Global anti-Semitism demands a united response

The recent desecration of a Jewish cemetery in south Ottawa should be a wake-up call. The beast of anti-Semitism is back.

In Europe, politicians who deny the Holocaust or trivialize the massacre of Jews are elected to the European Parliament. The Swedish left-wing paper, Aftonbladet, recently published an article claiming that Israeli soldiers kidnap and kill Palestinians to extract and sell their organs. This is the blood libel first put into circulation in the middle ages in England by anti-Jewish priests.

Another of the old anti-Semitic stereotypes is that of the secret cabal or lobby manipulating events behind the scenes to the profit and interest of Jews. A U.S.-based website called "Uncle Semite" has just published a 19-volume "catalogue of Jewish names" with 220,000 listed so that they can be sent anti-Semitic e-mails.

In Britain, the leader of the anti-Jewish [British] National Party has been elected to the European Parliament. There, alongside openly anti-Semitic MEPs from Hungary, France, Belgium and Italy, he enjoys parliamentary immunities and lavish allowances and expenses to spend peddling his poison.

Or take the Hungarian MP, Oszkar Molnar, who speaks for the main opposition party, Fidez. He said Hungary was under threat from "global capital -- Jewish capital if you like -- which wants to devour the entire world, especially Hungary." His party is set to win power next year and his anti-Jewish remarks have been defended by the party leadership.

Then there are the difficulties of Britain's Conservative Party. Its leader, David Cameron supports Israel and is a sincere friend of Britain's Jewish community. But his hardline anti-EU associates have made an alliance in Europe with oddball Latvian politicians who celebrate the Waffen SS conscripts from Latvia despite the widespread massacres of Jews in the country during the war. British members of the European Parliament are led by a Polish politician, Michal Kaminski, who was formerly a member of a neo-Nazi party as a young man and has said Jews should apologize for killing Poles in the Second World War.

It is as if Europe's nerve-endings on anti-Semitism have atrophied and a new tolerance of what a few years ago was politics beyond the pale is now the norm. At the same time global anti-Semitism has the endorsement of state leaders such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and is propagated throughout Europe by a network of Wahabi mosques and preachers financed by Saudi Arabia. Egypt recently tried to install its Culture Minister, Farouk Hosni, as head of Unesco despite his call to burn Israeli books at Cairo University. He was defeated but only by a handful of votes and nation after nation at Unesco were ready to vote for a man with his record as the UN's education and culture supreme.

Dislike of Israel has permitted dislike of Jews to become tolerated politics again. Of course to criticize Israel is not anti-Semitic. But Jews in Canada, Britain or elsewhere in the world should not be made to feel that their beliefs and affinities can face a new anti-Semitism when other forms of racism are combatted.

That is why the initiative of the Canadian Parliament to set up its own commission of inquiry into anti-Semitism, which will begin hearings today, is to be welcomed.

I have the honour of representing the British House of Commons after I chaired a similar commission of inquiry which reported in 2006. There was no doubt after our evidence sessions and visits outside of London that British Jews faced levels of anti-Semitic pressure that was not acceptable in a modern democracy. Girls frightened to wear a Star of David chain, boys jostled on their way home from school if they sported a kippa were minor incidents, if frightening enough for students. Worse were the attacks on rabbis or Hasidic students and the organized network of anti-Semitic Islamist ideologues making university life a misery for Jewish students if they did not bow to the anti-Israel hate of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Now is time for a fightback. Government departments, editors, university leaders, diplomats and all decent politicians have to wake up to the return of organized anti-Semitism in too many of the world's democracies. Canada is showing a lead in North America but the struggle against 21st-century anti-Semitism has to be global or it will fail.

Denis MacShane, a British MP, was No. 2 at the Foreign Office under Tony Blair. He chaired the British House of Commons Commission of Inquiry into Anti-Semitism. He will be talking about his new book "Globalising Hatred: the new Antisemitism" in Ottawa and Toronto.

Denis MacShane
Ottawa Citizen

Kaminski admits wearing 'fascist' symbol

Michal KaminskI, the Polish MEP at the centre of the controversy over David Cameron’s European alliances has admitted he wore the symbol of a totalitarion group, claims he had previously denied.

In an interview with the JC, Mr Kaminski was asked if he had ever said he was proud to wear the Chrobry Sword [pictured, left], the symbol of the National Radical Camp (ONR). Formed in 1934, the extreme rightwing, nationalist ONR- Falanga was largely a student movement, but practised violent anti-Semitism including attacks on Jewish students, buildings and businesses, organised boycotts of Jewish businesses and attacks on left wing groups. The group used the medieval symbol of the Mieczyk Chrobrego – the Chrobry sword. Mr KaminskI categorically denied knowledge of wearing the Chrobry sword symbol.

He told the JC: “No, I never wear it. I don’t even know which symbol you are referring to.”

But Mr KaminskI later issued a clarification, where he admitted he had worn the badge. He said: "I did wear the sword, which was used around a millennia ago to crown Polish Kings, on my lapel on occasions. After 1989 it was used as one of the symbols of the Christian National Union and many Conservative politicians would wear it, including politicians now in the Civic Platform.

“In recent years it has been taken as a symbol by the Far Right. Although it is not the same, there are similarities with how the BNP in Britain has taken the Union Jack as their symbol. When I felt the symbol started having this meaning I stopped wearing it and I asked the rest of my party to stop too.”

He added: “I acknowledge that it is possible that my pronunciation was unclear, so I am happy to clarify his position on this controversial symbol."

JC

Cameron's unsavoury European ally

The Polish MEP Michał Kamiński is an antisemite, homophobe and nationalist. But David Cameron is courting him

Michał Kamiński, the Polish MEP and leader of the European Conservative and Reformist grouping in the European parliament, has been invited to attend the Conservative party conference. His opposition to the Lisbon treaty has led British Conservative MEPs to view him, and the Law and Order Party (PiS) that he represents, as natural allies.

