WHAT could Canada's policy makers have been thinking? Up until last summer, successive Canadian governments held to the idea that the most effective way to combat racism and intolerance was to adopt a systemic approach.
This holistic method, championed in bureaucratic circles, grouped all racisms under one umbrella, ignoring the need for a specialized study of each. Governments simply refused to focus on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust as a means for advancing anti-racism efforts. This prevailing culture, however, has undergone a transformation under the Harper Conservative government.
Last year, I was part of two Government of Canada delegations to international meetings where Canada's traditional positions were dramatically altered to reflect a substantive change in both attitude and approach.
The Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had created in 2004 the position of the representative of the chair on anti-Semitism. The stance of Canada until June 2007 was that this position should be abolished.
The Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF), an organization whose title says it all, first met in Stockholm Sweden in 2000. Until June 2007, Canada refused to join.
At the June OSCE meeting in Bucharest, Romania, Secretary of State Jason Kenney announced for the first time a break with the traditional position; he spoke in favour of maintaining the representative on anti-Semitism. Kenney went from Bucharest to a meeting of the ITF in Prague, Czech Republic, to announce that Canada would, at last, apply to join the ITF.
Why would Canada want to abolish an institution dedicated to combatting anti-Semitism and refuse to join an organization committed to Holocaust remembrance? The justification was a belief in the need to integrate the effort to counter anti-Semitism and remember the Holocaust into a general effort to combat intolerance and remember all grave rights violations. This justification is unpersuasive.
* The approach ignores the value of specialization. The discourse of hatred and genocide denial is, for every victim group, quite different. It takes an organization familiar with the discourse and denial directed against a victim group to combat it effectively.
* The approach ignores the history of human rights. The whole contemporary human rights superstructure has its foundations in revulsion to the Holocaust. It is impossible to understand human rights today without understanding how and why the standards developed.
* The international dimensions to the Holocaust were unprecedented and unreplicated since. The Holocaust was a crime in which virtually every country in the globe was complicit. It gave us examples worldwide of good as well as evil.
* Anti-Semitism is unique because the situation of Israel is unique. Israel is the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack. The Holocaust and struggle against anti-Semitism, because they are seen as reasons for the existence of the State of Israel, are uniquely attacked and must be uniquely supported.
* A focus on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism provides an effective link to other bigotries and tragedies. Either the immunity for prior mass violations and the silence that enveloped them made the Holocaust possible. Or, the killing machines the Nazis developed for the Jews were all too easily turned towards other victims. Or, the premature shutdown of the Nuremberg tribunals before all Nazi war criminals were prosecuted and the refusal to set up a successor tribunal for crimes against humanity until more than 50 years later provided a licence for subsequent man-made disasters.
* Austria and Germany were the countries of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Schubert, of Goethe, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Hegel and Kant. The Holocaust tells us in a way that no other tragedy can that neither education nor culture nor intellect can immunize us from evil.
* The progress of European civilization made the Holocaust easier rather than harder to perpetrate. A focus on Holocaust teaches us that industrial, technological development increases our capacity for evil.
* The Holocaust was not only the death of six million people. It was the loss of the Yiddish shtetl culture in Europe. What we learn from anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is not just the death of the past but the loss of the future.
* Anti-Semitism remains the universal hatred, the one belief the extreme right and the extreme left have in common, the one venom religious fundamentalists and secular fanatics share. Learning about the Holocaust becomes one of the most effective means at our disposal for discrediting contemporary extremism.
A purported effort to combat racism without a focus on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust turns into farce or worse. When we bury under generalities the struggle against anti-Semitism and Holocaust remembrance, the struggle against human rights violations itself is buried.
David Matas is a Winnipeg lawyer and senior honorary counsel to B'nai Brith Canada. He represented the Jewish human rights organization as a member of the Canadian delegations to the OSCE meeting and the ITF meeting. Today is the United Nations-designated day for Holocaust Remembrance.
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