Article content continued

There has never been a satisfactory explanation of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, but he somehow persuaded himself that even if Germany lost the war, it would win by exterminating the Jews of Europe. Roosevelt told the leaders of American Jewry on Dec. 8, 1942, that they could write any declaration condemning Nazi infamies they wished and affix his name to it, but that Hitler was “an insane man,” we were facing “a national psychopathic case” and that the only way to end the atrocities was to win the war. Of course the war was not provoked or sustained exclusively by the desire to spare the Nazis’ victims, but ending and punishing the barbarities of Nazism — made, as Churchill said, “more sinister and more protracted by the lights of perverted science” — were among the chief war aims. The United States accepted more Jewish refugees than all other countries combined, and Pius XII, who was not without his faults, sheltered all the Jews of Rome during the German occupation, condemned Nazi and Japanese barbarities, and undoubtedly saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews.

The Christian secular and religious leaders were not blameless, but they were authentic and distinguished defenders of the civilization Nazism assaulted, and it is not the place of Dr. Sussman or anyone else to assimilate them to the Pagan and diabolical evil of Nazism, under the spurious rubric of them all being Christians of different factions. Nor does a glance at Islamic history or a perusal of the Koran and the New Testament sustain for an instant his preposterous claim that Christianity is more violent than Islam. Not that it is particularly relevant, but when the Jews had their own jurisdictions, before being overborne by more numerous neighbours, they were not averse to violence themselves, including David and Solomon. And the Christians were subject to a good deal more violent (and relatively unprovoked) oppression than were the Jews by the Romans, until most of the Romans, and most of the Jews, chose to become Christians. The Christian democratic leaders of the West in the 20th century secured the destruction of Nazism and the implosion of international Communism, the liberation of occupied Europe, the salvation of the Jews, and the redemption of Germany from Nazi evil. Canada played a distinguished part in all of this.

My status as a philo-Semite is well-known, including by every leader of Israel starting with Menachem Begin, but that status, which I wear proudly, does not obligate me to endure in silence collective libels on my co-religionists and my heritage, and particularly not from a local academic who should know the difference between a Muslim terrorist and a Christian proselytizer, and between Christian democracy and Nazism. Shame, Dr. Sussman; you dishonour your great people.

National Post

cbletters@gmail.com