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Publisher and Editor-in-Chief SAMUEL KAPLAN
Our 65tli Year
Since 1930 the only weekly publication serving Jewry of the Pacific Northwest
An Independent Newspaper
Advertising Manager RON FREEOMAN
Editor ARIELA FRIEDMANN
City Desl< LYNDA ROSENBERG
Thursday, February 23,1995
Published 47 times per year by Anglo-Jewish Publishers Ltd. 3268 Heather St., Vancouver. British Coiumbia V5Z 3K5 Subscription in Canada: $45.00 per year pius $3.15 G.S.T.
The Hon. Shiela Finestone is following in the footsteps of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau in refusing to consider compensatory payments for Chinese. Ukrainian and other immigrants into Canada for their degrading experiences. They were forced to submit to poll taxes and internment, among others, in the early years of this century when active racial and religious discrimination was a blatant factor in Canadian immigration policy.
The government will go no further than an apology to the injured groups because allocating financial compensation, it is argued, would open a Pandora's box of claims. The government, they contend, cannot, in principle, be held accountable for the moral sins of past administrations.
This is a disappointing response. In democratic societies governments usually honor treaties signed by previous governments. Democratic governments inherit benefits and obligations contracted by former administrations. They also inherit liabilities. Governments cannot and do not summarily reject deficits accumulated by their antecedents by arguing that they are not responsible for past misdeeds.
Similarly, the current Liberal government cannot dismiss so cavalierly the legitimate demands of Canadians of Chinese, Ukrainian and Sikh origin, who seek more than a mea culpa nod in their direction for wrongs committed against them in the past.
There are several important precedents to suggest that Ottawa's current policy in this matter is misguided. Fifty years after the end of World War I!, the German government continues to pay pension and compensation benefits to the victims of Nazi barbarism. Of course, there can be no comparison between the Nazis treatment of Jews, Gypsies and other groups during the war, and Canada's treatment of Chinese, Ukrainian and Sikhs.
What can be compared, however, is the principle
of accountability. Successor governments to the hated Nazi regime have always recognized their moral responsibility for the crimes committed by the Nazis. German governments from Adenauer to Kohl have always made a distinction between guilt, which they do not accept, and, moral responsibility — which they do.
A striking example of this principle, which shows that there is no statute of limitations on that kind of morality comes from Florida. On New Year's day in 1923, a white mob attacked the 120 black residents of the tiny hamlet of Rosewood, near Cedar Key.
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After a fruitless search for a black man who had allegedly assaulted a white woman, the mob destroyed every home and building in the area over several days. Six blacks were killed during the mob action.
On January 22, 1995 the state legislature of Florida acknowledged that it had failed to protect the black families of Rosewood and awarded a $2 Million compensation package to nine age'' survivors who were children when the rampage inst their families took place 72 years ago. The money is being provided to reimburse the people for loss of property and life. When final adjudication claims are concluded, the financial compensation may go higher.
In the light of these examples, the Canadian government should re-examine its policies towards righting the wrongs of the past. The decision, a few years ago, to award compensation to Japanese Canadians for their internment on the West Coast during World War II, should be extended to Chinese, Ukrainian and other groups seeking redress for the indignities they suffered.
It is our obligation as Canadians to recognize our responsibility for the sins of previous governments.
It is not a question of a Pandora's box; it is a question of elementary justice.
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report of the Network Measurement Project at the DEC Network Systems Laboratory in Palo Alto, California [available on request from the Nizkor Project; see "Viewpoint" sidebar].).
Having saturated a dozen or so newsgroups on the Internet with their version of history, the Holocaust-deniers would like nothing better than to be ignored by persons who know the truth.
They would love to have the field entirely to themselves — a field to which they have committed thousands upon thousands of dollars to publish their own version of history, to sell their books, and recruit members (CBC Primetime Documentary, Feb. 14, 1995).
Holocaust-denial can be crude anti-Semitism but it also can be — and is increasingly — extraordinarly slick and professional, masquerading as bona fide work of expert historians. To potentially millions of naive persons — for example, to those teenagers who have never read a book in their lives, who never read newspapers, who have little or no critical skills, but who do "cruise the Internet" (sometimes for hours on end) — Holocaust-denial looks like the truth. (Statistical studies published earlier this month report 48 million persons worldwide with Internet accounts).
Almost overnight, there has been a sea change in anti-Semitism: it has become hi-tech. And it is a menace that must be fought. Look at the last two issues of Response published by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. The issue last summer (vol. 15, no. 2) had three separate articles on anti-Semitism on the Internet. The latest issue
continues the warnings. (See also US News and World Report. Aug. 8, 1994, p. 52).
Holocaust-denial on the Internet won't go away; it gets worse by the day. Arguments about "legitimiz-ing" the falsehoods are moot. When the falsehoods, distortions and defamatory pronouncements are cascading in such volume, one can't afford the luxury of worrying about "legitimizing" them. One must fight back — quickly and with intense effort and broad-based support.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has sent to the U.S. Congress an appeal that legislation be enacted to "police" the Internet. Knowledgeable observers are virtually unanimous in their belief that the request will be impossible to implement, both for technological reasons and because it almost certainly will encounter insurmountable Constitutional challenges in the United States.
Here in Canada, the Federal Human Rights Commission has been looking into the possibility of recommending anti-hate legislation for the Internet. It is quickly emerging that the attempt will be aban-
Ei/iaervin Stark and Norman Swartz are members of the Jewish community concerned about Holocaust denial on Internet.
donded.
Jewish organizations and writers as well as anti-racist and multicultural groups who argued, as did Lipstadt only a few years ago, are now scrambling to reassess and abandon those arguments and to face up to the new technological realities. They see that the Holocaust-deniers have grabbed the initiative and that would-be
Orwellian rewriters of history have free access — free both of financial cost and of editorial overview ~ to thousands of subscribed readers on the Internet and potentially to millions more.
We — both the Jewish community and concerned non-Jews — need to recover lost ground. We need to fight back with the truth every single day.
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Dear Mr! Kaplan:
I just wanted The Bulletin to know that the Canadian Zionist Federation High School Debate held Feb. 16 included a sixth youth group.
The sixth youth group was Beth Israel Synagogue's USY and Kadima chapter, Vancouver Nitzachon. Nitzachon had two teams participating both in the senior debate and the junior debate. The senior team consisted of Mira Oreck, Lenny Epstein and Marc Chernoff and the members of the junior team were Michelle Vigod, Rachel Seelig and David Bluman.
JERUSALEM — A Pales-
tinian worker from Gaza has won $2 million in Israel's lottery, but has been unable to get to Tel Aviv to pick up his award because of the closure imposed on the territories. Hebrew daily Yediot Achronot reported that a man from Gaza City telephoned Israel's lottery offices, saying he had picked the winning numbers. The lottery was drawn two days after Israel sealed the West Bank and Gaza Strip due to a suicide bombing near Netanya that killed 21 Israelis.