Watch out kids, here comes Kenney

Denyse O'Leary has some spirited commentary on Jason Kenney's speech to the Global Forum for Combating anti-Semitism in Jerusalem. Among other things we learn that Kenney, Canada's Minister of Citizenhip, Immigration, and Multiculturalism reports that

We have articulated and implemented a zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism.

For now this just seems to mean a de-funding of certain leftist, Arab and Muslim organizations. But why stop there? Real zero tolerance would entail some de-funding of universities, among other bodies, and perhaps a new election law that penalizes parties that pander to the "anti-Zionists". But maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea, from a pragmatic point of view. Kenney is doing a good job but perhaps his tongue is getting ahead of certain realities, given the widespread nature of antisemitism. The victim-worshiping ideologies of our times are, at best, incipiently antisemitic as a general rule. But this is just to suggest that antisemitism is not ultimately about Jewish people, in any specific sense, but about what the Jews, in general, represent to Western and world history as the first serious developers of monotheism and national (not ethnic) identity. Antisemitism, most generally, is the hatred of the "firstness" that creates a difference between one historical innovator and another less notable party. Such differences are necessary to humanity but they are so often the source for the scandals of victim mongers.

Remembering...

Jason Kenney, Canada's Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, issued the following statement on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day:

"The extermination of millions of Jewish people during World War II was a crime against all humankind. In remembering the Holocaust and paying tribute to its victims, we renew our commitment to fight against the evils of racism, discrimination and anti-Semitism.

"The Holocaust stands alone in human history for its horror and its inhumanity. It is crucial that we learn from this experience, not only to ensure that such atrocities never take place again, but also to better enable us to build societies based on a respect for human dignity, in which such acts are not possible.

"Our government has taken a principled stance in combating Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. More than a year ago, I announced that Canada would refuse to participate in the racist Durban process because we had serious concerns that the failings of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, would be repeated at the 2009 Durban Review Conference. In 2001, the Durban Conference degenerated into open and divisive expressions of intolerance and anti-Semitism. Yesterday's speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vindicated Canada's principled decision to lead the world in withdrawing from the conference. As a result of Canada announcing its withdrawal from the Durban Review Conference, Canada's seat will be vacant for the duration of the conference.

Under our government, Canada will support any international conference that combats racism; we will not, however, lend Canada's good name to those that promote it.

"The Government of Canada is committed to ensuring that the Holocaust is not forgotten. To that end, Canada co-sponsored the UN resolution that led to the recognition of January 27th as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. In 2007, Canada co-sponsored another UN resolution that condemned denial of the Holocaust. Canada has consistently voted against unbalanced resolutions within the UN. "

This commitment is also reflected in our ongoing efforts to attain full membership in the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. In 2008, we took another step forward and received liaison status in this Task Force and, in June, I will present Canada's formal application for full membership.

"As Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, I urge Canadians to learn about the Holocaust, to remember its victims, and to reject all forms of hatred and discrimination."

Conservatism is a creative renewing of previous covenants and centres of attention

Saturday's National Post profiled Jason Kenney: This man wants to reinvent Canadian multiculturalism:

The higher profile matters - the Galloway issue, the scuffle with Arab groups, the language abilities of immigrants - form the early marks of a pattern of what is to come. Rejecting the [Canadian Arab Federation]'s support for Islamic terrorists and arguably anti-Semitic messages, Mr. Galloway for financially supporting Hamas, calling for newcomers to better integrate: These are of a piece with efforts to fortify what the Conservatives would call The Canadian Identity. It is, Mr. Kenney makes clear, a vision for a country that stands up for its pluralism, but also for its core liberal traditions of tolerance, democracy and secularism. "We can't afford to be complacent about the challenge of integration," he says. "We want to avoid the kind of ethnic enclaves or parallel communities that exist in some European countries. So far, we've been pretty successful at that, but I think it's going to require greater effort in the future to make sure that we have an approach to pluralism and immigration that leads to social cohesion rather than fracturing."
[...]
Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis this week called Mr. Kenney "intolerant" for raising the issue of enhanced language requirements. The Arab Federation has painted him a Zionist lackey.

But there are those, many of them within Canada's ethnic pockets, who support such a muscular approach.

"What is different with him is, with previous [Conservative] immigration ministers, both have been pussycats; this guy is a tiger," says Tarek Fatah, an author, prominent Liberal supporter and founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress. "He's standing up for Canadian values. I would like every politician to stand up for this country the way Jason Kenney has."

Before being elevated to Cabinet last fall, Mr. Kenney spent two years shuttling between community halls, temples and church basements, building support networks in Sikh, Hindu, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Jewish and Arab communities, as Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity. His mission: to break a near lock his Liberal opponents have had on ethnic support since Trudeaumania.

