“Peace for our time" was a declaration made by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in his September 30, 1938 remarks in London concerning the Munich Agreement and the subsequent Anglo-German Declaration made with Adolph Hitler.Immediately after Chamberlain landed back in England, he jubilantly boasted to the crowds on the runway: “This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine [shows the paper to crowd]. Some of you, perhaps, have already heard what it contains but I would just like to read it to you: …we regard the agreement signed last night … as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.’” Later that day, he told crowds outside 10 Downing Street: “My good friends… a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.” The phrase “peace for our time” is still remembered for its deceitful uselessness; less than a year later, Hitler invaded Poland beginning the Second World War.The Labour Party spokesman Hugh Dalton anticipated this when he publicly suggested that the piece of paper that Chamberlain was waving was "torn from the pages of Mein Kampf,” a work written by Hitler containing passages of a genocidal nature such as “The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international [Jewish] poisoners are exterminated.”The world is now witnessing another “peace for our time” declaration with widespread calls for a ceasefire in Israeli’s life-and-death attempt to destroy Hamas, a terrorist group supported by many more Palestinians the world is willing to admit, hell-bent on doing to the Jews what Hitler failed to accomplish, namely wiping them off the face of the earth based on the 7th-century teachings of their religion.One often repeated Islamic hadith – sayings attributed to the religion’s founder, the prophet Muhammad – are even contained in the 1988 Hamas Charter: “Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, and the stones and the trees will say, oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me — come and kill him.”Many non-Islamic supporters of the Palestinian cause loudly shouting for a “peace in our times” ceasefire are as naïve today as disgraced Chamberlain was in 1938 just a few short weeks before Kristallnacht. This was the Night of Broken Glass, a pogrom against Jews carried out by Nazi Party paramilitary units along with participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on November 9-10. The German authorities looked on without intervening, the same way Canadian authorities and university administrators are now allowing Jew-haters to freely spew their poisonous venom on the streets and university campuses of the country.Throughout Nazi Germany and Austria, Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.Hundreds of Jews were murdered or committed suicide and historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.Since the barbaric October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, a pogrom supported by ordinary Palestinians, Kristallnacht has been reverberating in Canada and around the world on a daily basis.When the extent of the Nazi atrocities was revealed at the end of the Second World War, the free nations of the world declared “never again.”“Never again” has always rung hollow as many Middle Eastern countries, including those created out of whole cloth by Britain and France during the mid-20th century, and the terrorist organizations they openly support, have attacked Israel time and again since its rebirth by the United Nations in 1948.Earlier this year, B’nai Brith Canada released its report of antisemitic incidents for 2022 showing a rising tide of antisemitism. “In 2012, the Jewish community sounded the alarm when that audit noted 1,345 antisemitic incidents, the highest ever since we first began auditing in 1982,” the audit reads. “Ten years later, the number is an alarming 105.9 per cent higher than that reported in 2012, and the second-highest total since we started tracking 41 years ago.”The B’nai Brith Canada report also showed that “Jews, who comprise approximately one per cent of the country’s population, remain Canada’s most targeted religious minority, with antisemitism accounting for 66.9% of all hate crimes in 2022.”The rate of such incidents has exploded since October 7.Under the working definition set out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”As members of IHRA, both Canada and the United States have adopted the IHRA definition.The IHRA website enumerates numerous examples of contemporary antisemitism. “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” is an example of antisemitism. “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is another illustration of antisemitism; as is “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”Perhaps the most egregious example of antisemitism is Holocaust denial or minimization: “Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.”On November 4, pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered on Parliament Hill. Among the symbols displayed by demonstrators was a swastika, a Nazi symbol. Anthony Housefather, a Jew and the member of Parliament for Mount Royal, was quick to condemn the hateful display.“The use of Nazi imagery tied to Israel is not only a disgusting disregard for facts but is also antisemitism pure & simple as the IHRA definition states,” he wrote in a November 4 post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The use of this imagery & the hateful rhetoric sometimes heard has led to real fear among Canadian Jews.”On November 6, Ottawa police charged a 29-year-old man with hate-motivated crimes in connection with a threat made against a local rabbi. “The Ottawa Police Service Hate and Bias Crime Unit has charged an individual in relation to harassment and a threatening phone call to a religious leader,” a November 6 statement issued by the Ottawa Police reads.On November 7, Montreal police opened an arson investigation into a firebombing of a Montreal-area synagogue. Incendiary devices also damaged the back door of another building that is home to the offices of the Canadian Jewish Appeal.“We’re seeing right now a rise in antisemitism that is terrifying,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on November 8. “Molotov cocktails thrown at synagogues. Horrific threats of violence threatening Jewish businesses, targeting Jewish daycares with hate. … This needs to stop. This is not who we are as Canadians. This is something that is not acceptable in Canada, period.”Overall, however, few of these vicious extremists have been apprehended let alone charged with hate crimes. The Kingston Whig Standard has related the compelling story of one Holocaust Survivor, historian Zvi Bacharach: “Bacharach was just 10 years old when the Nazis unleashed the Kristallnacht in his hometown of Hanau, Germany. He said that his parents could not comprehend that such horrors could be perpetrated by their fellow citizens. ‘It came as a blow. I remember my mother standing pale and crying. … I remember her phoning her gentile friends — she had more gentile friends than Jewish friends — No answer. No one answered her.’”Many Canadian Jews now experiencing virulent antisemitism must feel exactly the way Bacharach’s mother felt in 1938 — abandoned by angry neighbours consumed by irrational Jew hatred, public officials replying only with harsh words or gratuitous platitudes rather than with direct action.Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba.
