B'nai Brith: putting their "faith" in criminalization of Judeophobia

UPDATE: fourhorses at Free Dominion points out some of the government agents whom B'Nai Brith should be targeting next, according to their own logic in the following post.

UPDATE 2: And let's not forget how our criminal law can be corrupted once judges must play the game of defining and punishing "hate" speech, rather than clear incitement to violence:
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A number of the bloggers who have been calling for an end to Canada's "human rights" commissions, or at least to the powers of these commissions to police our freedom of expression, saw this recent press release from B'nai Brith as a hopeful sign that that organization was reconsidering its record of working with Canada's "human rights" commissions to prosecute internet hate mongers. Those who had hoped that Canada's organized Jews would stop fighting the last Holocaust by fooling themselves into thinking that going after socially marginal "neo-Nazis" was somehow a politically serious act, and who had called instead for Jewish organizations to concentrate on the threat of a next Holocaust posed by antisemitic Islamists and allied leftists who, in Canada, are now using the "human rights" codes to attack critics of political Islam, including Jewish defenders of individual freedom, will probably be disappointed at the recent decision of B'nai Brith to put its faith in Canada's criminal hate speech laws. However, at least B'nai Brith's target is now those one can take a little more seriously as promoters of a second Holocaust.

Today came the news that B'nai Brith is lobbying the Ontario Attorney General to prosecute under the criminal code, in order to combat the rampant Jew hatred, posing as anti-Zionism, at Ontario's universities:

TORONTO – B’nai Brith Canada has urged Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley to proceed swiftly with hate crime charges against demonstrators who took part in an anti-Israel event last February at McMaster University.

Protesters chanted “death to Jews” and “Viva Jihad,” while waving signs that promoted hatred and violence.

In a letter to Bentley, B’nai Brith Canada said that Hamilton Police urged that “you proceed with hate crime charges in connection with the anti-Israel rally held at McMaster University on Feb. 29, 2008. As reported by various news outlets, including the Hamilton Mountain News, hate-filled slogans such as ‘death to Jews’ and ‘Viva Jihad’ traumatized those in attendance.

“We urge you to…proceed with hate crime charges against demonstrators who actively promoted hatred and violence.

“B’nai Brith Canada’s 2007 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents illustrates the growing trend of antisemitic incidents across Canada taking place at educational settings. This is especially true with regards to university campuses where incidents rose dramatically, more than doubling from 36 cases in 2006 to 78 in 2007.

“While free speech is undoubtedly a fundamental component of Canadian society, it should not act as a shield for protesters chanting ‘death to Jews’ and ‘Viva Jihad.’ As universities across Canada gear up for a new academic year, we look to your leadership to signal that poisonous messaging that promotes hatred and violence against a particular segment of the community – in this case Jewish students – will not be tolerated, on or off campus.”

In the letter, B’nai Brith acknowledged that Bentley has fought hate crimes throughout Ontario: “We are well aware of your ongoing commitment to combating hatred against all of Ontario’s diverse communities and welcome your ongoing efforts on this front. Please do not hesitate to call upon B’nai Brith, which stands ready to lend its expertise and assist in any way possible.”

Frank Dimant, B’nai Brith Canada’s executive vice-president, said, “We are calling on the Attorney General to act on the request of the Hamilton police. Failure to bring this matter to a resolution is at odds with the severity of the offence.

“Campus is an important microcosm of society where there can be no immunity from hate. As universities across Canada gear up for a new academic year, any further delay leaves Jewish students at risk.”

For me, the question is whether a chant of "death to Jews" can be seriously taken as an incitement to violence, rather than a vile comment on the highly politicized legacy of the Holocaust. While a free society must tolerate the expression of pretty much all resentments, it should draw the lines at actions that are violent or that are seriously and directly intended to encourage violence.

But this is to say we should not confuse the issue in terms of "hate speech", since pretty much every human being has hateful expressions of one kind or another in his or her speech. What should be illegal is clear and direct incitement to violence, not words that some (inevitably politicized) seer can interpret as passing Canada's judicial tests for words "likely to expose a person or group to hatred or contempt". Ultimately the test of incitement to violence would likely be that violence did indeed flow more or less directly from the act of incitement.

