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First, Do No Harm: How Dr. Newman’s Valedictorian Speech to U of M Graduates Got History So Wrong
Ed. note: This post was originally published in May, but given recent events in which the president of PARIM (the Professional Association of Residents and Interns of Manitoba) was forced to resign his position by the board of PARIM for criticizing remarks made by Dr. Gem Newman during his valedictory address to graduating medical students at the U of M, we thought it appropriate to repost this article to our home page.
By DOUGALD LAMONT I am compelled to respond to Dr. Gem Newman in his delivery of a valedictorian address to the medical graduates of the University of Manitoba medical school, which was shockingly ignorant of history.
Dr. Newman’s understanding is challenged by the facts of history, on every topic he touched on: Canada, Settler-Colonialism, the relationship with Indigenous people, and Israel’s founding.
It was a disservice to his peers, and to informed decision-making around the current crisis.
If we want a more just and peaceful world, we need to press for political solutions. I personally favour an immediate cessation of hostilities and release of Israeli hostages, and humanitarian aid to Gaza with oversight from the International Community. That is why we need a political process to peacefully negotiate a new political arrangement. If it is a two-state solution, I believe it must emerge from this process. It should be self-evident, just from the point of view of practical politics, that a single state that consists of two populations who are in the midst of a horrific war, will likely face insurmountable obstacles in trying to work and govern together.
Reasonable people should be able to agree that Israel should continue to exist, that the Palestinian people should be free, that the fighting should end, and those who have violated the rules of war should be held to account. To be blunt, neither side has a monopoly on virtue.
International Human Rights Law “prohibits attacks directed against civilians, as well as indiscriminate attacks, namely those that strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.”
I also believe it’s reasonable to assert that the current leadership of Israel and Gaza should have no place at that table, given that they are responsible for the current crisis. The intelligence failures alone around October 7 should disqualify the current senior Israeli leadership, just as the attack of October 7 should disqualify Hamas.
Declaring recognition of a Palestinian state, with no defined or agreed-upon leadership or borders, short-circuits any such political process.
That is because while some support a two-state solution, others quite clearly favour a “one-state” solution that would essentially spell the end of the State of Israel. I have never seen the term “Zionist” tossed around as such a slur, as a kind of shorthand for holding an unacceptable view.
A Zionist is basically someone who thinks the State of Israel should exist – and the state of Israel does exist. Before Israel’s founding, debating whether or not it should exist was hypothetical. Now that it does exist, debating whether it should or not can be credibly interpreted as an existential threat.
For Israelis, and for many Jews, that clearly amounts to the destruction of their nation, including by violence. This, too, is exactly what many states and state-supported terror groups have committed to.
That is why the lack of clarity around some slogans seems to be calling for more conflict, not for a peaceful resolution.
When asked about the slogan “From the River to the Sea,” some have shrugged and said that it was Israelis who first came up with the slogan. This is true, but that is because the State of Israel does stretch from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinian territories do not. It would require Israeli territory for Palestine to reach from the river to the sea, which again, can suggest that Israel will just become Palestine.
Dr Newman should know that for Israelis, and for many Jews, that clearly amounts to the destruction of their nation, including by violence. That is exactly what many states and state-supported terror groups have committed to, and have been promising for decades.
If we want a more peaceful and just world, we should strive to achieve those ends in ways that are peaceful and just, and that requires a political path.
It is not that the history is better than you might expect – it is worse.
The Nazi Holocaust was Modelled on the U.S. Killing of Indigenous People and Seizure of their Lands
There is an important link between the treatment of Indigenous North Americans and the Nazi Holocaust. Hitler believed that he could turn Germany into the a world dominating empire by emulating the way the United States had killed indigenous people and taken their property, except Hitler’s goal was to exterminate every Jew in the world.
“In the Nazi state, Lebensraum became not just a romantic yearning for a return to the East but a vital strategic component of its imperial and racist visions. For the Germans, eastern Europe represented their “Manifest Destiny.” Hitler and other Nazi thinkers drew direct comparisons to American expansion in the West. During one of his famous “table talks,” Hitler decreed that “there’s only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins.”
As Nazi troops moved across Europe and the Soviet Union, Jews were rounded up, their homes, properties and businesses stolen. Some were murdered on the spot, lined up and shot.
Some were stuffed into the backs of trucks with the exhaust piped in, and driven back and forth until everyone inside was dead. Others still were gathered up, put on trains and sent to death camps where they were killed in factories purpose-built for killing human beings. Their stolen belongings were used to finance their own deaths, and the gold was retrieved from their teeth.
Jews were targeted by the Germans for complete extermination wherever the lived in the world, based both on pseudoscientific race theory about the supposed supremacy of the imagined “Aryan” race, and antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish global influence.
Jews were being rounded up and slaughtered in the millions, and as refugees, had no place to go. They were refused entry to country after country, including Canada.
That is one of the very major reasons the creation of the State of Israel cannot be compared to settler colonialism by European or Asian empires colonizing Africa, Oceania, the Americas. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 occurred with the support of the United Nations, as well as the global left. The historical reason for that is relevant.
Clearly, after the Second World War, it created pressure for Jews to have their homeland, so that they would not always face being a minority in a country when, because of their stateless existence, they had faced pogroms, slaughter and discrimination for millennia.
The Palestinian Cause was Undermined Because its Leader was a Nazi Collaborator
There is no question that the at the time of the creation of Israel, the credibility of the Palestinian cause was undermined because Mufti Amin al-Husseini, the leader of Palestine, was a Nazi Collaborator. Al-Husseini received personal financial aid from the Nazi government, participated in Nazi propaganda broadcasts, and worked to find recruits for the Nazi SS.
