Sikh MP Tim Uppal says there is ‘so much we can learn’ from the Holocaust

2015/01/29 Leave a comment

Interesting profile on Uppal’s interest and connection to Holocaust awareness and remembrance, and says something about Canadian multiculturalism to have a Sikh Canadian lead the Canadian delegation:

Holocaust remembrance is not a faith-based cause, Mr. Uppal said.

“I was doing something as a Canadian, this is something that affects us all,” he said.

“It wasn’t because of anything of my own faith, but this is something that I felt was important to us all as Canadians.”

‘This is something that affects us all’

Mr. Uppal has become a fixture on the Jewish community lecture circuit, addressing crowds ranging from the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee to groups of teens about to depart on March of the Living trips.

He said he hopes to one day expose his own children, now six, four and two, to the story of what happened to the 11 million people who fell victim to the Nazi government’s racist policies.

“It’s so important that we pass on this history to future generations,” he said.

For Mr. Uppal, the issue of racism also hits closer to home.

Sikh MP Tim Uppal says there is ‘so much we can learn’ from the Holocaust

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Germany To Fund Anti-Semitism Education for Muslim Youth – Forward.com

2014/09/23 Leave a comment

Much of the focus of Canadian Holocaust Centres is reaching the diverse communities of Canada, not just Muslims, to increase awareness and understanding of the Holocaust and its lessons:

Felix Klein, Germany’s special representative for relations with Jewish organizations, is in Washington this week to meet with Jewish groups and with Obama administration officials because of American concerns about a spike in anti-Semitism in Germany during the recent Israel-Hamas conflict in the Gaza Strip.

Many of the offenders were Muslims, and many of those were members of Germany’s substantial Turkish minority.

“Sometimes, we hear it is difficult to teach the Holocaust” to Muslim students, Klein told JTA in an interview Wednesday at the German embassy in Washington.

“We would give special tools that would interest young Muslims, that would incorporate the role of Turkey” during World War II, he said.

Klein said there was a “feeling of unease” among Germany’s 100,000 Jews after the spate of anti-Semitic incidents.

Germany To Fund Anti-Semitism Education for Muslim Youth – Forward.com.

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Mid-East: The knowledge constituency versus the ignorance lobby

2014/06/14 1 Comment

Good piece by Hussein Ibish on the resignation of Prof. Dajani over his leading a visit to Auschwitz:

Even if none of that’s true, knowledge is, nonetheless, power. The constituency for keeping Palestinian students ignorant of certain facts, presumably because they present the truth about Jewish suffering in Europe during the 20th century and that this complicates the understanding of Jewish Israelis simply as oppressors in the occupied Palestinian territories, is a perfect example of the “stupidity lobby.”

And it’s not just restricted to Palestinians and their relationship to Jewish history and the Holocaust. There is a broader conflict throughout Arab culture between those who want to embrace the world, in all its complexity and challenges, versus those who want to crawl inside a warm cocoon of insularity. Relying on nostalgic fantasies about former periods of greatness, the broad Arab ignorance constituency is very powerful.

It includes not only Islamists and other religious dogmatists, including apolitical clerics, but also strident nationalists, leftists, fascists, and chauvinists of every possible variety. Among all of these groupings, as well as the important open-minded and globally-conscious constituencies that are most in favor of engaging the world, there are people who push back against insularity. But for the past century at least, the majority trend in the Arab world has been to try, insofar as possible, to shut out knowledge of and engagement with outsiders, except for commercial purposes.

Many Arabs seem to be suspicious of and hostile towards real knowledge of others as opposed to myths and stereotypes, of course, and even more engagement with them. Too many of us just don’t want to hear it. Those, like Prof. Dajani, who try to break through this curtain of insularity are frequently punished, or at least criticized, for their embrace of broader realities, some of which are uncomfortable and destabilize reassuring mythologies.

Prof. Dajani says he doesn’t regret the turn of events. Why should he? He’s done something noble and constructive, and he will continue to do so without the support of his former university, through many other venues such as his Wasatia movement. But he, and all those like him throughout the region who want to smash the shackles of decades of carefully cultivated ignorance and embrace history and reality in all its troublesome complexity, are pointing the way.

The whole Arab world is at a turning point. If it continues to allow the stupidity and ignorance lobby, in all its myriad forms, to insist on cultural insularity, chauvinism, and deafness to the outside world, it will remain utterly stuck and unable to successfully join and compete in a globalizing world. But if the intelligence and knowledge constituency, as embodied by Prof. Dajani and so many other important leading Arabs, succeed in turning their societies away from decades of enforced parochialism, they will be among the most important groups in building a better future for the Middle East.

