Written by: Yves Engler

One would expect a “holocaust museum” to oppose every genocide as well as all forms of racism. However, the Montreal Holocaust Museum (MHM) is offering excuses and cover for the perpetrator of what the World Court described as a “plausible genocide” in Gaza, occupied Palestine.

One would also expect governmental and media outrage when directors of this taxpayer-funded museum blame the victims of said genocide. But no, that outrage has been saved for graffiti writers who expressed their horror of what is happening in Gaza by scrawling “fuck Israel, fuck Quebec” on a sign devoted to the museum’s ultra-Zionist leading donor.

Recently political and media elites echoed genocidal Zionist organizations criticism of someone who wrote “fuck Israel, fuck Quebec” on the Azrieli Foundation sign in front of the site that will host the new MHM. According to the photos posted on X, graffitists also “tagged” that sign and an MHM sign.

The Montreal Gazette and La Presse reported on the markings. Heritage minister Pascale St-Onge posted about calling MHM while Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre declared that “hatred against the Jewish people is the world’s ugliest and most enduring form of hatred.”

But the MHM is not simply a museum. It’s promoting a holocaust in Gaza. After over 10,000 Palestinians had been killed in the latest round of Israeli barbarism directed at the besieged coastal strip, MHM released their position “on the continuing conflict in Israel”. The November 15, 2023 statement noted: “The past few weeks have been excruciatingly painful for our Museum community. We have seen the worst terrorist attack committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, an escalating war in a place that many of us call a second home, images of extreme violence, the proliferation of hate propaganda, and the terrorizing of Jews around the world. We share the pain of the Israeli and Palestinian families, equally victimized by the cruelty of Hamas. We are heartbroken thinking of the innocent hostages being held by these ISIS emulators, and we pray for their immediate release back to the loving arms of their Israeli families.”

The MHM has many ties to Montreal’s main apartheid and genocide lobby organizations. The museum lists Montréal’s Federation Combined Jewish Appeal as its “Beneficiary” and has co-sponsored initiatives with B’nai Brith, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and other anti-Palestinian groups. In 2020, it released a statement titled “The Montreal Holocaust Museum regretfully notes the Montreal Mayor’s refusal to support the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.” The IHRA definition seeks to label criticisms of apartheid and genocide as antisemitic.

Worse than its official statements, the head of MHM has used the Nazis’ decimation of European Jewry to justify Israel’s holocaust in Gaza. In a speech to the Montreal Mayor’s Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony last month, Jacques Saada declared:

“We live in an upside down world. A world gone mad. A world that now escapes all truth. A world where the victim is described as the aggressor and the aggressor is portrayed as the victim. A world where women sing the praises of Hamas, while it wants to enslave them. A world where members of the LGBTQ communities sing the praises of Hamas, while in Gaza it sentences them to death. A world where young people sing the praises of Hamas, even as it promises young Palestinians a bright future on the way to the Middle Ages. We live in a world where we vilify democracies, but where we venerate the dictatorships of a fundamentalist Islamism which has nothing to do with the Islam of enlightenment. … All this is also happening in the streets and on the campuses of Montreal. A world where university professors treat their Jewish students as prostitutes. A world where a self-proclaimed Imam, from the top of a platform at Place des Arts, calls for the elimination of a people and where he is applauded by thousands of people.”

A few days earlier Saada used a commemoration of the Nazi Holocaust to promote Israel’s ongoing one in Gaza. He told the crowd, whether you are on the Far Right or the Far Left, a proponent of a distorted wokeism or a supporter of brutal, medieval Islamism, whatever the pretext for your repugnant antisemitism, you will not silence us!”

Previously Saada opposed a ceasefire and has attended Israel rallies and events. Prior to his recent position at the MHM, Saada was one of Montreal’s leading apartheid promoters. He participated in a 2020 Honest Reporting Canada talk with former Conservative foreign affairs minister John Baird and during Israel’s murderous 2021 onslaught on Gaza, Saada declared that “Israel has the right to defend itself; no, it has the duty to defend itself.”

The lead private donor of the new MHM is the Azrieli Foundation whose sign was defaced. Worth more than $3 billion prior to his death, David Azrieli served in the paramilitary Haganah group during the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. His unit was responsible for the Battle of Jerusalem, including forcibly displacing 10,000 Palestinians. A Montrealer who also owned property in Israel, Azrieli paid for an amphitheatre to be built in the occupied Golan Heights to commemorate his Haganah brigade and made a controversial donation to Im Tirtzu, which an Israeli court deemed a “fascist” group. In 2011, Azrieli gave Concordia University $5 million to establish the first minor in Israel Studies at a Canadian university. After attending an Association for Israel Studies’ conference organized by the Azrieli Institute, prominent anti-Palestinian activist Gerald Steinberg described the institute as part of a “counterattack” against pro-Palestinian activism at Concordia.

Twenty-five years ago, Norman Finkelstein detailed how Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry was weaponized against Palestinians. In his 2000 book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Finkelstein, whose grandparents perished in Nazi death camps, argues that the American Jewish establishment exploited the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for economic and political gain and to further the interests of Israel. Since the book was written, Israel lobbyists’ reliance on antisemitism/Nazi Holocaust claims to undermine Palestine solidarity has grown substantially.

The real scandal concerning the MHM is that federal, municipal and provincial governments have given tens of millions of dollars in grants — while subsidizing tens of millions of dollars more through donations to charities — to an institution enabling Israel’s horrors.

The Montreal Holocaust Museum is promoting a holocaust in Gaza, so intense public anger towards it is justified.

Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.

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Yves Engler is the author of 13 books. His latest book, available now, is "Canada's Long Fight Against Democracy”.

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