In 1941, Al-Husseini travelled to Berlin and on November 28, met with Hitler.
“Al-Husseini began the conversation by declaring that the Germans and the Arabs had the same enemies: “the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” He proposed an Arab revolt all across the Middle East to fight the Jews; the English, who still ruled Palestine and controlled Iraq and Egypt; and even the French, who controlled Syria and Lebanon.
(The British had secured a mandate for Palestine at the Paris peace conference in 1919, and made halting attempts to create a “Jewish national home” there without prejudicing the rights of the Arab population.) He also wanted to form an Arab legion, using Arab prisoners from the French Empire who were then POWs inside Germany.
He also asked Hitler to declare publicly, as the German government had privately, that it favored “the elimination of the Jewish national home” in Palestine.
The Fuhrer then made the following statement to the Mufti, enjoining him to “lock it in the uttermost depths of his heart”:
- He (the Fuhrer) would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.
- At some moment which was impossible to set exactly today but which in any event was not distant, the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from Caucasia.
- As soon as this had happened, the Fuhrer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.
In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the Arab operations, which he had secretly prepared. When that time had come, Germany could also be indifferent to French reaction to such a declaration.”
Al Husseini’s work was actively financed by the Nazi government.
“From spring 1943 to spring 1944, Husseini personally received 50,000 marks monthly and Gailani 65,000 for operational expenses.” [Rashid Ali al-Gaylani was the Prime Minister of Iraq]. ”In addition, they each received living expenses averaging 80,000 marks per month, an absolute fortune. A German field marshal received a base salary of 26,500 marks per year.”
Along with other Arab broadcasters, al-Husayni disseminated pro-Axis, anti-British, and anti-Jewish propaganda from Berlin to the Middle East. In radio broadcasts, he called for an Arab revolt against Great Britain and the destruction of the Jewish settlements in Palestine.
Al-Husayni spoke often of a “worldwide Jewish conspiracy” that controlled the British and US governments and sponsored Soviet Communism. He argued that “world Jewry” aimed to infiltrate and subjugate Palestine, a sacred religious and cultural center of the Arab and Muslim world, as a staging ground for the seizure of all Arab lands. In his vision of the world, the Jews intended to enslave and exploit Arabs, to seize their land, to expropriate their wealth, undermine their Muslim faith and corrupt the moral fabric of their society. He labeled the Jews as the enemy of Islam, and used crude racist terminology to depict Jews and Jewish behavior, particularly as he forged a closer relationship with the SS in 1943 and 1944. He described Jews as having immutable characteristics and behaviors. On occasion, he would compare Jewishness to infectious disease and Jews to microbes or bacilli. In at least one speech attributed to him, he advocated killing Jews wherever Arabs found them. He consistently advocated “removing” the Jewish homeland from Palestine and, on occasion, driving every Jew out of Palestine and other Arab lands.
Al Husseini was directly involved in recruiting for the SS.
“When the SS decided in February 1943 to recruit among Bosnian Muslims for a new division of the Waffen-SS, SS Main Office Chief Berger enlisted al-Husayni in a recruiting drive in Bosnia from March 30 and April 11. On April 29, Berger reported that 24,000–27,000 recruits had signed up and noted that the “visit of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had had an extraordinarily successful impact.” Both al-Husayni and the SS repeatedly referred to the success of the 13th Waffen-SS Mountain Division (also known as “Handschar”).”
After the Second World War, the 13th Waffen-SS Mountain Division was charged with war crimes and the killing of over 5,000 Jewish and Serbian civilians. In the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war, hundreds of its members fought against Israel.
All of this is critical historical context for Zionism of the time, and for the creation of the State of Israel. There can be no question that Al Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis meant that his cause was treated with considerably less sympathy.
None of this negates the present-day mistreatment and injustice towards present-day Palestinians, but it does mean that their experience does not mirror that of Indigenous people, nor is the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 comparable to other “settler colonial” states, like South Africa, or Canada.
- As soon as this had happened, the Fuhrer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.
In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the Arab operations, which he had secretly prepared. When that time had come, Germany could also be indifferent to French reaction to such a declaration.”
- At some moment which was impossible to set exactly today but which in any event was not distant, the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from Caucasia.
Tommy Douglas, Eugenics and Provinces’ Role in the Canadian Colonial State
This brings me to my second point about Dr. Newman’s valedictorian speech, which was his citing Tommy Douglas as a moral beacon in a speech where he also mentioned Indigenous health outcomes.
While Douglas enjoys a reputation as a paragon of political virtue, he and his party are responsible for one of the most horrifically damaging colonial systems for Indigenous people in Canada in the last 70 years: provincial child welfare systems. This is in addition to his promotion of eugenics-based sterilization, another aspect of his political career that is minimized and ignored
For all of the claims that the left in Canada is “woke,” the role of progressive politicians and parties in our country’s profoundest tragedies is not just forgotten and unknown, it is buried.
The New Democratic Party was created as a successor to the CCF party. While the NDP is today seen as a party of labour, and the “working man,” the CCF, as social gospelers, were evangelical Christians, often British, who promoted eugenics and forced sterilization as a low-cost solution to poverty, mental illness, and disability, and they did so for years.
In 1933, Tommy Douglas published his Master’s thesis from McMaster University, “The Problems of the Subnormal Family,” based on his time working at the Weyburn Mental Hospital. Weyburn Mental Hospital was not a small-town facility – at the time of its construction, it was the largest building ever built in the British Empire.
