“One Year Later…Gaza Remembered”, Talk given on January 30, 2010, at Vancouver Public Library
by Joanne Naiman
We are here tonight primarily to hear about the effects of an illegal occupation and war on the people of Gaza, and to express our solidarity with the Palestinian people. In the anti-apartheid movement, a popular slogan was the old Wobbly saying “An injury to one is an injury to all.” What I hope to show you tonight is that, indeed, the “injuries” affecting people half way around the world are about to have serious consequences for us all.
Specifically, I’m going to talk about the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism1 (CPCCA), which has been meeting in Ottawa since last fall, and is now meeting through February. “What Coalition?” you may be asking yourselves. Exactly—this entity has been almost totally out of the public eye since its inception. While many Canadians have expressed dismay about the recent prorogation of Parliament, few are aware of a committee whose main aim is, to quote one critic, “an attempt to curtail freedom of speech and academic freedom across Canada, and to possibly criminalize certain kinds of human rights discourse.”2
What, exactly, is the CPCCA? The Canadian House of Commons regularly sets up parliamentary committees to study particular subjects and make recommendations back to parliament. In the case of the CPCCA, however, this procedure was totally circumvented, and despite its name, this entity has no authority from parliament as a whole, despite being made up of 22 MPs from all four parties currently sitting in the House of Commons. The two key players in setting up the CPCCA (and who are ex-officio members of its Steering Committee) are Irwin Cotler—a lawyer, past president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and former Liberal Justice Minister—and Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration & Multiculturalism.
In March of 2009, Kenney—who has been described by Murray Dobbin as “point man for Stephen Harper on issues involving Israel”— banned British MP George Galloway from entering Canada, almost certainly because he’d just led a humanitarian relief convoy to Gaza. He also recently reallocated funding away from the United Nations Relief Agency (UNWRA) because of its assistance to Palestinian refugees. At a recent conference in Jerusalem, Kenny boasted of his government’s “zero tolerance approach to antisemitism.” As examples of this he noted the following actions taken by his government: 1) the elimination of funding to the Canadian Arab Federation (whose leadership he described as anti-Semitic and apologists for terrorism); 2) ending contact with “like minded organizations”[to the Canadian Arab Federation] such as the Canadian Islamic Congress; and 3) the de-funding of KAIROS, a church-led NGO agency, which Kenney (incorrectly) described as “taking a leadership role in the [Israeli] boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign.” To further quote Kenny, “The existential threat faced by Israel on a daily basis is ultimately a threat to the broader Western civilization.” In other words, Kenney endorses an “us” vs “them” view of the world, a “clash of civilizations” that pits the Christian “west” against the Moslem “east.”
The other half of this duo, Irwin Cotler, is considered an expert on international law and human rights law. He has served on the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and its sub-Committee on Human Rights and International Development, as well as on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. In 2000, he was appointed special advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the International Criminal Court. However, despite this background, he has a long record of supporting Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights and breaches of international law. Cotler strongly opposed the Goldstone report, and concluded, “if there had been no Hamas war crimes, there would have been no need for an Israeli response.”3 Cotler’s wife, Ariela, is a native of Jerusalem and has a longstanding connection to the right-wing Likud party in Israel, and two daughters have been in the Israeli military. Cotler’s views on antisemitism are clear: “Compared to most previous anti-Jewish outbreaks, this [new antisemitism] …attacks primarily the collective Jews, the State of Israel. …In the past, the most dangerous anti-Semites were those who wanted to make the world Judenrein, ‘free of Jews’. Today, the most dangerous anti-Semites might be those who want to make the world Judenstaatrein, ‘free of a Jewish state’..”4
The CPCCA emerged from the experience of a delegation of eleven MPs, led by Kenny and Cotler, at the London Conference to Combat Antisemitism in Feb 2009. The London Conference was itself an off-shoot of the Inter-Parliamentary Committee for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). Working backward, the ICCA was originally co-founded in 2002 by none other than Irwin Cotler, with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Rabbi Michael Melchior and former Deputy prime Minister of Sweden Per Ahlmark. However, this committee apparently was thought to be too closely tied to the State of Israel to be effective, and didn’t move forward. Its second incarnation—now distanced from direct Israeli involvement—met in London in February 2009, with funding from the UK government and a British charitable organization.5 The underlying assumption and key premise of the CPCCA, even prior to hearing any witnesses (in line with both the ICCA & the London Conference), is clear from its website: that we are witnessing an expansion of antisemitism both in Canada and internationally, and its form is being referred to as the “new antisemitism.”6 All three of these groups express an urgent need to combat this new antisemitism, especially in the media and in academia.
