Hanes: Disinformation and hate threaten to drown out lessons of history
Heidi Berger has spent the better part of the last decade trying to get Quebec to make education about genocide compulsory in schools.
Now she finds herself caught between the lessons of history and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, in a polarized political climate where the word genocide has been weaponized.
'It's tough times,' said Berger, founder of the Montreal-based Foundation for Genocide Education. 'It's very, very tough.'
Inspired by her late mother's commitment to sharing the story of surviving the Holocaust, Berger started the organization to promote teaching young people about some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century in order to prevent such mass murders from ever happening again.
After much lobbying and nudging, a tool kit was developed three years ago for the Quebec Ministry of Education by pedagogical experts to help teachers delve into the difficult topic of genocide. It covers those that occurred in Armenia, Namibia, Rwanda and Bosnia, as well as the Holocaust, the Holodomor, when the Soviet Union starved millions of Ukrainians, and crimes against Indigenous Peoples.
Although the guide remains optional in schools, it was nevertheless a major breakthrough in Berger's quest.
Then Oct. 7 happened and put everything the foundation had accomplished to the test.
'What has really been so heavy on my heart is the obstacles to teaching about the Holocaust and genocide after Oct. 7,' she said. 'It's been challenging to give our presentations by children of Holocaust survivors to schools which previously welcomed us. I have to be honest: There are a number of schools who have cancelled scheduled presentations because they cite concerns that discussing the Holocaust or genocide in general may trigger emotions in their students. There's also a fear of reprisals from parents. And there's also a basic lack of training in how to mediate discussions on the topic.'
Teaching about a subject as painful, sensitive and complex as genocide has never been easy, but it has become all the more difficult since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 and taking 250 hostage.
The word genocide went from being an obscure term to a ubiquitous accusation chanted at protests against Israel for its ongoing bombardment of Gaza.
Rhetoric has hardened on both sides, with some now referring to Hamas not just as a terror group but a 'genocidal' terrorist organization due to its explicit goal of wiping Israel off the map.
Support for Israel's right to defend itself has waned as the war drags on and two ceasefires have faltered.
More than 55,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gaza health ministry, which doesn't distinguish between civilians and combatants. Apartment blocks have been levelled, millions of Palestinians have been displaced inside Gaza and there are frequent warnings that Israel restricting aid is pushing the population toward starvation.
There's no doubt the human suffering is awful. But is it unlawful?
South Africa brought a complaint of genocide against Israel to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The ICC cautioned Israel about committing genocide and issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, as well as the masterminds of the Hamas attack, who have since been assassinated.
History will ultimately judge whether this is genocide.
But in the meantime, the public has formed its own opinions, as sympathy for Palestinians grows and shock over the tragedy of Oct. 7 fades.
In a new online poll by Léger conducted in early June, almost half of 1,100 Canadians surveyed — 49 per cent — agreed that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
And those views were solicited before Israel started bombing Iran to contain the existential threat of its nuclear program in a dramatic escalation of already tense hostilities in the Middle East.
A closer look at the Léger poll shows that over 60 per cent of respondents who identify as Liberal, New Democratic, Bloc Québécois or Green party voters hold the view that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, compared to 37 per cent who declared themselves Conservatives.
There is a deep split in public opinion despite the fact 46 per cent of respondents told pollsters they barely understood or had a poor understanding of the conflict.
These findings illustrate the strong emotions surrounding Israel's pulverization of Gaza, but also the fallout from a social media shadow war playing out since Oct. 7.
On Thursday, the Foundation for Genocide Education is hosting a fundraiser where journalist and author Warren Kinsella will speak about propaganda and hate in an age of disinformation.
Kinsella, who recently returned from Israel, is writing a book and producing a documentary on the digital campaign 'to shape history, sway public opinion, and control the narrative surrounding one of the world's most polarizing conflicts.'
Iranian-funded propaganda against Israel began well before Hamas's 2023 attack. But in November 2023, the New York Times uncovered a 'deluge of online propaganda and disinformation' spread by Iran, Russia and to a lesser extent China 'that is larger than anything seen before.'
'It's fascinating and surprisingly sophisticated what they did,' Kinsella said in an interview.
Kinsella's talk will look at how anti-Israel attitudes, once the domain of the far right, have now been adopted by the progressive left. They have been strongly embraced by younger generations, who tend to see Israel's actions through the lens of their post-colonial, anti-racist values.
Israel, meanwhile, has failed to tell its own story effectively, said Kinsella, once an adviser to prime minister Jean Chrétien, resulting in the Jewish community writ large being blamed for Netanyahu's war.
