May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles
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In many countries the situation for non-Jews was even worse, often far worse, especially for non-White minorities, who to this day continue to face hostility and frequent excesses in many countries. The Muslim conquest of India from the 12th to the 18th centuries reportedly resulted in the slaughter of tens of millions of Hindus.The Act of Resettlement that followed Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland, ordered Irish property owners in three-quarters of the island to remove themselves to the impoverished western province of Connacht by May 1, 1654, to make room for incoming English and Scottish colonists; those remaining east of the River Shannon after that date were to be killed wherever found. “The human misery involved,” in the judgment of Marcus Tanner, “probably equalled anything inflicted on Russia or Poland in the 1940s by Nazi Germany.” See Marcus Tanner, Ireland’s Holy War: The Struggle for a Nation’s Soul, 1500–2000 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001), 145. The treatment of the Irish by their English rulers, who exacerbated if not directly caused a famine that took one million lives between 1845 and 1852, was one of darkest chapters of British history, eclipsed only by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Protected by the British navy, in the 1710s and 1720s alone, British ships carried 200,000 slaves across the Atlantic. In the mid-1700s there were approximately 15,000 black servants (many of them slaves) in London. Slavery there was as brutal as it was in Mississippi or Alabama; slaves were often beaten so badly that they died or became crippled. In 1783, Guildhall was the site of the infamous Zong Massacre trial. The Zong was a ship manned by slave traders; they decided to tie the hands and feet of 133 slaves and throw them overboard, and then tried to collect insurance on their dead cargo. When this horror began to be widely known, it pushed many who had been ambivalent about slavery to oppose it. Others suffered as well, though their tolls were smaller. From 1869 to 1939, an estimated 100,000 orphaned or abandoned youngsters, the so-called home children, were taken off the streets of Britain and, without the consent or knowledge of their parents, sent to Australia, Canada and other former British colonies with the promise of a better life. Many were abused physically and mentally, especially in orphanages, or put to work as child labourers. (Australia apologized in November 2009 for its part in the mistreatment of the home children and the British government announced it will issue a formal apology in 2010.) During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the Brish builr 45 tented camps were built for Boers—mostly women and children—whose farms had been destroyed under the “scorched earth” policy. Approximately 120,000 persons held under terrible living conditions, of whom 28,000 died of starvation, disease and exposure. At least 20,000 Blacks also died in the camps. Only recently, in conjunction with a lawsuit brought by the victims in 2011, is the British colonial legacy of the mid-20th Century coming to light. Kenyans were systematically castrated and raped for political purposes by British officials in the 1950s, during the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule. In that same decade, considered by many as the “enlightened” late period of the empire, the British slaughtered, tortured, sexually brutalized, burned alive, starved and jailed some 150,000 Africans, for having the temerity to fight for national independence. See Doug Saunders, “The Importance of National Shame,” The Globe and Mail, April 9, 2011. The track record of the Dutch is especially appalling. As historians have pointed out, “from the outset, violence was intrinsic to Dutch colonial exploits in the Indonesian archipelago. The VOC, the Dutch East India Company, used extreme force to build up its trade empire in the seventeenth century. The almost total annihilation of the population of the Banda Islands in 1621, a clearly genocidal act committed under the direction of Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen in enforcing the Dutch spice trade monopoly, is only the most gruesome and well-known example. A later infamous violent episode was the massacre of up to 10,000 ethnic Chinese in Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1740.” See Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses, “Mass Violence and the End of the Dutch Colonial Empire in Indonesia,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 14, nos. 3–4 (2012): 257–76, here at 265. During the conquest of the Caucasus, between 1860 and 1864, the Russians massacred and expelled hundreds of thousands of Adygs (Circassians or Cherkess). The Belgians are said to have systematically murdered millions of Black Congolese between 1880 and 1900 in their quest for rubber. Congolese who refused to harvest the rubber for their Belgian overlords had their hands chopped off, before bleeding to death. Between 1904 and 1911, the Germans exterminated 65,000 out of 80,000 members of the Herero tribe, about 85 percent of the tribe’s population, during the Herero uprising in German South West Africa. (Some estimates mention 100,000 victims from the Herero and 15,000 Namaqua, a smaller ethnic group, in what is today Namibia.) The extermination order was hung around the necks of captive Herero, who were driven into the desert under gunfire to die. Bizarre racial experiments, like those of the Nazi German concentration camps, were performed on prisoners. (Thousands of skulls and other body parts flooded German universities, where academics and students conducted “scientific” tests