TORONTO — A Sudanese minister compares the failure to reach consensus at the recent Copenhagen climate change conference to the Holocaust.
Denis MacShane, left and Irwin Cotler
A Polish member of the Council of Europe says Poles will apologize to Jews for war-era atrocities when Jews apologize for having killed Poles.
Two leading British military scholars, one being Sir Martin Gilbert, are excluded from the United Kingdom’s commission of inquiry into the Iraq war because they are Jews.
Meanwhile, Iran continues to be the world’s greatest source of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel vitriol.
These are just a few examples of a new, frightening and escalating anti-Semitism gripping the globe, two parliamentarians told a synagogue audience last week.
Anti-Semitism “attacks the core values of democracy” and “is defining an ongoing worldview that poses a huge challenge to democrats worldwide,” warned British Labour MP Denis MacShane, who shared the podium with Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, Canada’s former justice minister, at Shaar Shalom Synagogue.
MacShane, a non-Jew who chairs the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and headed an all-party parliamentary commission of inquiry into anti-Semitism in Britain, said the “new” anti-Semitism in Europe is less about Holocaust denial than “Holocaust vandalization.”
An example of the latter is the recent theft of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Polish government has issued an arrest warrant for a leading Swedish neo-Nazi in the case.
MacShane, who served in former prime minister Tony Blair’s cabinet and addressed the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, noted a “significant” rise in anti-Semitic incidents across Europe, while in Britain, the newest figures show a 70 per cent increase in anti-Jewish attacks last year over the year before.
Most of them, he pointed out, mix traditional anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and anti-Israel prejudice, and “we are seeing a lively advance by hardline Islamists.”
European universities, he added, are not doing enough to combat on-campus anti-Semitism and anti-Israel speakers, whose appearances are always defended under the guise of free speech.
“This is how rotten the European body politic has become.”
In his talk, Cotler repeated many points contained in his address last year to the founding conference of the London, England-based Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA).
An internationally recognized human rights advocate, Cotler said the world is witnessing an “escalating, sophisticated, global, virulent and even lethal anti-Semitism” not seen since the end of World War II.
He reserved his harshest condemnations for Iran, a “clear and present danger to international peace” because of four converging dangers: the nuclear threat; its voicing of “genocidal” anti-Zionism; its support for terrorism in the Middle East, and a “massive domestic assault” on the rights of its own citizens.
“Let there be no mistake about it,” Cotler warned. “Iran is in standing violation of international prohibitions against the development and production of nuclear weapons. Indeed, [it is] a serial violator.”
The regime is also guilty of incitement against minorities, prohibited under an international convention against genocide to which Iran is a signatory, he noted. Cotler said there are more incitements to genocide in Iran today than there were in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia prior to ethnic slaughters in those countries.
“What we have here is the toxic conversion of the most horrific of crimes, genocide, embedded in the most enduring of hatreds, namely anti-Semitism.”
There are several manifestations of this genocidal anti-Semitism, he explained, such as the call by Iran’s president to “wipe Israel off the map.” As well, there are the covenants and charters of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda, which not only call for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews worldwide, but also for terrorist acts in furtherance of those objectives. And there are fatwas – religiously-sanctioned writs – in which Jews are characterized as enemies of Islam, causing Israel to become “the Salman Rushdie of the nations.”
Less overt, but perhaps more pernicious, forms of the new international anti-Semitism are ideological ones, in which anti-Judaism is “laundered” under the cover of the struggle against racism (and where Israel is tarred as an apartheid state), and “legalized” anti-Semitism seen in anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations.
Cotler pointed to one sign of how Iran thumbs its nose at the international community: Interpol has issued an arrest warrant for the country’s defence minister, Ahmad Vahidi, as a leading suspect in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people.
The terrorism Iran supports “is not only Mideast-oriented, but has a global orientation.” But by focusing solely on the nuclear threat, the international community risks ignoring or “sanitizing” the other threats.
Cotler’s ultimate message is that “silence is not an option.”
