civil rights

Fight Jew-hatred – and lies

The U.S. Congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is limping along in the face of a near-total absence of cooperation from the Republicans who make up almost half of Congress and of the American voting public. Despite reams of video evidence, there is legitimate worry that justice will not be served in the case of an attempted coup at the heart of American government.

Those who tried to overthrow the will of the people and who even called for the murder of the vice-president of their own party are venerated by their supporters as patriots, while those who seek justice for those events are vilified as traitors.

The very people who tried to subvert the democratic decision of the American people last November – those who are trying to steal the election from President Joe Biden – chant “Stop the steal!” apparently without a hint of irony or self-awareness.

But the fight over Jan. 6 is a small puzzle piece in a larger social disorder. We are seeing verifiable truths dismissed as lies and what should be summarily debunked as lies revered as gospel. Listening to some of these voices, it is difficult to tell whether they are trying to create a reality based on what they wish were true – Trump won, Democrats eat babies, whatever – or whether they truly believe these falsehoods. It’s probably some of both.

Are we approaching a tipping point where a healthy society that has at least a modicum of shared consensus on what is true and what is false slides into a moral terrain that has no agreed-upon truth or lies, right or wrong, good or evil?

The pandemic has brought this problem into clear relief. Doctors say that they are treating people who, on their deathbed, continue to insist there is no such thing as COVID. There is a spectrum, from outright denial of the existence of the virus to conspiracies that it was invented for nefarious purposes to the idea that the virus itself is legitimate but is being exploited by governments (or other disreputable entities) to take away some amorphous “freedoms.”

Recently, parents opposed to mask mandates chased fellow parents (and their kids) at a school in California, screaming that the kids could not breathe through the masks. When some parents responded with what, by any fair measure, is common sense, one protester screamed back: “You were propagandized.… You are not being told the truth!”

To put a fine point on it, people who have been propagandized and who are convinced of a lie are shouting at others that they have been propagandized and do not know the truth.

Recently, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, speaking to a Republican crowd that should have been in his back pocket, said, “If you haven’t had the vaccine, you ought to think about getting it because if you’re my age –” At this point, he was drowned out by screaming and booing. When he was able to speak again, he told the Republican crowd, “Ninety-two percent of the people in the hospitals in South Carolina are unvaccinated.” To this, some audience members began screaming “Lies!”

The New York Times Magazine’s ethics columnist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, wrote recently of the “strange mirror game” being played by conspiracy theorists and hucksters. “They peddle hoaxes that warn of hoaxes, scams that warn of scams. They dupe their victims by cautioning them not to be duped.”

Lies have been around forever. But it seems we are in another realm now. When Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to Trump, defended then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false claims that attendance numbers at Trump’s 2016 presidential inauguration were the largest in history, Conway asserted that there were facts and then there were

“alternative facts.” This was not the genesis of a culture of gaslighting, but it did represent, along with Spicer’s lies, a turning point. The Trump administration operated in a world that rational observers would view as existing in an alternative universe of alternative facts.

Jews and supporters of Israel who forgive Trump’s many affronts because they deem him to be on “our side” on one issue suffer from something that might be equated to the difference between the weather and the climate.

Trump may indeed have taken steps that people view as being to Israel’s advantage. But, in nearly everything else Trump and his supporters have done, they have assaulted truth, facts and rationality. They call black white and up down. Legitimate media are “fake news” and darkweb rantings are trustworthy sources.

In a story in the last issue of the Independent, the commentator Bret Stephens said: “We now have come to a place where, increasingly, we are a nation that can bring ourselves to believe anything and a nation that can bring itself to believe anything … sooner or later, is going to have no problem believing the worst about Jews.”

Trump, Spicer, Conway and their crowd did not invent the situation where lies are gospel and truth is rejected, but they did their best to perfect it.

It should not need saying that such people should not be trusted, since their loyalty and sincerity are worthless. Republicans who, on a dime, turn into an angry mob screaming “Hang Mike Pence!” should not be trusted when it comes to something as sacred as the security and the fate of Israel and its people.

