Montreal, August 28, 2024
Once again the pro-Netanyahu organizations which compose the Israel Lobby in Canada have targeted a public personality with the spurious charge of antisemitism.
Several Zionist organizations have demonized Fred Hahn, the president of CUPE Ontario, as being antisemitic because he posted a cartoon critical of Israel, prompting CUPE’s National Executive Board to call on the recently-re-elected Hahn to resign as General Vice-President of CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees).
A recent press release from Independent Jewish Voices Canada sums it up nicely:
“Hahn’s alleged crime? During the recent Paris Olympics, Hahn re-posted a satiric video showing an Israeli diver (clearly representing the State of Israel) turning, mid-plunge, into a bomb and destroying a street scene and killing children in Gaza. Rather than seeing the social media post as the criticism of Israel that it is, groups like CIJA, B’nai Brith Canada and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center opportunistically insist that it is directed against Jews. Following a well-worn pattern, these organizations are running the antisemitism charge up the flagpole to see who salutes it.”
This follows, not surprisingly on the heels of the revocation of the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund of Canada and that of the Ne’eman Foundation of Canada. The graphic images of Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza have identified it as a rogue state in the eyes of the world. The increasing attacks by pro-Israel organizations in Canada against all those who are critical of Israel are proportional to that reality. The cries of ‘antisemitism’ are meant to deflect denunciations of Israeli war crimes by painting them with the epithet of antisemitism.
These pro-Israel organizations have a long history of targeting and demonizing any and all individuals and organizations that dare to criticize Israeli apartheid and war crimes enacted against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the occupied Palestinian West Bank and Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem. This is not the first time that these Zionist organizations have targeted CUPE.
In May 2006, the Ontario wing of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) voted unanimously to pass a resolution to support the international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until Israel recognized the Palestinian right to self-determination.
In 2009, CUPE Ontario President Sid Ryan defended a new resolution which he stated “broadens and deepens” the 2006 resolution on Israel to support a campaign of economic boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel for its occupation of Gaza. Ryan likened CUPE’s boycotts to those of Gandhi, stating that “It’s following a long tradition and a peaceful tradition of using the pressures of a boycott in a peaceful way to bring pressure to bear on the state of Israel to end this illegal occupation.”
More recently there has been a concerted effort by Zionist groups to oust the United Nations Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese who has dared to denounce the horrendous living conditions to which the Palestinians are being subjugated by the ongoing Israeli-imposed genocide. She has also pointed to the ‘onerous’ fact that Israel, as a hostile military illegal occupier of Palestinian territories has no ‘right- to self-defense’ in those territories which it occupies, including Gaza. She has also correctly pointed out that a population under hostile military occupation has the right to defend itself against that military occupation by all possible means (excluding harming civilian populations).
Quite recently, Zionist organizations have succeeded in forcing the resignation of Birju Dattani as head of the Canadian Human Rights Commission before he could even take office. Dattani – the first Muslim and racialized Canadian citizen to be named to the post – has made the onerous and ‘antisemitic’ endorsement of the BDS movement as a non-violent answer to the Israel-Palestine conflict. In an interview with the National Post, Dattani said, “I spoke on many panels as a graduate student with people holding a range of views. This does not mean I shared or agreed with the views of other panelists.” That these Zionist organizations have ‘stretched the truth’ in the case of Birju Dattani is an understatement. They are, however, experts at stretching the truth.
Take the latest example of their continuing McCarthy-like witch-hunt against any and all endorsements of Palestinian rights: the attack against the organizers of Ottawa’s Gay Pride festival who made the ‘awful’ mistake of publicly and rightfully characterizing the ongoing ‘Israel-Hamas’ war as human rights abuses against Palestinians. Eleven days before this year’s Gay Pride festival was to begin on Aug. 17, Capital Pride released a “solidarity with Palestine” statement addressing the “escalating levels of violence in Israel and Palestine.” They were, of course, denounced. No surprise there. As one would say in French: ‘L’antisémisme pour toutes les sauces.’.
The boycott was endorsed by an Ottawa children’s hospital, the University of Ottawa ( the same university whose faculty of medicine suspended Dr. Yipeng Ge for pro-Palestinian posts he had made on social media. Dr. Yipeng Ge has since resigned even though the U of Ottawa agreed to reinstate him), some civil servants and the Mayor of Ottawa, Mark Sutcliffe. Joseph P. McCarthy is alive and well in Canada. (Are you or have you ever been critical of Israel?)