Come last October's election, the payoff arrived: The Tories upset numerous Liberal strongholds surrounding Vancouver and Toronto by converting Asian, East Asian and Middle Eastern voters from red to blue. Mr. Kenney's predecessors, including Diane Finley and Monte Solberg, were ministers of immigration. When Mr. Kenney got the job in October, the Prime Minister added the "and multiculturalism."
[...]
Multicultural maven is a curious role for a pale, Reform party pioneer raised in Saskatchewan, educated by Jesuits, deeply socially conservative, who came to politics primarily with an agenda for fiscal restraint (Before becoming a Reform MP in 1997, he headed the Canadian Taxpayers Federation). But political opponents looking to brand him as too redneck for the sensitive immigration file find it hard to land a punch. In his diverse Calgary Southeast riding, families speak fondly of Mr. Kenney's efforts, long before he became the minister in charge, in helping them sort out immigration issues; his key staffers, including a Tibetan, a Muslim and an Armenian, resemble the dessert lineup at the UN cafeteria. He spearheaded the government's efforts to recognize the Ukrainian Holdomor, its apology to the East Indian community for the Komagata Maru incident, he has defended Chinese Uyghur Muslims and paid his respects at the Mumbai Jewish centre attacked by terrorists. On his office wall hang portraits of abolitionist heroes William Wilberforce and Abraham Lincoln.
[...]
"The irony is that as a white, Catholic kid, he's very cosmopolitan. Maybe the most cosmopolitan minister we've had," says Mr. Solberg, now an advisor for government relations firm Fleishman-Hillard in Calgary.

That line gave me a chuckle, a reminder that maybe the real provincialism in Canada is that old Protestant sensibility that once openly painted the Papists as unworldly backwoods Irish and French Canadians, even if in the control of some ultramontanist clergy and the big bishop in Rome. Or maybe the implied joke is that curry- and kimchi-chomping Kenney is not even Jewish! In any case, my sources tell me that Canadian Catholicism today, at least in many urban churches, is very cosmopolitan, at least full of immigrants from the global church, giving face to Catholicism's aspiration to a universal anthropology.

But, jokes and innuendo aside, the point is we all still have trouble articulating the basis for the unity that makes whatever pluralism we have in Canada sustainable. And this is what makes Kenney's initiative interesting as it is becomes a direct challenge to the left-Islamist alliance that would represent the likes of Hamas-friendly George Galloway or the Canadian Arab Federation, not as the backwoods bubbas I think they are, but as avatars of some ostensibly global popular movement opposed to some supposed American/Jewish hegemony in the global marketplace. Kenney is challenging Canadians to ask, who do you want to represent your "multiculturalism".

One of the interesting things about representation, no less representations that attempt to appeal to wide swathes of people, is that they depend not simply on abstractions that anyone can learn, but on the potentially iconic integrity of the individual (who is rooted in a particular time and place) producing, sharing, or transforming them. And since the basis of any successful representation is some implied unity that allows the representation to be shared (and transformed), what are representations of Canadian values really? Are they abstract concepts or individually incarnated and exemplified ways of being? Or how are they both? As we become better at answering such anthropological questions we will better realize the conditions of a true "multiculturalism", i.e. one that provides us new ways of understanding what unifies us in a shared national covenant.

To this end, another politician worth watching may be someone I only learned about today, a member of the Ontario Provincial Parliament, Randy Hillier, now running for leadership of the Ontario Conservatives. Here are some excerpts from his leadership candidacy announcement (HT: Catfur):

Every society known to mankind is comprised of individuals.

It’s evident that if individuals are responsible, self-reliant and independent, their society will also be responsible and self-reliant.

But we have strayed from this concept.

We have passed countless laws that diminish the individual’s responsibility, removes their good judgment and places it into the hands of a regulatory body.

We have become a “nanny-state” of dependence.

We are no longer responsible for our actions when we allow ourselves to blame others for our actions.

We now have over half a million provincial regulations.

Many of them diminish individual responsibility.

Many others blur the line between private and public property, and allow government to intrude where it has no business.
[...]
We were a province that was home to the most equal and blind system of justice on Earth, namely, “Common Law”.

It is now just another costly legal system where we let special interest groups hijack our courts and paralyze our legal system.

It has become a legal system that preys on the financial weakness and ignorance or common people.

It’s now a never-ending system of little justice where a guilty plea is less costly than a strong defence of innocence.

We have built a regime of countless review boards and commissions through which faceless bureaucrats dressed in quasi-legal robes hand down “kangaroo” verdicts that suffocate our natural rights as individuals, and extend false privileges to collective bodies.
[...]
Where the Liberals are blind to the future and ignorant of our past, we must show people a defining vision – one seen through the clear lens of hindsight and history.

We must show them that we are not here to manage their affairs, but that they are here to manage the affairs of government.

That the people are the true guardians of democracy and those of us lucky enough to have been elected to Parliament are their subjects.
[...]
My campaign will be driven by ideas and ideals, while being anchored by the three central principles of Freedom, Justice, and Democracy.

Freedom strengthens commerce, creativity, industry, education, and the most important element of our society – the family.

When the rights of government overtake the rights of the farmer, the worker, the doctor, or the parent, all of society suffers.

