Mr. Chair, I wish to thank you for the opportunity to open this important debate in committee of the whole on the growing wave of anti-Semitism we are witnessing around the world.
I will begin with a word of thanks to my hon. colleague, the member for Mount Royal, who proposed the debate this evening following his involvement as rapporteur in the special session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, three weeks ago. I would also like to commend the good work done by my colleague from Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, who, with our former colleague Mario Silva, co-chaired an all-party parliamentary inquiry a few years ago into the issue of anti-Semitism here in Canada.
Tonight, as a committee, we debate what is the most ancient, durable, and pernicious form of hatred: anti-Semitism.
Regrettably, in all of human history we see various forms of xenophobia and bigotry directed at religious and ethnic minorities, and minorities of all kinds. However, there is one particular kind of hatred rooted in history, which seems to transcend time and culture, which is passed from one generation and one century to the next. It has its roots in ancient history, yet it has very modern and contemporary manifestations. That, of course, is the ancient and pernicious evil of anti-Semitism.
It is difficult for the rational mind to conceive of such an irrational hatred, rooted in fear, prejudice, myth, and stereotype, yet we cannot deny the evidence. I recall in 2009 visiting and laying a wreath at the mass grave of Jews of the “Holocaust by bullets”, massacred at the ravine of Babi Yar near Kiev, Ukraine. In the course of 72 hours, troops from the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen lined up and individually shot more than 30,000 Jewish children, women, and men for the sole crime of being Jews.
I am bound to admit that for me, being there was a kind of revelation, because in people tend to think of the Shoah as something industrial, the murder of people on an industrial scale. We think of Auschwitz and Birkenau. However, in Babi Yar, we can see a place where Nazi soldiers killed Jews one by one, one person at a time.
It was a killing on a personal scale, not the industrialized killing of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It revealed for me the depth of the evil of the Shoah, which of course itself was a manifestation, a culmination of an unthinkable evil of centuries of European anti-Semitism, which itself had been expressed over the course of the centuries in pogroms, in attacks, in the obliteration of Jewish communities.
I went, as it happened, from that visit to Babi Yar in Ukraine a few weeks later to the teeming metropolis of Mumbai, a city with a population about two-thirds the size of Canada's population. In Mumbai, I went to visit the Chabad-Lubavitch House that had been run as a local refuge for Jewish travellers by Rabbi Holtzberg, who provided a bed and a kosher meal and spiritual guidance to young Jewish travellers passing through India.
I visited that place because just a few weeks before, the rabbi and his wife, Rivka, had been brutally murdered by jihadist terrorists who attacked the city of Mumbai. What is remarkable is that those jihadi terrorists attacked large-scale installations like the train station and the Taj hotel, but they sought out this one very small, obscure Jewish home in a back alley of this enormous city. I went up to the top, the fifth floor, of that building, quite frankly walking through the scenes of complete devastation, of death, the scenes of anti-Semitism. I could smell the odour of death in that place. As I went to the top floor, I looked out over this enormous city of 20 million people and I thought to myself that, out of 20 million people, they targeted this place, this one particular place. This one place was like a magnet for their hatred. Why? It was because it was a house of Jews. Something suddenly connected in my mind that the evil that had brought those jihadi anti-Semitic terrorists to the Chabad House in Mumbai was the same evil that inspired the members of Hitler's Einsatzgruppen in Babi Yar in 1940 to commit their massacre on the eve of Pesach, or Passover.
These phenomena are connected. They echo through time and history. It is no coincidence that the European anti-Semitism, which ultimately was culminated in the Shoah, was grounded in certain myths like the so-called chronicles of the elders of Zion. Is it not perverse that we should see the television serialization of the chronicles of the elders of Zion being played in Arab countries like Egypt on television to this day? Is it not obscene that we should see in schools around the world some of the most basic and crass anti-Semitic myths and stereotypes being taught to young children in a form pedagogical child abuse, I submit? We must speak frankly about this.
When we see the attack on the Hyper Cacher store in Paris a month ago, the attacks on synagogues in Copenhagen a week ago, the attack on the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels last November, and the attacks against institutions within the Jewish community around the world, what we see is the phenomenon of the new anti-Semitism.
We have seen this transition, from the rancid old anti-Semitism of Europe to the virulently violent new anti-Semitism that is spreading across the world. Tonight I join with colleagues from all parties in condemning both forms of anti-Semitism.
Canada is taking a leadership role in combatting this phenomenon of hate. We did so in joining the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and in chairing it two years ago. We are doing so through Holocaust education efforts. We are doing so through recognizing our own history of anti-Semitism, which our government did in acknowledging the injustice of the wartime immigration restriction measures on Jewish European refugees, in building a monument at Pier 21; by funding projects to educate current and future generations; by taking a zero tolerance approach toward Semitism; and by de-funding organizations that give expression to anti-Semitism dressed up as anti-Zionism. It was always said that Jews were denied citizenship in Europe, and now the new anti-Semites say that Israel should be denied membership in the citizenship of nations.
We will call this new anti-Semitism for what it is, which is why Canada was the first country in the world to withdraw from the tainted Durban II and Durban III process, and why we were proud to host the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism in 2010, again thanks in part to the member for Mount Royal, which published the Ottawa protocol, which provides an extremely helpful definition of what constitutes anti-Semitism.
Let me cite from it as I close. It states:
Let it be clear: Criticism of Israel is not antisemitic, and saying so is wrong. But singling Israel out for selective condemnation and opprobrium—let alone denying its right to exist or seeking its destruction—is discriminatory and hateful....
As Canadians stand in solidarity with the Canadian Jewish community, we stand in solidarity with the Jewish community around the world, including with those who, every day, live lives of dignity and courage simply by maintaining a democratic Jewish homeland in the State of Israel. For all of them, we stand on guard.
