by his extreme views.
JOSHUA LEVI
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