In the Making of a Socialist, Douglas passed off his thesis in a later interview as being on the subject of “Christian sociology,” when it endorsed the segregation and forced sterilization of people he deemed to be inferior.
Douglas’s thesis topic, in his own words was that:
“The subnormal family is an ever-increasing menace physically, mentally and morally, to say nothing of a constantly rising expense. Surely the continued policy of allowing the subnormal family to bring in to the world large numbers of individuals to fill our jails and mental institutions and to live upon charity is one of consummate folly.”
Douglas starts his thesis this way:
“The problem of the subnormal family is chiefly one for the State. Since the state has the problem of legislating in the best interests of Society, and since we have seen that the subnormal family is an ever-increasing menace physically, mentally and morally, to say nothing of a constantly rising expense, it is, surely the duty of the State to meet this problem.
The suggested remedies which the state might effect are three in number:
1) The Improvement of Existing Marriage Laws;
2) Segregation;
3) Sterilization of Unfit, and Increased Knowledge of Birth Control.
He elaborates:
“Sterilization of the mentally and physically defective has long been advocated, but only recently has it seeped into the public consciousness. From the day when Plato wrote his Republic to the present, eugenicists have advanced various solutions to the problem of the defective, but sterilization seems to meet the requirements of the situation most aptly.
For while it gives protection to society, yet it deprives the defective of nothing except the privilege of bringing into the world children who would only be a care to themselves and a charge to society.
4.) Another effect of the abnormal family is the cost of maintenance: It may be a mercenary view to take of the problem, yet in view of mounting taxation, it is of importance to the average citizen to know the effect of the subnormal family on his tax bill.”
Douglas did not drop the subject. In 1934, Douglas proposed it with the youth wing of the CCF, and the next year, 1935, Douglas was elected MP for the first time.
The power of Douglas’ carefully cultivated political reputation is so great that for many, it creates a cognitive dissonance so profound that it is dismissed. They puzzle as to how a person they so greatly admire could have advocated for forced sterilization.
The question as to how Douglas and other eugenicists could express such concern and apparent love while also calling for sterilization is because they see people who are poor, mentally ill or who break the law as defective, and subhuman, because of their particular brand of radical Christian ideology. Treating people as subhuman means treating them as animals, where the usual rules of human morality no longer apply. It is a kind of cruel pity – and instead of alleviating suffering, they opt for ending it.
Douglas was not a young man – He was an adult, in his 30s, calling for forced sterilization and segregation, just as his political mentor and family pastor, J. S. Woodsworth had done.
J. S. Woodsworth, Sterilization and the Bureau of Social Research
In 1909, Woodsworth published “Strangers Within Our Gates,” which was blatantly racist, ranking various groups according to their capacity to integrate into Canadian society.
Woodsworth’s treatment of Blacks is subhuman. He favorably cited U.S. progressive John R Common, who Woodsworth quotes saying, “The very qualities of intelligence and manliness which are essential for citizenship in a democracy were systematically expunged from the negro race through two hundred years of slavery.”
Woodsworth also endorsed Residential Schools as the solution for dealing with First Nations, favourably citing the Methodist Principal of the Brandon Residential School, where dozens of children had died, who said that “Both Church and State should have, as a final goal, the destruction and end of treaty and reservation life.”
Throughout the 1910s, Woodsworth ran the “Bureau of Social Research,” which publicly promoted eugenics and forced sterilization across Canada’s Western Provinces. Woodsworth’s editorials calling for eugenic sterilization were printed on the front page of the Winnipeg Free Press, and were considered as official recommendations to provincial governments.
According to a 2004 article in the Journal of Historical Sociology, Sterilizing the ‘Feeble-Minded’: Eugenics in Alberta, Canada 1929-1972, Woodsworth’s work directly informed the adoption of sterilization policies in Alberta.
“The eugenics platform was championed in western Canada by a number of influential social reformers including J. S. Woodsworth, a Winnipeg-based proponent of the “social gospel.” Woodsworth was concerned with the declining quality of immigrants arriving in the west. He translated his personal fear into a public crisis, spreading the idea that no segment of Canadian society would be left untouched by the influx of thousands of immigrants of inferior stock from central and eastern Europe. In time, his policy recommendations turned to eugenics and sterilization programs” (Chapman 1977: 13).
In 1928, Alberta and BC both passed forced sterilization laws. Researchers have directly attributed Alberta’s decision to adopt forced sterilization to Woodsworth’s advocacy. One of the Alberta MNA’s at the time who supported the bill, William Irvine, was a close friend and colleague of Woodsworth’s. When Irvine was later elected as an MP, it was in his office that the CCF was founded.
From 1929 to 1972, when the Alberta eugenics board was finally disbanded, the Board saw 4,800 cases of proposed sterilization and approved virtually all (4,739) of these; 2,834 sterilization procedures were eventually performed, the majority on females.
That was not the only questionable judgment that Douglas made in his political career. In 1935, when Douglas won a seat as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons for the first time, he did so with an endorsement from the radical right Social Credit Premier of Alberta, which was considered by some to be fascist. The creator of the “Social Credit” economic philosophy, Major Douglas, was explicitly anti-semitic.
The endorsement was arranged for Douglas’ by a key member of his campaign team, Daniel C. Grant, who had been the chief organizer for all of Western Canada for the Canadian Ku Klux Klan.
Grant had been a driver for J J Maloney, the head of the Ku Klux Klan, and had worked in Manitoba as a recruiter and organizer. In 1928 in Winnipeg, Grant had delivered a speech saying that
“The Klan strove for ‘racial purity. We fight against intermarrying of Negroes and whites, Japs and White, Chinese and Whites. This intermarriage is a menace to the world. If I am walking down the street and a Negro doesn’t give me half the sidewalk, I know what to do.” He then lashed out at the Jews and said that “The Jews are too powerful … they are the slave masters who are throttling the throats of white persons to enrich themselves.”