aimed at proving that Africans were anatomically similar to apes.) See Ben Shepherd, War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 42–43; David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber and Faber, 2010). The Armenian genocide of 1915 is said to have claimed at least one million lives. Horrific atrocities were also perpetrated in many other countries. Repeated murderous attacks by Hindus upon Muslims have become a feature of intercommunal relations in several Indian cities since partition of the subcontinent in 1947. See Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002). In September 1955, mobs of Turks attacked the Greeks of Istanbul and left 45 Greek communities in ruins, smashing their homes, businesses, churches, schools, and cemeteries. The pogroms effectively ended millennia-old Greek civilization in Asia Minor. Between 1935 and 1976, 60,000 mentally and physically handicapped women were forcibly sterilized in socialist Sweden. One of the goals of that program was to rid society of “inferior” racial types such as Gypsies and to encourage Aryan features. Similar allegations were levelled with respect to Denmark, Norway, Finland and Switzerland. Especially in Germany, but also in France, England and elsewhere, violent assaults against immigrants and foreigners became a daily occurrence in the 1990s. In that decade, at least 40 Gypsies were killed in the Czech Republic in racially motivated attacks. See Gwynne Dyer, “Europe’s Gypsies consider their future,” The Toronto Star, August 6, 2000. Romas continue to be persecuted, attacked and killed, and their homes are fire-bombed in the Czech Republic and Hungary. Anti-Roma riots broke out in northern Bohemia in September 2011, and again on August 24, 2013, eight Czech cities experienced riots. Characteristically, what is branded as a “pogrom” in Eastern Europe (except in the case of the Czech Republic) becomes merely a “riot” if it occurs in Western countries. In this regard, the 2001 attacks on East Indians in Oldham, England, where dozens were injured, are no exception. See, for example, the following media reports: “Race Riot Casts Pall over U.K. Vote,” The National Post (Toronto), May 28, 2001; “Right-wing Groups Blamed for British Riots,” The National Post, May 29, 2001. One of the most notorious race riots in England, Totenham’s 1985 Broadwater Farm riot, which was sparked by the death of a local resident after an encounter with the police, led to the savage killing of a police officer (who was hacked to death) and the wounding of nearly 60 others when 500 mainly Black youths rampaged through the streets, assaulting police and setting fires. A Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) inquiry in 1999 into the death of Black British teenager concluded that the force was “institutionally racist.” On August 6, 2011, several hundred youths rained missiles and bottles on officers near Tottenham police station after a protest over the fatal shooting of a Black man by armed officers. Twenty-six officers were injured in the skirmish as rioters smashed windows, looted and set buildings alight, and torched three police cars. See Raphael G. Satter, “London’s Dramatic Riot Echoes Deadly Unrest of 1985,” Toronto Star, August 7, 2011; “Violence in London Erupts in Wake of Riots,” Reuters, August 7, 2011. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, a series of attacks on Muslims was unleashed in distant Western Europe. Within eight days of the killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh on November 2, 2004, arsonists attacked nine mosques and four Islamic schools were bombed, vandalized, or set on fire in Holland, in places like Eindhoven, Uden, Rotterdam, Utrecht, Breda, and Huizen near Amsterdam. Dozens of violent attacks on Muslims were reported. See Michael McClintock, Everyday Fears: A Survey of Violent Hate Crimes in Europe and North America (New York: Human Rights First, 2005), 1; Sandro Contenta, “Fear replaces tolerance as racism sweeps Holland,” Toronto Star, November 27, 2004. Within days of the London commuter bombings by Muslim extremists in July 2005, more than 100 revenge attacks—including the beating death of a Pakistani immigrant—were reported across Britain. See Caroline Mallan, “‘He was just another kid,’” Toronto Star, July 14, 2005. A number of Jews, including schoolchildren, were also assaulted in the United Kingdom during this period. See McClintock, Everyday Fears, 3. Gypsies and Africans have fared badly throughout Western Europe in recent years. When a a mentally disturbed immigrant was accused of stabbing a Spanish woman in El Ejido, a small town in Andalucia, Spain, in February 2000, two days and two nights of looting and burning of houses, shops and mosques belonging ensued. The violence against Moroccan and Algerian immigrants, accompanied by racist slogans, reportedly met with the passivity or connivance of most inhabitants of the town, the police and the municipal government. According to a BBC report of February 8, 2000, “Riot police in Spain have again clashed with hundreds of protesters on the third consecutive day of violence directed against immigrants from North Africa. The local immigrant community has asked the authorities for protection after rioting left their property ransacked and their cars overturned. Clouds of smoke wafted over the south-eastern Spanish region of Almeria as a plastic recycling factory, set alight by anti-immigrant protestors, burnt to the ground. … Spanish state radio reported that more than 30 people were injured and seven others arrested as police prevented protesters marching on El Ejido.” The Ponticelli Romani camp in Naples was burned to the ground in May 2008, causing the approximately 800 residents to flee, while Italians stood by and cheered; four Molotov