More gravely still, there is a reason why Jews are often referred to (as dehumanizing as the term is) as “canaries in a coalmine.” When antisemitism emerges, it is a sign of broader societal disorder. It is no surprise that the spike in antisemitism we are witnessing coincides with a phenomenon where verifiable facts are regarded as debatable assertions and the most ludicrous assertions are not only accepted as truth but defended with fanaticism and violence.

In the late 20th century, Canadian Jewish Congress and other groups adopted an approach premised on the idea that the best way to ensure the safety of Jewish people was to advance an ideal that protects allminorities. There might always be people with antisemitic motivations, but, if we can inculcate in society a transcendent commitment to equality for all, we may create a firewall against the worst antisemitism.

As CJC and others did several decades ago, it may be time for Jewish people and others who care about fighting antisemitism to rededicate ourselves to strengthening the most fundamental principles of our democratic societies, the very foundations that we too often have taken for granted, even after Jan. 6. This includes not only ensuring basic things like civil and voting rights and protecting the institutions of democratic government, but it calls on us to contest outright lies and to defend basic truth. If, in the process, we manage to yank our democratic societies back from the abyss of lies and the frightening places they lead, we will have made things better not only for the Jewish future, but for everyone’s.

Panel on shared legacy

A still from the documentary Shared Legacies: From the left are Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Maurice Eisendrath and Abraham Joshua Heschel during the march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965.

The Victoria Shoah Project held a panel discussion on Oct. 20, following an online showing of the documentary Shared Legacies: The African American-Jewish Civil Rights Alliance.

The 2020 film, part of the sixth annual Victoria International Jewish Film Festival, chronicles the common history of prejudice and hardships each group has faced, and features footage of the relationships of such luminaries as Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Included are interviews with many prominent civil rights leaders of the time, such as Andrew Young, John Lewis, Rabbi Alvin Sugarman and Rabbi Peter S. Berg.

After the screening, there was a Vancouver Island-based panel discussion with Adrienne and Barrie Carter, Paul Winn and the Victoria Shoah Project’s Robert Oppenheimer. From their own experiences, they each spoke about African-Canadian and Jewish-Canadian relations. They also talked about the film, and the events from 1960s America that it depicts, from personal, historical, present-day and Canadian perspectives. Rick Kool, also of the Shoah Project, served as moderator.

Adrienne Carter was born in Hungary in 1944, as the Nazis marched into the country and were increasing their campaign to exterminate the Jews. Many in her extended family died in Auschwitz. She and her family moved to Canada in 1956, following the Hungarian Revolution. “The whole stateless experience is very well known to me,” she recalled. “I married Barrie in 1965, at a time when Blacks and whites rarely ever connected, let alone married, and at a time when many Southern states had laws against interracial marriages.”

A co-founder and the director of services at the Vancouver Island Counseling Centre for Immigrants and Refugees, she has spent much of her working life helping immigrants by providing therapy to those who have experienced trauma, including intergenerational trauma.

Barrie Carter, who was a special needs education assistant until his retirement, told the audience of his early years. Born in Jacksonville, Fla., he moved to the northeastern part of the country where, in his teens, he volunteered with the NAACP in Bridgeport, Conn., and in New York and picketed Walgreens to challenge their segregationist luncheonette policies in the South. He immigrated to Canada on a bicycle in 1963. “While I was riding north, people were taking the bus south to the March on Washington. But I just had to get away,” he said.

Both Barrie and Adrienne Carter have traveled around the world, providing services to victims of torture and genocide.

Winn, whose work experience includes having been the executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, followed by recounting his experiences growing up in Toronto’s diverse Kensington Market neighbourhood.

“When I was 10 or 11, I was a Shabbos goy. I would do some things for the neighbours on Saturdays because they were unable to perform those tasks for religious reasons,” Winn recalled. “I got invited to bar and bat mitzvahs.”

He said, “It was natural for the Black and Jewish communities to support each other when there were struggles with such things as immigration. When I watched the film, I remembered how the connection between the religious Black and Jewish communities helped bring about a lot of activities in Canada, as well.”