A 1974 biography by Doris Shackleton, a former CBC reporter and NDP staffer, entitled “Tommy Douglas” openly acknowledged Grant’s work organizing for the KKK.
In 1929, Grant and the KKK had helped elect the Conservative-Progressive coalition government in Saskatchewan, which had earned him a patronage post in charge of the labour office in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where Douglas met him. Grant was fired when a new government was elected, because they didn’t want KKK organizers working in the labour office.
There have been various attempts to minimize Douglas’ promotion of eugenics, saying that his views were changed by a trip to Germany in 1936. In fact, Douglas went to Germany because he wanted to see one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies.
In a 1956 interview, published in the book “The Making of a Socialist,” Douglas explained – when asked about his 1936 trip to Germany the year after he was elected a Member of Parliament:
“[Interviewer] You were in Europe for how long?
[Douglas] About three months. We went from Switzerland to Nuremberg, because I wanted to see the great annual festivity Hitler put on each year there. It was frightful. I came back and warned my friends about the great German bombers roaring over the parade of self-propelled guns and tanks, Hitler standing there giving his salute, with Göring and the rest of the Nazi bigwigs by his side.
There was no doubt then that Hitler was simply using Spain as a dress rehearsal for an attack on other nations.
[Interviewer] It was with very great difficulty that people were able to appreciate the anti-Semitism that was going on in Germany. Did you yourself see any examples of it?
[Douglas] I didn’t see any. Most of it was over by the time I got there.”
To suggest that in 1936, most of the anti-semitism in Germany was over defies reason and evidence.
“The New Residential Schools” Tommy Douglas and the creation of provincial child welfare
These are just some of the reasons that holding up Tommy Douglas as exemplar of political purity, is “problematic”. It is far from the only example of Douglas’ historic association with damaging policies that has been whitewashed.
The reality of Canada as a colonial state is that provincial governments have played a direct role in the mistreatment of Indigenous people, in areas of jurisdiction that the provinces themselves asked for, and Tommy Douglas is one of the people responsible.
Again, in Shackleton’s biography, Douglas describes how, in 1951, the Federal Government began to shut down residential schools, “after a series of negative reports,” that at the urging of the CCF and Premier Tommy Douglas, the federal government transferred responsibility for First Nations child welfare to provinces.
The result has been 70 years of provincial governments seizing Indigenous children from their families and never returning them, in numbers greater than the total yearly attendance of Residential Schools.
The “60s scoop” meant thousands of children across Canada were taken from their homes and adopted out across North America and around the world.
“The department of Indigenous Affairs indicates that the number of Indigenous children adopted between 1960 and 1990 was 11,132,” though some research suggests it was over 20,000.”
CFS has been described by Cindy Blackstock as “the New Residential Schools” and the scale of it across Canada is colossal.
In the last decade, the number of Indigenous children apprehended and in custody of CFS in Manitoba alone exceeded the total population of every single residential school across Canada. By 2013, the province of Manitoba had 11,000 children in the custody of CFS.
According to the Lancet, it was the highest apprehension rate in the world. That is more, in a single province, than the entire “60s scoop” across Canada over 30 years. If that weren’t bad enough, governments in Manitoba and British Columbia also seized federal child allowances intended for those children.
This horrific policy is the direct cause of Indigenous misery, and shorter life expectancy. Over half of the homeless population in Winnipeg were at one point wards of CFS. Canadian provinces took Indigenous children from their families, took their money, and left them on the street at the age of 18 with no supports. Our jails, our runaways, our gangs, and tragedy after tragedy have the common thread of CFS involvement. Because CFS is not just about looking after the safety children, it has always also been about controlling and threatening parents.
That’s why the top five of 94 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are all concerned with children in provincial child welfare systems.
This absolute catastrophe of a social policy was conceived of, created and sustained, by provincial governments for decades, and directly contributed to the relentless trauma that provincial governments have inflicted on Indigenous people, and about which there is a deafening silence.
Why are children being seized? Largely because of First Nations and Indigenous poverty and neglect. Why is there Indigenous poverty? Because, for decades, provincial governments across Western Canada have approved megaprojects – dams, mines, oil and gas – much of it on First Nations land.
In Manitoba, there are dams that have destroyed Indigenous communities’ self-sufficiency by destroying the environment. Entire communities flooded out of existence, dammed rivers destroying lakes that were the source of successful commercial fisheries, wiped out by Hydro and the Government of Manitoba, without compensation.
What’s more, provincial governments are funded on a per capita basis – for every person who lives within their borders, including on reserve, yet provincial governments like Manitoba exclude First Nations from receiving that funding.
Indigenous people in Canada consistently face the most discrimination in provincial systems, and when a catastrophe or a tragedy inevitably happens, the response has always been to defend the system. Indigenous deaths in ERs, in jail, in CFS or as victims of crime are blamed on the victims.
Together, provincial governments’ combined budgets are larger than the federal government, and Indigenous Canadians face terrible discrimination from provincial governments in economic supports, education, health, justice, child and family services and natural development.
Because the federal policies are the same everywhere: it’s the provincial policies that are different, which is why child and family poverty, and Indigenous incarceration in Manitoba are so much worse than any other province.