cocktails were thrown into Romani camps in Milan and Novara that same month; in June, a settlement of around 100 Romanian Roma in Catania, Sicily, was attacked and burned to the ground. Other incidents that year included racist attacks by vigilantes, assaults by law enforcement officials, and forced evictions. See Claude Cahn and Elspeth Guild, Recent Migration of Roma in Europe, OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, December 10, 2008, 61–62. After Black African migrant workers were shot at and beaten with metal rods in Rosarno, Italy, in early January 2009, they rampaged through the town destroying everything in their path and attacked residents and police officers. See Adriana Sapone and Ariel David, “African migrant workers continue rampage in Italy,” The Globe and Mail, January 9, 2009. Polish immigrants have been the victims of scores of racially motivated assaults, house burnings, and even killings on the streets of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Ireland in recent years. Two Polish immigrants were murdered in Ireland in February 2008, with screwdrivers driven through their skulls; three Polish immigrants were murdered in Northern Ireland in July 2009. A Pole barely escaped lynching at the hands of a mob armed with bats in Accrington, Lancashire, in May 2009; a Pole was knifed in York and yet another suffered serious head injuries in Aberdeen, Scotland, in July 2009. After an international soccer match between Poland and Northern Ireland in March 2009, gangs of young people started attacking Poles and the Romas in Belfast, culminating in the expulsion of more than 100 Romanian Gypsies from their homes in a wave of attacks by hooligans armed with bricks and bottles. In May 2011, a man carrying a knife threatened Polish residents of a housing estate in County Antrim, north of Belfast, in a racist attack. A British loyalist group claimed responsibility for a pipe bomb was left on the windowsill of a house inhabited by Poles in County Antrim in October 2011. Other racist incidents in the area have included smashing windows of homes, threatening graffiti, and physical assaults. On July 11, 2012, Polish flags were burned in several places in Belfast as well as election posters of a Polish candidate. See “Northern Ireland Attacks on Poles Blamed on Loyalists,” The Guardian, April 10, 2009; “100 Romanian Gypsies Take refuge in Belfast Church After String of Violent Attacks,” Associated Press, June 17, 2009; “Three held after Poles threatened by knifeman,” Belfast Telegraph, May 16, 2011; “Migrants living in fear after racist bomb attack on Poles,” Belfast Telegraph, October 13, 2011. A spate of attacks on Polish homes in Belfast erupted again in January 2014, and several Poles were knifed and assaulted in racial incidents in England in late 2013 and early 2014. See Steven Alexander, “Seven Attacks in 10 Days as Racist Gang Targets Polish Community in East Belfast,” Belfast Telegraph, January 17, 2014; Maciej Czarnecki, “W Wielkiej Brytanii atakują Polaków,” Gazeta Wyborcza, February 21, 2014. Attacks continued through February and March, culminating in the vicious beating of three young Poles by a gang in a Belfast park on April 21, 2014. See Adrian Rutherford and Claire Williamson, “Gang of 15 That Attacked Polish Trio Playing Football ‘Needs To Be Taken Off the Streets,’” Belfast Telegraph, April 25, 2014. BBC News Northern Ireland reported on May 6, 2014, that the home of a Polish mother and her son was attacked in east Belfast. The living room window of the house was smashed and the windscreen of a car parked outside was also broken. Another spate of hate crimes targeting the Polish community in Belfast occurred in April 2015, when several homes occupied by Polish people were struck. A beauty salon employing a number of Polish staff was extensively damaged by arsonists; days before the attack, graffiti saying “Polish Out” was daubed on the shop front. In 2013 there were 307 racist hate crimes reported in the city, and in 2014 there were 476—88 of which targeted the Polish community. Police believe loyalist paramilitary elements have been involved in the attacks. See “Poland Concern over Belfast Attack,” Belfast Telegraph, April 14, 2015. Incidents of violence against Jews, Muslims and others have also been reported perennially in great numbers throughput the United Kingdom. According to a 2009 report, the Crown Prosecution Section prosecuted 13,008 racially and religiously motivated crimes in the United Kingdom, of which 10,398 led to convictions. See the United States Department of State International Religious Freedom Report 2009, Internet: Even highly developed countries like the United States did not escape the scourge of racism. The legacy is long and makes for very disturbing reading. Because of abysmal conditions, many slaves died soon after arriving in the American colonies. Runaway slaves were hunted down relentlessly and rebellious slaves were beheaded and their heads impaled on posts along roads as a warning to other slaves. Although slavery was outlawed in 1865, Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan to maintain white control by terrorizing Blacks. States passed black codes to restrict the rights of freed slaves. Souhern Blacks widely lost the right to vote as states enacted poll taxes and literary tests and restricted voting to men whose father or grandfather coud vote in 1867. Between 1917 and 1921 riots, started by Whites attacking Blacks, swept the country. In 1917, one of the bloodiest race riots in American history took place in East St. Louis, Illionis. It was started by white workers who were protesting the hiring of African Americans. By the time the violence ended, 39 blacks had been murdered and nearly 6,000 others had been driven from their homes. During the “The Red Summer of 1919” alone there were 26 race riots in which the White population turned on Black Americans and destroyed their communities, murdering and injuring thousands of Blacks. The most infamous of these was the Chicago Race Riots. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the end of May 1921, the city’s whites, incited by the press and by politicians, massacred several hundred innocent Blacks. See István Deák, “Heroes and Victims,” The New York Review of Books, May 31, 2001; Brent Staples, “Unearthing a Riot,” The New York Times, December 19, 1999. Assaults on Blacks continued unabated. See, for example, Robert Shogun and Tom Craig, The Detroit Race Riot: A Study in Violence (Philadelphia: Chilton books, 1964). The United States—and not Nazi Germany—was the first country to concertedly undertake compulsory sterilization programs for the purpose of eugenics, targeting, among others, Black and Native American women, and implemented a wide-scale sterilization programme in Puerto Rico, such that by 1965 34% of Puerto Rican mothers ages 20–49 had been sterilized, the highest rate ever documented for a population. See Harriet B. Presser, “The Role of sterilization in Controlling Puerto Rican Fertility,” Population Studies, vol. 23 (3) (November 1969): 343–361. In addition to the forced sterilization Puerto Rican women endured, starting in 1965, they were also used as test subjects for birth control pills. The Puerto Rican women involved in the study were not told they were part of a drug trial. Researchers informed them that they would be receiving a drug that prevented pregnancy.While not nearly as horrific as the medical experiments conducted by the Germans (on Jews and Poles) and the Japanese (on Chinese) during the Second World War on a massive scale, the U.S. government subjected hundreds of African Americans to medical experiments, known as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, in which the victims were left untreated to study the disease between 1932 and 1972. The experimentation only came to an end in 1972 because of a whistle-blowing Public Health Service epidemiologist. See Kathleen Kenna, “U.S. to apologize for experiments on black farmers,” The Toronto Star, May 16, 1997; “‘We were treated … like guinea pigs,’” The Toronto Star, May 17, 1997. The U.S. government continued to conduct medical experiments in foreign countries, even after the Holocaust. Between 1946 and 1948, some 1,500 soldiers, prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala were infected with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. A number of high-ranking U.S. government officials knew about the research, including Thomas Parran Jr., who was then U.S. surgeon general, the documents show. He was reported to have said, “You know, we couldn’t do such an experiment in this country.” While there was a belated apology when the information was unearthed more than 60 years later, there was no mention of compensation. See Rob Stein, “U.S. Apologizes for Newly Revealed Syphilis Experiments in Guatemala,” The Washinghton Post, October 1, 2010. When blacks went to use the public swimming pools for the first time in St. Louis, Missouri, on Independence Day in 1949, Outside the pool fence, a mob of some 200 restless white teen-agers collected. Police arrived in time to escort the Negroes safely from the park. But all that afternoon, fist fights blazed up; Negro boys were chased and beaten by white gangs. In the gathering dusk, one grown-up rabble-rouser spoke out: “Want to know how to take care of those niggers?” he shouted. ‘Get bricks. Smash their heads, the dirty, filthy —.” Swinging baseball bats, the crowd shuffled in mounting excitement. Then someone called out: “There’s some niggers!” The crowd cornered two terror-stricken Negro boys against a fence. Under a volley of fists, clubs and stones, the boys went down—but not before one of them whipped out a knife and stabbed one of his attackers. In a surge of fury, the nearest whites kicked and pummeled the two prostrate bodies, turned angrily on rescuing police with shouts of “Nigger lovers.” Within an hour the crowd had swollen to number more than 5,000. In the park along bustling Grand Boulevard, busy teen-age gangs hunted down Negroes. Other ones climbed into trucks and circled the park, looking for more targets. … By 2 a.m., when hard-pressed police finally cleared the streets, ten Negroes and five whites had been hospitalized, one critically injured. Next day Mayor Joseph M. Darst ordered both outdoor pools closed, and ruled that St. Louis’ pools and playgrounds would stay segregated. See Time Capsule 1949: The Year in Review, As Reported in the Pages of Time. The litany of racist incidents does not stop there. Some 60 Black churches were burned to the ground or seriously damaged in the southeastern states in 1995–1996, all too reminiscent of the brutal 1960s when the Ku Klux Klan and others burned an estimated 100 churches in Mississippi alone. (The Sunday bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, killed four African-American girls.) See David Snyder, “Re-igniting the fires of racism,” The Toronto Star, March 31, 1996 (Newhouse News Service). (In January 2012 Jewish synagogues in New Jersey, one of them with a rabbi and several worshippers inside, came under firebomb attacks.) According to the FBI more than half of the almost 7,500 reported hate crime incidents in the United States in 2003 were directed at blacks. There were 3,150 black victims, including four who were murdered. