neo-Nazi

Critical to take a stand against hate

Since time immemorial, no matter what calamity occurred in the world, if there was a problem plaguing humanity, Jews were used as the convenient scapegoat.

Earlier this year, as the coronavirus pandemic spread across Europe and then throughout North America, conspiracy theorists claimed that Israel and Jews around the world were secretly involved in spreading and even engineering the deadly disease. While these conspiracies are baseless and seem almost comical at first glance, thanks to the power and ubiquity of social media, even the most bizarre falsehoods can find fertile ground and poison the minds of millions of people almost instantaneously.

Unfortunately, the pandemic continues to rage across Canada and the world and, though the claim that Jews are behind COVID-19 remains utterly fictional, that hasn’t stopped a dangerous new crop of antisemites from spreading their toxic bigotry.

Not only is Canada not immune to the age-old virus of antisemitism, but British Columbia has also been infected. As was reported in the Georgia Straight, an anti-mask activist in Vancouver, Marco Pietro, who organized and participated in a number of rallies protesting coronavirus restrictions and policies, released a Holocaust denial video on social media. The two-minute-long video features Pietro saying that the Holocaust is a myth perpetrated by fake survivors to scam money out of the wider, unsuspecting public. He also claimed that Mein Kampf – Adolf Hitler’s antisemitic manifesto – didn’t contain any objectionable material, and that the coronavirus pandemic is a plot used by Jews in a quest for control. Pietro also said that concentration-camp survivors are liars and accused “a bunch of Zionist Jews” of “setting up” Hitler.

Meanwhile, on Nov. 15, a speaker at an anti-mask rally in Vancouver condemned “satanic, talmudic” people. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) reported that the No More Lockdowns group (which now goes by the name “Human Rights Movement”) produced an event in Vancouver organized by antisemitic conspiracy theorist Raoul Taylor van Haastert, who has decried the “Zionist media” and stated “our WWII history is a lie.” CAHN’s report cited Vancouver neo-Nazi Brian Ruhe, who, in an antisemitic post that went viral, shared his beliefs about “Rothschild-Zionist-communist control” that is being covered up, claiming that Jews control the media.

Let there be no doubt, there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Jewish people or the state of Israel are behind the coronavirus pandemic or any of these other odious libels. Conversely, the evidence supporting the Holocaust’s veracity is so overwhelming and indisputable that, to deny its occurrence, far from being a legitimate disagreement on historical facts, is rather merely an attempt to deny the Jewish people’s collective suffering at the hand of the Nazis to further an antisemitic agenda.

Most British Columbians would rightly brush off Pietro’s and Ruhe’s words as illogical rants of mad men, but, tragically, as bothersome and as offensive as their statements are, antisemitic acts are at or near all-time highs across Canada, including in British Columbia.

Earlier this year, B’nai Brith Canada’s annual audit of antisemitism logged more than 200 such incidents in British Columbia alone, ranging from harassment to vandalism. In one such incident, for example, Camp Miriam, on Gabriola Island, was vandalized with graffiti, including a swastika and other images. The image and symbol that represented the Nazi regime that murdered six million Jews in Europe less than 100 years ago is today being used to attack young Jewish summer campers. One can only imagine the long-lasting psychological damage inflicted on young people as a result of such an incident – and multiply that by more than 200 incidents last year alone.

Such antisemitic conspiracy theories, as espoused by Pietro, Ruhe and others must be forcefully repudiated and condemned by all. Thanks to social media, even the most bizarre lie can have a worldwide impact, and that’s why it’s so critical to take a public stand against antisemitic hate and propaganda. As history has taught, while antisemitic words are bad enough, the paramount concern is that they can often morph into violence. Enough is enough.

Mike Fegelman is the executive director of HonestReporting Canada (honestreporting.ca), a nonprofit organization working to ensure fair and accurate Canadian media coverage of Israel.

Ukrainian incidents concerning

In Europe, it has often been dangerous for Jews to be Jews. And Easter in particular has led to frenzied antisemitism, as priests commonly riled up parishioners with a selective retelling of the crucifixion story, after which throngs would emerge from churches and attack Jewish fellow residents.

This is a generalization, of course. Many Easters have passed peacefully in many parts of Europe. But Jew-bashing was a common occurrence with formal and informal sanction. Children sometimes came home from school with arts and crafts mallets to be used symbolically to hammer the Jews on Easter weekend. Predictably in such an environment, on many, many occasions, the hammering was not symbolic.

So it was this past weekend, when firebombs were reportedly thrown through the windows of the main synagogue in the Ukrainian city of Nikolayev. Thankfully, prayers were not taking place at the time and no one was injured. But the traumatized and beleaguered community must certainly have heard echoes of the past in this act of contemporary vandalism and hate.

Ukraine, of course, is the centre of global anxieties, verging as it does on something between a civil war among ethnic Russian and Ukrainian citizens and an incipient full-scale invasion by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has already invaded and annexed Crimea.

It may be an unofficial aspect of our tradition to always expect the worst even while hoping for the best, so it may not have come as a complete surprise to some of us that Easter weekend did not pass without an unfortunate incident. Particularly in the aftermath of another chilling incident in the days before the firebombing. A photocopied sheet was spread throughout parts of Ukraine during Passover declaring that Jews over the age of 16 must register at the (Russian-occupied) government building in Donetsk, paying a $50 registration fee and listing all real estate owned. The echoes of the past this poster elicited were obvious and outrage went viral.