Oppenheimer, a clinical psychologist with a focus on traumatized children and youth, a human rights activist and a staunch promoter of Holocaust education, also shared some information about his career. Reflecting on the 28 years he spent working in Detroit, he said, “It was an interesting experience for me. I was the only non-African-American on the staff and I was impressed with how welcoming the community was to me.

He added, “One of the things that impressed me about the movie was when Heschel said ‘not to be a bystander to history.’ I think that is central to my idea of human rights, that we cannot just stand by.”

“One of the things that really hit me in the film,” said Kool, “was a pastor standing in a church with a rabbi who said, ‘Reverend King isn’t here anymore, Rabbi Heschel isn’t here anymore, but are their children here now?’”

Barrie Carter observed that the youth in activist groups today “have the same dynamism as we did. They have an energy and a knowledge of concepts. It isn’t just a blind following. It is a positive morality.”

“They seem to believe it is part of their responsibility to make things better,” added Winn about today’s activists. “They want to make things better.”

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

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Note: This article has been amended to reflect the correct name of the film festival. It is the Victoria International Jewish Film Festival.

Horror at the border

While American elected officials posted pious family-friendly Father’s Day messages on social media Sunday, about 2,300 children remained incarcerated by the U.S. government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch, stolen from their parents at the southern border with Mexico.

The families are migrants from throughout Central America and the idea of tearing children from their parents is dubbed the “nuclear option” for discouraging illegal migration into the United States. Once the families are divided, children and adults begin separate legal journeys. Some parents are being deported while their children remain behind. One infant was snatched from its mother while breastfeeding.

The boys are being held in a repurposed Walmart. No one outside government knows where the girls are.

President Donald Trump, whose administration implemented the inhumane policy, blames Democratic lawmakers for the situation, in keeping with his pathological dishonesty.

Inevitably, social media is making rampant comparisons with the Holocaust. In an age when the Nazi era is invoked just about every time a disagreement arises, this parallel remains troubling. As distasteful as the analogy is though, it does reflect a laudable desire to scream injustice in the loudest way.

“We are better than this,” critics say, or “This is not America,” both of which defy the evidence. As awareness increases about this horror, if Americans are not rallying on the streets in every city and town, we will know whether this is America or whether they are better than this.

On restitution

The government of Canada has apologized to Omar Khadr and awarded him $10.5 million in damages. Khadr is a Canadian citizen whose parents took him as a child to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fifteen years ago, on July 27, 2002, a firefight took place in which Khadr, then 15, was wounded and a U.S. soldier, Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer, was killed.

Khadr was arrested and incarcerated at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he pleaded guilty to throwing the grenade that killed Speer. Khadr later said he confessed falsely in the hope of returning to Canada. However, the facts of the firefight, whether Khadr was guilty or not guilty, whether he was a terrorist or a coerced child soldier-victim, are not relevant to the apology or the compensation.

The decision to apologize and pay Khadr millions of dollars is a result of a $20 million civil suit that Khadr launched after the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously determined that the Canadian government’s interrogation of Khadr while he was at Guantanamo “offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.” The civil suit claimed that Canadian officials violated his rights, interrogating him when he was a minor, in the absence of legal representation. He also claims to have been subjected to torture, which would be consistent with the history of Guantanamo and evidence in the public realm.

The decision to apologize and compensate turns on this point: even if Khadr were guilty, the government of Canada did not adequately protect the rights and well-being of one of its citizens; indeed, it was complicit in their violation and acted outside of the rule of our own nation’s laws.

We can all make our own assessment of right and wrong in this case. But the Supreme Court of Canada made the key judgment about the legal foundation of Khadr’s case and the federal government – facing the alternative of almost certain failure in defending itself in the civil case, resulting in a much greater cost to taxpayers – opted to pay Khadr $10.5 million.

Whether it is First Nations land claims and residential schools payouts, symbolic payment to the Chinese-Canadian community for the head tax on their ancestors or compensation to Japanese-Canadians who were deprived of their property and forcibly sent to internment camps during the Second World War, money and an apology are poor substitutes for justice.

