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Irwin Cotler on the new anti-Semitism
by Scott Gilbreath ~ February 15th, 2009
Canadian MP Irwin Cotler (Lib – Mount-Royal) is speaking in London this week at an international conference on anti-Semitism. Ruth Gledhill has obtained an advance copy of Mr Cotler’s speech. Here are the opening paragraphs.
Global Antisemitism: Assault on Human Rights
[...]
What we are witnessing today – and which has been developing incrementally, sometimes imperceptibly, and even indulgently, for some thirty-five years now – is a new sophisticated, globalizing, virulent and even lethal Antisemitism, reminiscent of the atmospherics of the 30s, and without parallel or precedent since the end of the Second World War.The new anti-Jewishness overlaps with classical Antisemitism but is distinguishable from it. It found early juridical, and even institutional, expression in the United Nations’ ‘Zionism is Racism’ resolution but has gone dramatically beyond it. This new Antisemitism almost needs a new vocabulary to define it; however, it can best be identified using a rights-based juridical perspective.
In a word, classical or traditional Antisemitism is the discrimination against, denial of, or assault upon, the rights of Jews to live as equal members of whatever host society they inhabit. The new Antisemitism involves the discrimination against the right of the Jewish people to live as an equal member of the family of nations – the denial of, and assault upon, the Jewish people’s right even to live – with Israel as the ‘collective Jew among the nations’.
The whole thing can be downloaded here.
Only last Friday, an advisor to the British government on extremism, Maqsood Ahmed, was rebuked for forwarding an e-mail claiming that “Jews” are behind several websites criticising Islam.
The conference is co-hosted by Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). The ICCA was co-founded by Mr Cotler and British Labour MP John Mann.
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February 18th, 2009 at 04:26 PM
[...] IRWIN COTLER on the new anti-Semitism …. [...]