Is antisemitism in fact growing in Canada? I am a sociologist, and in the submission I made to the CPCCA in the summer of 2009, I made clear that all the traditional data used to assess the level of prejudice and discrimination towards groups—such as income, discrimination in hiring & housing, educational level, hate crimes etc.—do not indicate that this is the case. Does antisemitism in all its odious forms exist in Canada? Certainly. Is it expanding and intensifying? No. Nonetheless, and without any supportive evidence, the CPCCA website states that “the extent & severity of antisemitism is widely regarded as at its worst level since the end of the second World War” and “recorded incidents of antisemitism have been on the rise both locally and globally.”
The CPCCA claims independence from the government of Canada, NGOs, and Jewish community organizations, and that it “will voluntarily disclose all sources of funding.”7 However, no one to date has been able to get any information on their funding sources. And this is no small organization: listed on the website are seventy individuals who have been or will be brought to Ottawa to appear as “witnesses” at their inquiry. The CPCCA received around 150 written submissions last summer. The hearings have largely been attempts to confirm the positions the CPCCA had from the outset. Many submissions disputed the CPCCA’s premises of a “new antisemitism,” and pointed out both the deficiencies and the dangers of such an argument.
This hasn’t stopped Panel Chair Mario Silva from saying “The breadth and depth of experience these witnesses have will do a lot to augment our understanding of the present situation and will thoroughly inform our coming recommendations.”8 To give you a true sense of the Kafka-esque nature of this committee, one of the first speakers to be called was Irwin Cotler, while Jason Kenney is one of the last. Clearly, this Coalition knew where it was headed from the day it sent out its first call for submissions. The rest has been pure window dressing.
It’s not hard to see that if one accepts Cotler’s premise that Israel is what he calls “the collective Jew,” then any criticism of the State of Israel is, de facto, anti-Semitic. There can be little doubt, therefore, that this Coalition will soon be putting forward recommendations to the government that certain criticisms of the State of Israel within Canadian universities and in the media should be defined as a form of antisemitism, and therefore an incitement to hatred. Thus, in the strange Alice-in-Wonderland world we’re now in, those who stand up and charge Israel (correctly) with gross violations of both the Geneva Conventions and of international humanitarian law may soon find themselves charged under section 319 of the Canadian Criminal Code and section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, or else silenced by judicial warrants of seizure issued under section 320 of the Criminal Code.9 We can assume that this would include calls for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions, as well as using the term “apartheid” to describe the actions of the Israeli state.
Given Jason Kenney’s recent comments in Israel, it is clear that the CPCCA anticipates a very attentive and rapid response from the Canadian government. In his Dec 16 speech in Jerusalem mentioned earlier, he noted the presence in the audience of Irwin Cotler, as well as Scott Reid and Mario Silva, the Co-Chairs of the CPCCA, and concluded by saying “that we can offer some useful reference points and best practices to share with the rest of the world and parliamentarians who share our concern about the new antisemitism.”10 Put plainly, the CPCCA is a front for what is effectively a done deal, with four federal parties as willingly participants. It is also clear that Canada is to be a testing ground for what is being planned for other international jurisdictions.
Without a doubt, the main purpose of this redefinition of antisemitism is to create a serious chill on university campuses and in the media. Teachers will be afraid to discuss Israeli policies in their classrooms, while Israeli Apartheid Weeks will be prohibited by administrations on campuses across the country for fear of being charged with inciting hate crimes. Likewise, articles critical of Israeli government policies or actions (as rare as they are) will likely disappear from the print and electronic media. It is possible that websites could be shut down. Organizations critical of Israel will be unable to rent public venues for meetings. Already, I’ve heard that some Palestinian support groups fear they may be charged under hate laws. In other words, what we will be seeing—in fact are already seeing—is a new form of McCarthyism. For me, as a Jew, one of the worst ironies here is that – should such legislation actually come to pass, as seems likely – antisemitism will actually increase. As Bahija Reghai has noted, by equating Jews with Israel and Zionism, the CPCCA reinforces “the reductionist and false notion that all Jews are responsible for the acts of the state of Israel.”11 It is worth noting that this past Wednesday (January 27), speaking at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to himself as “leader of the Jewish people.”12
I don’t think it’s too extreme to say that if the proposals likely to come out of the CPCCA become law, meetings such as this one will be very risky undertakings in future. I should also point out that, if this legislation comes into being, we will be in the bizarre situation of being able, in Canada, to stand up and roundly criticize our own government (for, say, something like prorogation of parliament or poor treatment of Afghani prisoners) in a way that we won’t be able to criticize a foreign government. Something is terribly wrong with this picture.
