Anti-Semitism 'beast' is back, British MP warns
Last Updated: Monday, November 2, 2009 | 11:33 AM ET
CBC News
Graffiti at an Ottawa cemetery was removed on Oct. 23 after vandals spray-painted swastikas and anti-Semitic profanities the night before. (Chad Pawson/CBC)A British parliamentarian scheduled to appear Monday before an investigation into anti-Jewish sentiments in Canada has warned that anti-Semitism is on the rise around the world.
British Labour MP Denis MacShane, who headed a 2005 hearing into anti-Semitism in his home country, said in an op-ed article on Monday that campaigns targeting Jews are gaining traction in Europe and around the world and that governments must respond.
"The beast of anti-Semitism is back," MacShane wrote in the Ottawa Citizen, citing an incident just over a week ago in Ottawa when swastikas and anti-Semitic profanities were spray-painted in red across headstones, walls and a sign at a Jewish cemetery in the city's south end.
"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."
MacShane said politicians representing anti-Jewish political parties from Britain, Hungary, France, Belgium and Italy all have seats in the European Parliament, a sign that views once abhorred after the Second World War have become fashionable again.
"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," he wrote.
MacShane is one of three speakers set to appear Monday before the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism, kicking off what the government panel expects to be a month of hearings.
Former German politician Gert Wisskirchen and Charles Small, the director of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism at Yale University, are also expected to speak Monday in Ottawa in the first of eight scheduled hearings.
The parliamentary coalition's steering committee chair, Conservative MP Scott Reid, has said he hopes the three men speaking Monday will be able to help put the problem of international anti-Semitism into context and provide insight into how recommendations made in other countries might apply in Canada.
The hearings are scheduled to end on Dec. 8.