Money and an apology will not return lost years or family members. They cannot heal physical or mental wounds, though the money can help pay for medical and psychological treatment. Apologies and reparations cannot undo the harm done. But they can help hold our government and society accountable and, ultimately, that serves us all well.

More work left to do

Call It Democracy speakers, from left to right, Mira Oreck, Margot Young and Sharon Abraham-Weiss. (photo by Zach Sagorin)

“From the Holocaust, there is a lesson we can all agree about: ‘Never again.’ There are two paths: never again to us or never again to anybody,” said Sharon Abraham-Weiss, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Abraham-Weiss was speaking at the event Call it Democracy, held at Temple Sholom on March 14. She was joined by Mira Oreck, director of public engagement at the Broadbent Institute, and Margot Young, a University of British Columbia law professor, who served as facilitator.

About Israel, Abraham-Weiss said, “The Declaration of Independence from 1948 is the establishment for this democracy, promising equality for all its citizens. When I’m saying citizens, 20% of the citizens of Israel are Palestinian-Israelis, Arab-Israelis, people that were in Israel in 1948. Speaking about the occupied territories, it’s a different story.”

She said, in contrast to Canada, Israel “does not have a constitution … so, our toolkit, as lawyers, [is] the Basic Laws that we consider higher laws.” Additionally, she said, “We don’t have any separation between state and religion and this is something very important to understand.” For example, “the only way to get married … is in the Orthodox rabbinical system for Jews or other religious systems for non-Jews.”

Moreover, she continued, “In 1967, we occupied areas known today as ‘the occupied territories,’ Judea and Samaria, Palestine, you can name it. There are about two million people there, Palestinians. When I speak about democracy, it does not apply to the occupied territories. It’s different [there] because these people do not have the status of citizens, they are refugees.”

Oreck thanked the Coast Salish peoples, “whose territory we are gathered on tonight,” when she began her remarks. “I think it’s a relevant acknowledgement to the conversation around civil liberties, civil rights and human rights.”

Oreck described the notion of civil liberties as a political one. “These are political decisions that are made from country to country and we often think of civil liberties in a fairly narrow sense. What are the personal guarantees and freedoms that the government cannot infringe on by law?” she asked, listing freedom of conscience, religion, press, the right to security. “We don’t necessarily think about poverty and housing and other rights that we may think of more generally as human rights that don’t fall into our more narrow definition of civil liberties,” she said.

Young shifted the conversation to the balance between security and liberty.

“Can security reasons be justified by everything we are doing? Abraham-Weiss asked. “The answer from my perspective is no, not at all, it has to be balanced. Can we completely dismiss the idea of security reasons? And the answer is no.” She spoke about profiling at airports as an example. “It’s hard, for on one hand, we don’t want any terror attacks; on the other hand, 20% of our population belongs to the Arab minority. Can we generalize … that they are all suspects?” She said, “How do you bring your citizens to be part of the society when you always blame them? How do you bring your citizens to be part of the society when their schools, per capita, are less than the schools I am going to in west Jerusalem and other places?

“In 2010, the government of Israel joined the [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] and the OECD said that, if you want to be a member of the developed countries, you must show us better numbers of Arabs in the job market and better participation of ultra-Orthodox in the job market. [With] this incentive, we showed better numbers … and this, in a way, is balancing the security risks.”

In the Canadian context, Oreck referred to the passing of anti-terrorism Bill C-51, noting that the NDP was the only party that voted against it. “There are real conversations around how we address very real security threats and what the tension is,” she said. “But, also, what are we willing to trade away?… Frankly, who would be in violation of that security based on C-51?… Would people that are protesting pipelines, for example, be a threat to national security? And, if so, who are those people? Who is being threatened? Who is being protected?”

Another prominent Canadian security discussion has been about the Syrian refugees, said Oreck. “When the new government talked about bringing in Syrian refugees, well, what is the threat?… There are still many questions around what the screening process was, should men be able to come in, or should families be prioritized?”

In Canada, there is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Young noted in changing the topic from security to equality. “We do have a lot of these questions being decided by our Supreme Court of Canada in an authoritative way,” she said.

