September 27, 2010: A terrorist plot in our own backyard

By Michael Regenstreif

Justin Bieber, the diminutive teenaged singer from Stratford, Ontario, who has become a pop culture phenomenon this year, was big news in Ottawa as we entered the last week of August.

On Tuesday night, August 24, Bieber sang to a crowd of 16,500 fans at Scotiabank Place and he was all over the local mainstream media, including the next morning’s Ottawa Citizen, where Bieber’s picture dominated the front page.

We were in the dog days of August, so there wasn’t much hard news to fill up the front pages. A lot of people were still on vacation, Parliament wasn’t in session and the municipal election campaign was still in the warm-up stage. So, it was big news when this year’s teen heartthrob came to town.

What a difference a day makes (to borrow an old song title).

Just as thousands of Ottawans were looking at that picture of Bieber over their morning coffee, the RCMP and Ottawa police were converging on a townhouse at 91 Esterlawn Private – only about 15 city blocks from Ottawa’s Jewish Community Campus – and on an apartment, 10 minutes away at 220 Woodridge Crescent near the Bayshore Shopping Centre, executing a search warrant and arresting the first two suspects in an alleged Islamist terror plot.

“Ottawa terror plot had al-Qaeda links: police,” screamed the headline on the front page of the next day’s Citizen.

As the news unfolded over the next couple of days, we learned that the suspects arrested that morning in Ottawa were Misbahuddin Ahmed, an X-ray technician at the Civic Campus of the Ottawa Hospital, and Hiva Alizadeh, a former electrical engineering student. A third suspect arrested in London, Ontario was Khurram Sher, a pathologist who went to medical school at McGill University, did part of his residency at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital and once auditioned for Canadian Idol.

It was disconcerting, to say the least, to learn that an alleged terrorism plot was unfolding in our own backyard.

While the news of an al-Qaeda plot in Ottawa was disconcerting for all Canadians, it was especially so for many in the Jewish community because of the history of terrorist attacks on Jewish targets in Israel, and in the Diaspora.

The murderous 2008 attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, remains fresh in our collective memory.

We have also been reminded recently of the horrific synagogue bombing in Paris in 1980, which killed four people and injured dozens more because Hassan Diab, a suspect in the case, was arrested in Ottawa in 2008. Diab, a sociologist who has taught courses at both the University of Ottawa and Carleton, is currently fighting extradition to France on the charges.

Yes, it is disconcerting to learn that there were alleged terrorists living, working and shopping among us. But it is also comforting to learn that our police and security services are on the job and have been able to shut down alleged terrorist cells like the one busted in Ottawa last month, or the so-called Toronto 18 in 2006, before they could carry out their plots.

It’s a sad reality of our contemporary world that society must remain ever on guard against the threat of terrorism.

Peace talks

Israel and the Palestinians are back at the table, under the sponsorship of the Obama Administration, negotiating directly, and at the highest levels, for the first time in far too long. The negotiations will be difficult and trying, but, hopefully, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas will be able to see the negotiations through to a conclusion that gives the Palestinians the state they need and Israel the security it needs.

Whenever Israel has found itself at war over the past 62 years, it has benefitted from the unwavering solidarity of Jewish communities – and the overwhelming majority of Jews – throughout the Diaspora. Less than two years ago, the Soloway JCC in Ottawa and other facilities across Canada overflowed with Jews standing in solidarity on a January night during Operation Cast Lead.

That solidarity with Israel in times of war has not been as strong, Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, pointed out this month, in times when Israel has searched for peace.

The road to peace will not be easy and will demand compromises and concessions from both sides. The peacemakers deserve and need our solidarity.

September 6, 2010: Whitton’s ‘historic significance’ is not worthy of honour

By Michael Regenstreif

It made headlines recently when it was announced that Charlotte Whitton, the mayor of Ottawa from 1951 to 1956 and 1960 to 1964, had been nominated for official recognition as a Canadian of “national historic significance.”

Nominations are submitted to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, which investigates and recommends to the minister of the environment which nominees they consider worthy of recognition. The minister then accepts or rejects the board’s recommendation. To date, 648 Canadians have been so recognized.

Whitton’s name was put forward by the Ottawa Committee of the Famous 5 Foundation, an organization that encourages women to participate in politics and public service, because she was the first woman to serve as mayor of a major Canadian city.

Whitton’s nomination became news when it emerged that several major Jewish organizations oppose Whitton’s designation on the basis of her antisemitism and have asked Environment Minister Jim Prentice to reject it.

Long before she became mayor, Whitton was one of Canada’s most prominent social workers as director of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare for more than 20 years and was instrumental in keeping Jewish refugee orphans out of Canada during the Second World War, thus sealing the fate of many in the Holocaust.

Whitton’s role in that shameful chapter of Canadian history is well documented in None Is Too Many by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, and in Open Your Hearts: The Story of the Jewish War Orphans in Canada by my cousin Fraidie Martz. (The Jewish war orphans Martz wrote about in her book were only allowed into Canada beginning in 1947.)

In an op-ed published August 18 in the Ottawa Citizen, Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and Mitchell Bellman, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, argue that Whitton’s actions, motivated by antisemitism, doomed hundreds of Jewish children to die in the Holocaust. That, they say, should make her ineligible for the historic designation. I agree.

Farber and Bellman also point to an incident that took place in 1964, when Whitton was mayor of Ottawa and refused to allow a half-million dollar donation (worth more than $3.5 million in 2010 dollars) from Jewish philanthropist Bertram Loeb to the Civic Hospital to build and equip a research facility.

In an editorial published March 3, 1964, the Ottawa Citizen attacked Whitton for her decision.

“Why did Miss Whitton do it? This is the question that must be puzzling many Ottawans today,” wrote the Citizen.

In a Globe and Mail obituary published when Loeb died in 2006, it was written that some “suspected that Ms. Whitton cringed at the thought of seeing a Jewish name on a city facility.”

Having now read the through the 1964 Ottawa Citizen coverage of the Whitton-Loeb story, that explanation makes sense to me.

Dave Mullington, the author of a forthcoming biography of Whitton, responded to Farber and Bellman with an op-ed in the Citizen refuting allegations of Whitton’s antisemitism with a short list of several interactions Whitton had with Jews or Jewish organizations, which, he wrote, “certainly show that she was not as bigoted as some would have us believe.”

Mullington’s defence of Whitton is ironic in light of a December 3, 1982 article he wrote as a Citizen reporter on assignment at Temple Israel for a presentation Abella and Troper made on Whitton and her role in ensuring that Canada not be a haven for Jewish children during the Holocaust.

Mullington reported, in great detail, on Abella and Troper’s research and unquestioningly quotes the authors as saying Whitton was “an outright racist.”