Articles


Cotler decries neutrality at Wallenberg memorial exhibit

Posted On 01/27/04
By: Marshall Shapiro

TORONTO — They came to honour a man put his life on the line and single-handedly saved over 100,000 Jews during the Holocaust of World War II. As lavish as the praise of Raul Wallenberg was, the enormity of his heroism in the face of terror and monstrosity, was beyond any words of thanks and praise.

The event was the opening of an exhibit entitled Raoul Wallenberg — Symbol of Justice and Humanity, held on January 18 in Toronto.

It fell to keynote speaker, Canada’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Hon. Irwin Cotler to put it into a dynamic perspective. “Neutrality punishes the victim,” he said — a lesson from WWII that is vitally needed in light of today’s new wave of antisemitism that is branching out from the cradle of the old wave, in Europe.

Cotler quoted the Supreme Court of Canada in affirming Canada’s anti-hate legislation: “The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers, it began with words.”

“These are the chilling facts of history, these are the catastrophic effects of racism,” Cotler told an audience assembled for the opening of the display at the South Tower of the Royal Bank Centre at Bay and Front Street.

Fifty years after the second world war, he said, we are witness to a state-sanctioned trafficking in hate which in the Balks and Rwanda took us down the road to ethnic cleansing and genocide respectively.

“Nazism almost succeeded not only because of its pathology of hate and its technology of terror but because of crimes of indifference — because of conspiracies of silence,” Cotler declared.

“The duty to protect must be seen as the cornerstone for the protection and promotion of human security in our time in the face of unrelenting evil.”

“As Eli Weizel puts he,” he said, “neutrality and indifference always means coming down on the side of the victimizer, never on the side of the victim.”

In a message for our times, Cotler declared “Neutrality and indifference by individuals or neutrality and indifference by state must be rejected.”

The exhibition, running from January 17 to 31, is sponsored by Norshield Financial Group. The 32-panel display was in development for two years according to Peter Rona who assembled it. “It all flows from Raul Wallenberg’s childhood right to his accomplishments, his trials and tribulations, his fate and the unknown,” said Rona, Founder and President of the Raoul Wallenberg International Movement for Humanity. “It also includes our work in trying to find out what happened to him.” The display will appear, shortly, on the Internet at www.rwallenberg-int.org. The exhibit will tour in Canada and also in California. Antoinette Marwitz, Consul General of the United States of America, Istvan Emri, Consul General of Hungary and Ya’acov Brosh, Consul General of the State of Israel also spoke. The Ambassador of Sweden regretfully did not not attend because of illness — unfortunate because it coincided with the controversy in Sweden concerning an anti-Israel “artwork” currently in the news.