Minister Cites His Mumbai Tour

By Jason Kenney, National Post

In November, during a trip to Kiev, I paid my respects at the Babi Yar Holocaust site where more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis over a two-day period in 1941.

For me this brought to mind a new dimension of the unfathomable evil of the Holocaust. Babi Yar was not about the mechanized and perversely discreet killing of the gas chambers. Here, men in uniform lined up and shot 33,000 individual human beings, one by one, non-stop over a period of two days. Even for those who were just following orders there had to be some deep blackness in their hearts, some hatred that allowed them to dehumanize the innocent individual human beings whom they shot.

A few weeks ago I was in Mumbai, India, where I went to visit Chabad’s Nariman House. I was literally sickened walking through the debris, seeing the blood-splattered walls; to stand in the place where Rabbi Gavriel Holzberg and his wife Rivkah were tortured and slaughtered. As I later looked out on Mumbai from the rooftop of Chabad House I marvelled to think that in this huge, teeming city of 20 million the killers had meticulously, deliberately sought out to target this one rather obscure, peaceful place, and this particular man and his family.

Why did they do so? Because, and only because, the Holzbergs were Jews, and as such because they represented all the Jews. Sixty-eight years and thousands of miles separate the ravine of Babi Yar from the debris of Nariman House, but these places are connected by the same uniquely durable evil of anti-Semitism. Even pluralistic Canada sees signs that this evil is newly resurgent. The 2007 audit of anti-Semitic incidents by B’nai Brith recorded over 1,000 reported anti-Semitic incidents, up by 11% from the previous year.

Last year at our national Holocaust commemoration ceremony, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, speaking of the Holocaust, that “this genocide was so premeditated and grotesque in design, so monstrous and barbaric in scale and so systematic and efficient in execution that is stands alone in the annals of human evil.”

“Unfortunately in some countries,” he went on, “hatred of the Jews is still preached from religious pulpits and still proclaimed from political podiums. There are still people who would perpetrate another Holocaust if they could.”

Let me tell you some of the things that Canada is doing to respond to this new anti-Semitism. We have recently applied to join the international task force on commemoration, education and research of the Holocaust. In that respect we have conducted a national baseline study of school curricula on Holocaust education. Our Parliament has declared through all-party support a bill for claiming the National Yom Hashoah Holocaust Memorial Day.

We are addressing our own history of officially sanctioned anti-Semitism, the most notorious manifestation of which was Canada’s refusal to accept the hundreds of Jewish European refugees aboard the St. Louis as it arrived in Halifax harbour in 1938. In fact, as that boat arrived in Canadian waters, one of my predecessors infamously declared with respect to European Jewish refugees that none was too many for Canada to receive. That is why our government has established a $2.5-million commemorative fund to help educate future generations about the incident and the hatred which underscored it.

Our government takes a zero-tolerance approach to expressions of anti-Semitism in the public square. There are organizations in Canada that express hateful sentiments, but expect to be treated as respectable interlocutors in the public discourse. I think, for example, of the president of an organization called the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed Elmasry, who notoriously said three years ago on live television that all Israelis over the age of 18 can legitimately be killed. They are combatants, he said, and therefore legitimate targets for elimination.

I think as well of the leader of the Canadian Arab Federation, who notoriously circulated an e-mail when Bob Rae was running for the leadership of his party, calling on people to vote against Mr. Rae because of Arlene Perly Rae’s involvement in

Canada’s Jewish community. Just last week, the same individual and organization circulated videos which included the inculcation to hatred of children by organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

These and other organizations are free within the confines of our law, and consistent with our traditions of freedom of expression, to speak their mind, but they should not expect to receive resources from the state, support from taxpayers or any other form of official respect from the government. And I would encourage all other governments to take a similar approach to organizations that either excuse violence against Jews or express essentially anti-Semitic sentiments.

The government of Canada has consistently voted against resolutions singling out Israel as a scapegoat at international forums such as the Francophonie and the United Nations Human Rights Council. Just two or three weeks ago, we were the only country of the 40-some member states of the United Nations Human Rights Council to oppose a resolution scapegoating Israel for the violence in Gaza.

My proudest moment as minister was when I announced on behalf of our government that Canada would withdraw from Durban 2 [a UN conference on racism]. We did so deliberately. We did so after having participated in the initial preparatory meetings. We did so being fully conscious of Canada’s tradition as an international champion of tolerance, pluralism and mutual respect. And that’s precisely why we withdrew.

We withdrew from a process that sees Iran sitting on the organizing committee, a country whose president has repeatedly engaged in inciting genocide against the Jewish nation; a conference in which Libya plays a central role on the organizing committee; a conference where many of the key organizing meetings were set on Jewish High Holidays to diminish the participation of Israeli and Jewish delegates; a process which reinvited all of the NGOs that turned the original Durban conference into a notorious hatefest, including those responsible for circulating copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and organizations which outside the conference venue held up portraits of Adolf Hitler.

Let me close by quoting again the Prime Minster following his visit last summer to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. He said, “I was moved beyond words by what I saw to revulsion, anger and most of all a deep, aching sadness for the millions of innocents who perished. But I also felt hope, hope because of the indomitable spirit and strength of the Jewish people, hope that left behind the horror of the Holocaust and moved forward to build the thriving, modern democratic state of Israel and also hope because today most people in most civilized countries recognize anti-Semitism for what it is, a pernicious evil that must be exposed, confronted and repudiated whenever and where-ever it appears, an evil so profound that it is ultimately a threat to us all.”

-Jason Kenney is the Conservative MP for Calgary Southeast and Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism.