New hatred enters Eden.
Yes, it is long past due to end this " Multiculturalism " racket,because the following is a direct result of what happens when these " ethnic communities " are encouraged NOT to integrate with the larger community.
Canada has an opportunity to see the downfall of this outdated policy happening in real time in European cities and act on it before it becomes inaction able.
KC
Tony Atherton
CanWest News Service
Saturday, April 10, 2004
For Jews, Montreal academic Morton Weinfeld wrote three years ago, "Canada is a post-biblical Garden of Eden," a nation that is inclusive and tolerant, where anti-Semitism is largely a thing of the past.
"Jewish life in Canada is as good as it has been anywhere since the Golden Age of Spain," Mr. Weinfeld, McGill University's chair of Canadian Ethnic Studies, wrote in his 2001 book Like Everyone Else ... But Different, a comprehensive study of Jews in Canada. According to the book, the Canadian Jewish community, the sixth-largest in the world, is the only one outside Israel that is growing, mainly because it attracts Jews from around the globe, including Israel.
This week, with the acrid smell of smoke still lingering over the ruins of the library at the United Talmud Torahs School in the city Mr. Weinfeld calls home, the author's unstinting paean to a generous nation might sound a little flat to some of Canada's Jews. It's not just the ugliness of this particular act of anti-Semitism -- the firebombing of a gathering place for Jewish children -- but also its context. The violence comes just weeks after a barrage of anti-Semitic incidents of vandalism and desecration that shocked Jews in the Toronto area.
These acts are not the anomaly some might assume. A year after Mr. Weinfeld's book was published, incidents of anti-Semitism in Canada had risen by more than 60%, according to a study by the Jewish advocacy group, B'nai Brith. Last year, they were up another 27% to 584 incidents, the highest figure since the group began collecting data in 1982.
They ran the gamut from the distribution of hate propaganda and taunting of Jewish seniors, to bomb threats at Jewish community centres and vandalism at synagogues.
"Although other countries have borne the brunt in the continuing rise in [anti-Semitism] ... this year's audit indicates that Canada has little reason for complacency," the B'nai Brith says in its 2003 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents. "In fact, there is significant cause for concern...."
Despite such alarms, Mr. Weinfeld thinks his 2001 characterization of the Jewish experience in Canada still holds up. "Most of the conventional forms of anti-Semitism remain low and Canada is still a great place for Jews to live, by any comparative yardstick," he said this week from Montreal.
But there is a "new anti-Semitism" at large in the world and even our new Eden, it seems, is not immune to at least some infection, Mr. Weinfeld says.
"Many scholars of anti-Semitism, and certainly most Jews, believe there is a new form of anti-Semitism, and that new form manifests itself through hard criticism of Israel and Zionism. And sometimes that harsh criticism extends to a visceral antipathy," Mr. Weinfeld says.
The "new" anti-Semitism is generally characterized as race hatred "masquerading ... as anti-Zionism, or as a critique of Israel, or behind anti-ideologies such as anti-racism or anti-imperialism," according to the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. Last month, the centre released a report documenting an alarming rise in anti-Semitic incidents in European countries, including a sixfold increase in France since 2001.
Manifestations of the new anti-Semitism are often directly linked to events in the Middle East, observers say. A note left at the site of the recent firebombing reportedly denounced recent Israeli attacks against Palestinians, including the killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, leader of the Islamic Hamas movement.
"The Middle East situation has become so much more a part of the news in general that it's raised awareness and emotions across the spectrum," says Peter Haas, director of the Samuel Rosenthal Center for Judaic Studies and chairman of the religion department at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
The monitoring centre's report notes a "significantly high peak" of anti-Semitic incidents in some European countries during the month of April, 2002, when the state of Israel and its government figured in a storm of controversy over its occupation of the Jenin refugee camp in Palestine, where extensive human rights violations were alleged. Similarly in Canada, the incidence of anti-Semitic acts were at their highest in April and May, 2002, according to B'nai Brith reports. They would not rise to such a peak again until March, 2003, when the buildup to the war in Iraq brought Middle East tensions again to centre stage.
"What we're seeing in Europe is really an anti-Israelism, that's become anti-Zionism, that's become anti-Jewish," Mr. Hass says.
And while some of what Europe is experiencing may be leaking into Canada, he says it is less evident in the United States, where support for the war in Iraq and bitterness over the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changes the complexion of events in the Middle East.
"Our engagement in the war on Iraq generates much more anti-Muslim feeling than anti-Semitic," Mr. Haas says. "That has caused Muslim groups [in the United States] to moderate their anti-Israelism so as not to appear too pro-Arab."
Mr. Weinfeld draws a distinction between the new anti-Semitism, which he says is largely imported, and traditional homegrown anti-Semitism, long in decline. Old-style Canadian anti-Semitism was manifested in three forms, he says: a French-Canadian, Roman Catholic anti-Semitism based on religious animosity; an Anglo-Protestant anti-Semitism aimed at preserving an elite status; and a prairie populist anti-Semitism, evinced in movements such as Social Credit.
The new anti-Semitism is international, Mr. Weinfeld says, and its spread has something to do with changing demographics.
"There is a growing population of Arab and/or Muslim people who have come [to Canada] in the past few decades. This is a large constituency that is very passionately interested in the Middle East," Mr. Weinfeld says. "This is new."
The effect of such changing demographics is much more noticeable in Europe, Mr. Hass says, where North African and Middle Eastern immigration has been particularly high. In some cases, these new Europeans are bringing back to the continent a revised form of the anti-Semitism that was exported to their countries decades earlier, he says.
Mr. Haas theorizes the Nazi influence in the Middle East and North Africa in the 1930s and 1940s inflamed sentiment against the Jews as a way of agitating for revolt against British and French colonial powers in the region. "The images and the language [of Middle Eastern anti-Semitism] are all really drawn from the Nazi propaganda and Nazi racist ideology -- the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and all that."
This nascent anti-Semitism grew after Israel became a fact of life in the region, and then came back to Europe with the population shift of the last two decades. "As I understand it, a lot of these [anti-Semitic] incidents have not been per se by native Europeans as much as by these immigrant groups."
Such charges are controversial, however. The European Union Monitoring Centre's recent reports on anti-Semitism had to be revised when its initial draft was deemed to have put too much emphasis on the roles that "young Muslims," "people of North African origin" or "immigrants" might have played in the rise of anti-Semitism. Since such labels were often based on the perceptions of those reporting incidents of anti-Semitism, rather than verifiable records, the monitoring centre opted to tone down the report while calling for better official mechanisms for recording incidents.
Pinpointing the nature of the new
anti-Semitism may be less important than loudly condemning hate crimes of all kinds, says Riad Saloojee, executive director of CAIR-CAN, the Council of American-Islamic Relations Canada.
Incidents such as the Montreal firebombing, or the recent vandalism and attempted arson at a Pickering mosque, "are certainly attacks against the multicultural fabric of Canada, but they also serve as very powerful incidents for education and for change. Each challenge then also becomes an opportunity to sort of strengthen our collective commitment to values like justice and peace and mutual respect and tolerance.
"These concerns really affect us first and foremost as Canadians, and not as Jews or not as Muslims. It's a chance to universalize the issue of hate crimes," Mr. Saloojee says.
Such sentiments convince Mr. Weinfeld that, in the end, Canada as well as the United States will resist the trend toward the new anti-Semitism. "Generally, anti-Semitism in North America has always been at a lower level, historically speaking, than in the Old World.... One of the ways in which we live in the New World is that we have made an effort to try to minimize those Old World conflicts."
Various Jewish leaders have congratulated Canadian politicians and public figures for reacting more quickly and firmly to recent incidents of anti-Semitism than European politicians faced with similar events in recent years. And, Mr. Weinfeld says, "I've been gratified that the leaders of Islamic organizations in Canada have been very quick to condemn this act that took place in Montreal, clearly and unambiguously."
In some ways, Mr. Weinfeld says, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish acts "are two sides of the same coin, because they do respond to current events in the Middle East."
Mr. Saloojee agrees. "People who harbour anti-Muslim, anti-Arab views are, I think, as much a danger to the Jewish community as those who harbour ... anti-Semitic views are a danger to the Muslim community. I think people who espouse an ideology of hate and exclusivity are really a threat to both communities."
(Ottawa Citizen |
