October 11, 2010: Controversy over cartoon is a tempest in a teapot

By Michael Regenstreif

I’ve always found Parliament Hill and its buildings to be an inspiring place. Not because of the politics that play out there, but because of the democratic ideals Parliament represents.

One of the most inspiring sights on Parliament Hill is the Peace Tower. Built in the 1920s as a memorial to Canada’s fallen soldiers in the First World War, the Peace Tower looms high over Parliament Hill and, until the 1970s, was the tallest structure in Ottawa.

When I see the Peace Tower, whether up close on a visit to Parliament Hill or just catching a fleeting, distant glimpse from the 417, I am reminded of how privileged we are, as Canadians, to be living in a free and democratic country. Canada – however flawed our democracy may be – is one of the world’s most democratic countries.

Aside from its great height, one of the most instantly recognizable features of the Peace Tower is the clock with its four faces looking to the north, south, east and west.

The clock was a gift from the government of the United Kingdom in honour of the 60th anniversary of Confederation in 1927.

In the centre of the Peace Tower clock’s face is a geometric figure consisting of a series of triangles made of molded glass that make up a 12-pointed starlike design. And within that 12-pointed star-like figure, the dominant six points look like the six-pointed Star of David, a symbol of the Jewish people for the past 2,000 years.

Although the Star of David does appear to be within the clock face design, I doubt the designer had any kind of a Jewish message in mind more than 80 years ago.

I also don’t think Le Droit editorial cartoonist Guy Badeaux – who draws under the name ‘Bado’ – had any kind of a Jewish message in mind when he drew his September 20 cartoon marking the opening of the fall Parliamentary session. The cartoon is dominated by a traffic sign in front of Parliament Hill indicating a slippery road ahead.

As you can read in a news report on page 2, a controversy has erupted over whether the cartoon, which we show in the report, is antisemitic.

Officials of B’nai Brith Canada say that it is, that it represents the idea that Jews control the Canadian government, and that the cartoon will be used by anti-Jewish and Islamist websites to spread antisemitism.

According to Badeaux, the cartoon had nothing to do with Jews; that’s just how he draws a simplified version of the clock face design.

The Canadian Jewish Congress and the Quebec Jewish Congress are standing behind Badeaux, who, they say, has been a good friend to the Jewish community over the years. Badeaux recently participated in a panel discussion of cartoonists organized by the Quebec Jewish Congress in Montreal.

It’s all quite the tempest in a teapot. There are battles to be fought against antisemitism, but the Le Droit cartoon does not seem to be one of them. Without any evidence to suggest any antisemitic intent on Badeaux’s part, I would agree with the Canadian Jewish Congress position that we should accept his explanation and put this issue in the forget-about-it file.

B’nai Brith Canada, though, wouldn’t let go of the issue.

“The cartoon’s message is clear to those who understand the history of antisemitic imagery,” said B’nai Brith Canada CEO Frank Dimant in the September 30 issue of B’nai Brith’s Jewish Tribune newspaper.

Ironically, the page in the Tribune with Dimant’s comments was dominated by a large advertisement for a film called Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story. The graphic in the ad is a baseball whose seam stitching pattern is of Stars of David. Every stitch is another Star of David.

So, just who is it that controls baseball?

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.”