By Ted Belman
The JTA reported ” It (CIJA) was satisfied that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s omission of Jews in a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day was not deliberate.”
The Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) based its case on the fact that, on the same day, the government tweeted “On this #HolocaustMemorialDay, we honor its victims & vow to fight intolerance and anti-Semitism.”
ISSUING SUCH A TWEET IN NO WAY SUGGESTS THAT THE OMISSION OF JEWS FROM THE HOLOCAUST WAS NOT DELIBERATE. IN FACT IT REINFORCES THE CONCLUSION THAT IT WAS DELIBERATE.
I wrote to CIJA the following:
When Canada issued their infamous statement on the Holocaust without mentioning Jews, I said Canada embraces holocaust denial because “To deny that the Holocaust is essentially a Jewish tragedy is to deny the Holocaust.”
I am very disappointed that CIJA have now accepted that such an omission was OK because in a subsequent tweet the PMO made a “vow to fight intolerance and anti-Semitism”.
Many sources say “The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945″. It was certainly understood as such in the decades following the Holocaust. Similarly, after the holocaust and before it, the term was antisemitism not anti-Semitism. What the hell is “anti-Semitism”?
The “final solution” was designed for the “Jewish problem”.
The fact that other people were also killed in the killing machine does not in any way diminish the fact that Holocaust referred to the killing of Jews and thus was a unique event aimed at the destruction of the Jewish people.
Many liberals try to diminish this message by universalizing the Holocaust to deny it of its unique focus on Jews. Many Holocaust museums are designed to deliver the same message.
This may be OK with CIJA but not with me.
The fact that the PMO vowed to fight anti-semitism, in no way makes their earlier statement acceptable.
Shame on you.
Ted’s accusing Trudeau’s omitting reference to the slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Shoah is a fair conclusion to draw.
About the same time as Trudeau’s Holocaust statement, Canada’s Foreign Minister Stéphane Dion’s issued a fence sitting statement condemning the violence in Israel, but failed to identify the Palestinians as being the aggressors and that their violence is nothing short of terrorism.
By Trudeau universalizing the message of the Holocaust by taking Jews out of the message and his Foreign Minister’s message that not only deliberately avoided mention of Palestinians and their terrorism and Israelis rightly trying to defend themselves, drew an ugly moral equivalence between Israelis and Palestinians.
On CIJA and a few other Jewish organizations expressing their deep concerns with the statements of both Trudeau and Dion, both according the CIJA’s CEO, Shimon Koffler Fogel issued clarifying statements that satisfied CIJA.
The fact however is that the clarifying statements that satisfied CIJA by both Trudeau and Dion were private. The offending statements heard by all Canadians were very public.
CIJA and Jewish organizations must do a whole lot better.
It is abundantly clear that this new Trudeau Liberal government is quickly reverting to past Canadian Liberal governments’ Mid East policies that were referred to by the Liberal government and Canadian main stream media as the traditional Canadian balanced Mid East policy.
Those policies however, were always very deliberately calculated to appease Muslims and Mid East Arabs with a view to advancing Canadian interests in the region. Those policies thus were balanced on a tilt against Israel.
To ascertain the measure of Trudeau and his government, all one needs to do is Google the following: Omar Alghabra
The quack racial policies of the Third Reich were only an attempt to give scientific dignity to their fundamental antisemitic hysteria. To the Nazis, all the world’s problems were laid at the feet of the Jews. To ignore the basic mission of the Holocaust as the mass murder of Jews is to ignore the rich history of Nazi persecution of Jews from the very beginning of Nazi power.
Trudeau is clearly an antisemite and refusing to identify the Jews as being the focus of the Holocaust is to lie about history.
I actually should not have commented. I am not Canadian and actually do not have a feel for this.
Trudeau and his cronies are ignorant and insensitive. I don’t believe for a second it was an oversite. When addressing something as serious as the holocaust of the Jewish people to eliminate using the words Jew, Jewish, anti-semitism or any word that would be associated with Jews has to be done with thought to be able to exclude it.
@ Bear Klein:
I would say it goes further than that; much further.
My guess is that Trudeau Jr. and his people care so little of Holocaust Day they did not proof read what some underling wrote. They do not care about Jews or Israel. That is my gut feeling.