| AHENAKEW TRIED FOR COMMENTS AGAINST JEWS
Ahenakew is reported to have said, among other things, “I don’t support Hitler. But he cleaned up a hell of a lot of things, didn’t he?” He also said Hitler was right to “fry” millions of people. It’s the kind of sloppy talk that happens in personal conversations when we are tired and upset. Ahenakew has been charged with violating Section 318 of the Criminal Code, which states: (1) Every one who advocates or promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years. Ahenakew did not commit genocide. He expressed a personal opinion on past historic events. He did not advocate killing Jews, nor instituting conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Jewish people. He did not focus on Jews as a religious group, but on that small number who have become financial and media barons. His comments were an emotional reaction about something that took place in the past. Section 318 is one of the most ignored sections of the Canadian Criminal Code. If the standards used against Ahenakew were applied to Canadians, it would be used almost every day. No one has ever prosecuted a Canadian for promoting hatred or genocide against the Indigenous peoples. Jim Pankiw was never prosecuted for his anti-Indian election platform. He became a Member of Parliament. Ralph Klein is still the Premier of Alberta after calling homeless Indigenous people, whose resources he had stolen, “a bunch of lazy bums”. “Indian” bashing has been widely accepted for 500 years, long before the Criminal Code came along. Indigenous people were officially defined as “non-persons” in the Indian Act until recently. Canadians are the heirs to genocide against the Indigenous people of North America. Because of the atrocities Hitler committed during World War II, people have forgotten that he was a 20th Century pioneer of the social welfare state. He instituted decent living conditions for the common German people. They had been suffering because of oppressive reparations they were required to pay following the defeat of their monarchs. Hitler made sure the people had employment and good health. But his social engineering project went too far. He tried to get rid of not only the Jews, but also Gypsies and the mentally and physically handicapped. In the book, “Wasichu”, Hitler indicated he was inspired by the way North Americans dealt with its “Indian problem”. Our holocaust led to the loss of thousands of our nations and over 115 million of our people. Hitler thought this “removal policy” was a great way to promote racial purity and to eliminate the people he called eugenically deficient. Canada and the United States pioneered racial segregation. Only 1% of us survived the North American Indian holocaust. Anti-Indigenous propaganda in the media and the schools conditioned people to accept racism. They pretended our land was vacant. They outlawed our languages and our culture. They labeled us as primitives. They said we were a dying race. We were put in barb-wired concentration camps called “reserves”. We could not leave without passes. We could not hire lawyers to defend our rights. The British paid generous bounty money for native scalps – more for women because we had the children. Our children were taken from us and sent to Christian run residential schools. The healthy ones were forced to sleep with children suffering from tuberculosis and other diseases. In some schools the death toll approached 100%. The overall mortality rate was about 50%. Those who survived became victims of sexual and physical abuse, suffering from trauma to this day. Our children were brainwashed. Hitler used this tactic too. Taking children from their parents is now prohibited in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of genocide, 1948. Decades after signing this Convention Canada continues its genocidal habits. The provincial governments should be prosecuted for the false propaganda they disseminate through their education system? Canadians are eager to investigate genocide somewhere else – preferably long ago and far away. Genocide continues on their doorsteps. Why is the disappearance of 500 Native women in the last decade not being investigated? Don’t daughters of Indigenous people have a right to walk this land in safety like everyone else? Ahenakew spent his life fighting for Indigenous rights. It took them this long to find something they could use to skewer this uppity “Injun”. If Canadians were Kahentinetha Horn |
| poster: Thahoketoteh |
