A Canadian Holocaust: Remembering the Shoah: Philip Carl Salzman, Frontier Centre, Apr. 11, 2018— Think about it. What would the death of six million people look like in the Canadian population?
The Politics of Social Justice: Earl Bowen Jr. & Asaf Romirowsky, Ynet News, Mar. 5, 2018— The recent furor over the relationship between the Women’s March leadership and Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan is beginning to subside — but its full import has yet to be appreciated.
The Perversity of Intersectionality: Lawrence Grossman, Algemeiner, Mar. 21, 2018— The recent furor over the relationship between the Women’s March leadership and Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan is beginning to subside — but its full import has yet to be appreciated.
David S. Wyman, 1929-2018 – The Man Who Changed How We Think About America And The Holocaust: Dr. Rafael Medoff, Jewish Press, Apr. 11, 2018— For many years, if you asked students in any yeshiva high school whether they knew that 400 Orthodox rabbis marched to the White House in 1943 to protest the Roosevelt administration’s indifference to the Holocaust, you would get a roomful of blank stares.
On Topic Links
At Holocaust Remembrance Day Ceremony, Netanyahu Warns Iran: ‘Don’t Test Israel’s Resolve’: Jewish Press, Apr. 12, 2018
Trump Yom HaShoah Message Pays Special Tribute to Warsaw Ghetto Fighters on 75th Anniversary of Uprising: Algemeiner, Apr. 12, 2018
Every Holocaust Story Matters: Nira Berry, Algemeiner, Apr. 12, 2018
Exposé: The Depth of Anti-Israel Hate on American Campuses: Noah Beck, Arutz Sheva, Mar. 30, 2018
A CANADIAN HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING THE SHOAH
Philip Carl Salzman
Frontier Centre, Apr. 11, 2018
Think about it. What would the death of six million people look like in the Canadian population? A loss of that number would be equivalent to the annihilation of every single person in the following cities: Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, London, and Halifax. Or, the death of every person in British Columbia and Manitoba. For Canadians, such numbers are impossible to imagine.
Equally hard and painful to imagine is the cruelty of murdering six million people, referring only to Jews and not to all people who suffered the same fate. There were two main ways the Germans and their helpers murdered six million Jewish citizens of Germany, France, the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, and Greece, among others: round up men and women, boys and girls, infants, and elderly, take them to the countryside, force them to strip naked, and shoot them with machine guns; or, transport them to camps, where they were confined in buildings and murdered with poison gas.
In 2018, April 11th is Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) in Israel, which is also observed in Canada. The date corresponds with the 27th day of the month of Nisan in the Jewish calendar. The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is January 27th, selected to honour the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. How can we understand this almost unthinkable event that many people see as the epitome of evil?
A major part of the evil was the racial theory that divided people into races, and evaluated them according to the quality of their race. Germans held the German race to be pure and noble. In contrast, Germans saw the Jews as an inferior race, polluting the German race and polluting Germany and other countries. After the catastrophes of their defeat in WWI and the Great Depression, Germans looked for someone to blame besides themselves, and the Jews served as their scapegoats. No doubt, it helped that many Jews were prosperous, and the prospect of Germans appropriating Jewish homes, stores, and factories must have seemed a pleasant compensation for the hardships Germans had suffered.
For fifty years after the Holocaust, racial theory was rejected as false and immoral. Physical and biological anthropologists refuted the idea of human races as unscientific. All living humans belong to the same species, as shown by the fact that any two fertile humans can produce fertile offspring. Furthermore, all characteristics mistakenly labelled “racial,” such as hair type, skin colour, head shape, etc., vary independently, and appear as gradual clines from one population to the next. Studies of “race” were replaced by population genetics.
But what was old and outmoded is now new and compelling again. In the last few decades, race theory has become popular again. Once more we are reducing individuals to their racial categories and treating them according to their race. These days, we do not talk about “purity” and “pollution,” but about “oppressor” races and “oppressed” races. And we talk about the need to raise the oppressed races and marginalize the oppressor races.
Blacks, people of colour, Indigenous First Nations, and Muslims (although Muslims are a religion and not a race) are alleged to be oppressed by whites and Christians and Jews (although these latter two are not races either). In this new race theory, genders are treated as honorary races, with men oppressing women, with the usual reversal required. “Racism” has been redefined to mean oppression of a race, not just thinking of and treating people according to their race. This is a neat twist, because it means that Blacks, people of colour, Indigenous First Nations, and Muslims can never be racist! They can only suffer from the racism of others.
