Two Mournful Violins

By Dr. Myron Kuropas

Why would anyone be upset with a Canadian Museum for Human Rights?  The problem, apparently, centers around preferential treatment by a museum advisory board which granted permanent gallery space to the Holocaust and Canada’s aboriginal peoples.  

That’s just fine with Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress.  Mr. Farber recently applauded the U.S. Office of Special Investigations (OSI) for its untiring efforts against John Demjanjuk.  “It is comforting that there are authorities in the world who still pursue justice for Nazi war crimes,” he wrote in the December 4, 2009 issue of The Toronto Star.  Acquitted in Israel for crimes at Treblinka, Ukrainian American John Demjanjuk is currently on trial in Germany for the deaths of thousands of Jews at Sobibor.

During a recent interview in a Jewish Canadian publication, Mr. Farber argued that the Holocaust deserves a prominent place in the Museum because it “redefined the limits of human depravity,” and “was also the foundation for our modern human rights legislation...”

Ukrainian Canadians believe other groups should also have permanent exhibitions in a museum devoted to human rights.  Led by Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association director of research Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, they accept the concept of a permanent exhibit for the Holocaust and aboriginals, but believe that the Holodomor and the Canadian internment camps are also worthy of prominence in the Museum.

Mr. Farber’s viewpoint is nothing new.  It is part of two unalterable positions taken by the Jewish establishment for decades - two melodies played by two mournful violins, if you will. The first melody intones that the Holocaust is unique, a genocide like no other because it was aimed solely at Jews.  This isn’t quite true, of course, since Roma, homosexuals and other “untermenschen”, including Ukrainians, were  murdered by the Nazis as well, solely because of their ethnicity or sexual orientation.

The second Jewish melody informs us that the more people know about the Holocaust, the less likely a similar genocide will be repeated.  The political chattering class and the educational establishment agree.  U.S. Vice-President Al Gore played this melody on the first anniversary of the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., when he declared:  “In order to prevent such an atrocity from ever happening again, those who care must tell the story.” And tell it they have with thousands of articles, hundreds of books, and dozens of movies and museums.  Did anything change?  Hardly. Genocides continued all over the world - Cambodia, Rawanda, Bosnia and Darfur to mention but four.  Did Holocaust education protect the Jews?  Not really.  Although Holocaust denial was ruled a crime in many European countries, anti-Semitism is rising.  As Sam Shulman pointed out in a brilliant piece last January in The Weekly Standard (“Holocaust Hegemony...and Its Moral Pitfalls”), anti-Semitism in Europe has returned with a vengeance. “Jewish populations in Sweden are leaving entire cities,” he writes. “The retired chief of Holland’s major conservative party advised Jews who are ‘identifiably Jewish’ to leave the country, because the Dutch state cannot protect them from anti-Semitic violence. It’s not Holocaust deniers who commit attacks on individual Jews in Dutch cities.”  Those who taunt rabbis are fully aware of the Holocaust because it’s been part of their school curriculum for decades.

Another example of Holocaust hegemony is the recent attack on Yale professor Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.  Although he denies the Holodomor was a genocide, Dr. Snyder offers a refreshingly balanced approach to understanding Europe’s two greatest mass murderers.  The Holodomor is described at length by Dr. Snyder, as are Stalin’s other genocides.  The Holocaust receives even more attention and analysis in Dr. Snyder’s book.  Not enough, apparently.  In the eyes of leftist reviewers in the Guardian, writes Mr. Schulman, “Snyder is an unwitting abetter of the ‘double genocide - the notion that Hitler’s crimes were one genocide, and the crimes of Stalin, though different in many respects, were another.  Communists and fellow travellers are passionate adherents of the notion that Jewish Holocaust is nonpareil.”  Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff, for example, claimed that Professor Snyder was guilty of moral equivalence, robbing “the Shoah of its universally accepted uniqueness and historical significance.” The left agrees, not because they especially like Jews (they don’t), but because focusing on Hitler takes the spotlight off of Stalin.

The violins can still be heard in Canada but the melody may be changing. Writing in the Jewish Post and News, Bernie Bellan believes Professor Luciuk may have a point. “No doubt, the Holocaust stands apart from other genocides in terms of its deliberate targeting of an entire people for extermination. But in terms of severity, the Holodomor may have actually cost more lives,” writes Mr. Bellan.  “Ukrainian Canadians feel marginalized by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights... As such, the Museum is driving a wedge between Jews and Ukrainians,” he concludes.

Is the tide turning?  Are Jews putting down their violins and listening?  Would be nice.