Barbara Kay
National Post, Nov. 5, 2023
“As for Lyons’s curious public reticence, she may be operating under a superannuated anti-antisemitism paradigm of genteel back-channel diplomacy. This is the one where Jews (or in Lyons’s case a non-Jew who understands the way things work in Jewish communities) avoid combating antisemitism in ways that are too “pushy.””
Two of Canada’s presumed authorities on best practices in combating antisemitism have surprised Canadians who consider themselves deeply invested in their competency: one in a negative, the other in a potentially positive way.
No sooner had Deborah Lyons, Canada’s former ambassador to Israel and Afghanistan, been handed the baton on Oct. 16 from her venerable predecessor, Irwin Cotler, as Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, than she stumbled on her first lap of the course.
About a week earlier, on Oct. 7, Israel suffered a proto-genocidal assault on civilians, from infants to the elderly, within its borders by Hamas terrorists, who — along with their supporters in the Arab world and in the West — celebrated their bloody rampage. Lyons surely knew the special envoy post was hers, so she had a week to organize her thoughts.
But as of this writing, although reportedly active in dialogue with Jewish communities across Canada about an Oct. 7-related rise in antisemitic incidents, Lyon has yet to issue a meaningful public statement dedicated solely to that cataclysmic event. If and when she does, no matter how sincerely crafted, it will forever be accompanied by an irremovable what-took-so-long asterisk.
Another latecomer to the podium on this file is Bernie Farber, chair of the controversial Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN). CAHN, which has received more than $500,000 in anti-racism government grants, has indignation and denunciation at the ready for any and all acts of antisemitism perpetrated by real (and imagined) white supremacists. But invariably, when it comes to antisemitic speech or actions of campus progressives or Islamists, CAHN has remained shtum. Even this pogrom and the pro-Hamas rallies that followed could not rouse CAHN to a statement of sympathy and support for Canadian Jews.
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