“Social justice,” an idea borrowed from communist equality theory, requires that each “race” be equal in education, jobs, wealth, and government positions. In short, there must be equality of results for each “racial” category. Individuals should not be judged, at least according to this theory, by their achievements or character or potential; “colour-blind” merit does not merit consideration. Rather, people must be judged by their “race.” According to “social justice” theory, this is not racism; it is justice.
It is unfortunate that “social justice” ideology has been adopted by the Canadian government and by Canadian educational institutions, the latter shaping the minds of future generations of citizens. According to this ideology, if justice is denied to individuals because they are white or Christians or Jews or men, well, they are all oppressors, and deserve what they get. Of course, we have no reason to worry about losing Vancouver or Manitoba, or about seeing large numbers of Canadians machine-gunned or gassed. Today’s anti-white, anti-male, and anti-Christian campaigns are on behalf of, aside from women, relatively small minorities in the country. There is no chance that these minorities will fully take control of the state, or that any campaign to exterminate the majority would attract anyone other than the most extreme fringe activists.
There will be no holocaust in Canada. But our renewed enthusiasm for racism, for thinking of people, and allocating and denying benefits on the basis of race, undermines the integrity and the autonomy of individuals by reducing them to being members of abstract categories. In place of individual autonomy, “social justice” offers social engineering at the hands of the state and educational officials. However well meaning, “social justice” ideology replaces universal standards with double standards, rejects merit as a measure of individual’s characteristics, and dismisses individuality, freedom, efficiency, and creativity, all on behalf of equality of results for racial categories.
This new “good” racism poisons social relations and destroys even a pretense of community solidarity and commonality of citizenship. “Social justice” brings benefits to some at the expense of injustice to others. It is an offence against human rights, which always pertain to individuals and not “races,” and it will not benefit Canadian society. Haven’t we learned from the Holocaust that racism is a malicious and destructive ideology? The new “racism” will only harm Canada.
THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
Earl Bowen Jr. & Asaf Romirowsky
Ynet News, Mar. 5, 2018
On October of 1967, Martin Luther King underscored that “when people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!” This bold and unapologetic statement is something that you would not hear today from the membership of Black Lives Matter (BLM). In today’s age of technology, we see more rapid use of social media and soft power by pro-Palestinian groups hijacking the narrative of peace, justice and human rights, while in reality they yearn for Israel’s destruction. The term “social justice” is nothing new in today’s world but may represent new ways of thinking among many who advocate for full equality in our society. Among many African Americans, the mere notion of social justice can be a constant reminder that institutionalized forms of racism still exist across all sectors of our society.
The reality of racism remains a constant force of evil that must of necessity be confronted by all Americans who subscribe to the basic principles that gave birth to America. Yet even among African Americans, there are divergent views about the concept of social justice and what it means in the larger context. This has particular relevance to many of the current events taking place in the Middle East and in the state of Israel. To place this issue in some historical perspective, it should be noted that the murder of six million Jews was a causative factor in the creation of the state of Israel. Israel’s basic right to exist represents a foundational principle of social justice.
Interestingly enough, there is growing trend is to regard Palestinians as “people of color” as they continue to superimpose BDS on racial and other protest movements, even as violence by BDS supporters, and their “intersectional” allies, undermines their broader appeal. It is predominately on the political Left where the adaptation of the Palestinian cause as their own under the guise of “intersectionality,” a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s to highlight the dual oppressions faced by black women—sexism and racism—and the feminist and anti-racism movements that failed to fully represent and advocate for them. Currently, it has become a slogan under which minority groups join to fight what critics see as unrelated battles, but what activists see as iterations of the same struggle for justice.
As it is clearly articulated by the Black-Palestinian solidarity statement, “Palestinian liberation represents an inherent threat to Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid, an apparatus built and sustained on ethnic cleansing, land theft, and the denial of Palestinian humanity and sovereignty. While we acknowledge that the apartheid configuration in Israel/Palestine is unique from the United States (and South Africa), we continue to see connections between the situation of Palestinians and Black people.
“Israel’s widespread use of detention and imprisonment against Palestinians evokes the mass incarceration of Black people in the US, including the political imprisonment of our own revolutionaries. Soldiers, police, and courts justify lethal force against us and our children who pose no imminent threat. And while the US and Israel would continue to oppress us without collaborating with each other, we have witnessed police and soldiers from the two countries train side-by-side.”