As Premier I will immediately introduce the Freedom of Association & Conscience Act, an act to protect the rights of the individual to not be compelled or coerced into actions or associations that that they find objectionable.

We’ve created private monopolized and special interest governments such as the Ontario Medical Association and Law Society of Upper Canada.

We compel people to join business and industry associations that collect dues but do not represent them, and we provide no protection for freedom of conscience.

Justice is only just when it is truly blind.

When the law is applied unequally – and absent of due process – the law can become an instrument of harm rather than justice.

One of the worst examples of this has been the Ontario Human Rights Commission and other quasi-tribunals.

As Premier, I’ll make sure those violating human rights appear before real judges in real courts, where civil rights and due process are not distorted by the balance of probabilities.

The Human Rights Commission and other quasi-tribunals will be rendered redundant under my government.

Such ideas appeal to universal truths that anyone can take up and incarnate. They are the real basis of a pluralistic society, not the claims from the left that "multiculturalism" has to understand itself in opposition to some supposedly invidious hegemony or established centre/covenant (some conspiracy of power) that necessarily excludes the rest of us. It's true that every centre or attention, every institution, every national covenant relies on at least some degree of violent closure: even a maximally free society has to begin by defining what it is not, by giving formal closure to its representations, so that the individual can be a particular someone (e.g. distinctively a Canadian) in relationship to universal values.

The left often implies that all one needs is the abstract universal value, and that we don't need to be someones defined, in our shared freedom, by some "arbitrary" act of closure, or judgment of right and wrong (e.g. that there is no room for friends of Hamas in Canada). But the universal can only really be incarnated from a particular historical position that is potentially exchangeable with other covenanters, and that necessarily excludes some other part of humanity ("brotherhood", or "sisterhood", becomes a meaningless Utopian concept when we try to articulate a universal sibship): a shared contract must set terms, and the personal integrity needed for successful renewal or representation of any contract/covenant means that one can't be all things to all people; one can't be a cipher. And similarly, neither can be the political and secular institutions of a free society: they too must incarnate a distinctive history in their search for universal truths.

This doesn't mean we should choose unnecessarily violent forms of exclusion; indeed, the course of history is one where we tend to move from more to less violent forms of closure, as we Westerners today seek forms of closure in which sundry others can readily share. And if the historically- and culturally-rooted Catholic eucharist, the sharing in the Christian idea of a divine/personal sacrifice to end all human sacrifice, is a meaningful way of learning something of this paradox of a particular/universal personhood, so be it. However, it seems to be teaching Jason Kenney a way of doing politics that is not the same as calling all Canadians to recognize the Christ Jesus.

The unity on which Kenney's secular "Canadian values" are based would seemingly be found at both some more primitive or common level of human cultural history and in the historically modern (and readily exchangeable) incarnations of Canadian secularism. A proper multiculturalism will be an accepting recognition of all that helps individual people bridge the gap between the primitive and modern (e.g., many forms of Christianity), while closing the door on that which does not.

But this means that national renewal will have to entail a new discipline that can truly mediate leftist fears of unfair or violently arbitrary exclusion, while recognizing the conservative truth that there are some things that have to be excluded in order to maintain freedom and order. It seems to me, as an observer of Canadian politics, that despite some pragmatic successes of Canadian society, there remains room for improvement in the forms of "politically correct" closure we impose on ourselves. There are still some unnecessary or ill-conceived intellectual limits/government regulations/kangaroo courts in the way of a freer society, amidst fears that people with power or influence generalize about certain groups or identities too much, or too little, as we measure reality and discuss the paradoxical basis of the closure that allows us to be open and free. Successful politicians and thinkers will be those who learn to stow unruly passions and resentments in measuring and illuminating present realities while showing us a yet better way to mediate the paradox of closure/openness, unity/diversity, Canadian values/multiculturalism, so as to increase our shared freedom and marginalize those who hate it.

Jason Kenney on "Zionism is Racism"

Via Then There Was Light, another sign that, among our Parliamentarians, only the Conservative Party of Canada can see somewhat clearly one of the central political and cultural issues of our time. Here is a Conservative member's question to the Conservative government from yesterday's House of Commons question period:

Mr. Paul Calandra (Oak Ridges—Markham, CPC):

Mr. Speaker, Jewish students across the country are under siege as anti-Semites unveil their plans for Israel Apartheid Week. Liberal MPs have been quoted in the media and even today in the immigration committee saying that anti-Semitic organizations like the Canadian Arab Federation should receive taxpayer support.
Will the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism explain why the government believes that Israel Apartheid Week is anti-Semitic?

Hon. Jason Kenney (Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, CPC):

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are free to express different views about the policies of foreign government but Israel Apartheid Week is not about that. It is about a systematic effort to delegitimize the democratic homeland of the Jewish people, a country born out of the Holocaust.
We find very troubling this resurgence of the old slander that Zionism is racism. That is the notion that lies at the heart of Israel Apartheid Week.
Jewish students at campuses across the country are subsequently feeling increasingly vulnerable. We condemn these efforts to single out and attack the Jewish people and their homeland in this terrible way.

