REPLY TO MENZIES

Press, Volume C, Issue 29680, 25 November 1961, Page 14

REPLY TO MENZIES

Stern Gang Member (N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) LONDON, November 23. The London University research student Mr Yehojachin Brenner said last night that he was ‘ ‘pleased” to have an explanation “at last” as to why the Australian Government refused to give him an entry visa, the “Daily Mail” reports. Mr Brenner, a 34-year-oild German-born Israeli, was appointed to a lectureship at Adelaide University earlier this year but was refused a visa.

The Australian Prime Minister, Mr Menzies, said in Hobart yesterday that the refusal was because Mr Brenner had been a member ot the Jewish terrorist organisation, the Stem gang, which opposed British influence in Palestine just after World War 11.

The “Daily Mail” quoted Mr Brenner as saying: "I am pleased to have an explanation at last, but I am presented as a thug, when, in fact, I deeply deplore violence of any kind. I have never assassinated anybody. “As a member of the Stem group I was a small-arms instructor. Naturally I am unhappy that I trained men to take life. But when I joined I was only 17 or 18, and I believed the group was a legitimate fighting force.

‘The methods of the Stern group seem repugnant to me now, but if Mr Menzies is morally indignant about me. I would like to remind him that Alfred Krupp was made a welcome visitor to Australia.

“The Stern group, in trying to achieve its ends, used methods I dislike, but I have never tried to hush up the fact that I was associated with it. Now it looks as if I have lost a job I needed very badly,” he concluded.