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported nearly 10,000 hate crimes committed in 2006, mostly directed against non-Whites, and that figure is considered to be low as such crimes are often not reported by victims and law enforcement agencies. Of these, more than 1,100 were anti-Semitic in nature, including 80 physical attacks on Jews. A worrisome trend is a sharp increase in incidents in which nooses—a symbol of racist lynchings—are hung outside the homes of Blacks. See McClintock, Everyday Fears, 132–37, which also documents hate crimes directed against people of Hispanic origin and Muslims, including murders. Racial tensions between Orthodox Jews and Blacks continue to explode periodically. A 7-year-old Black child was struck by a car in the motorcade of an Orthodox Jewish spiritual leader in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991, and later died of injuries. In the ensuing rioting by Black youths, which lasted three nights, a rabbinical student, a member of the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement, was mortally stabbed. After an Orthodox Jewish school teacher was acquitted of assaulting a Black teenager in Lakewood, New Jersey, in the summer of 2007, a group of Orthodox Jews was pelted with eggs by teenagers and, in October of that year, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi was severely beaten by a Black man wielding a baseball bat. Brooklyn’s Crown Heights became the scene of Jewish-Black racial confrontations again in April and May 2008, when a Black man was badly beaten by two Jews, believed to be members of a local street patrol group, in an unprovoked assault. The suspects were not arrested by the police. This was followed by an attack on a Jewish teenager by two Black youths, who were promptly arrested. Angry Jews and Blacks took to the streets, pelting homes and school buses with rocks. Racial flare-ups in the United States persist to this day and take on all sorts of permuations. For example, Black mobs attacked Whites in and around Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 4, 2011 and August 4, 2011 resulting in scores of injured. See Don Walker, Mike Johnson, and Breann Schossow, “State Fair melees produce 11 injuries, 31 arrests,” Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee), August 5, 2011. On August 5, 2012, a White supremacist opened fire on congregants at a Sikh Temple on the outskirts of Milwaukee killing six American Sikhs. On February 10, 2015, three young Muslims were gunned down near the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill. On June 17, 2015, nine Blacks were killed when a White extremist opened fire on them in a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The history of oppression of Blacks in Canada is a topic that is avoided in favour of stories of Black slaves who escaped from the United States. Shelburne, Nova Scotia, was the site of Canada’s first reported race riot, when in 1784, white settlers burned twenty homes of black Loyalists. The Ku Klux Klan came to Canada in 1924 and soon enlisted thousands of followers, stirring up ethnic and religious hatred directed against Blacks, Roman Catholics, Jews and immigrants. Their founding meeting at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, attracted some 8,000 interested people willing to join. The Klan and the mainstream Conservatives joined together to defeat that province’s Liberal government in 1929 on an anti-immigrant platform. Like in the United States, Klansmen held outdoor meeting with burning crosses and exploded fire bombs in Catholic churches in Quebec. In February 1930, in Oakville, Ontario, scores of Klansmen gathered to burn a cross to protest a marriage between a White girl and a Black World War I veteran, who was threatened with death and his fiancée kidnapped. One of the leaders was charged and convicted, but sentenced to only three months in jail. Tellingly, many political and public figures, including the town’s mayor, as well as the local press, approved of the Klan’s conduct. In 1946, a middle-class Black woman named Viola Desmond was handled roughly and tossed out a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, when she took a seat on the ground floor of the theatre, which was reserved solely for White patrons. Besides being fined, she was charged with defrauding the Government of Nova Scotia of the difference in the tax between a ground floor and a balcony seat, where Blacks were required to sit, which amounted to one cent. Her appeal proved to be unsuccessful as the theatre owner’s right to refuse services as it wished trumped the equality promised in a democracy. See Constance Backhouse, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). In recent years, the Black Cultural Centre in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, was firebombed in 2006 and the Black Loyalist Heritage site in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, was destroyed by arson which also destroyed records and genealogical data collected by the Black Loyalist Society over the last 20 years. A Black woman from Jamaica immigrated toToronto in the 1950s was told to sit at the back of the bus and shopkeepers wouldn’t let her into their stores, saying they didn’t want “her kind of business.” When she bought a house in an upscale area of Toronto in the 1970s, where she was the only black resident, her neighbours threw garbage on her lawn, rang her doorbell at night, and left letters in her mailbox addressed to “monkey.” See Janet Thorning, “A Great Canadian Bird: For My Jamaican-born Grandmother, Hope Really Was Something You Could Catch,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), July 2, 2012. It is not unheard of for young black children to be called “niggers” by their classmates in Canadian public schools still today. See Lesley Ciarula Taylor, “Darker the Skin, Less You Fit In,” Toronto Star, May 14, 2009. Racial harassment occurs in many other contexts. In just one season there were 96 reported cases of young teenagers playing for the