Background at above link and in our earlier post.

Liberal Party MP takes stand against responsible government, apparently to curry favour with antisemites

24 Hours Vancouver

OTTAWA — Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is facing a possible investigation by Parliament’s ethics commissioner in the wake of his threat to axe funding to a group whose president called him a “professional whore.”

Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis has filed a complaint against Kenney with Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson, saying he believes the minister violated the parliamentary ethics code.

“I believe for the Minister to use his position and exert undue influence and or in this case instruct his officials to hold funding from such an NGO; this sets a bad precedent which clearly should not be allowed to stand,” according to a copy of the complaint obtained by Sun Media.

“With this move the Minister sends out a signal to community-based NGOs to toe the line or risk losing their funding.”

Karygiannis, whose Toronto riding is served by the federation’s settlement program, said funding for groups should be decided by civil servants based on the group’s performance — not on the basis of partisan politics.

Alykhan Velshi, spokesman for Kenney, described the complaint as “ridiculous” and said it was “disturbing” to see a Liberal MP standing up for a group that has made anti-semitic comments.

The controversy centres on a dispute between Kenney and the Canadian Arab Federation. Earlier this year, federation president Khaled Mouammar called Kenney a “professional whore” for supporting Israel.

Kenney shot back, saying groups like the federation whose leaders say intolerant or hateful things shouldn’t get taxpayer money. Kenney said he has asked his department to weigh public comments made by groups when assessing their funding applications.

Forget about the Canadian Arab Federation for a moment. Here we have a Liberal Party MP talking as if it is in any circumstance illegitimate for our duly constituted government to make political decisions in respect to how state money is spent, if this somehow contravenes some ethic of multicultural relativism in which the various self-appointed ethnic organizations presume a right to their share of government money, whatever their politics and whatever hatreds they promote.

The fundamental principle of Canada's constitutional democracy is that of responsible government: we give significant power to make government decisions to the Prime Minister and his other cabinet ministers, and in turn expect them to carry the full blame for bad decisions made by them or their departments. The great advantage of knowing exactly who is responsible for political decisions is that it allows us to minimize scandal as we isolate responsibility and pass judgment accordingly on our governments, both in Parliament and at the polls. Ideally, in our system where power is centralized in a few hands, decisions can be made that really matter, that make things happen; and then we all develop a better understanding of our stakes in that active reality as we choose whether to support or not the government. It is all too easy in our age when everyone and his dog wants to play the victim of the powers that be, to forget how necessary it is for our shared political freedom to have people who can take on - transparently and with full accountability - the basic need for someone to make decisions that can initiate political events and debates. Without such responsible executive authority initiating events, we cannot all share in an exchange of ideas about our shared reality, that we may take a regular measure of who and what we are, and trade in the political signs that events create as we oppose and ally and shape our shared future.

Yet for some people, the notion of a shared future leads them to imagine only victims of the normal course of decision making in a free society. For them, a shared future can only be a future where nothing happens to anyone that would lead anyone to complain that they are not sharing equally in our shared future: in other words, a future where nothing can happen, where no real political freedom can exist, lest it create winners and losers.

When Jim Karygiannis suggests that some anonymous, publicly-not-accountable bureaucrats be given the job of deciding what kind of politics from ethnic or religious lobbies is acceptable - i.e. whether their politics is getting in the way of the job they are being given money to do - he is suggesting that we don't let things happen in a way that will shake any boats. He is implicitly denying that we all have a stake in the political games a publicly-funded group like the Canadian Arab Federation play. He implicitly denies that we need duly-elected and responsible ministers to make a market in which we can trade our stakes in our system of government. Karygiannis implicitly suggests that the government take the lead in suggesting we all shut up about some group's hate mongering, sweeping it under the rug. I think he should be taking a clear stand on whether he accepts that the CAF is engaging in antisemitic hate mongering, and if so whether he condones it as legitimate criticism (of Israel, or whatever). He should call on all the scared ethnoreligious lobbyists who have maybe been phoning his office, scared that they might be next to be called out publicly for their politics, that instead of thinking they can get government money as if by multicultural right, that they too must make public their stake in the system: they too should be commenting on what the CAF is doing, and they too should realize that in our system of political freedom we we elect a government precisely to make political decisions about what kind of groups we do and do not want to support with public money.

Karygiannis' instincts are those of a growing class of people who seem to want to replace all forms of constitutional or responsible government with some over-arching law of multicultural political correctness mediated by lawyers, bureaucrats, media, acdemics, and NGOs, according to a ruling ethic of moral and cultural relativism. Apparently, it is those who dream of some kind of end to nation states freely exercising their sovereignty, those who dream that global conflicts can somehow be transcended if only this sovereignty is tightly bound and the right kind of international liberal elites are put in charge, while politicians who would make clear distinctions between good and evil are put out to pasture as an anachronism of some dark age of political simpletons, who have been achieving success in shaping opinion in the Liberal Party of Canada.

