June 28, 2008

 

Letter to Stephen Harper regarding his Human Rights award from B'nai Brith

Dear Sir Prime Minister:


It is announced with some apparent pride that you are the first Canadian to receive the B’nai Brith International President’s Gold Medallion, "in recognition of your Government’s efforts to fight discrimination and uphold human rights in Canada and around the world".

You further claim that "this acknowledges that the actions of your Government are guided by the principle that hate and discrimination have no place in a civilized society.”

Apparently you share this dubious prize with the likes and infamy of Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, two people that advocated and carried out policies of ethnic cleansing, theft of land, discrimination, de facto and de jure institutionalized racism, widespread torture, mass illegal detention without charge, targeted assassination, collective punishment and other Crimes against Humanity which are on-going to this day. Your policies continue Canada’s pretended, delusional 'peace' and 'human rights promoting record' in the Middle-East that in reality serves only to protect/defend illegal Zionist conquest, illegal brutal occupation and consolidation of illegal occupation, Palestinian dispossession/denial of Palestinian self-determination, illegal Zionist "for-Jews-only" settlements/roads/services, theft of Palestinian land, collective punishment, closure, denial of the Palestinian refugees' Right of Return, the use of food and medicine as a weapon of war, Zionist discrimination/racism against Israel's Palestinian-Israeli minority and general policies that are best summarized as "for-Jews-only" Apartheid in all its day to day ugly brutality.

Your government's policies in the Middle-East are in fact promoting hate and discrimination contrary to the empty, insipid clichés, platitudes and rhetoric by its enthusiastic support of Israel’s brutal, unrelenting and on-going Crimes against Humanity. One concrete example of this support relates to Canada's bestowing of charitable status to the Jewish National Fund (JNF) which is a key, blunt, Zionist instrument of Palestinian dispossession, used for the criminal laundering of stolen Palestinian land and the ethnic cleansing of the land's (Israel's/Palestine's) indigenous population (see Canada Park). It is tantamount to Canada granting tax charitable status to an organization that would have promoted anti-Black discrimiation/racism and dispossession in Apartheid South Africa. A simple, internal review of this status would reveal that this is flagrantly inconsistent with Canadian law and would be a step in the right direction. If nothing else, you and your ministers would learn the truth about the JNF.

Perhaps in time, as president Carter, Desmund Tutu and many others have courageously done, you will fill this obvious gaping deficit of knowledge about this conflict. You may then apologize for not having done more for justice and peace in the Middle-East and for not opposing the racist, settler-colonial policies of Israel's putrescent “for-Jews-only” Apartheid state. Such a state has as much a “right” to defend itself or exist, as arguably as Apartheid South Africa had a “right” to defend itself or exist.

Rather than call this a Human Rights prize, I think a growing number of Canadians, including increasing numbers of justice/peace-loving Jews throughout Canada, throughout the world and even in Israel, would more accurately describe it as an Inhuman Rights Award that you received and cynically accepted.

Serge Naggiar

Outremont, Qc


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