It’s with mixed feelings that we read of the recent decision of the Federal Court of Appeal in the matter of Helmut Oberlander. In rejecting Oberlander’s appeal, the court appears to have removed any impediment to having this member of a Nazi mobile killing unit deported from Canada.

One the one hand, justice, even when long delayed, is welcome. But on the other hand, why did it take 25 years to bring this case to the verge of completion?

Canada’s history of dealing with war criminals and their enablers is shameful. Simply put, the murderers and their helpers were allowed to come to Canada and live out their lives in peace. When the outcry of Jewish advocacy organizations forced the government to act, the response was phlegmatic and, more often than not, these men died of old age in their beds, enjoying what they denied to their victims.

At least in this case, the government was not to blame. Both the current Liberal and previous Conservative governments of Canada made repeated attempts to remove Oberlander’s citizenship and his person from this country. In all cases they were stymied by the Federal Court. Appeals over two decades were accepted again and again, one ruling even offered arguments that Oberlander’s lawyers did not raise.

But the Jewish community may be forgiven for feeling that Canada never took Nazis seriously after the end of the Second World War. What the Jewish community understood was that the threat of Nazism lay not only in its armed might, but in its ideology: the idea that shadowy forces operate behind the scenes to shape the way of the world; that Jews conspire to rule the world.

Such beliefs are powerful, atavistic. They teach us to fear and hate the “Other” and to see what is different as a threat. Such conspiratorial hatred is not easy to defeat, but ignoring it is not the solution.

But that is more or less what we have done.

When Nazis (and we call them that because the “neo” prefix is irrelevant) attempted to hold events in Toronto in the mid ’60s they were forcefully opposed by activists from the Jewish community.

When Ernst Zundel spouted his Holocaust-denying garbage he was dragged to court and then to the dock of the Human Rights Tribunal by survivors and by Jewish advocacy groups.

Anti-racist organizations, human rights activists and labour unions have in their time met challenges from other equally malicious sources. But today, those who seek to emulate the work of genocide and its enablers, like Oberlander, have arisen from the dustheap of history, to once again offer their adherents the toxic poison of supremacy and hatred.

Nazi-inspired gunmen have opened fire at synagogues and mosques; lone wolf incels propelled by hard right wing ideology have massacred Torontonians on their own streets. Only this week Statistics Canada’s latest hate crimes report notes an alarming 47 per cent increase in reported hate crimes in this country. Crimes against Muslims have risen by a startling 153 per cent while crimes against Jews rose by 63 per cent.

No small reason then, that Jews in particular pay close attention to people who hoist swastikas, bear them as tattoos and raise their arms to shout, “Jews will not replace us” as they march in front of synagogues.

From our perspective, the risk to Canada posed by right-wing extremism represents a clear and present danger to our democratic project. And we have to take them seriously and respond accordingly.

Nazis are not just a Jewish problem. Hate is corrosive to the strands that hold together our civil society. That makes it everyone’s concern.

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Nazi Germany died in the ashes of 1945, but its ideology has not perished from this Earth. It continues with us. Slouching forward. Waiting for its moment to be reborn. Now is the time for leaders to lead: presidents, prime ministers, kings, rabbis, imams, priests, community members, the corporate world; we all must be part of the solution.

Surely it is time for all of us to take a stand. As Rabbi Hillel, a great Jewish philosopher exhorted us: “if not now, when?”