Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation - it spreads Anti-Palestinian Racism

[yankeedoodle]

Hate in Disguise: the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation is about Anti-Palestinian Racism
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/hate-in-disguise-the-canadian-antisemitism-education-foundation-is-about-anti-palestinian-racism/

A Toronto-based group, the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation (CAEF), is co-organizing an event for this November. It's called "RISE UP Ottawa!"

According to its GoFundMe page, the event is about promoting education around human rights and celebrating Jewish pride. If that were in fact the case, this would be a wonderful event. However, there is good reason to believe that it's simply not true and that CAEF is not a genuine social justice group at all.

For starters, CAEF published an open letter—addressed to the Mayor of Toronto, John Tory—where it not only denies the illegal occupation of Palestine but the existence of Palestine itself. How does that align with social justice? Isn't social justice about fighting against Palestinian erasure, including the occupation—a material and observable fact?

States the letter:

Israel is not occupying anyone else's land.

Israel is not an apartheid state.

Israel has never committed ethnic cleansing. ...

There has NEVER been a country called Palestine and the word was only applied to the Arabs in the land after 1964, but they are not a distinct people.

This is just but one example of the anti-Palestinian racism that CAEF promotes. Do a basic search for "Palestine" on CAEF's site and you will find several others including:

The Arab Palestinian "narrative" is a concocted history, one which has appropriated Jewish history, and is ideologically based without any supporting evidence. There are no ancient "Palestinian" artifacts in the land of Israel, no evidence of any such state.

The definition of a "Palestinian refugee" is inaccurate and should be unacceptable to the United Nations and all the donor countries which continue to send millions of both humanitarian and development aid to a government that funds itself, commits fraud, rewards terrorism, has a bloated (and uncivil) civil service, paying folks in Gaza despite not being the government in  Gaza. The refugee status assigned to the so-called Palestinians by UNRWA doesn't even require that someone has lived on the land for more than 2 years.

("Remembering Not Rewriting History", August 5, 2022)

These ISRAELI born musicians are not from any country called Palestine as no such country has ever existed. They are beneficiaries of a democratic, free, multi faith rule of law country called Israel and that is the real story

("CAEF Letter to City News", July 27, 2022)

There has never been a country called Palestine and the increasing use of the label "Israel-Palestine" is another trick in their bag of myths and lies. There is no country with that name and we must not acknowledge such language. Remember, until 1967, the Arabs did not identify themselves as an ethno-national people called Palestinians, because they have no distinctive language, culture or history that distinguishes those who lived in Mandate Palestine, from those in Syria, Jordan or Lebanon. There were until 1948, Jewish Palestinians and Arab Palestinians, ie [sic] people who lived in the Mandate area, and the symbols for Palestine at that time included the Star of David.

("'Palestine' is a False Cause, a Word of Lies and an Antisemitic Campaign" May 29, 29 2022)

#FreePalestine is generally a genocidal call to eradicate Israel. It is unconscionable. There is no Palestinian country and never has been, and the people who are called Palestinian Arabs will only be free when they rid themselves of the evil Islamist dictators who govern their lives.

("How many lies can one NDP member squeeze into a Facebook post?", April 20, 2022)

Vile.

What CAEF really cares about is not social justice but lying, as if the Palestinian people are a "genocidal" force for evil while wholly papering over Israel's routine criminality. In doing so, it seeks to reinvent the "truth", creating a pseudo-version of events that are conveniently at odds with what major international human rights organizations—from the United Nations and B'Tselem to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—have all confirmed: Israel is an apartheid state, destroying the life and heritage of the Palestinian people.

Of course, such a state of affairs may be different in an imaginary world where Palestine, as CAEF would have us believe, "has never been a country" or is simply a "word."

Disconcerting is that CAEF is an officially registered charity in Canada. What public benefit, however, does promoting anti-Palestinian racism and erasure have? Recalling the etymology of "charity" itself, namely love for others, is involved in Palestinian denialism?

[...]

Instead of denouncing CAEF, the Canadian government is endorsing it. Scheduled to be a "VIP speaker" at RISE UP Ottawa! is Irwin Cotler, Canada's Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism. This erroneously signals to the public: you can be against antisemitism and for Palestinian racism at the same time. We should not be surprised. Cotler himself is a Nakba denier, something it's still legal to be unfortunately in Canada. The same and rightfully is not the same for Holocaust denial, which is illegal in Canada.

Those of us who genuinely care about combatting hate embrace both the Jewish and Palestinian people. What we don't do, however, is embrace the criminal state of Israel. That's undoubtedly not a function of the religion it purports to represent—Judaism—though impossible to take seriously given the state's abysmal human rights record. It instead emanates from a refusal to accept the ethnic cleansing of Palestine just as much as we refuse to accept bonafide antisemitism (that does not include criticism of Israel).

You can call the opposite "Zionism" or Israeli "ultranationalism", among a host of other terms. In the final analysis, however, words don't change facts on the ground. The Israeli state is murdering innocent Palestinians.

In avoiding any acknowledgment of this, while completely demonizing (and trivializing) the Palestinian people, CAEF does not have the right to call itself a "human rights" group. There are countless other pro-Israeli groups internationally doing the same. If it's not illegal it's at least morally fraudulent. The groups invoke the language of social justice to disguise their common hatred for Palestine. At best they are knockoffs, fake human rights groups with the "right" PR, websites, advertising, etc. to make them appear legitimate.

We're not talking enough about this in Canadian schools. We ought to. Students have the right to learn about truth and not what groups like CAEF and CIJA are liable to teach them regarding Palestine. That empowers students to reject hatred, which ruins education.