Greater Toronto Hockey League being penalized for discriminatory slurs targeted at visible minorities and other ethnic and religious groups. See Robert Cribb and Lois Kalchman, “Violence, racial slurs on the rise in kids’ hockey,” Toronto Star, December 5, 2009. In April 2014, in a town outside Toronto, a black student was beaten in a high school schoolyard as onlookers yelled racial slurs. The incident was filmed by several students who watched the morning attack of punches and kicks as one onlooker yelled “pound the nigger.” Others then taunt a white student after he falls, saying “you’re losing to the black kid,” followed by: “Get the nigger, get pounding.” Four youths and one adult were charged with assault. See Kristin Rushowy, “Students Hurl Racial Slurs as Teen Beaten at Sutton High School,” Toronto Star, May 6, 2014. Conditions for Chinese and Japanese immigrants to Canada were not much better. Some 17,000 Chinese labourers were brought to Canada to help build the transnational railroad in the early 1880s. As well as being paid less, Chinese workers were given the most back-breaking and dangerous work to do. In order to justify imposing a racist head tax on all future Chinese immigrants, John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, provided the following justification on May 4, 1885: “The Chinaman … has no British instincts or British feelings or aspirations, and therefore ought not to have a vote.” On September 7, 1907, “a rally of the xenophobic Asiatic Exclusion League boiled over into a riot. The mob, more than 10,000 white men, stormed the city’s Chinese and Japanese enclaves, throwing some immigrants in the harbour and damaging every Asian business they could find. ‘Not a Chinese window was missed,’ one local newspaper reported.” See Kate Allen, “How science got weeded out of Canada’s marjuana laws,” Toronto Star, December 1, 2013. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Chinese were barred from voting, barred from the practice of most professions and the civil service and even barred from gaining admission to public swimming pools. It was dangerous for Chinese people to venture out of Chinese enclaves. Even though treated far less severely thank Blacks, Asians, and Native Americans, Jews faced tremendous barriers to advancement. Open and flagrant discrimination of Jews was part of day-to-day life for most Jews in the United States and Canada well into the 1950s. Severely restrictive quotas on the admission of Jews were instituted by many American universities, including the prestigious Ivy League schools, already in the 1920’s. See Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), which describes a variety of discriminatory restrictions and practices against Jews that were widespread in the United States. Similar forms of overt racism and religious bigotry prevailed in Canada as well. Jews, as well as Blacks, were routinely banned from parks, beaches and community facilities, faced restrictions at universities and in property ownership, and were shut out from public offices and municipal employment. It was probably easier for a Jew to obtain such employment in interwar Poland than in Canada. According to one source, 2.5 percent of Poland’s 77,150 elementary and high school teachers were Jews, and Jews constituted 1.8 percent of all those employed in the public service. See Jaff Schatz, “Jews and the Communist Movement in Interwar Poland,” in in Jonathan Frankel and Dan Diner, eds., Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 15. In the small town of Kolbuszowa, a Jew worked as a revenue official and another as a clerk in the county office. See Salsitz, A Jewish Boyhood in Poland, 105–6. Jews were often the object of violent hostilities that led to race riots like the anti-Jewish pogrom at Christie Pits Park in Toronto in August 1933. See “The ugly side of Toronto the Good,” The Toronto Star, February 21, 2002. A volume of personal accounts of Jews from small communities recalled all-too-frequent occurrences of beatings at the hands of anti-Semitic youth and being called a “dirty Jew.” See Howard Victor Epstein, Jews in Small Towns: Legends and Legacies (Santa Rosa, California: Vision Books International, 1997). Signs bearing “No Jews or dogs” were still seen in Miami after 1945. A Jewish-American composer recalled how, as young men in the 1970s, he and his brother were taunted by fellow workers on a tobacco farm. After a group of about six workers beat up his brother, they tied him (the future composer) to a tree and tried to set him on fire. Only the fortuitous intervention of a foreman put a stop to this, but no one was punished and the incident was hushed up. See Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy (2012). Actress Debra Messing, who grew up in a small Rhode Island in the 1970s, recalled that as the only Jewish child in her elementary school full of Irish and Italian Catholics, her “most vivid memory” of second grade when a boy told her “Get to the back of the line, kike.” Relating her experiences she said, “We were different. We looked different, and people didn’t like us, which was very painful for my parents who grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. … I remember my mom crying when she went outside the day after Halloween and saw a swastika painted on my grandmother’s car who was visiting.” See Allison Kaplan Sommer, “Not a Sitcom: Debra Messing on the ‘Ugly Reality’ of Being Jewish in Hollywood,” Haaretz, November 9, 2015. Just as in other large North American cities, Jewish children in Toronto were frequently assaulted on their way home school in the 1920’s, 1930’s, 1940’s, and even in the 1950s. Since Jews attended public schools, whereas Catholics almost always attended Catholic schools, in most cases the bullies who victimized Jews