So, when Dr. Gem Newman lectures his fellow classmates on the injustices of Canada’s treatment of First Nations, he should know that one of the direct causes of homelessness, mental health, and forced poverty in Manitoba and across Canada is the direct result of decades of seizures of Indigenous children, which are a direct consequence of a policy brought in by Tommy Douglas to replace Residential Schools.
Tommy Douglas and provincial governments created some of the most damaging modern policies Indigenous people in Canada have experienced – and are still experiencing, every day.
As a valedictorian and as a doctor, Dr Newman is an authority, and he says a doctor’s advocacy is in a doctor’s job description. Advocates and authorities have a responsibility to work from evidence. That is why it is paramount for an authority, whether they are practicing medicine or politics, to ensure they know what they are talking about. Slogans are not solutions, and Dr. Newman’s facile understanding of history is a disservice to his audience.
It has to be said Dr. Newman’s ignorance about this should not be a surprise, because there is an effective conspiracy of silence which makes it a forbidden topic in Canada, because it is politically inconvenient.
Notably, it highlights the hypocrisy and moral double standards at work among high-profile Canadian progressives, Naomi Klein being the most prominent.
On Freedom of Speech, Civil Disobedience on Campus on Beyond
I write all of this as a strong supporter of freedom of expression, on and off campus including protest, investigative journalism, whistleblowing, satire, parody, speaking truth to power, and calling out corruption. I have personally done all of them. Rights have never been about doing and saying whatever you want, wherever and whenever.
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms sets out the circumstances where you are guaranteed rights to free expression. The Charter generally only applies to Government, not universities, except in Alberta, where courts ruled otherwise.
The reason for this is university autonomy. Universities are workplace and a place of research and education, where the goal is to work to an ever greater understanding of the world, and that has always required discernment. It is not a public square or an unmoderated internet forum, and if you don’t abide by the rules, you do not have a right to stay.
A simple example of speech that can get you removed from campus is plagiarism. The university sets out rules around free inquiry and academic freedom, but you can’t plagiarize.
This is important in the context of campus protests and civil disobedience. Protestors are not being silenced because of the content of their speech, nor are they choosing to break unjust laws to show how unjust they are.
The distinction here is one that was drawn by Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King. He was in favour of direct action and civil disobedience by having people be willing to be arrested and jailed, and face the consequences and punishment, because the unjust law they broke was asking for service at a segregated coffee shop, or sitting at the front of the bus. They actively discouraged and called out anyone who broke other laws as undermining the cause.
The laws that are being broken in this instance are ones that apply to everyone. It is not about the cause or the message, at all. It is about trespassing, or blocking a highway, or ignoring a court order.
There is a basic mistake that many commentators and protestors are making. When protestors say they mean “peaceful,” they think that if it is non-violent, that it must ,by legal definition be peaceful, and legal. You do not have to be violent to be “disturbing the peace.” Blocking highways and spamming 911 lines are not violent, but both are against the law, for obvious reasons, because someone could die. Canadian Supreme Court Precedent makes it clear, there are limits to protest, because other people have the right to be free from disruption.
If protestors are arguing that the injustice is so great, that they must break the law for justice to be done, then this is exactly the motivation behind what is known as “noble cause corruption” in policing. It’s just as unacceptable.
Freedom of expression is protected because it is powerful, and it is powerful for good and for harm. That’s why accuracy – especially at a university – matters. It means weeding out the lies, manipulation, dishonesty and deception. It means recognizing that human beings are contradictory, and flawed. It means working hard not to deceive others, or yourself, while we live in a world where armies of people are paid to deceive us, and recognizing that there may be more than two sides to every story. Two bitter opponents on either side of an issue can both be wrong.
“Resistance” that takes the form of attacks on civilians is just as unacceptable as reckless military actions that result in civilian deaths. Neither are morally or strategically defensible: to the contrary, they only further radicalize and inflame the situation.
Dougald Lamont (B.A., M.A) is a graduate of the University of Manitoba and a former member of the Board of Governors. He is the past MLA for St. Boniface and the former Leader of the provincial Manitoba Liberal Party from 2017-2023.
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Chesed Shel Emes panel delves into different aspects of death and dying
By MYRON LOVE They say there are two things you can count on in life – death and taxes. I don’t know about taxes – but no one escapes death.
When we are younger, few give much thought to dying. As we age though, we come ever closer to that final reality. The best we can hope for – in my view – is to live to a relatively old age in relatively good health and pass away quickly – preferably in your sleep.
So what would one consider a “good death?” That was one of the questions that was discussed by a panel of three experts on the subject who appeared together on Sunday, November 24, in a program at the Chesed Shel Emes titled: “The Last Stop – Reflections on Living and Dying”.
(The Chesed Shel Emes is our community’s non-profit Jewish funeral chapel; the only one of its kind in North America).
About 180 people were in attendance – both in person and online, as independent Rabbi Matthew Leibl, palliative care specialist Dr. Bruce Martin, and Dr. Harvey Max Chochinov, a psychiatrist who is one of the world’s authorities on the subject of the emotional aspects surrounding death and dying, shared their experiences and perspectives. Alison Gilmur, popular culture and lifestyles reporter for the Free Press. served as the moderator.
A “good death” – as opposed to a “bad death” – is important for patients and families alike, Chochinov noted.
“Is dying in your sleep a good death?” Rabbi Leibl asked. “That depends on both the individual and the family. It certainly doesn’t give the individual much time to think about it beforehand. I think the major concern for most people is that death be as painless as possible.”
“The problem is that you only die once,” Chochinov pointed out. “There is no rehearsal. Many fear the unknown. And you don’t know what the path will be, what it will be like for you. Or if you will still be you afterward.”
