4 No. 78 JUSTICE write in the shadow, pain and continuing trauma of the unspeakable mass atrocities of October 7, 2023 — the worst day in Jewish and Israeli history since the Holocaust — of horrors too terrible to be believed, but not too terrible to have happened; of horrific mass murder, rape, torture, maiming and mutilation, burning and beheading, of women, children, the elderly, disabled, Holocaust survivors — the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. I write of the crime of "kinocide" — the premeditated and wholly illegal targeting, terrorizing, torturing and killing of whole families. This includes the killing of parents in front of their children, and children in front of their parents; and the forcible abduction of 251 hostages, many of whom were, themselves, tortured in captivity, and even murdered. Every day spent in Hamas’s captivity was an ongoing crime against humanity. Hamas, the perpetrator of these unspeakable atrocities, is not only a terrorist statelet, but a genocidal antisemitic terrorist statelet. Hamas affirmed this stance in its 1988 charter, and has maintained it since, having sworn to commit October 7 “again, and again, and again, until Israel’s annihilation.” One would have thought that these genocidal atrocities by Hamas — let alone its standing incitement to genocide, which is a standalone breach of the Genocide Convention — would have resulted in a global condemnation, including by the UN, ICC and ICJ, of the terrorist group; that it would have resulted in global action against Hamas. On the contrary, and beginning on October 8, one found denial even that these atrocities took place, or support for them, or justification for them, or even celebration and glorification of them, in the political square, the public square, the cultural arena, and, in particular, on the campus and in academic culture. And more: what we witnessed, and beginning also on October 8, was an unprecedented global explosion of antisemitism, where we have been witnessing the highest level of incidences of antisemitism since audits began in the late 1970s, and where we have also been witnessing the highest level of hate crimes targeting Jews; and where, for example, Canadian Jews, 1% of the population, are the target of 72% of religiously motivated hate crimes, and where Canadian Jews are 25 times more likely to be the target of a hate crime than any other minority; and where hate crimes increasingly characterized by violence are identity-based crimes, which reverberate amongst the community as a whole; where, for example, the Bondi Beach Hannukah massacre was felt by Jewish communities the world over, as was the killing of two Israeli embassy officials outside the Jewish Museum in Washington D.C.; the murder of a Holocaust survivor peacefully marching for the release of the hostage in Boulder, Colorado; let alone the torment, torture and even murder of the hostages in captivity. At the same time, and paradoxically while we witness a virulent resurgence of global antisemitism, there are now more resources dedicated to combating antisemitism than ever before. We have Special Envoys across multiple countries, working individually and collectively, we have National Action Plans to combat antisemitism, and we have growing advocacy involving Jewish communal leadership and their respective domestic governments. To comprehend this paradox, we need to understand the origins, nature, essence and impact of antisemitism. Antisemitism is the oldest, longest, most enduring, most toxic and most lethal form of hatred — one which mutates and metastasizes over time — but is always anchored in one historical, foundational generic, conspiratorial trope — that Jews, the Jewish People, and the Jewish State are the enemy of all that is good, and the embodiment of all that is evil – reflected in whatever is the zeitgeist of the particular moment. When the zeitgeist was Christianity, the Jews were held to be guilty of deicide. When the zeitgeist was the Black Plague in the Middle Ages, the Jews were the poisoners of the wells. When the zeitgeist was race, Jews were nonA Day of Infamy: October 7 — Legal Aspects* Irwin Cotler * Foreword by The Honorable Irwin Cotler to a forthcoming volume of articles on A Day of Infamy October 7 – Legal Aspects. The author commends the IJL under the leadership of Meir Linzen and the editorship of Mala Tabory for organizing and publishing this timely and significant volume of essays. I
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