The Ukrainian Canadian Congress is trying to hide Canada's list of Nazi war criminals. CIJA CEO Shimon Fogel is covering for them.
One year later, the stain of the Hunka Affair still cannot be washed from our hands.
Just shy of a year ago, on September 22nd, Waffen SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka was celebrated and applauded by the Parliament of Canada, during President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to our nation. Enraged that my own country would celebrate this monstrous person without even a moment of hesitation, I submitted and published my first opinion piece: “As a dedicated Jewish Liberal organizer, this won't be forgiven or forgotten.”
That submission to the National Post would springboard me into further political commentary, and while my writing and my radio and television spots have taken me to a much broader variety of topics since, I’ve kept my finger on the pulse of the Hunka Affair.
After all, despite Prime Minister Trudeau promising days after the incident that the Deschênes Commission report, containing the names of Waffen SS veterans whom immigrated to Canada after WW2, might be released, this has not yet happened. Indeed, as I have revisited this topic on repeated occasion over the past year, not a single thing has changed.
When I was interviewed by John Oakley in the immediate days after the scandal, I expressed my skepticism that the Deschênes Commission report would ever be released to the public. In my own words:
Jake Landau: Another thing that would help would be revealing the other half of the Deschenes Commission report, which is still classified to this very day. And frankly, I'm highly suspicious of what's in there that successive governments, Liberal and Conservative, have never wanted us to see.
John Oakley: Do you think there will ever be full revelations on that front?
Jake Landau: I think there'll be full revelations after most of the people involved in writing that report are dead.
As time has passed, and further information regarding the Hunka Affair has released to the world, my skepticism and my ire have only increased.
In February, when I was interviewed by Travis Dhanraj during primetime on CBC News Network, we discussed how the Prime Minister’s Office did indeed invite Yaroslav Hunka to the Toronto rally, and how they did so at the prompting of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. No updates on the release of the Deschênes Commission report were provided to the public.
In March, almost five months after the Hunka Affair, and seeing no response from the significant media pressure regarding the scandal, I put my frustrations back to the page once more. I explicitly called out the broken promise, pondering openly if the distraction of the Jewish community by the Israel-Hamas War was being exploited to dodge accountability over the importation of Nazi war criminals.
Both Liberals and Conservatives have kept the second half of the Deschênes Commission report classified, from Prime Minister Mulroney up to the present day. This second half is the portion of the report concerning allegations against specific individuals.
In keeping this classified, individuals such as Peter Savaryn who served in the Waffen SS under the Nazi regime, were protected from public scrutiny, and allowed to live long and happy lives in Canada, free of any guilt or consequences after fighting for the genocidal regime of Adolf Hitler.
Peter Savaryn served as the Vice-President of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada during the leadership tenure of Prime Minister Mulroney; he became Chancellor of the University of Alberta, and by 1987 had been inducted into the Order of Canada, dying of old age in 2017, with his Waffen SS service not revealed until after his death. Not revealed to the public, but certainly known to Prime Minister Mulroney when Mr. Savaryn was awarded the Order of Canada.
As I have written before, the 14th Waffen SS Grenadier is confirmed to have perpetuated several massacres, and historians suspect them of participating in several additional war crimes. Whether or not every single Waffen SS veteran who came to Canada was personally complicit is immaterial.
International law has determined since the Nuremburg Trials that any individual who willingly joined or remained a member of the SS after September 1st, 1939, despite the public knowledge of their crimes, is themselves a war criminal.
Thus, every single Waffen SS veteran who came to Canada, of which there are hundreds, is a war criminal. Those still alive must face accountability for assisting Hitler’s regime in the genocide of the Jewish people. Every Waffen SS soldier dragged out the war, boosting the ranks of the Nazi war machine, delaying the liberation of the camps. All of them are complicit, none of them are innocent, none of them deserve peace.
And yet, the federal government doesn’t seem to agree. The Ottawa Citizen reported earlier this week that a few months previously in June and July, Library and Archives Canada (LAC) performed closed consultations with a select group, and stakeholders not selected for this group were completely unaware of any consultation process.
Members of the Ukrainian Canadian community were consulted, but neither Holocaust survivors nor Holocaust scholars were contacted at all. This is an obvious, outrageous bias against the primary victims of these war criminals, the Jewish people. What does the Ottawa Citizen report that LAC heard from stakeholders?
“A few stakeholders were concerned that the release of the report would result in new legal action (criminal prosecution, citizen revocation, or otherwise) being brought against the individuals named in the report,” a summary of the library’s discussions noted.
Other stakeholders who advised LAC worried the list would embarrass Canada’s Ukrainian community or be used by Russians for propaganda purposes, the records show.