In Israel, explained Abraham-Weiss, “Our main tool is the Basic Law of Human Dignity [and Liberty] and, when we take things to the Supreme Court … although it is about freedoms, the word that is not [there] is the word equality and the reason equality is not there, it is because … the Orthodox were against the word equality because of women’s rights.”

She explained how equality was written “into dignity” in the 1990s. “Humiliation and discrimination harms your dignity and that is how it was justified. It is a very famous case,” she said, referring to that of Alice Miller, who wanted to be a pilot in the Israel Defence Forces. “She was rejected because she was a woman. Now, the interesting story about her … is that she was a pilot already, she just made aliyah. She moved from South Africa and she was holding a civil pilot license and they told her she can’t be a pilot, and she said, I am.” Miller became Israel’s first female pilot.

In Canada, said Oreck, “we are probably also dealing with an outdated version of gender and needing to really reevaluate the way that we look at gender rights, what does that mean.” She pointed to some advances, commending “the work the Vancouver School Board has done around gender-neutral bathrooms.” She said, “What is once at the margins, eventually, becomes mainstream.”

“Our job as a human rights organization is to find out what is … marginalized, outlined, and bring it to the heart of the consensus,” agreed Abraham-Weiss. “I think especially as minorities, it’s important to be consistent and put question marks on things that can be taken for granted.”

Abraham-Weiss used the example of administrative detention. She said it “was used, traditionally, against Palestinians and, whenever we brought it up, they would say [for] security reasons. Now, recently, it is used against right-wing settlers, Israeli-Jewish settlers. Now we are consistent about it … we are consistent about the procedure and part of the reason we have success is that we are not partisan … we work in the parliament of Israel with various members of the political spectrum. So, on children’s rights, our best ally is from [Avigdor] Lieberman’s party, which is right-wing. On International Human Rights Day, we held a conference in the Knesset held by … two members of the Knesset, one was from the joint Arab-Jewish party … and the other was Likud.”

Abraham-Weiss said, “In terms of human rights, within Judaism, we are more tolerant, [but] we are still not doing good enough, with Ethiopian Jews for example.… It takes time, but I think we are moving to it.”

Young asked Abraham-Weiss and Oreck to discuss the “elephants in each of the country’s rooms, really, really tough issues that that people dance around on, but don’t always talk about.”

Abraham-Weiss said, “The elephant in the room is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, so, while we have tolerance and multiculturalism within Judaism, we are less tolerant to multiculturalism with the Palestinian-Israelis and their culture and I have to admit … the last couple of years, we have been dealing with what we call the shrinking democratic space in Israel due to the conflict.”

During Protective Edge, the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, Abraham-Weiss said, “We saw that there were voices against the war and, the voices, people were calling to marginalize them. So, they were opening Facebook pages calling to fire these people from their workplaces. Now, these are private places.… Look at the government. There were ministers saying: ‘Hey, don’t let anyone do demonstrations against the war, it is not a good time for demonstrations.’ When is a good time if this is the idea? Now that bothers me in a democratic country. In a pluralism of ideas, we have many voices. If you do have only one voice, you don’t call it a democracy anymore.… [Recently], there was an idea, a draft bill, to impeach the elected minority. So, the elected majority, the Jews, can impeach the elected minority, the Arabs?… I think this is a problem in a democracy.”

Oreck said, “Canada views itself and prides itself on being a multicultural country and yet … multiculturalism is, of course, from the ’70s … was about immigrants and was about new Canadians and it never dealt with First Peoples of this country and it never addressed the historical inequalities that we are dealing with now through reconciliation…. I think that, as a Jew anyway, that makes a challenge in some ways.

“For many of us,” she said, “Canada was a refuge and our families came here for safety and security and yet, at that exact time, of course, kids were being taken from their homes and sent to residential schools. So, how do you reconcile, how do you pride yourself on multiculturalism when, for many people that time was a very dark history.… We are still really addressing those challenges. I would argue that not having clean water on reserves is a failing of multiculturalism and I would argue that the Cindy Blackstock case on the underfunding of First Nations education is a failing of multiculturalism.… There is clearly still enormous work to do.”

