Fighting the New Anti-Semitism | FrumForum

Fighting the New Anti-Semitism
July 22nd, 2010 at 10:40 am Arsen Ostrovsky

On 21 July, I was privileged to hear Irwin Cotler deliver the Gandel Oration for the B’nai B’rith Anti Defamation Commission in Sydney, Australia. His topic –Contemporary Anti-Semitism and How We Can Overcome it.

Cotler is a Canadian MP, famed human rights lawyer and one of the world’s foremost experts on racism, genocide and Anti-Semitism.

In the oration, Cotler differentiated between ‘old Anti-Semitism’, which denied the rights of Jews as individuals to self-determination and to live as equal members of their communities, with the ‘new Anti-Semitism’, which he described as:

singling out Israel as the collective Jew among the nations for differential and discriminatory treatment in the international arena.

Cotler called this new Anti-Semitism “pervasive, pernicious and persistent” and said:

What we need now is a new conceptual analytical framework, paradigm shift in our thinking and understanding in what Anti-Semitism is all about.

He then specifically described six ‘indices’ of the ‘new Anti-Semitism’ that ought to form part of this new conceptual framework. . .

Fighting the New Anti-Semitism | FrumForum