were Protestants. When Irving Ungerman’s parents opened a poultry shop in Toronto in 1934, swastikas would be daubed on the store windows. Ungerman was bullied and beaten up repeatedly on the way from school, sometimes accompanied by anti-Jewish taunts. See Ron Csillag, “The Triumph of the ‘Chicken King’,” The Globe and Mail, November 14, 2015. The internationally acclaimed architect Frank Gehry, who grew up in then largely Protestant Ontario in the 1930s and 1940s, recalled: “In Canada when I was a kid, I remember going to restaurants with my father that had signs saying NO JEWS ALLOWED. I used to get beaten up for killing Christ.” See “The Frank Gehry Experience,” Time (Magazine), June 26, 2000, 52. Growing up in the Junction area in West Toronto during World War II, where he attended a largely Protestant public school, Joey Tanenbaum recalled that his classmates often taunted him for being Jewish and even blamed him for the war. See Liem Vu, “Members preserve synagogue legacy,” Toronto Star, July 16, 2011. Ruth Gottlieb Katz, a refugee from Germany, where she was vilified in school, harassed, spat on, kicked, and beaten by Nazi youth, found that when the family immigrated to Montreal before World War II, she was called a “Kraut” by other school children and routinely had her hand beaten with a ruler by the teacher when she made a grammatical error. See “Ruth Gottlieb Katz,” The Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, Internet: Other non-Jewish immigrant groups have also faced prejudice and hostilities in Canada. In the latter half of the 19th century, the Protestant establishment including leading newspapers, politicians and clergymen, demonized Irish Catholic immigrants who flooded into Toronto. Not only did they face discrimination and exclusion at every turn, they were frequently physically attacked by Protestants. Bloody confrontations between Irish Potestants and Catholics were regular occurrences, especially on July 12 and St. Patrick’s Day, when parades were held. Protestants and Catholics clashed at least 22 times between 1867 and 1892. See Allan Levine, Toronto: Biography of a City (Madeira Park, British Columbia: Douglas and McIntyre, 2014). In Winnipeg, during the 1930s, “anyone with a Ukrainian or Polish name had almost no chance of employment except rough manual labour. The oil companies, banks, mortgage companies, financial and stock brokers and most retail and mercantile companies except the Hudson’s Bay Company, discriminated against all non Anglo-Saxons.” See James Gray, The Winter Years: The Depression on the Prairies (Toronto: Macmillan, 1966), 126. Catholics were virtually precluded from municipal employment including the police force in Ontario as late at the 1950s. See Murray Nicolson, “The Irish worker in Victorian Toronto,” Catholic Insight, April 1999, 28. Other immmigrant groups did not fare better. Thousands of ex-servicemen and ordinary citizens converged on Greek establishments and attacked Greek immigrants for several days when a large anti-Greek riot broke out in Toronto in August 1918. More than 40 Greek businesses were destroyed, the city was put under martial law, troops were brought in and it took days of street fighting to restore order. See Joseph Hall, “The Danforth, 2004,” Toronto Star, August 13, 2004. Anti-Christian violence is endemic in many Muslim countries. After the fall of President Mohamed Morsi’s government in Egypt in 2013, scores of Christian churches, schools and other buildings were destroyed by rampaging mobs. Israel is plagued by its own minority problems, not only in relation to the native Palestinian (Arab) population, but also in relation to the many Christians who have migrated there in recent years from the former Soviet Union. See, for example, Patrick Martin, “Little promise in the promised land,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), February 18, 1995, and the affidavit of Lynda Brayer, in Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947 (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland, 1998), 270–75, which outline some of the religious-based hostility directed at these non-Jewish immigrants. In another seething development, violent riots erupted in Jerusalem on January 28, 1996 involving Ethiopian Jews protesting against what they perceived as widespread racism. A few months later, on May 24, hundreds of Jewish worshippers went on a rampage in the Old City, attacking Arab bystanders and damaging Arab property; according to Israeli police, this riot was unprovoked. See the Jerusalem Post Foreign Service report filed by Bill Hutman, reproduced in Kielce—July 4, 1946: Background, Context and Events (Toronto and Chicago: The Polish Educational Foundation in North America, 1996), 151. An Arab driving through a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in Acre at the beginning of Yom Kippur was enough to “provoke” an attack by Jewish residents. Rioting ensued for several days, as gangs of Jews and Arabs swarmed through the streets smashing shop windows, destroying cars, and throwing rocks at each other. Dozens of rioters were injured in the clashes and about one dozen Arab houses were torched. The Northern District police commander reported that the majprity of those inciting violence were Jews. Not surprisingly, Jewish politicians accused the Arab minority of staging a “pogrom.” See Oakland Ross, “Israelis hope ethnic tensions isolated,” Toronto Star, October 14, 2008. The sorry plight of the Palestinian population under Israeli occupation has received extensive coverage in human rights monitoring publications. Suffice it to point out that an editorial in the Israeli daily Haaretz, on July 9, 2008, acknowledged that Jewish settlers, who are bankrolled by the state of Israeli and international Jewish organizations, subject