So, here’s what can you do: first, start by taking a look at the CPCCA website, so you can see for yourself where this Coalition is headed. We are also asking all of you here tonight to write letters to your MPs and party leaders, which you can easily do via e-mail, expressing opposition to the participation of their party in the CPCCA – two Vancouver MPs, Joyce Murray & Hedy Fry actually sit on this committee, so if you’re in their riding it’s particularly important that you write them. However, since all four parties in the House of Commons currently sit on this body, none of them should be immune from our criticism. In your letter, be sure to ask for information regarding CPCCA funding. (Surely MPs should know who’s funding a committee they’re sitting on!) If you are connected to one of the federal parties as a volunteer or donor, or if you can speak on behalf of an organization, your letter would be particularly important. Also, check out the website of the Seriously Free Speech Committee and keep up to date on this issue. And help us spread the word about the secretive and dangerous CPCCA by inviting someone to speak to your group.
As I noted at the outset, the term “solidarity” is not just about pity and charitable handouts. What is happening to the Palestinian people today will likely have serious consequences for us here in Canada tomorrow. However, history has shown that the degree to which governments—all governments—take away peoples’ democratic rights and freedoms to serve their own ends always depends on the degree to which we allow them to get away with it. Together, let’s insure that the current government doesn’t take away our right to free speech.
NOTES
[1] This paper will employ the spelling of the term “antisemitism” that is used by the CPCCA.
[2] Keefer, Michael. Antisemitism Real and Imagined: Responses to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism. Waterloo, ON: The Canadian Charger, forthcoming in February 2010. Much of the general information on the CPCCA, and its legal implications, are taken from the introductory chapter.
[3] Irwin Cotler, “The Goldstone Mission—Tainted to the Core (II),” Jerusalem Post (18 August 2009), available online at Understanding the Goldstone Report
[4] Irwin Cotler, “The global reawakening of antisemitism.” (Keynote address at the founding conference of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism). National Post on-line, February 21, 2009.
[5] Information regarding Cotler’s role in the ICCA and the London conference is from Keefer, op cit.
[6] www.cpcca.ca
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Keefer, op. cit.
[10] Ibid.
[11] “Confusing politics and prejudice in the fight against antisemitism,” January 6, 2010, http://www.rabble.ca/news/2010/01
[12] Globe and Mail, Jan 28, 2010, p. A13.
Great article.
I’m forwarding it to friends.
Thank you,
j.desroches
Here is my own submission to the CPCCA:
TO Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism
FROM Roger Langen
RE OPEN LETTER TO THE CPCCA
ATTENTION Bob Rae
DATE August 31, 2009
Dear CPCCA
Your coalition has been formed to a purpose. I regret that my Member of Parliament, Bob Rae, has allowed his name to be associated with it.
You have invited depositions, so I am offering one. I make it in my own name. However, as outgoing Vice-Chair of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation Human Rights Committee and current Executive Officer and Human Rights Officer with Toronto OSSTF, I will endeavor to enlist the support of my colleagues in Ontario and beyond to combat the insincere and pernicious assumptions on which your coalition is founded.
Naturally, I do not expect the CPCCA to pay much attention to the content or the quality of the submissions, as yours is a project politically motivated. But I think it is important that individual Canadians and other institutional and civil society actors put their views on the record. My hope is that sufficient of those who do not have interest in common with your coalition’s spurious premise will give you pause to consider the quantity of common sense gathered within Canada to oppose it.
THE LONDON DECLARATION
Article 1 of the London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism establishes the sole faulty premise on which your parliamentary coalition is based: the conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of the State of Israel. The nearest analogue to this view is the complaint by Robert Mugabe that criticism of Zimbabwe is based on white supremacy. On such a premise, how is it possible to proceed?
