Amelie Botbol
JNS, Sept. 13, 2024
“I believe that the community of democracies including Canada does not understand the threat of Iran. The Iranian threat is seven-fold. First, Iran is a nuclear threat. Second, it is a genocidal one.”
Irwin Cotler, former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, sat down with JNS at his home in Montreal on Wednesday to discuss Canada’s approach to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Cotler discussed Ottawa’s recent arm embargo on Jerusalem and its resumption of funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). He traced the eruption of Jew-hatred on North American campuses to the ’70s and discussed the tenets of the Israeli Defense Forces as the most moral army in the world.
Cotler, an emeritus professor of law at McGill University and an international human rights lawyer, also served as Ottawa’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism. He emphasized the importance of implementing in Canada the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism and listed concrete actions to overcome threats targeting Jewish communities.
Finally, the international chair of the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights detailed his perspective on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
JNS: There are security agents outside checking the identity of visitors coming in and out of your house, how did this happen?… [To read the full article, click here]