But what is lost to this victim-worshiping outlook is the fact that the dream of overcoming conflict is Utopian, and that scapegoating duly-constituted centres of authority is highly dangerous to our shared political freedom. The best way to deal with conflict is not by trying to reduce all conversation to some code of Politically Correct relativism, where anything and hence nothing goes, but rather by allowing, in different ways, both free citizens and duly constituted government leaders to take a lead in initiating public political events that then allow the rest of us to respond, and trade positions and political and economic capital, in continually rediscovering what kind of people we today are and where we want to be heading. But that kind of thing is apparently too scary to a PC brigade leader like Karygiannis. No doubt he is hearing from many other political "players" who who don't want to judge but just want to play along in hopes that somehow the money machine of government will forever continue to work if everyone just shuts up and makes sure everyone is paid off. This is the hubris that, sooner or later, brings an end to each and every multicultural empire history has known. If you deny the need for responsible and accountable decision making at the various centres of a political system, eventually there are no events to attract our shared interest and exchange, and the centre can no longer hold people together. If we are not free to elect and remove governments that take clear stands on who is and is not in favour, it is then that the cheap and easy resentments - that group x is getting away with something and there is nothing anyone can say or do that will make a difference - develop an intensity that can really rip a system apart.

But, a cynic might ask, what else can we expect from a Liberal Party that has recently denied its members a vote on who should be their leader?

Jason Kenney's moral clarity on antisemitism and the Canadian Arab Federation

GayandRight: Jason Kenney's Speech at the Anti-Semitism Conference....

Ladies and gentlemen, in November during a trip to Kiev I paid my respects at the Babi Yar Holocaust site where more than 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis over a two day period in 1941.

For me this brought to mind a new dimension of the unfathomable evil of the Holocaust. Babi Yar was not about the mechanised and perversely discreet killing of the gas chambers. Here men in uniform lined up and shot 33,000 individual human beings one by one non-stop over a period of two days. Even for those who were just following orders there had to be some deep blackness in their hearts, some hatred that allowed them to dehumanise the innocent individual human beings who they shot down one by one.

A few weeks ago I was in Mumbai, India, where I went to visit Chabad’s Nariman House. I was literally sickened walking through the debris, seeing the blood-splattered walls. To stand in the place where Rabbi Gavriel Holzberg and his wife Rivkah were tortured and slaughtered. As I later looked out on Mumbai from the rooftop of Chabad House I marvelled to think that in this huge, teeming city of 20 million the killers had meticulously, deliberately sought out to target this one rather obscure, peaceful place, and this particular man and his family.

Why did they do so? Because and only because they were Jews, and as such because they represented all the Jews. 68 years and thousands of miles separate the ravine of Babi Yar from the debris of Nariman House, but these places are connected by the same uniquely durable and pernicious evil of anti-Semitism. Even peaceful and pluralistic Canada sees signs that this evil is newly resurgent. The 2007 audit of anti-Semitic incidents by B’nai Brith, Canada’s league for human rights, recorded over 1,000 reported anti-Semitic incidents, up by 11% from the previous year and also reflecting a doubling of the number of reported incidents over the past five years.

Just a day, Friday, as I was boarding the flight for London, as a simple concrete example of this new environment, one page of one of our national newspapers, two articles. One about Jewish university students at one of our major universities being attacked by a mob shouting anti-Jewish slogans at them. And another article, man sentenced for firebombing Jewish institutions.

We in Canada are beginning to experience the same. Of course we’ve always had the old-school anti-Semitism, and it’s still present. The manifestations from the extreme right and their presence on the internet. In my assessment it’s marginal, small and a shrinking form of anti-Semitism, but one which we can never forget. We do have robust hate crimes laws to deal with those manifestations of anti-Semitism, but we do see the growth of a new anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism predicated on the notion that the Jews alone have no right to a homeland, the anti-Zionist version of anti-Semitism.
[...]
[quoting Stephen Harper] "...we must resist the error of viewing the Holocaust as a strictly historical event. It’s not good enough for politicians to stand before you and say they remember and mourn what happened over six decades ago. They must stand up to those who advocate the destruction of Israel and its people today. And they must be unequivocal in their condemnation of anti-Semitic despots, terrorists and fanatics. That is the only way to honour the memory of those who were consumed by the Holocaust.”
[...]
As minister responsible for our multi-culturalism programme we have adjusted our programme to move away from celebrating our differences to focusing on social cohesion and building bridges between communities, combating radicalisation of youth.

For instance, I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to support an exciting new venture launched by the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Canadian Somali Congress, which will provide young Canadians of Somalian origin, typically refugees, with an opportunity to find internships in Jewish-owned businesses and professions so they can meet and de-stigmatise people from other communities.

I follow with great interest your government’s programme to sponsor British high school kids, secondary school children, to be able to go and visit the death camps in Europe and to learn firsthand and report back to their peers the reality of the Holocaust. And I’m hopeful that we can find ways to participate in similar programmes.

