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

I’m forwarding it to friends.

Thank you,

j.desroches