September 18, 2017: Antisemitism and BDS

By Michael Regenstreif

On September 5, I attended a sadly compelling event on leftist antisemitism presented by Fred Litwin’s Free Thinking Film Society. The evening began with a screening of “Whitewashed: Antisemitism in the British Labour Party” by London-based David Hirsh, a professor at Goldsmiths University, and continued with a panel discussion featuring Hirsh and Terry Glavin, a columnist with the National Post.

Both Hirsh, a member of the Labour Party, and Glavin come from left-wing backgrounds and spoke sadly and bitterly about the antisemitism, often masked as anti-Zionism, which has been adopted by some leftists – particularly on the far left.

One of those leftists is rock star Roger Waters, the former front man of Pink Floyd, who is coming to Ottawa to perform a concert on October 10 at the Canadian Tire Centre during his cross-Canada tour.

Waters is probably the world’s best known anti-Zionist rock star. A leading proponent of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, Waters, has for years been launching campaigns whenever major artists announce a concert date in Israel to bully them into cancelling.

It seems to me that an artist who accepts a concert date in Israel has already taken a stand rejecting BDS. And while a few, most notably Elvis Costello, have cancelled concerts in Israel following pressure from Waters and his followers, the list of artists who have stood up to him and rejected BDS is much longer. Just a few of the major artists who have gone ahead with their concerts in Israel in recent years are the late Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Madonna, and Diana Krall (who is married to Elvis Costello), among many others.

BDS proponents like to paint themselves as simply human rights activists standing up on behalf of oppressed Palestinians. In fact, it has been shown time and again that BDS is a movement to delegitimize the very existence of the State of Israel. BDS is not a movement interested in establishing a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel (which goes a long way in explaining why the Palestinian Authority rejects BDS) – it is a movement that wants to eliminate Israel. And this is why antisemitism is at the root of the BDS movement.

As I’ve said before, I don’t believe that all BDS supporters are antisemitic, or antisemitic in their intent. But antisemitism is at the root of the BDS movement because it unilaterally stigmatizes the world’s only Jewish state with all responsibility for the situation of the Palestinians. It absolves the Palestinians themselves of any and all responsibility. Renowned human rights activist Irwin Cotler, a former justice minister of Canada and legendary professor of law at McGill University, refers to this stigmatization as “the new antisemitism” in which Israel is singled out as “the Jew among nations.”

And sometimes the antisemitism of BDS proponents is explicit. Roger Waters, for example, has been known to paint Stars of David on the giant inflatable pig that he floats above the arena during his concerts. There is no escaping the meaning of that symbolism.

In advance of Waters’ Canadian tour, CIJA – the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs – has launched an online campaign calling for Canadians to tell Waters to leave Israel alone. There is a brief video about Waters and BDS (including a surprising revelation) that you can see at www.cija.ca/bdsishate and add your name to the list of Canadians rejecting Waters’ stand.

Filmmaker and author Ian Halperin, who grew up in Montreal, has a new film, “Wish You Weren’t Here,” about contemporary antisemitism with a focus on Waters. B’nai Brith Canada has arranged for the film to be shown in major cities on the same night Waters performs. In Ottawa it will be shown on October 10 at Cineplex Cinemas Ottawa.

I think it’s a mistake, though, to show the film on the same nights as Waters’ concerts because there is then no chance of opening the eyes of some of his fans to what he is about. The film should have been scheduled for a night or two in advance of Waters coming to town so that they would have had a chance to see it.

On behalf of myself and the staff and columnists of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, I wish everyone Shana Tova. May you have a Peaceful, Sweet and Happy New Year.

September 4, 2017: It’s not a matter of changing history – it is acknowledging history

By Michael Regenstreif

The news recently has been filled with stories about groups and individuals who would take down monuments or change the names of buildings or institutions which honour historical figures who we now know are not quite as honourable as whoever did the naming may have thought.

Here in Ottawa, for example, the federal government recently changed the name of the Langevin Block building, the office building directly across Wellington Street from Parliament Hill which houses the Prime Minister’s Office. The building is now simply known as the Office of the Prime Minister and Privy Council. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took that action because Hector-Louis Langevin, for whom the building was named, was an architect of the residential school system that we now know was an instrument of cultural genocide against Canada’s Indigenous peoples.

In the southern United States there has been a movement to remove monuments honouring leaders of the Confederacy – the group of southern states who fought the American Civil War against the U.S. – their prime issue being the right to own slaves, other human beings, as property.

The issue of the Confederate monuments came to a head on August 12 and 13 when an ugly mob of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and KKK members went to Charlottesville, Virginia to march in defence of a statue of Robert E. Lee – the Confederate general whose surrender ended the Civil War – which the Charlottesville City Council had decided to take down.

(And while the Lee statue was the supposed raison d’être for the Charlottesville marches, the dominant rallying cry was the horrifyingly antisemitic chant, “You will not replace us/Jews will not replace us.”)

In the days and weeks after the events in Charlottesville – including the terrorist incident in which a white supremacist purposefully drove his car at high speed into a crowd of counter-demonstrators murdering Heather Heyer and injuring many others – U.S. President Donald Trump made common cause with the antisemitic and racist mob in his defence of the Confederate statues. “They’re trying to take away our culture. They’re trying to take away our history,” said Trump of those who would remove what are, essentially, monuments to the institution of slavery and to those who led a treasonous war against the United States.

In 2011, I wrote a column in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin arguing that the City of Ottawa should not name its new archives building in honour of Charlotte Whitton, the city’s first female mayor. Why? Because history tells us that the antisemitic Whitton was responsible for ensuring that 500 Jewish refugee orphans ended up in Auschwitz instead of Canada during the Holocaust – an episode documented by historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper in None is Too Many. Despite what they knew about Whitton in 2011, Mayor Jim Watson and most city councillors voted to name the building for her anyway. Thankfully, they eventually relented to pressure from the Jewish community and other groups and the building was not named for her.

Changing the names of buildings, streets, parks and institutions named for people responsible for tremendous wrongs, or whose legacies remain painful, or removing monuments to them, is not changing history – it is acknowledging history. And there remains much work to do in this regard. For example, just a two-minute walk from the Jewish community campus in Montreal is Isabella Avenue, which honours the queen who expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. That’s a street name that should be changed.