The saga of Prof. Dajani, and the whole battle between the Arab ignorance versus knowledge constituencies, is far from over. My money is on the intelligence community ultimately defeating the stupidity brigade, but its going to be an uphill struggle.

The knowledge constituency versus the ignorance lobby.

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Jonathan Kay: The politics of genocide

2014/05/06 Leave a comment

Jonathan Kay on genocides and the related policies and controversies.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance refers to the Holocaust as “unprecedented” in its thoroughness and industrial approach, but that human suffering and killing is universal, whatever the specifics of the genocide or atrocity. Kay is on the same page; Yad Vashem sessions focus on the stories of individual lives, not just the horror of the numbers:

And herein lies the great paradox of memorializing genocides qua genocides: The whole exercise always is cast as one conducted for the victims and their suffering. Yet by agonizing and fighting over the semantics of genocide, we systematically ignore the way these victims actually die: as individuals full of individual grief and pain and love and loss. Everything else is arid semantics.

Jonathan Kay: The politics of genocide | National Post.

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Mahmoud Abbas Shifts on Holocaust – NYTimes.com

2014/04/28 Leave a comment

Some of the background behind Abbas’s statement on the Holocaust. While the article argues the timing is terrible, given yet another Hamas-Fatah reconciliation effort, it is nevertheless significant. And sometimes timing is deliberate to counter other events and decisions, as it is in many countries:

The rabbi who prompted the Holocaust statement, Marc Schneier, is the founder of both the celebrity-studded modern Orthodox Hampton Synagogue and the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, a 25-year-old group that fosters relations between Jews and Muslims, blacks and Latinos. Rabbi Schneier said he met with Mr. Abbas at his West Bank headquarters for about 40 minutes last Sunday to enlist his support against European crackdowns on ritual animal slaughter and human circumcision, and for a program that would establish partnerships between Palestinian mosques and Israeli synagogues.

When he suggested that it would be “very significant, very meaningful” for Mr. Abbas to make a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day, Rabbi Schneier recalled in an interview, the president agreed “before I could finish my statement.”

“It was very heartfelt, very genuine,” Rabbi Schneier said.

“Of course he expressed his frustration on the negotiations, on the peace process — I’ll leave that up to the political leaders,” he added. “I’m a great believer that Muslim-Jewish reconciliation worldwide transcends the Israeli-Palestinian process. We’re working on the spiritual peace process.”

Mahmoud Abbas Shifts on Holocaust – NYTimes.com.

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Holocaust Education: Who will tell the story?

2014/04/22 Leave a comment

Good overview on some of the work the Canadian Holocaust centres are doing on Holocaust eduction given that fewer survivors are available to provide personal testimony:

Eyewitness testimony has played a central role in Holocaust education, says Adara Goldberg, education director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. The challenge now is to transition to telling their story without them.

For a recent exhibit called Enemy Aliens about Jewish refugees interned in Canada during the war, a curator recorded internees’ experiences, and those voices were the first ones visitors heard upon entering the exhibit. Three of those interviewed died before the exhibition opened, Goldberg says.

The centre, like others across the country, is consulting with survivors on the best ways to use videotaped testimony. “We don’t want to exploit the voices [of survivors]. We want to make sure there is some pedagogical value in what we do.”…

At Toronto’s Holocaust centre, staff are using the 50,000 testimonies, some of them Canadian, recorded by the U.S-based Shoah Foundation. For the generation of digital natives at home with technology, “that’s an automatic point of access,” Phillips says.

The Toronto centre, aided by a grant from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, has begun organizing some of the testimonies into short, searchable sections, and presenting workshops to adult immigrants learning English. Few of the newcomers had much knowledge about Jews or the Holocaust, but they could relate to the stories of persecution and starting over in a new land, and understand what the survivors contributed to Canadian society. “For many of the… students, this was very inspirational,” Phillips says.

Who will tell the story? | The Canadian Jewish News.

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International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) – Now that Canada no longer chairs …

2014/03/18 Leave a comment

Further to my earlier post, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Ends: Andrew Bennett New Canadian Head of Delegation, a further update on the declining importance of IHRA now that the Canadian chairmanship has come and gone. Canada will no longer financially support attendance of Canadian Holocaust experts, leaving representation more at the symbolic rather than substantive level. I always found the strength of IHRA was the extensive involvement of experts, less so the governmental level (of which I was part).