But the picture is far from simple. In eastern Europe the road from communism to democracy has been a difficult one. While it has brought freedom, that freedom has at times meant the freedom to hate. Kamiński has impeccable anti-communist credentials. He has experience both as a parliamentarian and adviser to the Polish president. He has an equally strong record as an antisemite, homophobe and Polish nationalist. His politics fit as easily into the Polish as they do into the European context. He is at ease with both constituencies.

In the last years of communism in the 1980s, Kamiński belonged to the Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski (National Rebirth of Poland – NOP), a youth nationalist organisation that took as its inspiration the ideology of Roman Dmowski. At the same time, NOP declared its ideological proximity to the Falanga, a fascist youth organisation established under the umbrella of the National Democratic movement in the late 1930s. Dmowski and the Falanga were committed to a Polish state on racial principles, where the Jewish community would not have a place.

During the first years after the fall of communism, NOP openly proclaimed its determination to establish a national state. In its fight against the perceived evils of western influence, NOP mobilised skinhead groups that became notorious for attacking leftwing parties and the opposition. In the 1990s Kamiński moved on to became a deputy for the Nationalist Christian ZChN party. More recently, he has assumed the role of presidential advisor, since he is believed to be a smooth and well-connected operator in the Polish and European political scenes.

Fortunately for those who are trying to understand the man, he has left a good record of his political activism. A consistent element of his pronouncements has been his desire to defend Poland's interests against its enemies and critics. In 2001, when the leftwing president Aleksander Kwaśniewski made an official apology for atrocities committed by Poles against Jews in the town of Jedwabne in 1941, Kamiński made a public declaration in defence of those who felt that Poles had nothing to feel ashamed of. Likewise, his electoral call for "Poland for Poles" could have only one meaning in the Polish context: that non-Catholics had no place in post-communist Poland. In 2005, Kamiński publicly used a particularly vulgar phrase to describe homosexuals when interviewed on television about the then mayor of Warsaw's refusal to give permission for a gay pride march.

When Kamiński wants to be seen as a European statesman, his earlier pronouncements are quoted against him. His response has been to refuse to engage with his critics. The reason for this disdain lies in his confidence that what he has said – and the values to which he very likely still subscribes – cannot injure his political base in Poland. In a country where no politician, clergyman or activist has been prosecuted for antisemitic pronouncements, even though these are neither few nor discreet, what Kamiński has to say on the Jewish question is widely condoned. To the horror of those Poles who had hoped for a process of reconciliation between Jews and non-Jews after the debates on Jedwabne, an attempt was made last year to prosecute Jan Gross, the author of a book about Jedwabne and a more recent book on antisemitism after the war, for slandering Poland.

Tolerance of sexual diversity, meanwhile, is not something most Poles understand or want to understand. Since sexuality is seen through the prism of the Polish woman's duty to bear children for the nation, the rights of individuals and pleas for tolerance fall on deaf ears. Kamiński's contempt for homosexuals is matched by the contempt of the ruling Polish centre-right for women and their right to assert control over their bodies.

If Kamiński is made to feel politically comfortable in Strasbourg and at the Conservative party conference, it will confirm his conviction that good use can be made of him and the Polish PiS grouping because of their opposition to the Lisbon treaty. Kamiński's friends have previously threatened to refuse to co-operate with other conservatives when Kamiński was not elected as vice-president of the European parliament for the Conservative and Reformist bloc. If they withdrew now, the bloc would be very close to dissolution, because parliamentary rules require a grouping to bring together MEPs from 7 countries.

Kamiński's previous visit to the United Kingdom was in 1999, when he led a delegation to comfort General Pinochet, pending his extradition to Spain. Kamiński gave the ailing general a replica of the Black Madonna icon. Both men were apparently deeply moved and Kamiński declared this to be the most uplifting moment of his entire life. One wonders if his meeting with David Cameron will have the same impact.

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Cameron's revolting neo-Nazi connection

David Cameron has evidently forged some unfortunate connections with Europe’s neo-fascists through his Conservative MEPs. In this week’s New Statesman, out tomorrow, the excellent James Macintyre blows the lid on the Tory MEPs’ careless connection with the disgusting, neo-Nazi National Revival of Poland party (NOP) and its former big-wig, Michal Kaminski.

I have early sight of Macintyre’s piece and it’s worth quoting his second para to give you a taste of this nexus that the Conservatives have with Europe’s neo-Nazis, which they had better sever pretty sharpish:

“The new chair of the Conservatives and Reformists group, which includes the 24 Tory MEPs, is Michal Kaminski. He belongs to Poland’s Law and Justice party, one of whose MPs, Artur Górski, described the election of Barack Obama in the US as “a disaster” and “the end of the civilisation of the white man”. Kaminski is a former member of the neo-Nazi National Revival of Poland party (NOP), which, in a direct quotation from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, says in its manifesto that “Jews will be removed from Poland, and their possessions will be confiscated”. In 2001, he condemned his own president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, for apologising over the Polish massacre of hundreds of Jews in Jedwabne in July 1941.”

This kind of lazily-constructed relationship is the kind of thing that an aspiring governing party in the UK has to police extremely carefully. It’s a truly shocking connection, because these anti-semitic monsters in Poland are truly, deeply shocking.

Cameron’s shadow chancellor, George Osborne, drifted stupidly into a connection with dodgy Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Cameron should pay attention to who his MPs and MEPs are taking ale with. And this is an odious European flank that could cause him any amount of trouble in the months ahead. He needs to deal with it today, or tomorrow may not belong to him.

Telegraph