The rest is the usual poppycock:
• Article 2’s “guard against equivocation,” suggesting the anti-Semitic sniff-test that criticism of Israel should not be taken at face value
• Article 6’s uncritical re-statement of one of the Israel Lobby’s desiderata: the “singling out” of Israel internationally (Desmond Tutu, Iran) as a proof of anti-Semitism (as if criticism of Zimbabwe should be paired with criticism of some other state in order to be perceived as “fair” and not judged as probably racist)
• Article 13’s attack on Internet free speech as “cyber-hate”
• Article 16 and 18’s “counter-threat” to report and police-record “incidents”
• Article 21 and 24’s recommendations that education authorities “curricularize sensibility” and protect students from “calls for boycotts,” in the name of free speech.
Such is the Orwellian matter on which your coalition is based. You propose censorship in the name of free speech. You would suppress the word, “apartheid,” which has an international covenant to enable it, by insisting on respect for international law (Article 4); yet you would prevent university conferences and student activism based on international law (and human rights) concerns around Israel, as if South Africa could not have been the subject of such collective concern in the past, or Darfur today.
I understand why intellectual troglodytes Jason Kenney and Peter Kent would enthusiastically lend their names to such nonsense. By why Bob Rae?
THE NEW ANTISEMITISM
There is no such thing. Brian Klug, Senior Research Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at Oxford University, made this abundantly clear in “The Myth of the New Antisemitism” (The Nation, January 2004). Read it.
Regardless of the basis for affiliation, whether racial, cultural, religious, or political, no one of us can claim to be a “people apart,” as though we might be possessed of a privileging essence (Aryan) or, conversely, severely handicapped by an ingrained prejudice (Gypsies). This fundamental reality is what makes international law and human rights possible. Giving way to the anti-Semitic impulse which led to the Balfour Declaration in 1917, proposing a Jewish state as a solution to the “Jewish problem,” is wrong, even if the State of Israel today does indeed exist and – as even Hamas and Iran allow – exists “by right” (within its 1967 border, as per international law).
But what does this have to do with criticism of Israel? It is precisely because Israel is a state that it is susceptible to observation and criticism. If it receives particularly sharp criticism that is because, as an occupying power in an extraordinarily sensitive region of the world, it has been – as reliable international observers consistently report – a particularly egregious offender of human rights and international law. One does not have to be a Jewish scholar or organization, whether conservative or progressive in outlook, to find the recent assault on Gaza from any moral point of view an “unspeakable disgrace.” Israel singles itself out with such behavior. The shame Canadians have a right to feel can be traced directly to our Prime Minister’s covert support for such an action, in line with his refusal to recognize the democratic will of the Palestinian voter in January 2006.
Anti-Zionism is a political position, not a racialist one. It refuses to accept the coherence of an exclusively Jewish state, reducing non-Jewish persons to second-class citizenship. (Actual social practice in Israel today makes that description perhaps too sanguine.) The converse is the elevation of persons defined as Jewish to a position of “racial” privilege, a circumstance equally unseemly.
HONORING THE PAST
I hope I may speak for many Jews when I say that the worst offense committed by the Israel Lobby (and your complicity with it through the formation of this coalition) is the offense given to the memory of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism has its roots in Christian Europe. It flowered evilly on Catholic and aristocratic (nationalist) sentiments after the French Revolution and well into the 19th Century, finally exploding into colossal shame during World War Two. Jews – along with Gypsies, Poles, “homosexuals,” the disabled, and collaborators in support of conscientious objection to a racist, hegemonic imperial world – perished in the most awful way imaginable. That is why (I hope) we hold human rights dear today.
To exploit the Holocaust, however, in the name of defending a rightist conception of Israel, allied to Western strategic interests (and advancing, by the way, a racist “clash of civilizations” view of the world), wholly distorts, diminishes and demeans that great and terrible event. It is a much profounder offense than the intellectually vapid and marginalized, Lilliputian efforts of the Holocaust deniers, whom no one of education or sensibility takes seriously. Theirs is a true anti-Semitism, of the old kind. For credible organizations like the Canadian Jewish Congress and B’nai Brith to conspire to concoct a “new anti-Semitism” based on conscientious criticism of political actions and projects by major powers, including Israel, begs forgiveness from all the shadows and lonely ghosts of the Jewish past. It offers a despicable, gratuitous shame to Jews everywhere and to those of us – the great majority – who mourn with them their (and our) spectacular loss.
If your coalition is to serve a useful purpose, let it be this one: To re-announce the importance of respecting the past, and to encourage open debate and free speech in matters pertaining to politics, without stint or exception.
Roger Langen