From the start, there was uncertainty about the provenance of the sheet and whether it was being distributed on behalf of an official/ government agency. By the weekend, media were reporting that the poster had been “debunked,” that it was not issued by authorities. If true – because the “debunking” report is no more certain than the original belief that it came from whatever counts as a government in the region now – it would be a bit of a relief. But there should be no great celebration. In recent weeks, as Ukraine and Russia have become more and more conflicted, Jewish citizens of Ukraine have found themselves in an historically familiar and dangerously undesirable position. As has been so often the case in Europe, sides in the conflict are either demanding Jewish allegiance or scapegoating Jews.

Ukraine has a small but overt, visible and thriving neo-Nazi movement – with the support of about one in 10 Ukrainians – which is trouble enough. Putin did not help matters when he suggested recently that Russian influence in Ukraine would be good for the Jews because of rampant antisemitism there. There could hardly be a more dangerous position for Ukrainian Jews than to be seen as a justification for Russian incursion (as if Russia or Putin have records worthy of Jewish admiration).

Leaders of Ukraine’s Jewish community, which traditionally has been more Russian-speaking than Ukrainian-speaking, stood firm with their Ukrainian fellow citizens against Putin’s assertions that Ukraine is a hotbed of Jew-hatred.

“Your certainty about the growth of antisemitism in Ukraine, which you expressed at your press conference, also does not correspond to the actual facts,” rabbis and other leading figures in the community wrote in an open letter to the Russian president. “Perhaps you got Ukraine confused with Russia, where Jewish organizations have noticed growth in antisemitic tendencies last year.”

All these decades and centuries later, our coreligionists still struggle to find a place of welcome in their home countries, amid the nationalist and racial conflicts of Europe. Of course, we should not assume this is a far-away problem. The murders at two Jewish institutions in Kansas City last week is proof that antisemitism exists in our own backyards, as well, and we will continue to watch developments in the region and closer to home with wariness and hope, prepared to speak out and act on behalf of Jews – and anyone – who is endangered.

Of unambiguous gestures – “the quenelle”

Several athletes have recently been condemned for employing “the quenelle,” a one-armed salute critics say is a neo-Nazi gesture. Originated by a notorious French antisemitic comedian, the gesture, named for a French fish croquette, sees the perpetrators folding an arm across their chest with the other arm extended downward. Defenders say it is does not have racist connotations but is merely, depending on the telling, an “anti-establishment” gesture or an offensive move roughly equivalent to the middle finger. It has apparently been popular for years among French young people, but has risen to prominence after numerous incidents on the playing fields of Europe. American basketball star Tony Parker, who is from France, may have brought the quenelle to North American attention. He apologized, claiming he did not understand the gesture’s political or racial implications. What the quenelle means, according to a French Jewish communal leader, is clear and threatening.

“The gesture has gained popularity amongst young people, and reunites extremists from the Islamist camp, the extreme right and left, as well as revolutionaries with one common objective: the fight against the ‘Tel Aviv-Washington axis’ as well as Jewish power and Zionism,” Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, director of the Paris office of the American Jewish Committee, told JNS.org.

The act of folding an arm across the chest is an oblique move that, to the untrained eye, seems innocuous enough. This has allowed many, if not most, of the public figures caught performing the gesture to claim they did not know what they were doing. On the other hand, those who post to social media pictures of themselves doing the quenelle in front of synagogues, Holocaust memorials and the Jewish school in Toulouse, France, where a rabbi and three children were murdered in 2012, know precisely the significance of the salute.

French government officials are flummoxed about what to do. The country has extensive legal proscriptions against the promotion of racial hatred and the expression of hate speech, but the silent simplicity of the quenelle may, in some ways, endow it with its power while making it especially challenging to outlaw. The French government is pursuing means to ban the comedian who created the quenelle, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, from performing or speaking in public. Of course, “outlawing” racism is rarely effective, and the apparent spread of the quenelle is a reminder that France and other European countries have a lot of work to do in confronting hatred.

If those who perform the quenelle gesture are sometimes able to hide behind ignorance and ambiguity over its meaning, another troubling sports-related incident is unambiguous.

A Dutch football (i.e., soccer) team jetted off to Abu Dhabi for a match, leaving one of its players behind in the Netherlands. Dan Mori, a defender for the Arnhem-based team Vitesse, is an Israeli Jew – and Emirates officials told the team Mori would not be permitted to enter the country. The team went anyway, asking Mori to stay behind.

In the team’s defence, the communications director claims the team “stays away from politics and religion. We have always done this. We are a soccer club.”

There may well be a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t aspect to situations where external forces demand that people take a stand, or don’t. In sending the team to the game without its Israeli player, the team in no way stayed away from politics; they implicitly endorsed the racist policies of the United Arab Emirates.

Just as some quenelle perpetrators say they didn’t understand the meaning behind their actions, the Dutch soccer team may view the Emirati diktat as a position based on regional geopolitics of which Arnhem footballers know little. In fact, the exclusion of Israelis from Arab countries has always had the distinctive aroma of something more invidious than mere politics. It smells of the same effluence that has seen almost every Jewish community chased out of the Arab world in the past several decades.

People can say they do not understand the implications of their actions, plead innocence and insist they do not get involved in political disputes. But actions have consequences, and we each have an obligation to educate ourselves about the bad company we may join with our own seemingly innocent actions.