Gilmour asked the panelists what people fear most about dying? Chochinov cited the case of one woman who refused to take her medication because she feared it would make her confused – the way it had her mother prior to her death. Reassuring her that she was in capable hands allowed her to accept proper pain management and die peacefully.
Another anecdote from Chochinov concerned the case of a young woman who was facing death – with a young family and a young child at hand. “She was concerned that her little girl would have no memory of her,” Chochinov noted. “We completed something called Dignity Therapy, which allowed her to create a written legacy that would eventually be shared with her child.”
Rabbi Leibl referred to a member of the Shaarey Zedek who had been suffering for some time. She chose to die at home but, before her passing, she asked her children to leave the room. She and the rabbi talked.
“I asked if she was afraid,” he recalled. “She said that she wasn’t afraid, but that she worried that she would never see her family again.”
Dr. Martin noted that every death is personal. “There is no common thread,’ he said. “A last conversation can be profound or trivial.
“One concern for the dying is not being able to live to see their grandchildren grow up and the shared moments they will miss.”
Chochinov also added that some people are worried about the process of dying and what it may be like. “While dying is inevitable, suffering ought not to be”.
Gilmour asked what people can do to help comfort someone who is dying?
Chochinov’s answer was simple: “Be sure to show up”. “When you know someone is dying,” he noted, “for many the impulse is to stay away, to withdraw. You don’t know what to say,” he observed. “Don’t try to fix what can’t be fixed. But do show up and listen.”
Martin recalled a former mentor who suggested that the most important question that someone who is visiting someone who is terminally ill is: ‘What can you do to help?’ “
“People who are dying don’t need to be reminded about it,” Rabbi Leibl observed. “Although every case is different, a visitor should talk to the afflicted individual the same way you would talk to anyone else. You can talk about life, for example, or what you are reading, or a show you are watching together.”
Gilmour concluded her questioning by bringing up the issue of government-approved Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) – medically assisted suicide.
A number of liberal rabbis Are in favour of MAID, Rabbi Leibl noted. “Judaism however dictates that we must do everything we can to prevent death,” he pointed out.
“I have officiated at funerals for a few people who have chosen IAID,” he reported. “One such funeral was for a Holocaust survivor – in her 90s. I spoke with her the day before she died. She was at peace. I viewed what she was doing as courageous.”
Chochinov said it is also important to look at factors that can undermine a patient’s will to live, such as poorly controlled pain, limited access to palliative care and lack of supports, including respite.“MAID is driven by a desire for personal autonomy,” he observed. “It was originally designed as an option for patients who were suffering and facing a reasonably foreseeable death.” Eligibility criteria have been expanded, making patients not imminently dying, but suffering, able to request MAiD.He expressed grave concerns about extending MAiD for people who are mentally ill. “We simply can’t know which of these patients might improve with adequate time, support and care.”
In response to a later follow-up question from a member from the audience, Bruce Martin added that, in the case of people with dementia and MAID, the latter may prevent children and grandchildren from spending more time with the parent/ grandparent. After all, who then decides when the time is right?
The panelists were asked about talking about death and dying and how to cope. Martin noted that when he speaks to kids in schools, there is a lot of interest in the subject.
A question about planned giving elicited a comment from Chochinov about the importance of not only leaving a will, but letting family know what your wishes are. “It’s never too early to talk about these things”, he said, “but if you put it off long enough, there may come a time when it’s too late”.
Local News
Jewish scholar and bibliophile provides overview of hidden treasures hidden in Chevra Mishnayes congregation library
By MYRON LOVE Most shuls have a library of religious texts – or genizah (storage space) for discards – often books that were either donated specifically to the congregation or private collections dropped off at the synagogue after the original owners passed away.
On Sunday, December 8, the egalitarian Chvera Mishnayes synagogue in Garden City hosted a Lunch and Learning program, the highlight of which was an overview of the books housed at the Chevra Mishnayes – including Chumashim, machzorim, various assorted Talmudic tractates and commentaries on the Torah and Talmud. The program featured a presentation by Justin Jaron Lewis, during which the Yiddishist, bibliophile and professor of religion, revealed subtle features of some of the books, unveiling clues revealing when and where they were published, some direct connections to Winnipeg’s Jewish community and other interesting features.
The Chevra Mishnayes dates back to 1906. It has been at its present location on Jefferson Avenue since 1966. The former Ohel Jacob congregation merged with the Chevra Mishnayes in 1971.
“It’s amazing what people brought with them from the old country,” Lewis commented.
He cited as an example a book from the Chevra Mishnayes collection which was identified as having been bought from a Jewish books store in Toronto, but which had been printed in Poland. He pointed out other books that were published in the 19th century in cities such as Lublin, Vilna and Warsaw – all cities with large Jewish populations.
“The Warsaw edition had Cyrillic writing (based on the Russian-language alphabet) in it,” he noted. ‘Warsaw, Lublin and Vilna were all part of the Russian empire at the time.”
He added that a fourth book was published in Lviv in Ukraine which was part of the Austrian Empire in the 19th Century. “Because the Russians used to tax books that were printed in Russia but were to be taken out of the country, some claimed that their books were published in Austria or another country to avoid the tax,” Lewis explained.
Of interest also, for Jewish geography enthusiasts, Lewis noted, were books with the owners’ names written in them. One book belonged to the family of the well known comedian David Steinberg.
In a second book, Grade 9 Talmud Torah student Israel Pudavick had written his name.
There were other books originally from the collections of a shoichet named B.M Yahweis and one Rev. Martin Weisman.