I think B'nai Brith is intellectually confused if they think the widespread problem of Judeophobia and the left-political Islam alliance against Israel, America, and all free societies can be tackled through the heavy hand of the criminal law. Throwing student radicals in jail will not teach such people to like Jews or Israel. It will surely have the opposite effect much more often. It will create martyrs and thus foster the cause of the hate mongers, further encourage conspiracy theories of a Jewish lobby controlling Western governments, and only encourage the forces of moral relativism to say: well if one can't say that about Israel/Jews, nobody can say similar things about Islam, or Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, etc. etc. And given the current inability of Canada's "multicultural" politicians to make distinctions between relatively free and tyrannical cultures, we will likely have all kinds of necessary expressions of cultural or political contempt threatened by criminal sanctions. Again, let me remind that I am not defending actual incitements to violence. But any attempt at outlawing resentments would just be a Utopian project bound to fail in all kinds of ugly and dangerous ways.

The colonization of our universities by hateful antisemites and conspiracy theorists - much teaching in the humanities today is a sophisticated form of conspiracy theorizing where human reality is wrongly presumed to be constructed by one or another form of the will to power - is a tragedy of great proportions. But in the face of this calamity we cannot bow to our emotions to strike back in ways that might appeal to our sense of injustice, or our own desire to practice a will to power, but not to our pragmatic reason.

I have often argued that the only real protection for Jews from the age-old, but ever-modernizing, threat of Judeophobia is not the heavy-hand of the law but rather a widespread determination from our neighbors and co-citizens to defend the reality of a free society. What protects us is faith that there are others among us who will "get our backs", who will defend the individual against collective sacrificial violence from any quarter. Jews need to be ever vigilant that they are not falling for the old illusion that finding and prosecuting a "scapegoat" or two among the legions of Judeophobes will solve the problem. Yes, real violent criminals need to be prosecuted; but there is no reason to think that criminal prosecution solves the problem of Jew hatred. Weimar Germany frequently prosecuted Nazis; that did not stop their rise.

A free society cannot be defended by government but only by an ethic that is inculcated in sufficient numbers of individual citizens who know it is their responsibility to stand up to hate mongers wherever they are. If we leave this task to the governments, popular resentments, of which Judeophobia is always a leading contender, not the love of individual freedom, will sooner or later rule the day.

A free society cannot be built on fear of hatred but only by coming better to understand the human or anthropological nature of resentment, that we may further human self-understanding accordingly. We must do the hard work of facing down hatred by talking freely in ways that help people understand and mediate the resentment that makes Jew hatred both something unique among the various racisms of the world, and a sign that provides a clue to something fundamental to our shared human, often resentful, nature. The Jew, as member of the "chosen people", those first to develop monotheist thinking in a serious way, is obviously a symbol for some aspect of our universal humanity that we need better to understand.

I would suggest to B'nai Brith that the very fact that many leftists at our universities have made implicit or explicit alliance with Islamists, that they are ready to appease and encourage the most resentful forces of an anti-modernity, anti-freedom, anti-global economy movement suggests that the most fundamental lessons of the Holocaust have never really been learned. I would suggest that the nature of antisemitism is less than fully understood by most Jews and intellectuals in the West. I would then go on to suggest that no one should fall into the trap of thinking that he can prevent the next Holocaust by relying on criminal law and not on the work of expanding human self-understanding, work that can only be done in a society where freedom of expression is, with only a few exceptions (laws against personal defamation, fraud, incitement to violence), unlimited.

A nation of shabby resentments

Canadian anti-Semitism at an all-time high (ht: David T.):

There were 935 reported incidents of anti-Semitism in Canada in 2006 - representing a 12.8 percent rise from the previous year, a four-fold increase over the past 10 years and an all-time high since counting began - according to figures released by the League for Human Rights of B'nai B'rith Canada.

"Canada is a good place," affirmed B'nai B'rith Canada's Executive Vice President Frank Dimant, "but the barometer of intolerance is rising, and police statistics show it's Jews and blacks who are the most targeted groups in this country. When 42 synagogues were vandalized this year, it's not even a news item anymore," he told The Jerusalem Post by phone from Toronto on Wednesday.

The figures, reported in the League's 2006 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, show a steady trajectory of rising violence and harassment toward Jews. From around 60 incidents reported annually in the early 1980s, the number of reports rose to 212 in 1997, 459 in 2002, and on to 935 in 2006.

