Posted on 11/02/2005 6:15:31 PM PST by NZerFromHK
The late Simon Wiesenthal denounced Canada years ago for failing to bring war criminals to justice. Our record has only gotten worse
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When Simon Wiesenthal died on Sept. 20, the world mourned the loss of a man known for his tenacious passion for refusing to let the war criminals who orchestrated the Holocaust live out their days in peace. The survivor of 12 concentration camps is estimated to have aided in the capture of 1,100 Nazis worldwide. But for all his inspiring conviction, Wiesenthal refused since the early eighties to set foot in Canada. "He simply said he wasn't going to return to Canada because he felt there wasn't the political will to deal with the issue of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators," Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, told reporters the week of Wiesenthal's death. But while Canada may have been famously condemned by the man who was known as the "conscience of the world," it does not seem to have made Ottawa any more anxious to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice. Rather, politicians in this country continue to send a dangerous message to more contemporary war criminals around the world looking for a nice place to retire.
With 60 years having elapsed since the liberation of the death camps, time is running out for Canada to redeem itself on the World War II file, says Bernie Farber, president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. "These guys are no spring chickens anymore," he says. But the prosecution of those Nazis who are still alive is more significant than just putting doddering old murderers behind bars, says Farber. By demonstrating, as Wiesenthal did, that war criminals cannot ever count on outrunning justice, Canada could, by continuing to hound old Nazis, demonstrate to other murderers that this country is no safe haven for them, either.
That's certainly not the message Ottawa is sending right now. According to documents obtained by the Western Standard last year from the federal Justice Department through an access to information request, as many as 1,690 alleged Second World War criminals had made their home in Canada as of Oct. 27, 2004. By last fall, roughly 25 per cent had died. And of the more than 1,000 of those still alive, only 56 are being pursued, with another seven in active litigation. No wonder the number of suspected war criminals of all varieties--from Austria, Germany, Ukraine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and more--has soared in recent years, according to official government estimates. In 1997, the Justice Ministry estimated there were 477 such people living in Canada. In 2002, there were at least 2,406.
The reality is that Canadian officials lack the political will to hunt down and extradite war criminals, says John Thompson, president of the Mackenzie Institute, a Toronto-based security think-tank. Often, he says, Ottawa is too fearful of upsetting ethnic groups (read Liberal voters) to bother with administering justice. In January, federal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler admitted as much when he told the editorial board of a national newspaper that Ottawa's refusal to prosecute criminals from the Sri Lankan/Tamil conflict who are living in Canada was the result of a need for his government to remain on good terms with the Tamil community. Liberal cabinet ministers have even been caught attending fundraising events for the Tamil Tigers terrorist group. "The Sri Lankans who are living in Canada are . . . Tamils, for the most part," Cotler said. "And you know, Toronto, I think, has the largest number of Tamils in the Tamil diaspora than anywhere else outside of Sri Lanka, so we've got to be very careful just in terms of our own relationships."
Playing politics is certainly easier than going to the trouble of investigating and trying war criminals. Lynn Lovett, counsel for Canada's Justice Ministry, says that those sorts of prosecutions fall under the joint jurisdiction of no fewer than three different government departments: Justice, Citizenship and Immigration, and the RCMP. After trying to lay charges under the Criminal Code against suspected Nazis in the eighties and nineties, Ottawa found that the process led to lengthy and expensive trials, which often failed to meet criminal trial standards for proof. The result was a string of acquittals. So, rather than press criminal charges, Canada focused on trying to deport war criminals--with only marginally better luck. Michael Baumgartner, a former Nazi concentration camp guard who lied to get into Canada after the war, was awaiting deportation orders when he died this past June.
With Nazis, Canada had the perfect opportunity to demonstrate it was capable of dealing with these sorts of criminals, says Thompson. With the hard work of people at the Wiesenthal Center and in the Israeli government, former SS guards and the like were much easier to locate than most war criminals. Sometimes, all it took was a little effort. In the eighties, Sol Littman, a Toronto spokesman for the Wiesenthal Center, embarrassed Ottawa by tracking down nearly 30 suspected war criminals that justice officials claimed they could not locate, by looking them up in the Toronto phone book and checking their social insurance numbers.
"CSIS had hunting orders for Nazis they've almost never had since," says Thompson. "To go after those guys was really easy. Everybody was doing it." To Ottawa, it seems, leaving the majority of criminals to die peacefully in Canada was even easier. But with a growing community of war criminals in this country, it seems inevitable that, one of these days, Ottawa won't have any choice but to face up to what has become a terribly difficult problem.
I'm a Canadian and I say fire away. I have no love for my the majority of my compatriots. They are useful idiots if they are condemning for Australia for actually defending itself.
So people who, from their air-planes, machine-gunned civilians fleeing to river during the fire-storm at Dresden should go free? Should a Vietnam vet Senator from Nebraska go free? Should the people who dropped the A-Bomb go free? Were all these evil people or not?
The Allied cause was just. But, as hard as it is to imagine, many people on the other side thought theirs was, too.
Going after Nazi war criminals at this stage of the game gives vindictiveness a rather bad name.
Wow. I hope you never say the Lord's Prayer.
Well why don't you post some links and we'll all see and read for ourselves.
In the piece, writer Matt Labash cuts right to the chase, saying he regards Canada "as most Americans do, as North America's attic, a mildewy recess that adds little value to the house, but serves as excellent dead space for stashing Nazi war criminals, drawing-room socialists and hockey goons."
Labash has already experienced a milder form of anti-Americanism (just a mroe potent form of American leftism) out west in British Columbia. If he goes to Ontario's population centres, this is the soul of English Canadian anti-Americanism, he is bound to experience a double amount of smugism added with High Tory snobbery.
Loser inept Canada can kiss my royal American ass.
I was going to post a lengthy explanation, but upon review I will simply second post #28.
ping a ling...
I hear you loud and clear, friend. I'm very much an Old Testament type of fellow myself. And I believe that in many cases, we should forgive. But there is more to justice than moving on, or moving some money around. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life was not included in the Good Book for no reason.
Maybe they're starting a nuclear weapons program.
Col Tibbets and his colleagues were not evil.
The camp guards hiding in Canada, on the other
hand, were and are.
Judge the rest on an individual basis, and if cause
exists, bring charges. Good luck finding witnesses to
testify.
Communism in Europe is only 15 years behind us, and yet we never, NEVER (I shout), hear about the Communist murderers, but Nazis? Comrade, we will be hearing about Nazi war criminals hiding somewhere out there 50 years from now. Ah, but Communists meant well, didn't they?
Which church was that? The Church of Satan?
(I take that back. It's unfair to Satanists.)
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