'Israel has done a really, really crummy job of communications,' said Kinsella. 'Israel needs to tell a better story about itself.'
Legitimate criticism of Netanyahu's merciless bombing of Gaza is sometimes misconstrued as antisemitism. But it shouldn't be. Even within Israel, there is visceral opposition and loud dissent.
'Enough is enough. Israel is committing war crimes,' former prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote in Haaretz on May 27.
And in an interview with Israeli public radio, Yair Golan, a retired general and leader of Israel's Democrats party, said: 'Israel is on its way to becoming a pariah state among nations, like South Africa was, if we don't return to acting like a sane country. And a sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not give itself the aim of expelling populations.'
But this range of opinion is rarely heard outside Israel. Instead, practically the entire Jewish diaspora has been painted with the same brush — vilified, discredited and scapegoated.
The conflict has unleashed an alarming tidal wave of hate toward both the Jewish and Muslim communities in Canada and around the world. But the scourge of antisemitism, which the New York Times editorial board recently characterized as 'the oldest hate,' has been particularly vicious.
While Israel was still mourning its dead and counting the numbers of hostages taken, Hamas supporters celebrated the attack in the streets of Montreal and other Canadian cities.
In Montreal, bullets have been fired at Jewish schools and firebombs tossed at synagogues.
College and university campuses have become battle zones where Jewish students feel intimidated for showing visible signs of their identity, daring to defend Israel's right to exist, or demonstrating for the return of the hostages.
In recent weeks, antisemitism has reached dangerous new levels.
A young Jewish couple who worked at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., were shot to death leaving an event at the Holocaust museum there. An arsonist firebombed the home of Pennsylvania's Jewish governor on Passover. An assailant in Boulder, Colo., attacked a crowd of protesters rallying for the release of Israeli hostages, injuring 15, including a Holocaust survivor.
This violent turn is not only worrisome for the Jewish community, which was already feeling unsafe in Montreal as elsewhere, but also for democracy and society as a whole. As has often been pointed out when it comes to dark chapters in history: It starts with the Jews, but it doesn't end with the Jews.
This is why education about genocide is so important. It teaches critical thinking skills and helps students identify the warning signs that lead to mass murder, which are classification, separation, stigmatization, dehumanization, justification and elimination.
The foundation relies on the United Nations' 1948 definition of genocide, which is 'acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,' including killing; causing serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction; imposing measures intended to prevent births; and forcibly transferring children.
There is certainly room for discussion about how these criteria apply to both history and current events.
But rational debate has become a struggle, Berger said.
There were complaints after a recent presentation at one school where the foundation has long been sending the children of Holocaust survivors to speak.
'There was a small cohort of very vocal Arab-Palestinian parents who accused us and the principal and the board of governors of the school of us sending in representatives to platform pro-Israel views and to weaponize the Holocaust as a justification for Israel's actions in Gaza,' Berger said. 'We spoke to the principal after and we don't know if they're going to invite us back next year. Are they going to be afraid?'
Other schools have also stopped calling or are saying 'no thanks' when the foundation gets in touch.
Most painful of all, there has been a schism in the ranks of the survivors of other genocides who the foundation sends to schools as speakers.
'We had an Armenian presenter that we'd trained who went into schools to talk about her grandparents and the Armenian genocide. It was the only presentation of that kind anywhere. And she quit. She didn't want to be associated with us,' Berger said. 'We also had a Rwandan quit on us. Also a young Rwandan survivor himself, who quit on us, because we didn't want to say that Israel is committing a genocide because we don't believe it. In the meantime, we had a presenter who wanted us to remove the word genocide from our name.'
Instead of bringing people together to connect the dots of the hate and discrimination that can lead to genocide, the Jewish community, which forged the template for 'never again,' is once again ostracized.
Out of both necessity and circumstance, the foundation's focus has narrowed somewhat.
'We've had to shift more of our focus to educating about the Holocaust. Because when we go into schools to give presentations about the Holocaust, we talk about the history of antisemitism. And this is directly tied to the students' understanding of why and how this hate is resurfacing under the guise of anti-Israel protest and hate,' Berger said. 'What the problem is now in schools, we're told by teachers it's very cool for kids to be antisemitic. It's a very cool thing. And genocide is a very hot, controversial word now. It wasn't before, but it is now.'
As disinformation, discrimination and hate threaten to drown out the lessons of history, Berger remains steadfast in her goal of making education about genocide mandatory in Quebec schools to honour her mother's legacy.
'Still to me that is the most powerful tool we have,' she said.
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