There are religious commentaries in the Chevra Mishnayes collection penned over the years by Winnipeg rabbis such as Rabbi Y. H. Horowitz, Rabbi Meyer Schwartzman, Rabbi Shmuel Polonsky and one Rabbi Zorach Diskin – who lived in Winnipeg in the early 1900s.
“Some of the books offer a glimpse into Jewish history,” Lewis pointed out. There is one, published in 1865 in Warsaw, which he pointed out, includes a paean to Jewish life in Russia.
Censorship was strict in Russia, he explained. You had to satisfy the censors.
Lewis pointed out that trying to figure out the date of printing for some of the books can be challenging. In some cases, he noted, the book may be a copy – and the copyright date may be the date of the publication of the original. In other cases the date is written in Hebrew letters – leaving researchers to have to translate the letters to their numerical equivalent. What was thought to be the oldest book in the collection, for example, and which was originally estimated to date back to 1819, on further study was determined to be published in 1918.
Lewis also delved into the artwork in some of the books. With the Jewish injunction against recreating human images or those of angels or heavenly bodies, one book in the collection does have a scene where angels are watching as Moses hold the ten commandments and light is streaming from his head.
Another has a scene with Moses and Aaron opposite each other with lions overhead and Roman numerals also in the picture – an example, Lewis suggested of cross cultural influences.
Other popular scenes include the hands of the Cohen doing the priestly blessing The print design and layout can also offer opportunity for artistic flair.
Lewis further note that some of the machzorim have prayers inserrted in Yiddish – for instance, asking for good health – or a good life – or a prayer for one who is ill.
Incidentally, for readers with older Yiddish books at home who are considering trying to find a new home for them, Lewis is one of a handful of Winnipeggers who are collecting Yiddish books for transfer to the Yiddish Book centre in Amherst, Massachusetts.
The book centre,, he reports, is dedicated to finding good homes for such books in university libraries, or the homes of other scholars or other private homes. “A lot of younger people,” he said, “are rediscovering Yiddish and writing songs and poems in Yiddish.”
As to the Chevra Mishnayes’ library, Lewis observed that, as is the case with many other modern shuls, there has not been much interest in more recent years in studying Talmud and Torah.
“Some of the older books are crumbling,” he reported. “Perhaps we should form a committee to cull some of the books that we don’t need and look into ways to better preserve the remainder.
Readers with Yiddish books they no longer want can contact Justin lewis at justin_lewis@umaniotoba.ca
Local News
Representatives from The New Israel Fund of Canada come to Winnipeg to speak to Winnipeg audience
By BERNIE BELLAN In 1977, Menachem Begin became Prime Minister of Israel when his Likud Party was able to form a very narrow coalition with two other parties, thus ending 29 years of dominance by Israel’s Labor Party.
That event set in motion a series of changes to Israel’s political, social, and economic landscapes that are still reverberating to this day.
In reaction to the strongly conservative tilt of Begin’s government – which threatened to undo many of the democratic underpinnings of what Israel’s founders had attempted to achieve when Israel became a state in 1948, a group in California created what was known as the New Israel Fund. According to Wikipedia, “The New Israel Fund was established in 1979 in California and is credited with seed-funding ‘almost every significant cause-related progressive NGO in Israel’. Since its inception the fund has provided over US$250 million to more than 900 organizations. NIF states that while its position is that ‘Israel is and must be a Jewish and democratic state’ it says it was among the first organizations to see that civil, human and economic rights for Israeli Arabs is an issue crucial to the long-term survival of the state.’ “
In 1986, The New Israel Fund of Canada was established as a separate entity, with full charitable status in Canada. Since that time, “NIFC has contributed over $10 million to more than 100 organizations in Israel that fight for socio-economic equality, religious freedom, civil and human rights, shared society and anti-racism, Palestinian citizens, and democracy itself,” according to information taken from the NIFC website.
On Wednesday, December 11, two representatives of the New Israel Fund of Canada who were in Winnipeg spoke to a small group of individuals who braved a bitterly cold night to attend an information session held in the basement of Temple Shalom.
Those two individuals were: Michael Mitchell, a former Winnipegger and a longtime member of the board of NIFC; and Ben Murane, the executive director of NIFC. It was the first ever visit for Murane to Winnipeg and he said that one of the reasons he came here was to help make the work that NIFC has been doing in Israel more widely known to Winnipeggers.
Michael Mitchell introduced himself to the audience, saying that “the person who introduced me to the The New Israel Fund was (the late) Vivian Silver” (who, most readers are no doubt aware, was killed in the October 7 massacre).
Mitchell explained that the The New Israel Fund started “in the 1980s in a very small way, funding certain groups as the problems in Israeli society grew more severe.”
The New Israel Fund of Canada adheres very closely to the rules set out by the CRA for Canadian charities, he said. “We have agents in Israel supervising our projects.”
“NIF in Israel has an international board,” Mitchell noted, including Palestinians and representatives from NIF from other countries.
“NIF has money; they’re nimble, they’re quick,” Mitchell said, “to take nascent Israeli organizations and bring them along.”
NIF “has become much more sophisticated these past five years,” he suggested.
He cited as an example of how effective NIF has been in advancing the work of various Israeli peace groups the drastic decline in violence within Israel itself this past year between Jews and Palestinians, as opposed to what followed in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, when communities like Lod were riven by violent clashes between Israeli Jews and Arabs.
“If you’re in the middle of a war then you have to tamp down the violence between Jews and Palestinians,” Mitchell said. And a lot of the reasons for the decline in that kind of violence is attributable to the work done by organizations funded by NIF, he suggested.
Where NIF has achieved particular success, he continued, “is in organizing on the ground if you’re opposed to the messianic tendencies of the current Israeli government.”
