After Auschwitz, multiculturalism and moral relativism, are obscene -- Inclusive diversity is a weak substitute, and sometimes it takes a visit to Auschwitz to understand why
Trudeau at Auschwitz: The Achilles Heel of Multiculturalism
In November of last year, Canada's new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a speech in London England, setting out his view of Canada's values:
"Compassion, acceptance, and trust; diversity and inclusion--these are the things that have made Canada strong and free", he noted, and continued: "We have a responsibility--to ourselves and to the world--to show that inclusive diversity is a strength, and a force that can vanquish intolerance, radicalism and hate."
Trudeau, then, emphasizes something he calls "inclusive diversity". His father, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was responsible for the concept of multiculturalism finding its way into Section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. This section of the Charter was part of a range of provisions that helps determine how rights in other sections of the Charter should be interpreted and applied by the courts. It is believed that section 27 "officially recognized" a Canadian value, namely multiculturalism.
The section reads,
"27. This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians."
Then in 1988, the Mulroney Government completed the institution of "multicultural" values by enacting The Canadian Multiculturalism Act, with two fundamental principles:
All citizens are equal and have the freedom to preserve, enhance and share their cultural heritage.
Multiculturalism promotes the full and equitable participation of individuals and
communities of all origins in all aspects of Canadian society.
Ezra Levant writing in the Toronto Sun pointed out that Justin Trudeau criticized the new citizenship guide for new immigrants, called Discover Canada. One passage in that guide book said, "Canada's openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, ‘honour killings,' female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence."
Note carefully Trudeau's response to what should be morally obvious: "There needs to be a little bit of an attempt at responsible neutrality" by the Canadian government. Honour killings shouldn't be called "barbaric," he said. Amazing.
His brother Alexandre is a filmmaker who made a film called The New Great Game, about Iran's "courageous" decision to defy America and Israel. Sacha made it in co-operation with Press TV, the state-run propaganda agency of Iran.
At Auschwitz, Trudeau spent nearly three hours touring the infamous death camp that used industrial techniques to murder in gas chambers about a million people, mostly Jews, including my paternal grandparents and then eight year old sister of my father. In the last six months of the war, when the world had clear knowledge of this attempt to destroy every Jew in the world, the pace of executions sped up, so that about 600,000 were killed in that period. The Jews were brought into the concentration camps in packed cattle cars. A few bombs dropped by the Allies on the tracks leading to the camp could have saved the lives of tens of thousands. In total, six million Jews were murdered.
Racism is one thing; exterminationist racism is another thing. In the world today, proponents of exterminationist racism still exist and still aim to destroy another 6 million Jews, now living in the homeland of the indigenous Jews, Israel. Iran is the leader of the movement to destroy Israel and exterminate its Jews. Iranian-sponsored terrorist and political groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and even the Palestinian Authority share the wish to destroy the Jews of Israel; that they cannot do so, is the work of Israel in building a strong military and high tech weapons, and not any great support of Israel by the very European nations that handed over their Jews willingly to the Nazis.
Previous Prime Minister Stephen Harper took a sometimes unpopular moral stand on Canadian foreign policy, which resulted in his strong support for Israel. He contrasted Israeli liberal democracy with Arab support for terrorism and support for dictators and Islamist theocrats.
Trudeau was guided through Auschwitz by 88-year-old Nate Leipciger, now of Toronto, who survived Auschwitz. The prime minister couldn't hold back the tears as he stood before the ruined gas chamber where Leipciger's mother and sister were killed 70 years ago.
Leipciger was effusive in his praise of Trudeau: "He cried with me. That's what happened. He shed tears with me," Leipciger said of the words and emotions he shared with the prime minister when they embraced. "It proved he is a fine human being who understood what I was trying to convey about why we were there."
Trudeau signed the memorial book in this way:
"Tolerance is never sufficient. Humanity must learn to love our differences.
"Today we bear witness to humanity's capacity for deliberate cruelty and evil. May we ever remember this painful truth about ourselves, and may it strengthen our commitment to never allow such darkness to prevail."
Auschwitz defines Evil, except to those Islamists in Britain and elsewhere who petition local school boards to drop it from their children's curricula because they find it offensive, do not believe it happened, at least not to the extent accepted by others, and believe that it was some kind of lie made up to gain advantage for the Jews in the attempted partition by the United Nations, (which was not accepted by the Arabs who attempted to end it by war in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 and by constant terrorism since the 1920s.)