Also very importantly, our government takes a zero tolerance approach to expressions of anti-Semitism in the public square. There are organisations in Canada, as in Britain, that receive their share of media attention and public notoriety, but who at the same time as expressing hateful sentiments expect to be treated as respectable interlocutors in the public discourse. I think, for example, of the president of an organisation called the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed Elmasry, who notoriously said three years ago on live television that all Israelis over the age of 18 can legitimately be killed. They are combatants, and therefore legitimate targets for elimination.

I think as well of the leader of the Canadian Arab Federation, who notoriously circulated an e-mail when my colleague, our shadow Foreign Minister, Bob Rae, was running for the leadership of his party, calling on people to vote against Mr. Rae because of Arlene Perly Rae’s involvement in Canada’s Jewish community. The same individual, the same organisation, the Canadian Arab Federation, just last week circulated - including to all parliamentarians - videos which include propaganda, including the inculcation to hatred, of children by organisations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

These and other organisations are free within the confines of our law and consistent with our traditions of freedom of expression, to speak their mind, but they should not expect to receive resources from the state, support from taxpayers or any other form of official respect from the government or the organs of our State. And I would encourage all other governments to take a similar approach to organisations that either excuse violence against Jews or express essentially anti-Semitic sentiments.
[...]
my proudest moment as minister was a year ago this month when I announced on behalf of our government that Canada would withdraw, and has withdrawn, from the Durban 2 process. We did so deliberately. We did so after having participated in the initial preparatory meetings. We did so being fully conscious of Canada’s tradition as an international champion of tolerance, pluralism and mutual respect. And that’s precisely why we withdrew from the Durban process.

We withdrew from a process that sees Iran sitting on the organising committee, a country whose president has repeatedly engaged in inciting genocide against the Jewish nation, a conference in which Libya plays a central role on the organising committee, a conference where many of the key organising meetings were set, no doubt coincidentally, on Jewish high holidays to diminish the participation of Israeli and Jewish delegates, a process which re-invited to participate all of the NGOs that turned the original Durban conference into the notorious hate-fest, including those responsible for circulating copies of the Chronicles of the Elders of Zion and organisations which outside the conference venue held up portraits of Adolf Hitler, and a conference which as well re-invited those NGOs made it difficult or impossible for Jewish NGOs to come as observers, including the Canadian Council on Israeli and Jewish Affairs.

Now, I understand and appreciate the position of some governments to continue to wait and see how this process develops. I think many of us made the wrong decision several years ago to unwittingly legitimise the process. And I understand the position of some European governments that they want to watch and wait and see what Washington does. I find that a bit surprising. I always thought Europe prided itself as having its own independent foreign policy aligned with its own values and interests. That’s certainly the position of the government of Canada. We would encourage our friends elsewhere to remember that the Trans-Atlantic relationship includes Canada, and that we have taken what we believe to be a principled position on the Durban process.

The recent news that the Obama government will be sending officials to Durban II naturally revolts us. Let's be thankful that some in Canada are not so immersed in ideas of moral and cultural relativism that they would defend the right of hate-mongering groups to receive government monies as if they were just any other special interest ethnic group. The defense of free speech must include a criticism of any government that would fund hate and build a state on top of an exchange among group, and not individual, identities. A multicultural empire where self-appointed elites claim to represent one or another group and to negotiate on behalf of said group in the backrooms of the byzantine state is not compatible with a truly free society where people can be free as individuals to speak their minds. But let us not be quick to write off those who agree with this while still calling themselves, as free individuals, Muslim, even if their idea of Islam, or their own business with the state, is yet somewhat incoherent to us:

The Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) has welcomed the move by Minister Jason Kenney to cut funding of groups that spread hate and promote division.

In a statement, Salma Siddiqui, senior vice president of the MCC said, for too long successive Conservative and Liberal governments have been funding groups who, under the guise of multiculturalism, have been promoting an overseas agenda to the detriment of Canada

Earlier this week Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced a review of all federal funding of the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) after Hamas and Hezbollah flags were raised at a CAF backed rally. Reacting to the criticism, the president of CAF labeled Minister Jason Kenney a "professional whore."

Ms. Siddiqui said she was not only shocked at the language used by the CAF president, but was surprised to learn that the Arab federation was being generously funded by the very government it was lashing out at. It was revealed that CAF receives nearly $500,000 from just one government department.

The MCC demands that all future funding of CAF should be made conditional to a guarantee that the Arab organization will not behave as a mouthpiece of Hamas and Hezbollah in Canada and that it will embrace Canadian values, not those of Iran.

She said this condition should apply to all multicultural organizations. “I echo the words of Minister Kenney who said, ‘We should not be rewarding those who express views that are contrary to Canada's best liberal values of tolerance and mutual respect,’ added Ms. Siddiqui.

Rob Breakenridge has a record of the CAF's dirty deeds.