Similarly, Abraham-Weiss said, “I can criticize Israel because I care about Israel. I want a better Israel and I think we all deserve a better Israel.”

Call it Democracy was co-sponsored by the New Israel Fund of Canada and Temple Sholom with Beth Tikvah Congregation, Ameinu, Hillel BC Society and Or Shalom. NIFC president Joan Garson concluded the event.

Zach Sagorin is a Vancouver freelance writer.

Rights and security

When we see online memes saying that a Canadian is more likely to die from an interaction with a moose than a terrorist, we can justifiably relax and even admire the characteristics of a country where a gangly antlered mammal is more to be feared than the kind of ideological threats rampant around the world.

The moose meme is part of a campaign that views the federal government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper as fear-mongering, trying to drive voters back to the Conservative party lest more “soft on terrorism” parties come to power in this fall’s election. The Conservatives’ weapon at hand is Bill C-51, which is seen by critics as a bludgeon against a mosquito.

It may be true that in the history of our country moose have been more deadly than terrorists, but times change. Moose are not mobilizing globally to attack civilians across the West. Vigilance tempered by pragmatism would seem to be in the Canadian tradition.

The difficulty of balancing overreaction with being prepared has been most evident in the mixed reaction to Bill C-51 from Canada’s opposition parties. Thomas Mulcair’s New Democrats voted against the bill; Justin Trudeau’s Liberals voted for it but Trudeau said he would make changes to the law if he forms government.

Canada has blessedly not suffered the magnitude of terrorist or hate-motivated violence seen in Europe recently, including the brutal Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cache attacks. But we have seen so-called “lone wolf” violence in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, where warrant officer Patrice Vincent was killed and another Canadian Forces personnel was injured, and in Ottawa, where Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was killed while standing guard at the War Memorial.

Barring a stunning reversal in a Conservative-dominated Senate, Bill C-51 will become law in the coming weeks. The legislation will make it easier for government departments to share information about Canadians across jurisdictional silos. It will also give police new powers to “preventatively” detain or restrict individuals who are suspected of plotting a terrorist act. It bans the “promotion of terrorism,” gives the public safety minister the right to add people to the country’s “no-fly list” and increases the powers of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

CSIS is Canada’s spy agency and until now has had a role limited to observation. C-51 would expand that role to something called “disruptive” powers, allowing agents to act more directly in ways that are not fully spelled out.

Critics also fear a loss of individual privacy as, for example, tax information that is now secluded in the Canada Revenue Agency could be shared with other government departments.

These concerns are justified, particularly those that increase the powers of CSIS, which has been criticized for lacking adequate civilian oversight.

Some Canadian Jews, including the recently deceased Alan Borovoy, have been among Canada’s greatest civil libertarians and bulwarks against government overreach in individual lives. With a history deeply affected by totalitarian governments, some in our community may have a special sensitivity to legislation that threatens to impinge on individual rights. Because this is not an exact science, it will always be a matter for disagreement, with some arguing that security legislation goes too far and others declaring it absolutely necessary.

At the same time, though, terrorist attacks and hate crimes in Europe have been disproportionately directed toward Jewish people and institutions. Statistics on hate crime incidents in Canada also indicate that Jewish people and institutions are vulnerable to acts of hate in numbers disproportionate to population.

Most Canadians may be more vulnerable to a moose than a terrorist, but Jewish Canadians understand that terrorism needs to be taken seriously. Of course, so do civil liberties.

Canadians across the country will rally against Bill C-51 Saturday. Even so, it will almost certainly become law. When it does, concerned Canadians should pressure the government to improve civilian oversight of our spy agency, which is perhaps the most crucial measure needed to ensure the law does not lead to lawlessness by government officials.

We should also strengthen public vigilance by supporting organizations that monitor and measure government intrusions into private spheres, such as the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

And we should do all we can to ensure that Canada remains a place that is both safe from a collective standpoint – and secure in terms of our individual liberties.