The deliberate distortion of historical realities, fueled by those who oppose Israel’s right to exist, tend to exacerbate the path to peace in the Middle East. Clearly, there are many difficult issues that need to be resolved between Israel and the Palestinians, starting with a functioning Palestinian Authority (PA) removed from Islamist influence which has yet to be seen. For many African Americans, the notion of social justice is indeed a complex phenomenon, and Palestinians are viewed as people of color and Israelis are viewed as white Europeans. There are, however, large numbers of Jews of color, many of whom support the Jewish homeland and call for peace in the Middle East.
Groups like BLM have distorted the reality of the Middle East and have thereby pushed many African-Americans to make assumptions and conclusions based on falsehoods and misinformation. BLM statements are anti-Semitic not only because they are false and modern versions of tradition anti-Semitic blood libel, but also because BLM selectively chooses the Jewish state out of all the states in the world to demonize. The façade has fed into the worldview of intersectionality that has divided the world into a conspiracy of oppressors and an agony of oppressed: Victimizers and victims.
Finally, in a time where universalism trumps particularism, we see more individuals lacking any sense of history or collective memory, thereby generating a postmodernist form of social justice that seeks not equal treatment for all, but rather an equality of outcomes by erasing the same systems that developed the West at large.
THE PERVERSITY OF INTERSECTIONALITY
Lawrence Grossman
Algemeiner, Mar. 21, 2018
The recent furor over the relationship between the Women’s March leadership and Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan is beginning to subside — but its full import has yet to be appreciated. The Women’s March, according to its website, seeks “to harness the political power of diverse women and their communities to create transformative social change.” It is “a women-led movement providing intersectional education on a diverse range of issues.”
Intersectionality is a recent state-of-the art term, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the complex and cumulative way that the effects of different forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlay, and yes, intersect — especially in the experiences of marginalized people or groups.” Tamika Mallory, co-president of the March, attended Farrakhan’s speech at the NOI’s annual Saviours’ Day celebration on February 25 in Chicago. At the event, Farrakhan specifically praised Mallory and her movement, and she subsequently posted an image of herself at the event on Instagram.
For Mallory this was nothing new — she has enjoyed a long and close relationship with the NOI, credits its leader with helping her through some difficult times, and has described Farrakhan as the “GOAT — greatest of all time.” The problem is that Farrakhan, true to form, denounced Jews in his speech as well. He called Jews “satanic,” charged that the “powerful Jews” were his enemy, and declared them “responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out turning men into women and women into men.” Farrakhan despicable words were not surprising, given his decades-long history of anti-Jewish invective. But this proved embarrassing for Mallory and the Women’s March, whose devotion to intersectionality would presumably require opposition to prejudice aimed at Jewish women and homosexuals.
What to do? In a series of tweets, Mallory equivocated, but never once criticized Farrakhan. She first suggested that the entire controversy was simply a tactic to impugn the March, saying: “The attacks can make us defensive at times. We are literally fighting for our lives.” But, lo and behold, “someone brought to my attention that over the past few days I never tweeted my absolute position on how wrong anti-Semitism and homophobia is.” Her next tweet moved on to self-justification: “Contrary to others, I listen. I have been in deep reflection and trying to be thoughtful as possibly. … I won’t go back. I won’t redraw the lines of division.” Tweet number three urged “that we listen, reflect, attempt to understand, and give space for nuance and complexities of the different communities we come from.”
And finally, a tweet came clarifying that Mallory is “against all forms of racism … committed to ending anti-black racism, antisemitism, homophobia & transphobia,” and — she pointed out –“This is why I helped create an intersectional movement to bring groups together.” The Women’s March itself released an official statement with the heading: “Anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism and white supremacy are and always will be indefensible.” But rather than condemn Farrakhan, it gingerly noted that the problem was one of “alignment”: His “statements about Jewish, queer, and trans people are not aligned with the Women’s March Unity Principles….”
