Jul 02, 2004
Working for a tolerant society
New CJC Pacific Region head Mark Weintraub says Jews "got it right."
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
The work done by Canadian Jewish Congress over the past half-century has helped create a "firewall" in Canada that has prevented a worldwide spike in anti-Semitism from reaching full force here.
That's the view of Mark Weintraub, the new chair of Canadian Jewish Congress, Pacific Region. Weintraub, a Vancouver lawyer and longtime community activist, met with the Bulletin recently to look forward and back at the climate for Canadian Jews. His main message: "I think you can say with some degree of confidence that the Jewish community got it right, in terms of how to [if] not eliminate anti-Semitism, at least erode it."
Since the Second World War, Weintraub said, Canadian Jewish Congress has been among a number of groups at the forefront of advocating for a comprehensive infrastructure of human rights. And while Congress has fought against specific restrictive covenants and discriminatory practices against Jews in particular, the organization also has advocated for more general measures that prevent discrimination against any group.
"We did it in a way that drew upon the roots of our Jewish tradition," said Weintraub. "What we said was this: That there's no place in a country like Canada for any kind of discrimination, whether it be against Jew, or against Native Indian or Indo-Canadian or Chinese. Therefore, our challenges were not specifically with respect to discriminatory provisions against Jews, but we looked at the overall structural system of Canada and said what kinds of institutions do we need that can fundamentally shift our country."
Working with governments, advocacy organizations, civil institutions and other ethnic organizations, Canadian Jewish Congress has played an important role in bringing to life a whole range of institutions that are now intrinsic to Canadian multiculturalism, including the fundamental recognition that Canada is more than just English and French.
"What we ended up with, if one takes a look at the last 50 years, is a very comprehensive system of judicial, legal, administrative and educative structures, which have essentially been effective in combating discrimination against minorities," said Weintraub. "We advocated for the system of human rights tribunals both federally and provincially on the basis that not all prejudice and discrimination ought to be dealt with by the criminal law. Only the most extreme forms of prejudice, namely the fomenting of hate, which can lead to violence, ought to be criminalized. But there have to be other structures to communicate to Canadians at large that vile prejudice and discrimination have no place."
Congress also unequivocally supported the entrenchment of hate-motivated crime in legislation, based on the assumption that crimes motivated by discrimination are crimes of a different quality.
"When someone from a minority gets attacked by reason of their status, it's really an attack on the entire fabric of the country," he said.
Weintraub credited his immediate predecessor at Congress, Nisson Goldman, with a three-year struggle to convince the provincial government to replace the eliminated funding for the provincial Hate Crime Team. Though funding has not yet been restored, Congress has received a commitment from Premier Gordon Campbell that it will be forthcoming.
Weintraub said his top priority is fulfilling the core mandate of Canadian Jewish Congress, which has always been and remains combating anti-Semitism and providing for the safety and security of the Jewish community. This would have been his top priority even five years ago, before the latest spike in anti-Jewish crimes, though it takes an added urgency now, he said. But while acknowledging that the situation for Canadian Jews is as difficult as it has been in decades – a recent report by Canadian chiefs of police determined that one-quarter of all hate crimes reported in this country were directed at Jews – Weintraub insists things are better here than in the United States and far better than the grave situation in places like France.
"I think it's fair to say when there are expressions of anti-Semitism, which in the United States might be permitted because of freedom of expression and because they don't have human rights tribunals, because they don't have criminalized speech, those expressions here in Canada are immediately dealt with," Weintraub said. As examples, he cited the recent publication of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in a B.C. newspaper, the Miracle, and the anti-Semitic expressions of former Saskatchewan First Nations leader David Ahenakew.
"The response [to the Miracle] from the community was quick and overwhelming – the mainstream community, the Muslim community, the human rights community – and we had a venue for dealing with it. We handed that document over to the Hate Crime Team to see if it violated the criminal law," he said. "[In the Ahenakew case], immediately the Assembly [of First Nations] leadership, and leadership throughout the aboriginal community, was very swift in its condemnation.
"So when, every once in a while, you have one of these eruptions, we have created a climate in Canada wherein the leadership of the various communities where the anti-Semitism might erupt from, recognized that this is harmful not only to Canadian society, but harmful to the Jewish community and harmful to their own community."
More than most countries in the world, Weintraub said, Canada has a formally structured and highly sensitized response to discriminatory behaviors and attitudes, not only through legal recourse, but in educating people in the first place to challenge prejudice in themselves and society.
"We've got structures in place that can deal with [acts of discrimination] more swiftly and effectively," he said. "That is the work that Canadian Jewish Congress is in the middle of and sometimes, I think, in the forefront of."
Though the re-emergence of anti-Semitism in Canada has been jarring, Weintraub added, "The eruption in the last three years was not a huge surprise to those who are [working] in this area."
Members of CJC got a hint of what was coming down the pike three years ago at the United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa.
"We saw there how the conference was turned against Israel in a way that was very frightening," he said. "We saw there what was indeed a strategy to turn Israel into the next South Africa, the apartheid state. We saw it systematically being talked about and how over the next number of years that campaign needed to spread to the campuses and into the media and other institutions and, sure enough, we saw it happen."
Weintraub said one thing the Jewish community in Canada and elsewhere needs to investigate more and make the public aware of is the relationship between extreme anti-Zionist activities and the extreme elements of the Middle East.
"The campaign of anti-Zionism and of equating Zionism as racism has emanated from some of the most reactionary and despotic regimes in the Middle East," he said. "I'm not here to say that we can trace right now the funding of this campaign, except to say that we know as a fact that this attempt to delegitimize the state of Israel has for decades and decades come out of countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia and Egypt."
Weintraub added that the anti-Israel activists of the Middle East may have made common cause with some of the darkest figures from history.
"We do know that in the 1950s and the 1960s, a country like Syria, for example, gave refuge to Nazi leadership fleeing Germany. I think it behooves our community to spend more time in exposing what are the links between Nazi and fascist ideology and the most extreme anti-Zionist ideology that is coming out of the Arab countries. If we bring that more into the centre, I do believe that people will recognize that this extreme anti-Zionism is supported by people that, on every other front, they would completely repudiate."
As Canadian Jews struggle against anti-Semitism, the communal bodies of the community have undergone a major structural change. The Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy was created in the past year as an umbrella group to oversee the various advocacy agencies in Canada. Weintraub welcomes the new body, especially since it has explicitly promised greater support for CJC's work.
"The function of Canadian Jewish Congress has been maintained and in fact we have been told that we need to have more funding because what we're doing is good work and the collective Jewish community decision-makers in this regard want us to carry on and do more," he said.
Over his three-year term, Weintraub said, he will continue to improve communication between the Jewish community and other ethnocultural groups, especially Muslim communities, First Nations and Christians. While advocating for Jewish Canadians is the core objective of Congress, Weintraub noted it has always been in the interest of Jewish communities to live in a society that is accepting of all peoples.
"We've always felt that what we want is the most peaceful, tolerant society because it's the right thing and because it also ultimately assists Jews," he said. "So we have this confluence of what is good for the Jewish community is good for the overall community."
Internally, he added, the Jewish community must continue to look outward but also undertake an introspective look.
"The question which must engage Jewish leadership of every organization is the future: What kind of Canada are we going to have 20 years from now?" he said. Changing demographics will have an impact on Canadian Jews.
"We have a declining Jewish community. We know the ravages of intermarriage and assimilation," Weintraub said. "Where is our Jewish community going to be 20 years from now?"
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