Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism is designed to protect Israel from growing criticism of its violence, colonialism and apartheid. That was confirmed by the envoy hiring an individual found by a McGill University inquiry to have fabricated claims of antisemitism to smear Palestine solidarity activists.
In his recent statement on Israel Independence Day Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explicitly linked the special envoy position to that country. The position was created a year and a half ago for Canada’s (arguably) chief apartheid apologist, Irwin Cotler. A staunch proponent of Israeli colonialism, Cotler has a home in Israel and his daughter was recently a member of the Knesset. In response to a recent speech Cotler delivered at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, 45 faculty members sent the dean a letter to saying the event “reinforced anti-Palestinian racism in a way that is consistent with a broader pattern of silencing and erasure of Palestinian voices.”
Cotler has been bemoaning the “new antisemitism” of those who support Palestinian rights for decades. He claimed the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa “became the tipping point for the coalescence of a new, virulent globalizing anti-Jewishness.” After Canada’s biggest ever Palestinian solidarity demonstrations — largely by racialized Canadians — in May 2021, Cotler led an antisemitism summit and began decrying the worst antisemitism in Canada since World War II. (As Cotler knows, it wasn’t until the 1950s that it became illegal to block Jews and other groups from purchasing property in some neighborhoods. Some social clubs also restricted Jewish membership into the 1960s.)
In the most recent federal budget, the Liberals put up $5.6 million over five years for the special envoy position. With taxpayer funds Cotler hired Noah Lew as a policy and program analyst to support his work. But Lew may be the only Canadian ever shown by an official university inquiry to have fabricated claims of antisemitism to smear Palestine solidarity activists.
In October 2017, Noah Lew cried “antisemitism” after he wasn’t voted on to the Students Society of McGill University (SSMU) Board of Directors. At a general assembly, an ad-hoc student group, Democratize SSMU, sought to impeach the student union’s president Muna Tojiboeva. The group was angry over her role in suspending an SSMU vice president, and adopting a Judicial Board decision that declared a BDS resolution unconstitutional. While they couldn’t muster the two thirds of votes required to oust the non-Jewish president of the student union, Democratize SSMU succeeded in blocking the re-election of two Board of Directors candidates who supported the effort to outlaw BDS resolutions.
After failing to be re-elected to the Board of Directors at the same meeting Lew claimed he was “blocked from participating in student government because of my Jewish identity and my affiliations with Jewish organizations.” Lew’s claim received international coverage and the affair was even mentioned in the House of Commons.
In response the (anti-Palestinian) university administration launched a major investigation, which found the issue was… Palestine. After interviewing 38 students over three-and-a-half weeks, former student ombudsman Dr. Spencer Boudreau concluded that he could “not substantiate the notion that the vote was motivated by anti-Semitism” and couldn’t find “evidence that would equate students’ protests about Israel’s policies with anti-Semitism.” Rather, Boudreau found that the vote was “motivated by politics, that is, based on his [Lew] support for Israel and Zionism and/or for his view of the BDS movement.” Considering the uproar and political climate, this was a devastating finding. But it didn’t deter Cotler, a former McGill professor, from hiring Lew. Last year Lew interned at Cotler’s Raoul Wallenberg Center for human rights and in January he was hired to assist the special envoy.
Lew’s hiring confirms that Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism is designed to protect Israel from criticism. And to offer jobs to people who define support for Palestinian rights as antisemitism.
Over five and half million taxpayer dollars for this? Shame.
Only a bad conscience fears the truth…
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RE: “Irwin Cotler, Canada’s Special Envoy on Combatting Antisemitism, delivered a virtual speech on January 26 at an event hosted by the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Cotler’s speech reinforced hatred against the indigenous Semitic Palestinian people in a way that is consistent with a broader pattern, used by apologists for Israeli apartheid, of silencing and erasing Palestinian voices.
“Cotler accused critics of Israel of promoting hatred of Jews since Israel is the world’s only Jewish state.”
“Cotler’s statement is as absurd as stating that criticism of the white supremacist regime of former South Africa promotes hatred of all white people or that criticizing the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the world’s only Russian state, promotes hatred of all Russian people.
“By calling Israel ‘the world’s only Jewish state’, Cotler also echoes apartheid Israel’s beliefs which ignore the existence of 20% of Israel’s citizens who are Christian and Muslim Palestinians.
“Cotler went on to defend and justify Israel’s racism against indigenous Semitic Palestinians by stating that calling Israel an ‘apartheid state’ is another example of modern-day antisemitism.
“By doing so, Cotler brushed aside the indisputable findings of many renowned human rights organizations – including Israel’s B’Tselem’s report of January 2021, New York-based Human Rights Watch’s report of April 2021 and London-based Amnesty International’s report of February 2022 – that Israel has for 73 years been committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid, persecution and domination over 7 million indigenous Semitic Palestinians under its control and of the six million Semitic Palestinian refugees in neighboring countries who have not been allowed to return to their homeland since 1948. (cont’d)
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“Alarmingly, Cotler implicitly slandered many Palestinian and international human rights groups including reputable mainstream ones such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – who dedicate their time and energy exposing human rights violations anywhere in the world and whose recent reports condemn apartheid Israel and call for sanctions – by accusing them of hating Jews.
“Understandably, Israel tries to divert attention from its actions by claiming it represents World Jewry and accusing its critics of hating Jews. Cotler’s echoing of Israel’s claim is a serious mistake since it implies that all Jews are responsible for the crimes against humanity being committed by the apartheid Israeli regime.
“Even worse, Cotler is also promoting hatred against all those Jews who believe Israel is an apartheid state. An April 2021 poll by B’Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights organization, found that 25% of Israeli Jews believe Israel is an apartheid state. A July 2021 poll commissioned by the Jewish Electorate Institute shows 25% of US Jews and 38% of US Jews under the age of 40 agreed that ‘Israel is an apartheid state.’
“Ironically, instead of combatting hatred of Jews, Cotler is targeting 25% of Israeli and American Jews, and Canadian Jewish groups (including Independent Jewish Voices and Palestinian and Jewish Unity) who assert Israel is an apartheid state.
“Desperately, Cotler attempted in his U of T speech to defend a racist regime (that enshrines Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea over the indigenous Semitic Muslim and Christian Palestinians who have inhabited the area for thousands of years) by resorting to slandering reputable human rights organizations and Jewish critics of Israel and by promoting anti-Palestinian racism.
“By having a special envoy who openly defends an apartheid regime that has been committing for 73 years crimes against humanity over the indigenous Palestinian people, tarnishes Canada’s image since it implies that Canada will tolerate racism against any racial or religious group and that it will silence those who expose racism in Palestine and Canada, including acclaimed human rights groups and Jews.”