See also:

Last year, the National Post editorial board hosted Mouammar and a CAF colleague for an editorial board meeting. To our collective shock, they laid blame for virtually every problem the world faces on Israel — including the alienation of Arab-Canadian children in Canada's public school system. (One explained that he had sent his daughter for education overseas — because the inclusion of Israel in Canadian textbooks was too traumatic for her to endure.)

It's a disgrace that this group ever got a cent from Ottawa. I hope Kenney doesn't stop at slashing the CAF's funding — he should eliminate it.

(HTs: Catfur)

Canadian Government Waking Up to Arab racism and Blazing Cat Fur

Blazing Cat Fur: Blazingcatfur gets results: Jason Kenney to slash funding to Canadian Arab Federation - Minister called 'professional whore'

Catfur's campaign to expose the hatred of the Canadian Human Rights Commission's "stakeholder", the Canadian Arab Federation, seems to be getting results. As The Calgary Sun reports:

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is poised to slash federal funding to Canada's largest Arabic group after its president called him a "professional whore" for supporting Israel.

In an exclusive interview with Sun Media from London, England, where he is to speak today at an international conference on anti-Semitism, Kenney said groups are free within legal bounds to say what they like. But groups whose leaders say intolerant or hateful things shouldn't get taxpayer funding.

"We should not be rewarding those who express views that are contrary to Canada's best liberal values of tolerance and mutual respect."

One of those groups, said Kenney, is the Canadian Arab Federation whose president Khaled Mouammar called him a "professional whore" after Kenney criticized the presence of Hezbollah and Hamas flags at anti-Israel rallies in Toronto.

Kenney said the same group criticized Liberal MP Bob Rae because of his wife's involvement in Canada's Jewish community.


The federation received a $447,297 contribution from Kenney's department to operate a settlement program in Toronto for two years, teaching new immigrants language and job searching skills.

HELP FOR NEWCOMERS

Kenney said he has already asked department officials to weigh comments made by groups when evaluating funding applications, and the comments made by the Arab Federation president will affect its contribution when the current one expires in March 2010.

Mouammar, however, says that Kenney's decision will hurt newcomers to Canada, not just Arabs. Arabs make up only 5% of those who receive his group's settlement services, which Mouammar said were among the best in the Toronto area. Mouammar said Kenney's decision is "vindictive" and accused him of promoting Islamophobia internationally.

"This government is anti-Arab and anti-Muslim," he said, adding the federal government has refused to meet with the Canadian Arab Federation or the Canadian Islamic Congress since Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to power.

In the interview and in his speech, Kenney was also critical of the Canadian Islamic Congress, saying its former president Mohamed Elmasry once tried to "legitimize the killing of all Israeli adults."

Wahida Valiante, who succeed Elmasry as president of the CIC -- which doesn't get government funding -- said Kenney misrepresented Elmasry's comments on the world stage.

Kenney's comments come as he is attending the meeting of the International Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism. Kenney said the theme emerging from the meeting is the new and growing anti-Semitism around the world in the form of anti-Zionism.

Clearly, someone in the Conservative government gets it. It will be a mark of everlasting shame, however, on the Liberal Party of Canada - whose 2006 leadership convention and its outcome was influenced by an antisemitic campaign focused on Bob Rae's wife, in which the Canadian Arab Federation played a part - that it has not been the Liberal Party calling for the defunding and denormalization of those, like the CAF, who think they can guilt Canadians into opposing Israel and all that it stands for by calling us "Islamophobic".

p.s. letters of thanks and congratulations should be sent to Kenney: kennej@parl.gc.ca
Thanks to BCF too, but what to send such a kitty?

Canadian politics: increasingly polarized by antisemitism

Charles sent me this link yesterday: CCD applauds Harper government for withdrawal of support for UN 'anti-racism' conference

For Immediate Release
Wednesday, 23 January, 2008

Ottawa, Canada - The Stephen Harper government has withdrawn its support for a UN anti-racism conference scheduled to take place next year in South Africa, according to a media release today from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity, said today that the conference, like its predecessor in 2001, "has gone completely off the rails... Canada is interested in combating racism, not promoting it. We'll attend any conference that is opposed to racism and intolerance, not those that actually promote racism and intolerance".

"Canadians are shocked when they hear the clear and simple expression of reality by their leaders," said Alastair Gordon, president of the Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD). "We are used to hearing double-speak from our politicians -- fantasies that are at odds with the reality that most Canadians see and the values that they hold."

The last UN anti-racism conference held in Durban in 2001 degenerated into a hate-fest of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel vitriol, while the most egregious human rights violators escaped criticism. The Toronto Star today reported that "all of the non-governmental organizations invited to the first conference have been invited back to the second, including those that were at the 'forefront of the hatred', some of which posted pro-Hitler posters at the 2001 gathering."

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is in charge of planning for the conference, an entity that has directed 93% of its resolutions on human rights violations at just one nation - Israel. Iran is a member of the organizing committee, despite its government's open call to wipe the Jewish homeland off the face of the earth.