the Palestinians to continual abuse and mistreatment (assaults and even shelling are frequent occurrences), speak openly of driving them out of their homeland and making their lives a misery, and the police and courts rarely take these matters seriously, thus tolerating Jewish violence against Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. One of the most appalling examples of a racially motivated pogrom in recent years was an unprovoked rampage in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of in Pisgat Ze’ev on April 30, 2008, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, in which some 100 rather ordinary Jewish youths, armed with sticks, clubs, and knives, attacked and seriously injured defenceless Arab teens from a nearby refugee camp. Fortunately, the event was captured on a video surveillance camera and in ICQ messages, as otherwise many quarters would have doubtless claimed that it was started by Arabs and that Jewish “self-defence” was fully justified. The police took no steps to stop the announced pogrom, security guards and observers did not notify the police once it started, the parents of the attackers considered the children who were arrested to be the victims, and the local community by and large condoned their actions. More pogroms were being planned for future dates. The community was rewarded for the beatings when, several weeks later, the government announced the construction of 763 new homes in Pisgat Ze’ev, on territory incorporated into the state of Israel contrary to international law. According to a detailed report published in the Israeli daily Haaretz (Uri Blau, “‘I Kicked the Arab, I Stepped on His Head,’” June 5, 2008): Dozens of teenage boys from Jerusalem received the same ICQ message: “We’re putting an end to all the Arabs who hang out in ‘Pisga’ [Pisgat Ze’ev] and the mall … Anyone who is Jewish and wants to put an end to all that should be at Burger Ranch at 10 P.M. and we’ll finally show them they can’t hang in our area anymore. Anyone who is willing to do that and has Jewish blood should add his name to this message.” It would have been difficult to choose a more cynical date on which to send out such a message: Wednesday, April 30, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Dozens of boys arrived at the meeting place in the Pisgat Ze’ev shopping mall. They streamed in from all parts of the capital, some on foot, some by bus and some driven in by parents. Equipped with knives, sticks and clubs, they all had one purpose: to do harm to Arabs for being Arabs. At the entrance, the gang encountered two boys from the Shuafat refugee camp, who had come to shop for clothes and didn’t know the mall had closed early for Holocaust Day. The day’s end saw the two battered, bleeding and stabbed, and at Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Karem. … Their testimony indicates the attack was perpetrated in a society in which violence against Arabs is seen as a legitimate and necessary means by which to restore Jewish hegemony to the neighborhood. … “Yaron, who had a stick, hit him between the ribs or the head … Uzi jumped on his body. I more or less saw that they all jumped, kicked, stepped on him, on the Arab. The kid was a trampoline and punching bag. … The way he was pushed against the railing and the blows he got, I don’t know how the boy is alive. …” While the boys were beating Walid like a punching bag, Ahmed was stabbed in the back. … Another boy who was present, Ya’akov, 16, said in his interrogation that “these were two groups that split up. Each one attacked a different Arab, but most of the chaos was where I was looking. At least 20 kids hitting and lots of others, 100, standing on the side … I saw one heavy one, a fat face with a beard and stubble, he was holding a board like a construction board, 60 centimeters long. I heard someone, I couldn’t tell who, saying ‘Move for a second, move,’ and then he came and hit the Arab on the head with the stick. The Arab held his head after a second and shouted ‘ay’... Aside from the stick, I saw that they punched him hard, hit him. And then he started running toward the gas station.” … The group beating of the two teenage boys ended only when a police van approached the site by chance. … To identify the attackers, the police investigators from the juvenile division of the Zion district used footage from security cameras at the mall. The suspects turned out to be “ordinary” boys, without criminal records, who study at well-known schools in the city. Some said their participation in the incident was a result of peer pressure. … Only few of the accused expressed sorrow and regret. … Anat Asraf, Liran Asraf’s mother, says her son is the victim. “My son has no criminal record and happened to be there out of curiosity, like 200 other children. … But my son is a victim of the state. …” Still, you won’t hear many people condemning the attack on the Arab teens here. The belligerence of Jewish youth has not diminished as shown by the following report of anti-Arab riots that took place in Jerusalem in March 2012. Again the events were captured on video so it is difficult, though not impossible, for Jewish nationalists (and their allies) to turn this into just another example of Jewish “self-defence.” The Israeli police did not intervene to protect Arab citizens or arrest any of the culprits, and only launched an investigation under media pressure. If something like this had occurred in interwar Eastern Europe it would have been called a “pogrom.” According to a report published in Haaretz on March 25, 2012 (Oz Rosenberg, “Jerusalem Police Launch Probe of Soccer Fans Caught Attacking Arab Workers at Mall”): Yüklə 2,16 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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