"With the exception of a small hiatus in 2005, when a slight 3.3% decrease was reported, there has been a relentless upward movement over the past 10 years," the report reads.

Mitigating the severity of the audit is the fact that, of the 935 incidents reported, only 30 - that is, a mere 3% - involved violence. However, that figure also represented an increase over the previous year.

"My instinct is that Jews in Canada are starting to worry about their place here," attorney Marvin Kurz, national legal counsel for the League, told the Post, adding that Canadian Jews "are recognizing that this isn't a shrinking phenomenon but a growing one, and that it may not go away even if [Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud] Abbas and [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert sign a peace treaty tomorrow."

For this reason, he noted, "Jews are increasingly preoccupied with security. There are guards at synagogues now, and Jewish institutions are getting bullet-proof windows."
[...]
While police figures for 2006 are still being compiled for most of Canada's regions, those for the Peel Region, north of Toronto, show that in an area with 2,635 Jews and 53,470 Muslims in a general population surpassing 1.1 million, Jews were the targets of hate crimes in 29% of cases, followed closely by blacks with 27%. Muslims, despite popular perceptions of their victimization, were targeted just 8% of the time, the report found.

The increase in anti-Semitic incidents is partly due to growing anti-Israel sentiments among Canada's burgeoning Muslim population, Canadian Jewish leaders say.

As one example, Dimant cites an attempt during the Liberal Party leadership conference in December to convince voters to reject candidate and former Ontario premier Bob Rae because his wife, Arlene Perly Rae, was Jewish and holds a leadership position in the Canadian Jewish Congress.

The flyers accused the JNF, to which Rae once spoke, of "war crimes and ethnic cleansing" and said Rae supported "Israeli apartheid."

While Khaled Mouammar, president of the Canadian Arab Federation, denied distributing the flyer, The Canadian Press reported it had obtained a copy of an e-mail showing he was distributing it.

There has always been antisemitism, or better put, Judeophobia, in Canada, and I doubt the headline that it is at an all-time high - it was pretty rank in the 1930s. It first came here, as many places, with Christianity, as a test of the Christian (or post-Christian) to realize the true message of Jesus' transcendence, a test many have always failed.

It has often been said that a people who hate the Jews are condemned to destroy themselves or be destroyed by divine will. If the idea is useful, it is not so much because some among the Jewish minority in a Judeophobic population are blocked from realizing their full creative potential and thus denying us, say, another Einstein, Proust, or Arendt, or simply an entrepreneur who creates opportunities, wealth and jobs, or a doctor who saves lives. It is because what the Judeophobe resents - Jewish priority as the first monotheist nation, and all that goes with it - acts to delude him about the necessity of some people going first in various creative endeavours that discover new truths or opportunities that somehow apply to all of us (even to those whose Judeophobia takes the intellectualized form of the denial of any universal truths), and thus restrains his own creative potential. The role of Israel as the first among equals in the history of nations is a role we can all aspire to play as individuals, and should play at times. But those who step out of the pack to have a go at going first in some area of cultural, business, professional, or political leadership are often resented and denigrated. This, it seems to me, is a recurring problem in Canada.

And today, we have the phenomenon of "multiculturalism" (not that the Canadian born and bred have anything but a shallow monoculture drilled into them by the school system's enforcers of "multiculturalism", i.e. a singular victimary ideology) under which we welcome immigrants from some of the most virulently Judeophobic places on earth, now that a new kind of antisemitism mixing traditional European forms with Islamic or Koranic ones is pervasive in the mass media of the Islamic world. If Canadians want a decent future for their children, where people are served by risk takers and cultural innovators, if they want a country in which they don't have to witness the cement barriers in front of Jewish schools and the metal detectors outside rooms where Jewish professors are giving public lectures on topics of ancient Biblical history, or the queer looks given to bloggers who meet on Thursday nights in the library atrium with Israeli and Canadian flags on their caps - as are all presently the case here in Vancouver - then they are going to have to grab their Judeophobic fears and give them a good shake, demystify them, study the anthropology of resentment, and start building a country where firstness is celebrated, and where the nations that are first among equals (Israel in the Middle East, America in the world) are not the target of a constant and delusional victimary politics. Yes, even Canada can become a totalitarian hate state. If you want to imagine it, it's not too hard to do.