Mr. Chair, I rise today to talk a bit about some of the experience I gained as the co-chair of the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, which produced this report in 2011 based upon very extensive hearings. Some of the materials we collected have been put together with the presentations we heard into a book about anti-Semitism, edited by me and our former colleague, Mario Silva. The book is called Tackling Hate: Combating Antisemitism: The Ottawa Protocol .
One of the issues that arose at that time, and has arisen in the context of this debate this evening as well, is one that gives me endless frustration. Given the fact that I only have five minutes, I thought I would concentrate on this one thing.
We hear it said that we ought not to be discussing anti-Semitism unless we also discuss the other hatred that is the opposite face of that coin: Islamophobia. I want to suggest that is a false dichotomy. I understand the legitimate discussion that happens when people say, on the one hand, that perhaps we should discuss anti-Semitism on its own. Others say, no, that we should discuss anti-Semitism as the prototype for all forms of hatred of the other, for dehumanization of the other. Both of those discussions and both of those points of view are legitimate.
It is legitimate to say that the Jews have faced, unlike any other substantial numerous population in the world, an actual deliberate, methodical attempt to exterminate them completely. There is no other parallel in the world on the scale of the Holocaust, anywhere in the world. That makes what happened to the Jews in the 1940s absolutely unique. On the other hand, to refer to anti-Semitism and the Jews as being the canary in the coal mine for other forms of discrimination, abuse and hatred is also valid.
However, saying that we ought not to be discussing anti-Semitism as it occurs domestically in Canada or overseas unless we also deal with Islamophobia is really improper. The reason for this is very simple.
When we start discussing Islamophobia, it is very clear that we are normally not discussing the incidents that have occurred from time to time, for example, in the wake of 9/11 where Muslims in general have been targeted within the community. I can give many examples. In fact, I have a collection of essays that were published, presentations to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, which say that what we ought to be talking about is the ostensibly racist actions of Israel, the so-called apartheid state. One could be very offensive in referring to Zionism as racism, as the United Nations General Assembly once did. These are almost always stereotypes that characterize Israel very unfairly, but saying that unless we deal with that issue, we ought not to be dealing with anti-Semitism. This raises an important point. It insists that Jews, in this case Canadian Jews, are somehow collectively responsible for the actions of a country of which they are not citizens. They are somehow responsible for the actions of another group of people over which they have no authority.
Let me give a parallel. Let us imagine for the sake of argument that there is today a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment of the sort that existed back in the days of the Yellow Peril in the late 19th, early 20th century, back when there was systemic discrimination against the Chinese both from government and from private citizens. There was mob violence in some cases against Chinese on the west coast both in Canada and the U.S. Let us imagine in a situation like this if someone were to stand and say that we cannot talk about discrimination against Chinese until we deal with the politics of that human rights abuse in the People's Republic of China, until we deal with the way in which the Tibetans are being treated by the People's Republic of China, that we cannot deal with domestic issues relating to discrimination against Chinese. That would be self-evidently preposterous. I submit that once we scrape off that patin of concern over the Tibetans—who, believe me, deserve our concern in real life—it would be obvious this is de facto a form of racism. That is what is going on here when we make this parallel.
It is entirely legitimate to explore and discuss Islamophobia as a form of discrimination that has no place in our society.
It is legitimate to discuss every form of discrimination. We can do them all as a group, we can do them as individual forms of discrimination, but we ought never to say that some group has a collective responsibility somehow for issues over which it has no authority. That is a tremendous intellectual problem. I suggest that we always ensure never to allow ourselves to fall down that particular rabbit hole.