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December 1, 2001

“In order for evil to flourish, all that is required is for good men to do nothing.”
                                                                     -Edmund Burke

This world is full of evil. Those who doubted this fact before September 11th have had their eyes since opened. Evil stems from many sources and takes many forms. But the most dangerous kind of evil of them all is the conspiracy of silence. It is the evil born not from fanatical hatred, racism, or anger, but from apathy.

I attended Jewish school for eleven years, where they taught us the history of antisemitism in its many forms. They told us about the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion of Jews from England, the pogroms in Russia, and of course about the Holocaust. They showed us cartoons of propaganda and told us about the stereotypes and hateful images. They talked about how the saga of the Jewish people for the last two thousand years has been filled with persecution.

Despite this, in my sheltered naivety I believed that antisemitism was a thing of the past. Not since the middle ages were Jews forced to convert to Christianity on the pain of death, right? Even the horrors of the Holocaust happened over fifty years ago, and it couldn’t possibly happen again, could it? Nobody actually believes these lies anymore, right? Sure, there are the fringe extremist hate groups, but we have too many controls and safeguards in place to prevent them from starting up, don’t we? B’nai Brith, the Canadian Jewish Congress and all sorts of international organizations.

Not to mention the greatest safeguard of them all: the state of Israel. For the first time in two thousand years, we Jews have a country to call our own, a land that stands strong and is prepared to welcome other Jews with open arms, that extends the Right of Return to ensure that no country can again commit the conspiracy of silence of the Holocaust. That if Jews somewhere in the world are being persecuted and need to escape, that they will never again have nowhere to turn. Because perhaps scarier than the actions of the Nazis were the actions of countries such as the United States and Canada, who said “none is too many” and slammed their doors shut on desperate people.

So, I truly believed that antisemitism was over, and part of history. It couldn’t possibly be happening in 2001. Not here, not now, not in my city. Certainly not in my school. But here we are, right here and right now, and all the warning signs are showing up at an alarming rate.

Alas, I should have been a better history student, because any competent historian knows that the one truism about history is that it repeats itself. Reflecting further, I recalled pages in our Jewish history textbooks in high school speaking of the various “Golden Ages” of the Diaspora. These were periods of often several hundred years when Jews lived in one place or another in relative harmony and peace with their countrymen. These eras produced some of the greatest art, literature, science, and progress in Jewish history. Spain, until the inquisition. England, until the exile. France, until Alfred Dreyfus. Even Germany, before the Holocaust. In the early part of the twentieth century, so many Jews didn’t want to believe what was happening because they were so thoroughly identified as Germans, they simply could not fathom that they were about to be rejected by the country they called home. What’s scary about that is that I identify with being a Canadian in much the same way: with pride, patriotism, and a fierce sense that nobody will ever make me a stranger in my own country.

Of course, these Golden Ages were glossed over in the textbooks with a few short paragraphs. Wars and conflicts are much more exciting than peace and prosperity, so they tend to take up the most space. Peacetime is just filler between wars.

Is that what’s happening in the world right now? Have the past fifty years since the Holocaust been nothing but a Golden Age for world Jewry? Are we simply killing time until the next catastrophe? Because I was not alive before Israel was born, all I’ve ever known is a world where I could be proud to be Jewish, and where I had an attachment to a country that was not my own, but my own at the same time. It was part of the unshakable foundation of my personal world, similar to knowing that the sun would rise tomorrow or that my parents would be around to take care of me. A security blanket, in a sense. But lately, this foundation has been crumbling. Although Israel’s existence has been called into question in many wars since its establishment, no time is quite so dangerous as right now, because world opinion, temporarily sympathetic to the Jewish plight after the Holocaust, has swung back.

In this week’s Canadian Jewish News, a feature story revealed the fanatical antisemitism that is cropping up in the media in the Arabic world, containing propaganda and stereotypes traditionally associated with Christian Europe. The article cited Holocaust denials and descriptions of the Holocaust as a Jewish plot, “world Zionism” controlling the world’s economy, and Jews drinking Arab blood. “Jews celebrating by drinking children's blood? A conspiracy of bearded old men manipulating banks, media and governments? Jews as betrayers and spies ready to sell out their friends for money?” These images are now prevalent in Egypt, Syria, and many other countries in the Arabic world.

Similarly to the conspiracy of silence during the Holocaust, the world is once again turning a blind eye and a deaf ear. One of the latest tactics that these hateful fanatics are using is to attempt to equate Zionism with racism. When it was first uttered, people were shocked, but this blatantly false piece of propaganda has been repeated so many times over the past year, some are starting to accept it as truth. The United Nations passed several resolutions at the urging of its many Arabic member states to attempt to put this hatred into writing. Now, instead of referring to opinion, racists can refer to a UN resolution. It gives them credibility. Will anyone really remember what a farce the Durban Conference was in five years? Will they remember how Israel and the United States walked out in protest? Or will they simply remember the outcomes, put forth by bullying states who grossly violate the human rights of their own citizens while condemning the sole true democracy in the Middle East?

I only have to open any edition of this year’s Link or Concordian to see dozens of letters and opinion pieces attempting to link Zionism to racism. Because it is no longer politically correct to hate Jews, these people have shifted tactics, deciding to hate Israelis instead. The specifics may have changed but the motives remain the same. Israel is blamed for being a racist state due to the Right of Return, for being a colonialist state due to the occupation of the territories, and for being a murdering state for fighting terrorism.

Now, I don’t mean to minimize the plight of the Palestinian refugees or the very real problems facing the Middle East. This is most certainly a story with two sides, and regardless of history, hatred and violence cannot be justified. But it is also important to recall the true aims of the parties involved. One of these two parties wants peace so much, it is expressed in the country’s national anthem, Hatikva. The other wants nothing more or less than to have Israel wiped off the map and all the Jews forced into the Mediterranean Sea.

Concordia is a university in Montreal, in Canada, in the twenty-first century, and its walls are plastered with anti-Zionism posters. The student union is interested in suing B’nai Brith, and published a handbook with “The Palestinian Catastrophe” written instead of Israeli Independence Day, and showing cartoons of Israeli fighter jets plowing into defenceless little Palestinians. Two students were expelled for writing anti-Israel graffiti on the walls, but instead of condemning them, the student union helped them fight this expulsion in court. Students openly campaign for election on anti-Israel platforms, and accuse the media and the administration of being “controlled by Zionists and corporations”. These are the same stereotypes that the Nazis used when they claimed that Jews controlled the world’s economy. And not only are they going unchallenged, they are actually gaining support. If this isn’t hatred, I don’t know what is.

Racism and discrimination in all its forms is wrong. It is wrong against Jews, Muslims, Blacks, Whites, Blues, and Purples. However, one thing we can learn from history is that when the Jews are suffering, there will be no public world outcry to save them. We’ve had to learn the lesson the hard way, and perhaps we will keep having to learn it, but there is nobody we can rely on in the world except ourselves. If I allow my school to be overrun by hateful extremists, what’s next?