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Ethnic division over the CMHR is shaping up as an election issue

Yikes.

You can tell the Asper-dominated board of directors at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has been hurt badly by the Holodomor controversy. The Winnipeg Free Press had to ride to their rescue last Saturday after a week of hard knocks, although the gesture may have actually done more damage to the cause.

In an atrocity of an editorial, the newspaper conflated the Soviet starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the Thirties (the Holodomor) with a shortage of potatoes in Ireland 85 years earlier (the Gorta Mor). They're both famines, get it?

The Irish aren't demanding a separate gallery for their national tragedy, but if they were, (stupid) politicians like MP Joy Smith (Conservative) and MP Kevin Lamoureux (Liberal) "would be clamouring on their behalf..." wrote the FP. Instead, these and other deluded parliamentarians are supporting a "small but vocal" Ukrainian rump which wants a permanent gallery for the Holodomor although everybody knows the Holocaust is sssssspecial and only the Holocaust deserves to be recognized with a stand-alone, permanent gallery at the CMHR.

You don't say.

The CMHR's Asper-run executive have watched their white elephant's fortunes melt like river ice in May ever since the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association exposed their little secret last December.

The museum's backers didn't exactly want taxpayers to know they intended the CMHR to be a publicly funded Holocaust museum, with the rest of the world's genocides lumped together into a catch-all "atrocity gallery".

The Ukrainians aren't pleased to discover they got suckered by Izzy Asper who, to get government financing by showing cross-cultural support, promised them equal treatment in the museum for the history of Stalin's campaign of starvation which killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33 (not 1931-32, as the Free Press editorial said).

Equal treatment turned out to be equal to the other few dozen claimed genocides in the world, not to the Holocaust which, along with an Aboriginal "zone", will stand as the only two permanent galleries in the CMHR.

We wrote last time that Gail Asper had managed to unite Canada's ethnic groups against the CMHR's board of directors.

Today it appears she's united Canada's main political parties.

When we last wrote about the Holodomor controversy, 10 days ago, we noted that 3 MP's had made public statements supporting the position of the Ukrainians---two Conservatives and one Liberal (Kevin Lamoureux).

http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2011/02/asper-curse-begins-eating-away-at-cmhr.html

That number has since almost tripled with the addition of four Liberal Members of Parliament and one Conservative (Joy Smith). The joint letter issued by the Liberal quartet in support of a permanent gallery for the Holodomor was released a week ago, and its even stronger than the cookie-cutter support shown by the Conservatives on the issue.

In fact, it raises the possibility that the Holodomor controversy could turn into an election issue if, as expected, the March budget is defeated and we're called to the polls in the spring. No NDP MP's have taken a stand on the debate, and Liberal Anita Neville stands alone of the Manitoba Grits in rejecting the Ukrainians, Poles, Amenians, Latvians, and other ethnic groups that oppose special status for the Holocaust at the expense of their ethnic national tragedies.

For the record, then, here's the letter issued by the Liberal MP's on the Holodomor matter (emphasis ours) .
Statement from Liberal MP’s on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Statement of Liberal Members of Parliament on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
February 23, 2011

The publicly funded Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) located in Winnipeg was established by Parliament through amendments to the Museums Act in 2008 and is set to open its doors in 2013.

The purpose of the CMHR is to explore the subject of human rights, with special but not exclusive reference to Canada, in order to enhance the understanding of human rights, to promote respect for others and to encourage reflection, discussion and the taking of action against hate, oppression, and crimes against humanity.

One of the fundamental and most basic of human rights is the right to nourishment-the right to food. In the case of the Holodomor, this was the first genocide that was methodically planned out and perpetrated by depriving the very people who were the producers of food, of their nourishment. What is especially horrific is that the withholding of food was used as a weapon of genocide and that it was done in a region of the world that was known as the “breadbasket of Europe.”

The Holodomor-the famine-genocide perpetrated by Soviet authorities from 1932-33 against the Ukrainian people-has been recognized as such by the Parliament of Canada, and provincial legislatures in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec. Canada, with a population of 1.2 million Ukrainian Canadians, was the first country to enact federal legislation to annually mark the Holodomor on the fourth Saturday of every November.

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights presents an opportunity to illustrate the promise and the importance of human rights, but sadly part of its mission will necessarily also be to educate Canadians about the consequences of denying those rights. The Holodomor is as graphic and moving an illustration as can be imagined of the denial of the basic Human Right to Food. It is a story that is well known and well understood in the Ukrainian Canadian community since there are few families in that community who were not touched in some way by this man-made catastrophe, but it is not as yet widely known or understood in the broader Canadian community.

A gallery devoted to the issue of the Human Right to Food as illustrated by the experience of those who were denied this basic right through the famine-murder of the Holodomor would fit precisely within the mandate of the CMHR and would forward its important mission.

It is particularly appropriate that the CMHR, located in the city of Winnipeg with over 100,000 Ukrainian Canadian residents, in a province whose prairies were largely settled by Ukrainian farmers at a time when their Ukrainian peasant counterparts in Ukraine were being starved to death, include a permanent zone (gallery) on the Holodomor.

We federal Liberal Party Members of Parliament hold that this publicly funded national Canadian museum should create and operate a permanent gallery dedicated to the Holodomor, and that the Board of Directors of the CMHR should embrace and include respected members of the Ukrainian Canadian community with expertise in the Holodomor.

It was the Jewish-Polish scholar Raphael Lemkin, known as the”Father of The Genocide Convention” who coined the term “genocide” when referring also to the Holodomor in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
Unfortunately, the full extent of this horrific “genocide by famine” of millions of Ukrainians was suppressed behind the Iron Curtain during the subsequent 58 years by the Kremlin’s communist regime.

By taking a leadership role in establishing a permanent gallery for the Holodomor, Canada would encourage post-communist countries that are now our economic and security partners to begin to more critically address the human rights violations and genocidal crimes perpetrated in the name of communism and to cease the Holodomor denials which continue to this day.

By having the Holodomor in a permanent zone (exhibit) in our national human rights museum, Canada would fulfill its traditional role in leading the world in the promotion of human rights.

Borys Wrzesnewskyj, M.P.
(Etobicoke Centre)

Gerard Kennedy, M.P.
(Parkdale-High Park)

Kevin Lamoureux, M.P.
(Winnipeg North)

Hon. Navdeep Bains, P.C., M.P.
(Mississauga-Brampton South)

Bonnie Crombie, M.P.
(Mississauga-Streetsville)

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