Likely a combination of the bureaucratic (viewed as minor “all things Jewish” file rather than from a broader policy perspective) and the governmental (experts and expertise have more nuanced messaging than the political level, and focus on antisemitism and Israel mean ongoing community support).

Unfortunate, as the value of IHRA and Holocaust awareness and education is important for all Canadians, particularly in as diverse a society as Canada, and for the universal lessons it brings.

CORRECTION: Subsequently, this decision to no longer fund expert attendance was reversed given stakeholder pressure but still surprising that it happened in the first place.

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International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Ends: Andrew Bennett New Canadian Head of Delegation

2014/03/13 1 Comment

Interesting choice of new head of Canadian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance: Andrew Bennett, Canada’s Ambassador for Religious Freedom.

Responsibility for multiculturalism-related files now spans three Ministers:  Baird of DFATD, Alexander of CIC, and Kenney, who has overall political responsibility. Holocaust awareness and remembrance is about more than religious freedom. Countries like the US and UK separate religious freedom and Holocaust/antisemitism responsibilities. Represents a further dilution of the multiculturalism policy role of CIC, whether driven by the political or bureaucratic levels, and whether or not it represents distrust of officials.

News Release — Canadian Chair Year of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Ends: Holocaust Awareness and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism Continue.

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Why Himmler letters deserve closer study: Mallick | Toronto Star

2014/01/30 Leave a comment

Heather Mallick, who usually writes to the left on issues, has a good column on the Himmler letters and the nature of evil:

The truth is that evil exists, that it has to be confronted, and people will do anything not to. We don’t like hard truths. When I hear about murder, I’m curious about what built the killer. Tell me about child abuse, blows to the head, adolescent shocks and adult lies. Don’t tell me we can treat conditions that we can’t even yet identify because psychology is still a young science. What makes a person evil?

If there’s a thread that runs through all these histories, it’s a bizarre attachment to family. We see it all the time, mothers speaking kindly of their serial-killer sons, siblings defending the indefensible, the idea that everyone has something lovable in them and only families can see it. But is it true, even if Heinrich had pet names for Marga and Hedwig, even if evil has its apologists?

Here is the verdict of Katrin and her co-author in a new book about Heinrich: “These letters show the deformation of normality, violence masquerading as harmlessness, cold-bloodedness that goes along with ostensible care, and the unswerving moral certitude even while committing mass murder.”

Why Himmler letters deserve closer study: Mallick | Toronto Star.

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Universal lessons of the Holocaust | Irwin Cotler

2014/01/25 Leave a comment

Irwin Cotler on the universal lessons of the Holocaust:

The first lesson is the importance of zachor, of remembrance. For as we remember the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah – defamed, demonized and dehumanized, as prologue or justification for genocide – we have to understand that the mass murder of six million Jews, and millions of non-Jews, is not a matter of abstract statistics.

For unto each person there is a name, an identity; each person is a universe. As our sages tell us, “Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe.”

The second enduring lesson of the Holocaust is that the genocide of European Jewry succeeded not only because of the industry of death and the technology of terror, but because of the state-sanctioned ideology of hate. This teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other, this is where it all begins…

The third lesson is that these Holocaust crimes resulted not only from state-sanctioned incitement to hatred and genocide, but from crimes of indifference, from conspiracies of silence – from the international community as bystander….

The fourth enduring lesson of the Holocaust is that it was made possible not only because of the “bureaucratization of genocide,” as Robert Lifton put it, but because of the trahison des clercs – the complicity of the elites – including physicians, church leaders, judges, lawyers, engineers, architects and educators….

The fifth lesson concerns the vulnerability of the powerless and the powerlessness of the vulnerable – as found expression in the triad of Nazi racial hygiene: the Sterilization Laws, the Nuremberg Race Laws, and the Euthanasia Program – all of which targeted those “whose lives were not worth living.”…

Sixth is the tribute that must be paid to the rescuers, the righteous among the nations, of whom Raoul Wallenberg is metaphor and message. Wallenberg, a Swedish non-Jew, saved more Jews in four months in Hungary in 1944 than any single government or organization.

Universal lessons of the Holocaust | JPost | Israel News.

And a link to Canadian Holocaust activities:

Recognizing International Holocaust Remembrance Day

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