“There’s a much bigger audience – both in Israel and abroad, that wants to see progressive goals achieved,” Mitchell argued.
As for where The New Israel Fund of Canada stands, Mitchell noted that “the Canadian Jewish community is going through what the American and British communities went through 15 years ago, which is to stop waiting for mainstream organizations to represent them.” A lot of new groups have been formed, he noted, such as “Women Wage Peace” and “Stand Together,” both of which helped to sponsor the December 11 event.
“Canadian Jews are not more conservative about Israel than American Jews,” Mitchell suggested, referring to the results of a survey of Canadian Jews for which NIFC was one of the sponsors. (For more on this turn to https://jewishpostandnews.ca/wjn/news-from-syria-shouldnt-distract-from-whats-been-going-on-in-gaza/.)
“There are at least 100,000 Canadian Jews who agree with us completely but are quiet because they don’t want to rock the boat.”
Ben Murane followed Mitchell, giving a lengthy presentation during which he fully outlined what the NIF is all about. He began by noting that “I am also making a pilgrimage to the place that made Vivian.”
Murane was just a youngster when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, he said. “A lot of the stuff I had heard about Israel – about how great it was, wasn’t quite true,” he noted.
Referring to the most recent Likud victory that returned Netyanyahu to the prime ministership in 2022, Murane said: “Let’s flash backward – a government got elected by a slim margin and announced a grand vision for rewriting Israel’s democracy. It was the first wave of what became a global populism.
“We (the NIF) started investing more in Israeli democracy projects.”
Two years ago, Murane reminded the audience, “hundreds of thousands of Israelis were on the streets” protesting what was then the Likud government’s attempt at judicial overhaul – which would have severely limited the power of Israel’s Supreme Court to intervene in cases where civil liberties were at stake.
“We (the NIF) were firmly there,” Murane said, helping Israeli civil liberties organizations to fight back at what the government was attempting to do.
Then, with the events set in motion by the October 7 massacre, Murane observed: “We knew what would happen. They (the Likud-led coalition) would use what happened as an excuse to advance the rest of their agenda.”
But, what happened after October 7 was the almost complete disappearance of many of the structures that held together Israeli civil society, Murane suggested.
Families were forced to evacuate from their homes near the Gaza Strip – with no support given by the government. Instead, groups that had sprung up in 2022 in response to the government’s attempted judicial overhaul stepped in to provide basic supports to those families, with food and housing. The NIF provided funding for many of those groups.
Something else soon became apparent after October 7, Murane said. “It was immediately obvious that the government didn’t care about the hostages…They weren’t their people.” (Many of the hostages came from kibbutzim that were strongly socialist in their orientation and not at all supportive of the right wing government coalition.)
In fact, Murane observed, within Israel’s current political atmosphere, the only opposition to the government is coming from “the organized support for the hostages.”
Something else Murane pointed out about the aftermath to October 7 is that “it wasn’t just Jews hurt on October 7.” There were members of other groups taken hostage, including Thai and Filipino workers, also Arab Bedouins.
The NIF has helped to provide support for evacuees ever since October 7, including to joint Jewish-Arab distribution centres that “have provided aid on a daily basis,” Murane noted.
“It is not Jew against Arab,” he said. “It is those who believe in life as opposed to those who believe in death…We will take care of each other. We will be the first to help civil society deliver aid.”
Murane suggested that there are several key components to what the NIF is attempting to do in Israel, including “pushback, partnership and peace.”
By “pushback,” he meant, pushing back at the narrative that the Netanyahu-led coalition has developed, which is that the hostages will not return until Hamas totally accedes to the demands put forward by the Israeli government.
“Freeing the hostages is a political matter,” he suggested. “The hostage families have been saying to Jews in the Diaspora: ‘If you want to support the hostages, then Bibi has to step down.’ “
As for “partnership,” Murane explained that “there are still many Jewish and Palestinian people who will stand together and find common cause.” He referred to groups such as “Omidm B’yachad” (standing together), whose members have been “protecting trucks bringing aid to Gaza” from Israelis who had been trying to stop those trucks from entering Gaza.
“We want to keep that flame of partnership alive,” Murane said.
He noted that on Yom Hazikaron (Remembrance Day in Israel) over “6,000 Jews and Arabs came together in one place to show compassion for one another.”
When it comes to “peace,” Murane pointed to the example of World Central Kitchen (an organization receiving funding from the NIF), which has been providing food to Palestinians in Gaza. Helping that group is “an act of morality showing people around the world Zionists giving support to their neighbours.”
Insofar as the road to peace is concerned, Murane suggested that “there are ways out of this mess.” He noted that the idea for the Abraham Accords, in which Israel signed peace agreements with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan, in 2020, was actually first advanced by an Israeli peace group known as “MITVIM.”
Murane posited that a “reinvigorated Palestinian Authority” is one component that would lead to advancing the peace process, but “of course the Israeli government doesn’t want to hear about that.”
The NIF has been active in supporting many different Israeli peace groups, Murane noted, including “Breaking the Silence,” which is made up of IDF veterans who want to draw attention to what Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is truly like.
“The way out of this mess is not going to come from the government,” Murane suggested. “It’s going to come from civil society.”
Yet, time is short, he said. There will be another election in Israel within the next year or two. “We have two to three years to see who will win the civil war in Israel: the annexationist camp or the pro-democracy camp,” he said.
To that end, the NIF has greatly increased funding for many Israeli human right groups, Murane noted. (In 2023, the NIF provided $19 million in funding to over 234 different organizations in Israel, of which $1 million came from The New Israel Fund of Canada.)
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