Leon Mugesera is going home.
The Rwandan national, who incited genocide in his home country, but somehow obtained a permanent residency permit to live in Canada, will be deported after a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of Canada. It took ten years, but better late than never. Good riddance.
The Court did not take kindly at all to the suggestion--hell, it was a full-blown accusation--by Mugesera's lawyer that it could not try the case fairly because it had been "infiltrated" by some kind of Jewish cabal. Details need not be recounted here--you can read all about it in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Some things never change.
But there is an interesting wrinkle in this case. The Canadian Jewish Congress did, in fact, win intervenor status before the Court. And this is not the first time that we have heard from the CJC when the issue of racial or ethnic hatred is raised. When a Tamil is beaten into a coma in Toronto, or some skinheads mount a racist demonstration against Roma, or when the leader of the neo-Nazi Heritage Front bites the dust, the CJC is always first up in the media, as though the communities involved had no spokespeople of their own, as though Nazis and Jews are in some kind of binary opposition.
This sort of thing distorts recorded history--how many people know, for example, that twelve million, not six million, perished at the hands of Nazi death squads and extermination camps?--and it excludes and silences the authentic and legitimate voices of other victims of hate crimes, including genocide. Were there no Tutsis in Canada to make their case before the Supreme Court of Canada against Mugesera? Are there no Tamils or Roma to speak for themselves, no other victims of race hatred to celebrate the death of a neo-Nazi goon?
This is not to deprecate the voice of the Jewish community, with its own considerable history of suffering, persecution and mass murder. It is simply to make the case that other stories are there to be told as well, if the media would only create the space for them. As things remain, Jews appear to be expected to carry not only their own burden of history, but that of every other people in like circumstances. The CJC may embrace this burden willingly, but it is time for those other voices to be heard.