Iran's leader a target at Ottawa Holocaust event
CTV.ca News Staff
Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Sunday said the world must stand up to terrorists and fanatics who advocate the destruction of Israel, as he honoured those who lost their lives during the Holocaust.
Speaking at a ceremony on Parliament Hill on Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Day, Harper spoke of how the hatred that gave rise to the "awful, incontrovertible truth" of the Holocaust lives on today.
He said the world must resist the mistake of viewing the Holocaust as a strictly historical event, because: "There are still people who would perpetrate another Holocaust if they could."
"It's not good enough for politicians to stand before you and say they remember and mourn what happened over six decades ago. They must stand up to those who advocate the destruction of Israel and its people today, and they must be unequivocal in their condemnation of anti-Semitic despots, terrorists and fanatics.''
Harper stopped short of naming Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly declared the Holocaust a "myth," threatened Israel with annihilation, and who has hosted an international conference in December in which the main focus was to question the Nazi genocide of the Jews during the Second World War.
Other speakers at Sunday's half-hour ceremony didn't hesitate to vilify the Iranian leader.
"The thought that a person, leader or government can decide to decimate an entire race of people . . . cannot be suffered again anywhere,'' said Alan Baker, Israel's ambassador to Canada.
"And any attempt to resurrect such designs, as we are presently witnessing emanating from the president of Iran and others, must be firmly dealt with by all responsible nations and peoples of the world."
Liberal MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler said the world is "witnessing, yet again, in our own day, in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran, the toxic convergence of the incitement of the most horrific of crimes -- namely genocide -- embedded in the most virulent of hatreds -- namely, anti-Semitism.''
He warned that indifference and inaction are "complicit with evil (and) an invitation to aggression.''
Known to Jews as Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day was declared by an act of the Israeli parliament in 1959 and officially recognized by Ottawa on Oct. 21, 2003, through the Holocaust Memorial Day Act.
The date is determined each year by the Jewish lunar calendar and co-ordinated to mark the date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising on April 19, 1943.
Len Rudner, community relations director for the Canadian Jewish Congress, said the day provides an opportunity to honour and remember those who suffered and died in the Holocaust -- but who have no graves, and whose dates of death are unknown.
"It is an opportunity for us to remember not only those who died in torment, but for those who fought against impossible odds to thrust back against a Nazi terror," Rudner told CTV Newsnet.
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