“This ICCA conference is closed to public scrutiny,” Independent Jewish Voices spokeswoman Diana Ralph says in a text prepared for a Monday morning press conference. “It will launch international campaigns to shut down valid criticism of Israel.”
Ms. Ralph said the Canadian wing of the ICCA — the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism, a group of MPs formed immediately after the London summit — aims “to silence international condemnation of Israeli human rights abuses” and to “criminalize legitimate criticism of Israeli misdeeds.”
She said its hearings last year were dominated by pro-Israel advocacy groups. Its report, expected this month, has not yet been published.
A film prepared by Independent Jewish Voices to protest the summit includes references to the CPCCA a “farce” and a “scam.” It quotes Trevor Purvis, an assistant professor of international law and human rights at Carleton University, saying the CPCCA is “odious” and “sinister” in its efforts to criminalize criticism of Israel, and it quotes Alan Sears, a professor of sociology at Ryerson University, saying that when the Palestinian solidarity movement started to gain traction in Canada, “this was set up to put the brakes on that and to use the language of anti-Semitism to try to shut down the movement.”
As a co-host (and ex-officio member of the CPCCA), Mr. Kenney especially rankles this segment of the political spectrum, given his strained relations with Muslim and Arab groups. At the London conference, Mr. Kenney held up the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Canadian Arab Federation as hateful groups that should be denied both taxpayer dollars and “official respect.” The CAF has since lost government funding, the CIC leaders are blacklisted from government events.
The federal government funding for this anti-Semitism summit — about $450,000 — had to come via unusual channels from the multiculturalism program in Mr. Kenney’s Ministry, according to his testimony at the CPCCA hearings, after it was discovered there was no budget at Foreign Affairs for this kind of conference.
Mr. Kenney declined a request for an interview Sunday about the conference and the progress Canada has made on the London Declaration. There have been notable developments in the last year. For example the hate speech provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act are in legal crisis over their constitutionality and Jewish groups are cooperating in an effort to save them, and police this summer laid the first ever charge in Canada under the law against advocating genocide, against anti-Semitic blogger Salman Hossain.
Attendees of the conference include Joe Bossano, leader of the opposition Socialist Labour Party in Gibraltar; Emanuele Ottolenghi, an Oxford scholar of Israel; Michael Danby of Australia, once the only (and now one of two) Jewish Australian MPs; Hannah Rosenthal, the US Special Representative for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism; Ram Jethmalani of India; and Nthabiseng Pauline Khunou of South Africa.
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