It is to be noted that not one of the pro-Israel Zionist organizations named above – CIJA, the B’nai Brith or the Friends of Simon Weisenthal have made one peep regarding the ‘more than plausible” genocide which is being enacted against the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza (using the mantra of ‘Hamas’ as the excuse for bombing Gaza into the Stone Age) and pogroms being undertaken by the zealot Jewish settlers and Israeli Occupation Forces in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, which Ronan Bar, Israel’s head of the Shin Bet security service has referred to as ‘Jewish terrorism.’ Israel’s extreme-right party led by the zealot Ben-Gvir published an ad in Israeli newspapers opposing a hostage deal with Hamas and criticizing Shin Bet security service chief Ronen Bar.
Nor have these same pillars of the Israel Lobby in Canada (and Quebec) denounced the Mayor (of the tiny kingdom) of Hampstead, Jeremy Levi’s vocal support for genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, specifically the Palestinian children there. No denunciation either of the ‘proud Zionist’ Anthony Housefather’s unconditional support for Israel’s murderous campaign in Gaza. No critique of the five Canadian Members of Parliament who went to Israel in November of 2023 to voice their unconditional support for Israel’s war effort.
Let us give a brief overview of the effects of Israel’s genocide in Gaza:
There are now more than 40, 000 Palestinian deaths and more than 90, 000 injured. The majority of the victims are women and children. (There are thousands of missing Palestinians buried under the rubble left by the Israeli carpet-bombing which has now gone on unceasingly since October 2023, so that the actual number of deaths is still unknown). Some 80% of infrastructures have been destroyed: hospitals, medical clinics, cultural centers, schools, mosques, churches, residential buildings. There are virtually no trees that have been left standing. The Palestinians are succumbing to the man-made famine, calculated and imposed by a depraved extreme-right coalition in Tel Aviv. (An opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz stated that “Netanyahu and his nightmare coalition are the ‘New Antisemites.’) A Haaretz editorial of August 26, 2024 entitled “Israel’s Jewish Jihad Organization” states that the “Jewish terrorists are the military wing of the organization to which Ben-Gvir belongs and whose interests he represents as a cabinet minister”.
More than one million Palestinians have been and continue to be displaced by Israel’s genocidal occupation army according to a plan meant to terrorize and dehumanize them, bandied about from one center to another and murdered in areas that were supposed to enhance their security. Still, not a peep out of the Israel Lobby or their political servants at all levels of government: federal, provincial and municipal.
More than 500 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have been killed by Jewish settlers since October, aided by the Israeli Occupation Forces. Some 9, 000 Palestinians have been taken prisoner in the West Bank and the systematic rape of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention centers such as Tse Deiman has been confirmed. Moreover, Israeli authorities defend the rape of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers as ‘legitimate.’150, 000 Israelis have gone into the streets of Tel Aviv demanding that Netanyahu resign. Yet, the pro-Israel organizations mentioned above – these ‘Netanyahu-lovers, as they should rightfully be labeled – have absolutely nothing to say which is remotely critical of Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime in Tel Aviv! The only ‘trick’ they have left in the book is to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and to slander all those who dare to decry their hypocrisy and Israeli war crimes as being ‘antisemites.’ Jews who dare to stand up to their form of blackmail are ‘self-hating Jews’.
As per the attack on Sid Ryan some years back and the slanderous attacks on a host of other organizations and individuals over the years, the attack on Fred Hahn follows a calculated plan meant to weaponize antisemitism as the means of deflecting the legitimate criticism of Israel’s genocidal campaign against innocent and defenseless Palestinian civilians in Gaza. It follows years of a policy of intimidation supported by large elements of the political class in Canada and the corporate media. It is to the shame and dishonor of CUPE’s National Executive Board that it calls for Fred Hahn to resign. They allow Zionist organizations that tacitly, if not explicitly, whitewash Israeli war crimes to intimidate them.
It is the continued illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, the brutal and dehumanizing system of apartheid and the terrible living conditions under which the Palestinian population lives, which causes the spiral of violence which is now unfolding in the form of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The extremism of the present Israeli coalition government should be seen not as a new phenomenon, but rather the logical playing out of the inherent fascism and racism of Zionist revisionism as initially envisioned by the extreme right-wing fascist Vladimir ‘Zeev’ Jabotinsky whose vision has been carried forth by a succession of Israeli coalition governments from Menahem Begin through to Benjamin Netanyahu and his zealots Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.
Those pro-Israel Zionist organizations and their political allies are tacit (if not explicit) allies of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Ergo, they are complicit in the genocide taking place in Gaza.
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Contact: info@paju.org
