There were two dark shadows falling over the celebratory atmosphere of the 9th of November this week. The celebration was over the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The shadows bookended the first part of the week. You see, Nov. 9 was also the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht. And today is Remembrance Day, when we reflect on the price paid by so many for our freedoms.
The heroes we remember today fought and sacrificed to end the evil that was unleashed on Nov. 9, 1938. It is historically fitting that this date also encompasses a resolute triumph over yet another evil 51 years later. As I looked around at the world this week, and these three events, I had an uncomfortable feeling.
Just because of the events of the past several days, I felt it was important to tie these dates together. But I wasn't quite sure how.
The reasons for discomfiture this past week are clear enough. The UN General Assembly, led by the dictatorships and theocratic tyrannies that now control what could have been mankind's last best hope, voted to adopt the libelous Goldstone Report singling out only Israel for possible human rights violations in the Gaza conflict. Anne Bayefsky, human rights professor at Touro College and an accredited UN NGO participant, was physically removed from a debate on Goldstone when she dared criticize the process and the bias. The Palestinian representative asked "Have we captured her yet?" Tariq Ramadan — an apologist for radical Islam who goes as far as to refuse to condemn the stoning of women — speaks to a packed hall at the Universite de Montréal.
Dark clouds played as mist in my mind. All is not right in this world. Yes, cheer at the celebration of freedom but… I struggled to find a few words that would connect all these realities in a short phrase.
When I mentioned my thoughts for this piece — a piece I had to write this week — to the publisher of this paper, he gave me the phrase. He said, "Beryl, what you're saying is that Kristallnacht is not over." That was it. That was the discomfiture. Kristallnacht is not yet over!
No, they aren't killing Jews by the hundreds as they did on that night all over Germany. No they aren't wounding tens of thousands. And no they aren't destroying hundreds of synagogues flooding streets with the shattered glass that gave the 9th of November its name. But as Irwin Cotler has reminded so many, the Holocaust did not start with the gas chambers. It started with words! And so did what he labels "the first genocide of the 21st century — Darfur." The sonorous drumbeat of history goes on.
And the antidote to those words of hate, of exclusiveness, of nullification is not more law. It is individual vigilance. Individual responsibility.
Individual service and sacrifice to defend the just; promote the truth and eradicate evil. The kind of service and sacrifice our veterans showed and our soldiers show today. Against all odds, a vigilance that will never give in!
The words today may be more nuanced, more subtle, clothed in perverted legalisms, but they are just as deadly in their impact. In fact, the evil-doers in this world sometimes don't even pretend anymore.
The irony of this Nov. 9 has a recent parallel. The Durban 2 conference, that loathsome hatefest, opened on the eve of worldwide commemorations of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. On that day the Iranian president — this generation's leading Holocaust denier — gave the opening address to the conference. Ahmadenijad denies the first Holocaust while openly preparing a second against Israel. This past Monday we remembered Berliners' passion for freedom just as we did that of the Warsaw fighters. But just as we commemorated Warsaw in the shadow of today's hate, so we commemorate Berlin in the shadow of yesterday's.
No dear readers, for those of you with doubts, this is not just about the Jews. For history's evils so often start by seeking Jewish eradication first, and then engulfing everyone else. And it is not politically incorrect to state that at this time, in this week in this country!
This past Monday Georg Witscher, Germany's Ambassador to Canada, was interviewed on CTV. Tom Clark, who had witnessed the fall of the wall, asked him what the reaction in Israel was like on that Nov. 9 twenty years ago. Witscher was stationed in Tel Aviv at the time. Amb. Witscher said that obviously Israelis were pleased, yet the pleasure was laced with a certain caution. There were those who expressed concern at the direction a new, stronger Germany would take. And Amb. Witscher said, that in light of their history — and that of the world's — Israelis had every right totheir caution.
Does humanity learn anything? I don't know. What I do know is that despite mankind's fleeting encounters with courage and conscience — as we saw in Berlin 20 years ago — the pendulum of history seems to rest too long and in too many places in the Berlin of 71 years ago... One hopes that what our eyes see and what our ears hear are discordant sounds in an otherwise harmonious symphony ringing in the brotherhood of man. One yearns that the age of the appeasers and the cowards and the haters is over. But we can never be sure of that. And we can never be sure it is not too late.
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel noted when Iran's Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak at the UN General Assembly for the first time that, "10 years ago, and less, the ruler of a country that announced its aspiration for Israel to be wiped off the map would not have dared appear and speak on the UN's podium." It is not over yet. We cannot yet allow ourselves the luxury of basking in freedom's glow without remembering tyranny's shadow. The song of the canaries in the mineshaft of history must not be ignored or stilled. Kristallnacht is not over yet.The Suburban