OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged on Monday that his government will always stand up against the campaign of demonization, double standards and the delegitimization of Israel. (video)
Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaks at the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism conference in Ottawa. [Herman Cheung/PMO photo]
Michael Ignatieff, Leader of the Opposition, address
“When Israel – the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack – is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand,” Harper said at the Ottawa Conference on Combating Antisemitism.
“It is a responsibility of us all,” the prime minister added, to stand up to what he referred to as the “three D’s” – demonization, double standards and delegitimization.
More than 150 parliamentarians from 53 countries were on hand to hear Harper speak. They were in Ottawa to take part in the conference, which was organized by the second Inter-Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (ICCA). The inaugural conference was held in London, England, last year. The co-founders of the conference are John Mann, a Labour party MP from the United Kingdom, and Irwin Cotler, the Liberal MP for Mount Royal, who is the current Chairman of the ICCA..
Referring to Canada’s recent loss in its bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, Harper said: “Whether it is at the United Nations, or any other international forum, the easy thing to do is simply get along and go along with this anti-Israel rhetoric, to pretend it is just being even-handed, and to excuse oneself with the label of ‘honest broker.’ There are, after all, a lot more votes in being anti-Israel than in taking a stand. But as long as I am prime minister, whether it is at the UN or the Francophonie or anywhere else, Canada will take that stand, whatever the cost.”
Harper said that he had just returned from an official visit to Ukraine, where he laid a wreath at the monument at Babi Yar, the site of a massacre where more than 30,000 Jews and thousands of non-Jews were slaughtered. He referred to it as “a place of evil, evil at its most cruel, obscene and grotesque.”
He spoke emphatically about the importance and the need to remember the Holocaust. “Remembering the Holocaust is not merely an act of historical recognition.
It must also be an understanding and an undertaking – an understanding that the same threats exist today and an undertaking of a solemn responsibility to fight those threats.”
Seemingly directing his remarks at Holocaust deniers, and in particular at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was obliquely referred to as among those who threaten to “wipe Israel off the map,” the prime minister said: “While evil of this magnitude may be unfathomable, it is nonetheless a fact. It is a fact of history… Let us not forget that even now, there are those who would choose evil, and would launch another Holocaust if left unchecked.”
Harper congratulated the work of ICCA as well as that of the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, whose chair and vice-chair, respectively, are Conservative MP Scott Reid and Liberal MP Mario Silva.
He unambiguously asserted that “we must be relentless in exposing the new anti-Semitism [that targets the Jewish people by targeting the Jewish homeland]… not just because it is the right thing to do, but because history shows us and the ideology of the anti-Israel mob tells us all too well, if we listen to it, that those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are, in the longer term, a threat to us all.”