“Peace for our time" was a declaration made by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in his September 30, 1938 remarks in London concerning the Munich Agreement and the subsequent Anglo-German Declaration made with Adolph Hitler.Immediately after Chamberlain landed back in England, he jubilantly boasted to the crowds on the runway: “This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine [shows the paper to crowd]. Some of you, perhaps, have already heard what it contains but I would just like to read it to you: …we regard the agreement signed last night … as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.’” Later that day, he told crowds outside 10 Downing Street: “My good friends… a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.” The phrase “peace for our time” is still remembered for its deceitful uselessness; less than a year later, Hitler invaded Poland beginning the Second World War.The Labour Party spokesman Hugh Dalton anticipated this when he publicly suggested that the piece of paper that Chamberlain was waving was "torn from the pages of Mein Kampf,” a work written by Hitler containing passages of a genocidal nature such as “The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international [Jewish] poisoners are exterminated.”The world is now witnessing another “peace for our time” declaration with widespread calls for a ceasefire in Israeli’s life-and-death attempt to destroy Hamas, a terrorist group supported by many more Palestinians the world is willing to admit, hell-bent on doing to the Jews what Hitler failed to accomplish, namely wiping them off the face of the earth based on the 7th-century teachings of their religion.One often repeated Islamic hadith – sayings attributed to the religion’s founder, the prophet Muhammad – are even contained in the 1988 Hamas Charter: “Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, and the stones and the trees will say, oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me — come and kill him.”Many non-Islamic supporters of the Palestinian cause loudly shouting for a “peace in our times” ceasefire are as naïve today as disgraced Chamberlain was in 1938 just a few short weeks before Kristallnacht. This was the Night of Broken Glass, a pogrom against Jews carried out by Nazi Party paramilitary units along with participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilians throughout Nazi Germany on November 9-10. The German authorities looked on without intervening, the same way Canadian authorities and university administrators are now allowing Jew-haters to freely spew their poisonous venom on the streets and university campuses of the country.Throughout Nazi Germany and Austria, Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.Hundreds of Jews were murdered or committed suicide and historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.Since the barbaric October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, a pogrom supported by ordinary Palestinians, Kristallnacht has been reverberating in Canada and around the world on a daily basis.When the extent of the Nazi atrocities was revealed at the end of the Second World War, the free nations of the world declared “never again.”“Never again” has always rung hollow as many Middle Eastern countries, including those created out of whole cloth by Britain and France during the mid-20th century, and the terrorist organizations they openly support, have attacked Israel time and again since its rebirth by the United Nations in 1948.Earlier this year, B’nai Brith Canada released its report of antisemitic incidents for 2022 showing a rising tide of antisemitism. “In 2012, the Jewish community sounded the alarm when that audit noted 1,345 antisemitic incidents, the highest ever since we first began auditing in 1982,” the audit reads. “Ten years later, the number is an alarming 105.9 per cent higher than that reported in 2012, and the second-highest total since we started tracking 41 years ago.”The B’nai Brith Canada report also showed that “Jews, who comprise approximately one per cent of the country’s population, remain Canada’s most targeted religious minority, with antisemitism accounting for 66.9% of all hate crimes in 2022.”The rate of such incidents has exploded since October 7.Under the working definition set out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”As members of IHRA, both Canada and the United States have adopted the IHRA definition.The IHRA website enumerates numerous examples of contemporary antisemitism. “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” is an example of antisemitism. “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is another illustration of antisemitism; as is “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”Perhaps the most egregious example of antisemitism is Holocaust denial or minimization: “Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.”On November 4, pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered on Parliament Hill. Among the symbols displayed by demonstrators was a swastika, a Nazi symbol. Anthony Housefather, a Jew and the member of Parliament for Mount Royal, was quick to condemn the hateful display.“The use of Nazi imagery tied to Israel is not only a disgusting disregard for facts but is also antisemitism pure & simple as the IHRA definition states,” he wrote in a November 4 post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The use of this imagery & the hateful rhetoric sometimes heard has led to real fear among Canadian Jews.”On November 6, Ottawa police charged a 29-year-old man with hate-motivated crimes in connection with a threat made against a local rabbi. “The Ottawa Police Service Hate and Bias Crime Unit has charged an individual in relation to harassment and a threatening phone call to a religious leader,” a November 6 statement issued by the Ottawa Police reads.On November 7, Montreal police opened an arson investigation into a firebombing of a Montreal-area synagogue. Incendiary devices also damaged the back door of another building that is home to the offices of the Canadian Jewish Appeal.“We’re seeing right now a rise in antisemitism that is terrifying,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on November 8. “Molotov cocktails thrown at synagogues. Horrific threats of violence threatening Jewish businesses, targeting Jewish daycares with hate. … This needs to stop. This is not who we are as Canadians. This is something that is not acceptable in Canada, period.”Overall, however, few of these vicious extremists have been apprehended let alone charged with hate crimes. The Kingston Whig Standard has related the compelling story of one Holocaust Survivor, historian Zvi Bacharach: “Bacharach was just 10 years old when the Nazis unleashed the Kristallnacht in his hometown of Hanau, Germany. He said that his parents could not comprehend that such horrors could be perpetrated by their fellow citizens. ‘It came as a blow. I remember my mother standing pale and crying. … I remember her phoning her gentile friends — she had more gentile friends than Jewish friends — No answer. No one answered her.’”Many Canadian Jews now experiencing virulent antisemitism must feel exactly the way Bacharach’s mother felt in 1938 — abandoned by angry neighbours consumed by irrational Jew hatred, public officials replying only with harsh words or gratuitous platitudes rather than with direct action.Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba.