"Inclusive diversity" does not know how to deal with "humanity's capacity for deliberate cruelty and evil. Trudeau's compassion, trust and inclusive diversity are no equal to deliberate cruelty and evil, nor is it a force that can "vanquish intolerance, radicalism and hate."
Trudeau cried, in my opinion, not only because of the stories of life and death in Auschwitz told to him by his guide, the survivor Mr. Leipcinger. He cried because deep down, he began to realize, that diversity, respect for all communities, whether good or evil, is not a moral policy. It is a component of moral and cultural relativism--the belief that there is no good and evil and that all truth and morality is relative, and no cultures are better than any other cultures, so we should include them all, and respect them equally and import them into our country and interpret our laws to accord respect for any and all evil communities that wish to join our country, not for the purpose of accepting traditional values, but the new inclusive values of the Multiculturalism Act that say that "All citizens are equal and have the freedom to preserve, enhance and share their cultural heritage."
Perhaps Justin Trudeau cried too because his celebrated father did not see fit to help stop Hitler and the Nazi atrocities by opposing conscription and not serving with the army during the Second World War. In his Memoirs (1993), the elder Trudeau wrote: "So there was a war? Tough ... if you were a French Canadian in Montreal in the early 1940s, you did not automatically believe that this was a just war ... we tended to think of this war as a settling of scores among the superpowers."
This moral confusion of the father was surely passed down to the son, who advocates for loving differences without any moral judgment on those differences. For if a cultural heritage is anti-Semitic, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-child, how do we celebrate cultural diversity in the aftermath of Auschwitz? Evil exists. The lesson of Auschwitz is that we must eradicate evil and recognize that some nations become evil and we should not want their people in our communities enhancing and sharing their cultural heritage and asserting "group rights" over the individual rights that should be the bedrock of our civilization.
There are some differences that I do not love and will not love and will not tolerate. Trudeau's tears at Auschwitz demonstrate that official Multiculturalism has an Achilles Heel--when you grow up, you understand that there is Evil and unless you can articulate better values than inclusive diversity, you may start to cry when confronted with such overwhelming evidence of evil. Better that one adopts the values of a Stephen Harper--that there is no room for moral relativism in foreign policy and that the 6 million Jews of Israel today face a new Auschwitz--the soon to be nuclear Iran and the terrorist groups who kill Israeli children in their beds and school buses.
I cry too, when our Prime Minister can't seem to understand the contradiction in his policy of enhancing all cultures - when not all cultures are good or liberal. Moreover, he is keen to admit into the country some cultures despite their cultural celebration of the murder of Jews, gays, Yzedis, Christians together with a culture of rape towards women who do not follow their dictates.
For the definitive liberal critique of multiculturalism, see Salim Mansur's Delectable Lie: a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism.
After Auschwitz, multiculturalism and moral relativism, are obscene. Moral values in domestic and international matters must reflect our traditional Judeo-Christian ethics of the Bible. Inclusive diversity is a weak substitute, and sometimes it takes a visit to Auschwitz to understand why.
Howard Rotberg is a Canadian author and publisher. He is the author of <em>The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author and Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land. His latest book, Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed, about the overemphasis on being tolerant as opposed to upholding liberal freedoms, individual human rights and justice. He has written for Frontpage Magazine, Pajamas Media, Scragged.com, the Vancouver Sun, the Waterloo Region Record, Freedom Press Canada Journal, and Canada Free Press and is the founding publisher of Mantua Books.</em>
In November of last year, Canada's new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a speech in London England, setting out his view of Canada's values:
"Compassion, acceptance, and trust; diversity and inclusion--these are the things that have made Canada strong and free", he noted, and continued: "We have a responsibility--to ourselves and to the world--to show that inclusive diversity is a strength, and a force that can vanquish intolerance, radicalism and hate."
Trudeau, then, emphasizes something he calls "inclusive diversity". His father, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was responsible for the concept of multiculturalism finding its way into Section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. This section of the Charter was part of a range of provisions that helps determine how rights in other sections of the Charter should be interpreted and applied by the courts. It is believed that section 27 "officially recognized" a Canadian value, namely multiculturalism.
