Calgary Herald
Wed Dec 23 2009
Page: A16
Section: The Editorial Page
Byline: Naomi Lakritz
Column: Naomi Lakritz
Source: Calgary Herald
This is the season when Jewish people like me are asked questions such as: “Don’t you miss celebrating Christmas?” The answer is “no more than you miss celebrating Hanukkah.” The next question is, invariably, “Isn’t Hanukkah the Jewish Christmas?” Answer: “It has no connection with Christmas; it just happens to fall in December.” I hear this “Jewish Christmas” term often at this time of year, so I’m going to borrow it and take the liberty of making a wish list for a Jewish Christmas.
Top of the list? I wish that no such thing as the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism had to be convened. I wish there was no reason for it to exist. Sadly, there is. The CPCCA was established last spring, after two of the most vocal human rights supporters in Parliament — Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, along with Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, former justice minister and attorney general in Paul Martin’s government — led a group of 11 MPs at an international conference on anti-Semitism in London.
“What we are witnessing today — and which has been developing incrementally, sometimes imperceptibly, and even indulgently, for some 35 years now — is a new, sophisticated, globalizing, virulent and even lethal anti-Semitism, reminiscent of the atmospherics of the ’30s, and without parallel or precedent since the end of the Second World War,” Cotler said in his keynote address in London at the Interparliamentary Coalition for Combating anti-Semitism.
The CPCCA says the new anti-Semitism “is now being manifested in ways never experienced before . . . new fears have arisen, especially for those who support the state of Israel . . . on some university campuses Jewish students are being threatened and intimidated to the point that they are not able to express pro-Israel sentiments freely, or are even fearful to wear a Jewish skull cap or Jewish Star of David around their necks. Anti-Semitism represents a break from Canadian values, which promote the rights of all individuals to practise their religion, educate themselves, and express themselves with security and freedom.”
This anti-Semitism is not just about the kind of vandalism that surfaced here in November, when the Calgary Jewish Community Centre’s Holocaust memorial, along with a couple of synagogues, some mailboxes, bus shelters and a house in the city’s southwest quadrant were spray-painted with swastikas and slogans like “Six Million More.”
This anti-Semitism is also about the left-wing goose-steppers who promote such atrocities as Israeli Apartheid Week on campuses and who deny the Jewish state’s right to exist by condemning Israel for its retaliatory attack on Gaza, but remain silent about the siege of Sderot by Palestinian mortar bombs and rockets at the rate of about four a day from June 2007 to February 2008. And when this inconsistency is pointed out to them, these goose-steppers go on the offensive and loudly proclaim that it is not anti-Semitism to criticize Israel. But what else to call it except anti-Semitism, when Sderot goes unmentioned as the reason for the attacks on Gaza? No other country is ever assailed for defending itself.
Josh Zelikovitz, past-president of the Jewish students’ organization Hillel at Queen’s University, testified before the CPCCA that on his campus: “anti-Israel stances have been used to promote classically anti-Semitic motifs such as blood libel, portrayal of Jews in stereo-typically derogatory ways (large noses, money bags, etc.), comparison of Jews or Jewish Israelis to Nazis, or alleging Jewish conspiracies to control the world.”
Noemi Gal-Or, director of the Institute for Transborder Studies at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, B.C., testified that she has experienced anti-Semitism “expressed against me personally by (a) targeting my area of academic expertise (terrorism) as illegitimate and relating this also to my Israeli origin and the fact that I served in the Israeli Defence Forces.”
She said that “in recent years, I have increasingly been challenged by students during class, especially regarding the Holocaust and including comments likening the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians to genocide. In some student essays, Hitler was praised for his contributions to Germany.”
Navid Khavari, a Torontonian and member of the Baha’i faith, told the hearings: “The ‘new anti-Semitism‘ where prejudice against Jews as a people is thinly veiled in protest against the actions of Israel is not surprising. . . . Knowing that there are those who would twist disapproval over Israeli government decisions into a vindictive attack on the Jewish people as a whole is disturbing. Knowing that at the University of Toronto . . . I personally have been witness to vicious shouting matches condemning Jews as ‘new Nazis’ remains disturbing.”
When the hearings end, the CPCCA will issue its report to the federal government, with “practical recommendations as to how the problem can be addressed.”
The other item on my Jewish Christmas wish list? Success for the CPCCA on its mission of tikkun olam — Hebrew for the Jewish mandate to repair the world. There is, sadly, an awful lot to repair.
