What I want to do this morning is to juxtapose two examples of what is being said and what is REALLY being said.
One gives you excerpts from an article in today's "Canadian Jewish News" issue titled "CJC calls for laws to fight hate on the Internet." (CJC stands for Canadian Jewish Congress)
The other comes from notes a ZGram reader took while attending a lecture on "Combating Holocaust Denial" that took place December 2, 1996. This was a lecture given at a place called "Hillel Jewish Student Center" in Montreal and touted as its "lure" the following:
"What do Zundel, Keegstra, Ross and Smith have in common? They're all well-known Holocaust Deniers."
The Canadian Jewish News article deals with a report edited by Bernie Farber - Congress Director of Community Relations and, I understand, an avid ZGram reader - prepared by Congress for the Access and Equity Centre of Metro Toronto.
It lets its readers know that "(t)he Internet is not sacrosanct."
In this report, the Canadian Jewish Congress urges Metro Council to initiate a number of steps against "racist" groups, including advocating the use of criminal and civil laws to tackle "hate" on the Internet. It also urges Council ". . . to gather data and monitor hate groups on the Internet."
It wants Council to establish a forum for Internet service providers to develop a code of ethics for Internet use. It furthermore suggests that it would be a good idea for Metro Council to establish its own Web sites with links to other web pages on ". . . hate groups and how to respond to them."
It urges civil servants ". . . to recognize the existence of the problem and be prepared to confront manifestations of hate with strong public statements and by ostracizing hate mongers from city-owned buildings."
It strongly urges Council to address the issue of "computer hate", which ". . . has to be seen as a serious criminal activity."
Among the recommendations offered in the report are the following:
- Metro Council should ask their representatives on the Metro Toronto Police Services Board "to press for the transformation of the police hate crimes unit to a dedicated full time unit whose sole function is to investigate all hate-related crimes within Metro Toronto."
- Metro Toronto should press local school boards to offer mandatory courses on anti-racism.
- Metro Council's Equity Center should obtain public education tools such as CD Roms (computer discs), videos and printed material on confronting white supremacy
- Metro Council should refuse to give grants or business to those in the private sector who offer facilities to hate mongers.
Traditionally, Metro Councils' job around North America is to see to it that potholes in the road are fixed, garbage is taken out, and that the sewers work. In other words, what you have here is one more power grab by special interests to use a tax supported public office, the Toronto mayor's office, to act as cybercop and censor. You see a special interest lobby capturing a government body and getting it to do things which are none of its blank business! You and I pay for it.
To the above sanctimonious stance, as outlined by the formal report promoted by the CJC article, I juxtapose the following informal notes, taken from the lecture where the guest speaker, one David Silberklang, is Chief Historian, Yad Vashem Museum, Israel.
The person who attended this lecture and sent us the notes qualified his report by saying that the quotes were not verbatim, but the best he could reconstruct from his notebook. With this in mind, I put his observations in quotation marks to set them off from each other.
"History is a combination of facts and their interpretation. At Yad Vashem there are 50 million pages of Holocaust related documents. There is simply a huge volume of documents."
- "Revisionism has been legitimate for decades. But the deniers have a political agenda. They work on ignorance. The vast majority of humanity is ignorant. These people are not historians; they are liars and anti-Semites."
- "What is their agenda? They are anti-Leftist, anti-Communist, anti-British Imperialists. Furthermore, they claim that the Nazis and the Zionists were in cahoots. The plan is to rehabilitate the Third Reich and to say the Nazis didn't do those things."
- "The deniers are anti-Western civilization. The Nazis wanted to redefine Christianity. Christianity says that all men are created in God's image, therefore all are equal. The Nazis said no, we have races, with us at the top. So humanity would be in a perpetual master-slave relationship."
- "These Holocaust mythologists claim it is a colossal fraud, with two results: (our) own state, and money reparations. The reparations are symbolic. One cannot really repair the damage.
- "They are anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-humanist. There exists a real danger when they hit mainstream, since they use the right of freedom of speech when given the opportunity."
- "It is worrisome that some deniers are gaining in popularity. In France there is Jean-Marc Le Pen. David Duke won 35% of the vote in Louisiana."
- "Some of the individuals involved are Faurisson from France, David Irving who is a good writer and is a trained journalist who cracks jokes about Jews when given a forum."
- "Their audience is intelligent. Since the Holocaust is almost unbelievable, what is needed is more courses (in schools) and more museums."
- "You see, if you minimize the deaths, you minimize the tragedy. They claim that the Anne Frank Diary is a fraud, but it is the most widely read book on the subject. The Dutch government spent a huge amount of effort and manpower to disprove their claims. There have been some doctored diaries that have (been) published, so the deniers grab (them) and say, here is proof."
- "We simply cannot get all the evidence. If you go to Birkenau in Poland, all the gas chambers were destroyed. The explosions destroyed all the evidence."
- "What must be done is to discredit them at their roots. We need to build the attack using advertising and marketing."
- "People didn't ask those kinds of questions before. The deniers are using (the questioners' skepticism) as a wedge to destroy Western civilization. Zundel says things that could lead to other things; he hasn't said, 'go kill Jews.'"
- "Bringing Zundel to trial was a mistake. He should have been dealt with otherwise. The deniers are our enemy."
- "There are discussion groups on the Internet. What to do? I have no real formula. It is morally correct not to debate, but it is insufficient. In Canada, there are laws against Revisionism. The laws help, but they find a loophole. We should never debate, because if we lose, it would be terrible."
I leave you with that thought.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"Nothing is more indicative of the real levers of power than the subjects that are taboo . . . The turning point will come when these taboos (are) broken. They are not dictated by sensitive feelings, but by simple fear, exactly as are those behind the Iron Curtain."
(Alexander Jordan)