Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Monday by applauding Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza and calling for unquestioning loyalty to Israel.
Speaking at a Holocaust memorial ceremony in Ottawa, Poilievre celebrated the birth of the “great state of Israel” after the Nazi Holocaust.
He then praised Israel for its military campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 47,300 Palestinians and prompted a genocide case against Israel at the World Court, as well as accusations of genocide from leading human rights groups and scholars.
“Israel has fought back the regimes, and the terrorist groups that sought to annihilate Israel have themselves been annihilated,” said Poilievre, referring to the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, which he compared to the Nazi Holocaust.
“And Israel has friends, as do the Jewish people, friends that will stand through thick and thin, through fire and water, not equivocating, not speaking out of both sides of our mouth.”
Besides the massive civilian death toll and ongoing humanitarian catastrophes unleashed by Israel’s multi-front attacks, Israel in fact failed to destroy Hamas and other Palestinian and Lebanese resistance groups in the region.
Amid a fragile “ceasefire,” thousands of Palestinians have recently returned to areas of Gaza to find their homes and neighbourhoods completely destroyed by Israel, and facing dire shortages of basic supplies. Meanwhile, Israel has continued to attack civilians.
None of this was acknowledged by Poilievre, who also called for deportations of any temporary resident found to have committed antisemitic “hate crimes” in Canada. Over the past 15 months, baseless “hate” allegations have been levelled against peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrators across Canada.
Alex Cosh
Corey Balsam, national coordinator of Independent Jewish Voices - Canada (IJV), told The Maple he found Poilievre’s speech “appalling and a perfect example of how the memory of the Nazi Holocaust can sadly be used to justify fascist and even genocidal policies.”
“This ‘coming together of the nation’ based on the exclusion of others is exactly what led to the Holocaust.”
The memorial event in Ottawa was one of dozens that took place around the world this week. Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi regime’s death camps that were set up during the Nazi Holocaust primarily to exterminate Jews, as well as Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war.
The international Genocide Convention, which is cited in the ongoing genocide case against Israel, was established in 1948 because of the Nazi Holocaust.
History Whitewashed
Israel was established in 1948 following an ethnic cleansing campaign carried out by Zionist militias against Indigenous Palestinians. That campaign, known as the Nakba, forced some 750,000 Palestinians from their land to make way for the State of Israel.
Such details, however, were absent from Poilievre’s speech, which cast Israel’s foundation in a heroic light.
“That doesn’t mean it’s without difficulty,” Poilievre said of Israel’s foundation.
“We had all hoped that we had left the ugly, authoritarian socialist ideologies of fascism and communism behind, but they came roaring back with extreme and radical movements,” he said in reference to Palestinian resistance groups and their backers.
Despite Poilievre’s linking of socialism and communism to the Nazi Holocaust, it was the armies of the Soviet Union that liberated approximately 7,000 remaining prisoners from Auschwitz in 1945.
The Nazis murdered a total of 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, at Auschwitz in fewer than five years.
Throughout the Nazi Holocaust, the Third Reich and its collaborators murdered a total of six million Jews, 5.7 million Soviet civilians, 2.9 million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.8 million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of others based on their ethnicities, disabilities or political beliefs.
Socialists and communists were among the first victims of the Nazi regime, which cast the rise of communism as a Jewish conspiracy.
Falsely describing Nazism as a “socialist” ideology is a common tactic employed by some right-wing thinkers in an apparent attempt to offload responsibility for the crimes of Nazism onto the political left.
During his speech, Poilievre also denounced “antisemitism” on Canadian streets, blaming it on what he called “obscene, woke ideologies,” echoing one of the Conservative leader’s favourite buzzwords.
Balsam said Poilievre’s remarks showed how the Conservative leader is aligned with “Trump-style populism,” and that by invoking “woke ideologies,” Poilievre seemed to suggest that anti-racists, queer people and their allies somehow pose a threat to Jews in Canada.
Balsam also noted that Poilievre referred to antisemitic hate-crime statistics, but added the Conservative leader ignored the fact that the vast majority of hate crimes in Canada are believed to go unreported, particularly among groups that are more likely to be suspicious of police.
“This isn’t to say that Jews are not subject to hate crimes and antisemitism, but there’s no doubt that the relative numbers are blown wildly out of proportion for political purposes,” said Balsam.
The Conservative Party leader’s speech also made no mention of antisemitic threats posed by far-right groups in Canada. “It’s part of his base, so it’s not surprising that he would not go after right-wing groups,” said Balsam.
Palestine solidarity activists have been falsely accused of engaging in antisemitism for a range of actions since Israel began its attacks on Gaza, including shouting slogans calling for Palestinian freedom and protesting businesses whose owners support former so-called “lone soldiers” in the Israeli military.
Return of Harper Years?
Poilievre, who has spent his entire adult life in politics as a devout Zionist, has a long track record of smearing Palestine solidarity initiatives as antisemitic, and has indicated that a Conservative government led by him would implement hard-line pro-Israel policies reminiscent of the Stephen Harper era.
Alex Cosh
This would likely include cutting funding to UNRWA, Palestine’s main agency, returning Canada to voting in lockstep with Israel at the United Nations, and further crackdowns on Palestinian activism.
Abigail Bakan, a Jewish political scientist at the University of Toronto, told The Maple last year that Poilievre’s agenda “represents the opposite” of the Jewish traditions of social justice and solidarity.
“There’s nothing about Poilievre’s conception of foreign policy that would be protective of Jewish identity,” Bakan said.
Balsam, the IJV national coordinator, told The Maple that Poilievre’s invocation of the slogan “never again” in reference to the Nazi Holocaust during his speech highlighted two radically different interpretations of the phrase.
The first, popularized by Meir Kahane, the leader of the far-right Jewish Defence League, serves as a rallying cry for violence against anyone perceived as a threat to Jewish survival, which, Balsam said, “Zionist ideology presents as perpetually under threat.”
“By contrast, there is a very different interpretation of the ‘never again’ slogan, which is that never again should anyone, any group or people, be subject to something like the Holocaust.”
Alex Cosh is the news editor of The Maple.
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