But the true significance of the Women’s March’s flirtation with the NOI is much more alarming than mainstream press reports and explanations by March apologists indicate. The Final Call, the NOI’s newspaper, printed long excerpts of Farrakhan’s speech in its February 27 issue. It turns out that what the March and its leader soft-pedaled was not just a series of random insults aimed at Jews and gays, but rather a full-blown conspiracy theory of Jewish perversity and world-control. Jesus, said Farrakhan, came 2,000 years ago “to end the civilization of the Jews,” but failed in the attempt, and he — Louis Farrakhan — was sent to accomplish what Jesus couldn’t. Jews remain “the boss: this is their world.” In every country, he continued, Jews take on the national language and culture, “but they run the money, they run the business” — and in the US, for good measure, the FBI — so that “when there is a Jewish holiday, everything gets silent.”…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
DAVID S. WYMAN, 1929-2018 – THE MAN WHO CHANGED
HOW WE THINK ABOUT AMERICA AND THE HOLOCAUST
Dr. Rafael Medoff
Jewish Press, Apr. 11, 2018
For many years, if you asked students in any yeshiva high school whether they knew that 400 Orthodox rabbis marched to the White House in 1943 to protest the Roosevelt administration’s indifference to the Holocaust, you would get a roomful of blank stares. David S. Wyman – who passed away last month at 89 – changed all that. Wyman, in his best-selling book The Abandonment of the Jews, was the first historian to write in detail about the march – and to explain the part that the march played in the campaign to bring about U.S. action to rescue Jews from Hitler.
Subsequently, the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies – which was established by his colleagues to carry on his research about America and the Holocaust – undertook the task of interviewing rabbis who marched and explaining the significance of their protest in numerous publications. Today, it is fair to say, the march of the rabbis – as well as many other aspects of America’s response to the Nazi genocide – is widely recognized in the Jewish community, thanks to a scholar who was not Jewish and had no personal connection to the Holocaust at all.
Wyman, knew very few Jews and very little about Judaism when he was growing up in New England in the 1930s, except what he had learned in Sunday School about the biblical Israelites. The grandson of two Protestant ministers, Wyman earned his Ph.D. in history at Harvard University. His dissertation chronicled the Roosevelt administration’s policies toward German Jewish refugees in the late 1930s, a controversial topic for the time. In those days, most Americans still regarded President Roosevelt as an icon and assumed he must have done whatever he could to aid Europe’s Jews. Prof. Wyman was exploring uncharted territory. “I didn’t have any personal reason to choose that topic,” he remarked later. “I was looking for something that nobody had yet written about. Considering where it led me, sometimes I think that I didn’t choose the subject. It chose me.”
He often said it was bashert that he selected the topic – a term he learned while teaching himself Yiddish in order to be able to do research in the Yiddish-language press of that era. Wyman’s dissertation became his first book, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941, which was published in 1968. It described how a combination of anti-foreigner sentiment, anti-Semitism, and the Roosevelt administration’s tight immigration policies kept most European Jewish refugees far from America’s shores. Paper Walls led to an offer from a major publisher, Pantheon, to publish a sequel that would cover the Holocaust years.
The research for the sequel was a herculean task, and it sometimes took a personal toll. Prof. Wyman’s studies led him to realize how little Christians in America did in response to news of the raging Holocaust, and that shook him to his core. He told me there were times when he “cried for days” over his discoveries, and he would have to take a break from the research. David Wyman was the most admirable kind of historian: a historian with a heart. Wyman was equally pained to learn of the petty intra-Jewish turf wars and personality clashes between American Jewish leaders that undermined the political effectiveness of the Jewish community during the Holocaust. That included the ugly spectacle of Jewish leaders persuading President Roosevelt to refrain from meeting with the rabbis who marched to the White House three days before Yom Kippur in 1943…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
On Topic Links
At Holocaust Remembrance Day Ceremony, Netanyahu Warns Iran: ‘Don’t Test Israel’s Resolve’: Jewish Press, Apr. 12, 2018—As Israel bowed its head in the memory of six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the main Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem to warn against the dangers of a nuclear Iran and told Tehran not to test Jerusalem’s resolve.
Trump Yom HaShoah Message Pays Special Tribute to Warsaw Ghetto Fighters on 75th Anniversary of Uprising: Algemeiner, Apr. 12, 2018—US President Donald Trump’s Yom HaShoah — Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day — message on Thursday singled out the Jewish fighters of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising for special tribute.
Every Holocaust Story Matters: Nira Berry, Algemeiner, Apr. 12, 2018—To people on the street, my mother — Sheila Bernard z”l — looked like an average woman. She played tennis and golf; she enjoyed bridge, opera, theater, and many other things.
Exposé: The Depth of Anti-Israel Hate on American Campuses: Noah Beck, Arutz Sheva, Mar. 30, 2018—About six months after Andrew Pessin posted on his Facebook profile a defense of Israel during its 2014 war against Hamas, the once popular Connecticut College philosophy professor was subjected to an academic smear campaign.
