The ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn party’s announcement for a planned visit to Australia in October in order to tap into the large Greek-Australian community has been met with embarrassment by Greek Australians. Greek Australians vowed to stop the organization in its tracks and build a wall against messages of hate.

Just a few days after the group announced that former army generals and current Members of European Parliament, Eleftherios Synadinos and Georgios Epitideios, would visit Sydney and Melbourne, Greek-Australians made it clear that they would stop the party’s message of hate.

The party hopes that its visit will raise awareness and funds but Greek Australians are against the messages endorsed the neo-Nazi group. Bill Papastergiadis, the president of the Greek Orthodox Community of Victoria told the Guardian that the “visit by an anti-immigrant party is incompatible with the pluralist and multicultural society in which we live.”

Greek-Australian Victorian Liberal MP, a former minister in the state government, said that GD had minimal support in Greece and said that he feels embarrassed by its very existence. He said that GD is the antithesis of what Hellenism is all about. Furthermore, he added that members of the party may even be denied entry to Australia as, under Australian law, anyone associated with a criminal organization could be denied access. Nonetheless, according to the Australian ABC, a spokeswoman for the Immigration Minister said that the department had “nothing before it” concerning the two GD MEPs.

On his part, Ignatius Gavrilidis, the GD’s Australian representative, said that the party had 60-70 activists in Australia but thousands of latent supporters in the Greek-Australian Community at large who nonetheless did not wish to be publicly identified with the party. Gavrilidis said that clothing had been gathered and shipped to Athens for people hit by the economic crisis.

Gavrilidis also said that people were ignorant regarding the party and its Nazi affiliations, stating that a number of the salutes that bear resemblance to Nazi imagery were actually from ancient Greece. He did, however, admit that some supporters did admrie Nazi.