Barbara Kay
Epoch Times, Jan. 23, 2023
“The troubling reality is that there isn’t to my knowledge a single organization dedicated to Palestinian rights that accepts Israel’s legitimacy as a nation, or that accepts an attachment to their ancient homeland as a legitimate component of Jewish identity.”
On January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, whose gas chambers claimed the lives of more than a million people, most of them Jews, was liberated. Never again, it was assumed. But, following the 2001 United Nations’ “anti-racist” conference that made “Durban” a metonym for orgiastic Jew hatred, right-thinking national and institutional leaders around the world recognized the need for a collaborative response to antisemitism’s contemporary, virulent iteration, one that puts the Jewish state, rather than race or religion, in its crosshairs.
In 2005, Jan. 27 was designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day to ensure continuity of education on the Holocaust. Still, global antisemitism has continued to escalate. Even in pluralist Canada, where antisemitism was traditionally social and non-violent, the incidence of hate crimes is mounting.
Statistics Canada reports, for example, that as of 2019, Canadian Jews accounted for 16 percent of victims of recorded hate crimes, this percentage second only to black Canadians at 18 percent and much higher than Muslim Canadians at 10 percent. On a per capita basis, however, antisemitism is three times more prevalent than colour-based racism and five times more prevalent than Muslim hatred.
Moreover, there are discomfiting signs that antisemitism is moving inward from the margins, and that institutions are being infected by a strain of thinking that permits systemic indifference to expressed Jew hatred when it masquerades as “criticism of Israel.”
The government considered the situation worrying enough that in November 2021, Prime Minister Trudeau appointed the renowned international human rights lawyer and former minister of justice and attorney general Irwin Cotler as Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism. One of his principal duties is leadership of the Canadian government’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
By 2022’s year end, 1,600 global entities had adopted the working—but non-legally binding—definition of antisemitism crafted by the IHRA in 2016. Canada adopted it in 2019. It reads: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” … source