Literally, the only argument being put forward against release of these records, is that those who did awful things would face accountability for their actions. If you were a member of an organization that committed war crimes, and awareness of those war crimes makes you a subject of legal action, good.
The fact that these individuals were heard by the government, but not actual Holocaust survivors, is a sick and twisted perversion of justice. Even the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, run by former Liberal MP Michael Levitt, and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre, whose International Chair is former Attorney General of Canada Irwin Cotler, were both excluded from the consultation process. Considering the fashion in which these organizations are regularly consulted on a performative basis by governments of the day, this is disturbing.
As Jaime Kirtzner-Roberts wrote on behalf of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center:
“We consider the repeated concerns raised during the consultation process about the trauma that might be experienced by war criminals if evidence of their crimes is made public to be particularly outrageous.”
Further in the week, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress launched a salvo directly at the Jewish community. If the federal government attempts to declassify any portion of the Deschênes Commission report, the UCC will launch a Federal Court challenge to keep the names of these Nazi war criminals hidden. Indeed, the UCC has already begun fundraising donations within the community for this legal challenge.
As UCC CEO Ihor Michalchyshyn wrote in his own words:
“It is appalling that the Canadian Government could attempt, for no good reason, to subject innocent Canadians, their family members and descendants to public scorn.”
This is an exercise in Nazi apologetics, Holocaust denialism designed to distort the historical record and erase memory of the crimes perpetuated against the Jewish people. Veterans of the Waffen SS, by definition, are not innocent; they were participants in a genocidal regime which sought to erase my people from the face of the Earth.
But it is not a surprise, considering that the UCC has embraced these Waffen SS war criminals for several decades. As was reported in the following months of the incident, in 2007 the UCC awarded Yaroslav Hunka and other Waffen SS veterans from his Ukrainian unit their “Medal of Merit”; if these are the recipients of the award, it is a badge that should bring the wearer nothing but shame and sorrow.
Ihor Michalcyshyn’s statement is an abomination, and his group has no moral license to represent the Ukrainian Canadian community. The UCC, in making this statement, has insulted the very dignity of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. President Zelenskyy is himself a proud Ukrainian Jew, and his family, like mine, fought in the Red Army of the Soviet Union during WW2, directly against the Nazis and their collaborators. President Zelenskyy knows which side of that war was the right one, and so do I.
There appears to only be a single Jewish group that took place in the consultation, and by all accounts they are the only Jewish group willing to run interference and cover for these Nazi war criminals. Naturally, this is the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, an astroturf group which staged a hostile takeover of the Canadian Jewish Congress and then removed it’s democratic representation.
What does CIJA CEO Shimon Fogel have to say in regards to the Deschênes Commission report? Nothing good:
“Nazi war criminals should not be allowed to live carefree in Canada, they should be held accountable and pay for their crimes. The issue of releasing Part 2 of the Deschênes Commission report, however, is not black and white.”
The sheer fucking audacity of CIJA, who claims to be the “official” representative of Canadian Jews after erasing our democratic congress, to claim that the issue of Nazi war criminals “is not black and white,” and to then state later in the piece that “context is crucial.” You are correct Mr. Fogel, context is crucial, and the context here is that these men are war criminals who helped the Nazis in their attempts to erase our people from the Earth!
It is clearly not a mistake that CIJA was consulted while other Jewish groups were excluded, and it is also clear that the only purpose they served in this consultation was to provide the exact opposite response that the majority of Jews would have given. Shimon Fogel did not speak on behalf of the Canadian Jewish community, and he did not speak on behalf of the victims of Hitler’s regime; he spoke merely in favour of his own political interests.
A year ago, I was skeptical that justice would ever be delivered after the Hunka Affair. And even still, I was not so cynical to expect the Ukrainian Canadian Congress to outright fund a legal challenge. Further, I would never have predicted that CIJA, for all my complaints about them over the years, would outright betray the Jewish people to provide political cover for literal Nazi war criminals.
I have spent this year stewing in my own disgust. It is clear to me that the Nazis who butchered our families will never be held accountable, and the few politicians who make an attempt will be attacked and sabotaged relentlessly.
Canada will only declassify the Deschênes Commission report if they are given no other choice. They will delay it as long as possible, and every day justice is delayed, is a day justice is denied, potentially forever.
I would be more than happy to have my cynicism proven wrong, to see justice finally delivered, even if decades later than it should have been. But what little hope I had has been extinguished.
Canadian Jews will be betrayed by our supposed allies, yet again. Their platitudes, their promises, their apologies, all of it is worthless to us as we are victimized time and time again.
We remain in danger. Because Canada has a Nazi problem, and Canada will never be willing to solve it.