"The Stephen Harper government has again demonstrated that Canada can project power as a moral leader in international affairs," added Gordon. "A nation does not need a massive military to provide the moral leadership and clarity that denies legitimacy to Orwellian UN agencies that hijack the language of human rights to promote Jew-hatred.

"Stephen Harper has signaled that Canada will act on principle, regardless of UN consensus. This is the stuff of global leadership."

This news drew a reply from Khaled Mouammar, Canadian Arab Federation National President, as noted by Kate at Small Dead Animals. Mouammar states:

Canada's outright rejection of the [UN anti-racism] conference sends a clear message to the Canadian public that the current government is disinterested in promoting human rights and anti-racism. The very fact that Israel was "attacked" at the previous conference indicates that the international community and human rights organizations are in agreement that the occupation of Arab lands, the mistreatment and killing of Palestinians, and the denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return is in violation of international law and will be condemned and no longer accepted.

[...]

"We would also like to remind Jason Kenney that he is a Minister of the Canadian government, not the racist Israeli government; still, CAF is not surprised with Minister Kenney's position given his outright contempt for the Arab and Muslim communities in Canada and his condoning of Islamophobia. This is the same man who attacked a Muslim organization for lodging a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission against Maclean's Magazine for publishing an inflammatory and bigoted article, and who slandered Canadian NGO's at an OSCE Conference in front of the international community"

Kate then goes on to note that Mouammar gained notoriety by circulating a flyer at the last leadership convention of the Liberal Party of Canada, denouncing leading leadership candidate, Bob Rae, for his Jewish connections. As we reported, there was apparently a campaign of slander at the convention, directed at the fact that Bob Rae's wife is Jewish and an official with the Canadian Jewish Congress; and this campaign seems to have led to support for the successful candidacy of the current Liberal leader, Stephane Dion, who, according to Kate, has yet to comment on, or to denounce, this convention vileness.

Anyway, I recently saw the name Khaled Mouammar attached to a comment on the Globe and Mail online article by the four law students taking Mark Steyn and Maclean's to the "human rights" tribunals:

Khaled Mouammar from Richmond Hill, Canada writes: Jewish American writer, Isidore Feinstein Stone, stated that 'Every war, every outburst of genocide, is prepared by propaganda which paints the vicitm, the Other, as less than human. This is the ultimate lesson of Auschwitz, he who treats his brother as less than human prepares the path to the furnace.' Mark Steyn's article in Maclean's Magazine, intentionally or unintentionally, appears to be spreading racism against Muslims by insinuating that the rising number of Muslims in Western societies is sinister and threatens to destroy western societies.

The presentation of the Muslim as a menace, a terrorist, a shadowy figure who operates outside of the accepted value system and is therfore to be feared and mistrusted has gone on for too long and is undermining the multicultural and tolerant fabric of Canada. This racist image of the Muslim is nothing more than the result of the tranference of the popular anti-Semitic animosity from a Jewish to a Muslim target.

There was then a thoughtful reply to this Mouammar from one George Brown - probably someone taking the name of the Globe's founding publisher, the pre-Confederation politician from Canada West.

' Khaled Mouammar from Richmond Hill, Canada writes: Jewish American writer, Isidore Feinstein Stone, stated that 'Every war, every outburst of genocide, is prepared by propaganda which paints the vicitm, the Other, as less than human.... This racist image of the Muslim is nothing more than the result of the tranference of the popular anti-Semitic animosity from a Jewish to a Muslim target.'

I hear this argument often now. It's not true. Judeophobia (strictly speaking there is no 'Semitic' race or religion) is a reaction to the people who claim to be first in covenant with the One God, those who don't give God a name (to be compared with other names in contests over the Greatest God) but who start a new historical era by defining God: 'I am what I am'.

Islamophobia is a reaction to the people who come relatively late to the world of monotheism and who base their claims, not to having the New New Testament, but to having the Koran, the eternal uncreated word of God, that the Jews and Christians who came before never knew entirely or have somehow forgotten or corrupted.

Racism is not racism is not racism. Jews are a race and a religion, Muslims are not. Jews, when hated, are hated for being 'first', for being religious discoverers, which in the hater's mind becomes something conspiratorial. It is an attack on the successful, something still widely allowed in commentary on Israel. Muslims, when hated, are hated for being outsiders with a righteous claim to overcome those who previously left them marginal.

I see no evidence Canadians are laying the ground for a Holocaust of Muslims. I, for one, want to defend your individual freedom to be whoever you want to be; and that means contesting certain group resentments and their claims on the state. A free society can only be based on individual rights, not group claims.

I'm stretching the metaphor, but Stephane Dion needs to take a lead from his great liberal party antecedent, "George Brown", not to mention from Stephen Harper, a man who consistently stands for what he knows is right, with regard to Israel and antisemitism, notwithstanding the political consequences it will have. In contrast, Dion seems willing to reap the rewards. Let's just hope Harper can find the support among Canadians for a majority government so that he can more actively oppose the untruths made in the name of "human rights" in this country.

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