The troubled International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development (ICHRDD), familiarly known as Rights and Democracy, is a microcosm of a cultural and political struggle playing itself out in Canada today: progressive values versus a combination of far-right ideology, extremist theology and Middle East politics.

That’s an explosive mix. It’s blowing ICHRDD apart as I write this. Readers are probably aware by now that Stephen Harper‘s new appointees to the Board have a clear ideological mission: to exempt Israel from human rights scrutiny. To that end, small grants to three respected human rights organizations in the Middle East–Al-Haq, Al-Mezan and B’Tselem–were “repudiated” this past January. They have since been slandered by the Chair of the ICHRDD Board, Aurel Braun, who called B’Tselem (an Israel-based group that has been praised even by the Israeli Attorney-General) “toxic” and “Israeli in name only.”

But as we now know, Braun’s Gleichschaltung went much further than that. Internally, the now-late president of the organization, Rémy Beauregard, was subjected to gross mistreatment, including gratuitous slander. Employees have been terrorized, to the point that all but one or two of the staff wrote an open letter demanding that three new Board members, Braun, Jacques Gauthier and Elliott Tepper, be removed.

The staff complained of psychological harassment, intimidation and ethnic profiling–the latter confirmed, it appears, by interim president Jacques Gauthier. A gag order has been placed on all employees, three top managers have been suspended pour encourager les autres, and a horde of what Maclean’s commentator Paul Wells calls “freelancers” have been brought in, including a private investigator (Claude Sarrazin), forensic auditors, a new office manager (Charles Auger) and now a new communications director–Peter Stockland.

More on Stockland in a minute.

Braun has not been content to focus on Middle East matters. As Chair of the Board of a supposedly independent agency, he has been unusually protective of the current government. He went so far as to administer a tongue-lashing last year to the late president and to senior manager Razmik Panossian (now suspended). Their sin? They had publicly pointed out that Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, despite his denial, had been informed months in advance of Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai’s plans to legalize marital rape. He was apparently mortified that the Minister–with that ever-convenient memory of his–was being contradicted.

But Middle East politics, nevertheless, have been foregrounded at ICHRDD for months. The new Board appointees include two active members of B’nai Brith (Braun and David Matas). Jacques Gauthier wrote a PhD thesis defending the annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel. The Board also has a couple of Conservative Party trained seals (failed CPC candidate Brad Farquhar and Marco Navarro-Génie, who did his thesis work at the University of Calgary under Tom Flanagan), and a business-oriented Christian think-tanker, Michael Van Pelt.

In this affair, some of the dots connect themselves. The involvement of veteran pro-Israel propagandist Gerald Steinberg is probably worth its own story.But let’s step back and look at the wider picture. The ICHRDD imbroglio, in fact, has much to do with a troubling convergence of church and state in Stephen Harper’s Canada.

Canada has no constitutional separation of church and state. The “Establishment Clause” is part of the First Amendment to the US constitution, but far too many Canadians believe we have something similar.

We don’t, and it’s beginning to show. The Harper government, for example, has just awarded a $3.2 million grant to the evangelical organization Youth for Christ. (As NDP critic Pat Martin quipped, what if the outfit had been called Youth for Allah? He was promptly scolded for his opposition by that moral paragon, Public Safety Minister Victor Toews.)

Our Prime Minister is an evangelical Christian, a member of a denomination that believes Christ’s return to earth is imminent. He has called criticism of Israel “anti-Semitic” and suggested that some Members of Parliament were akin to Nazis. Jason Kenney, no slouch in the religion department either, is perhaps even more zealous on the subject of Israel.

Where does this inflexible stance come from?

There is, in fact, a theological explanation for the solidarity now being shown by right-wing pro-Israel Christians. Put simply, Israel must persist because the Bible says it must–until the Second Coming of Christ and the Rapture (watchthis clip to get the flavour).

So the anti-Semitism of evangelical Christians and Catholic demagogues in bygone days has been replaced? Hold on. Not so fast.

The Rapture–the bodily taking up of the faithful into heaven when the world ends–will only be available for Jews who convert to Christianity, “perfected Jews” in far-right commentator Ann Coulter’s parlance. The rest will be incinerated.

The state of Israel, then, not the Jews, is the focus of so-called “Christian Zionism.” If the difference is obscure for some, the evangelicals are quite clear on that point. And so are disillusioned Jews like Stephen Scheinberg, who watched B’nai Brith Canada lurch into the arms of the Christian Right:

[A] state of pluralism in B’nai Brith lasted until about five years ago. (It has now been totally eliminated with the expulsion of eight dissenting members…) At a rump national board meeting, with a bare quorum, Dimant introduced a resolution to forge an alliance with the Christian right in Canada. Knowing something of their American counterparts, I challenged the motion, but was the only one to do so. I turned to well-known Liberal human rights lawyer David Matas of Winnipeg, but he was not similarly alarmed, perhaps because his own unabashedly pro-Israel position was consistent with such an alliance, or perhaps he did not share my fears. [B'nai Brith president Frank]Dimant and others tried to assure me that the alliance was only for Israel advocacy.

I soon learned that was not the case.

(Scheinberg and ICHRDD Chair Aurel Braun–small world–once co-authored a book on the far Right. Those were the days.)

What in fact is emerging in the US and in Canada is a politico-religious alliance of what once upon a time might have been considered strange bedfellows indeed: conservative Jews, ultra-Christians and the extreme Right. The Christians are, to varying degrees, Dominionists, who want the state to govern according to the Law of God. And, in a further shifting of alliances, zealous Catholics like Jason Kenney have taken their places alongside the evangelicals.

Stephen Harper’s personal commitment to Dominionist notions is hardly a secret (the linked article is long, but well worth reading). And he has a powerful ally in “Doctor“Charles McVety, a Christian extremist who holds undue and unelected sway over the policies of the Harper government.

All of these elements and alliances have been brought to the fore by the civil war raging in ICHRDD. The Conservative government, a forgetful Minister of Foreign Affairs, B’nai Brith and various enthusiastic pro-Israel Christians are ranged against those who take universal human rights seriously (almost the entire staff of Rights and Democracy, for starters)–those, in other words, who think that even Palestinians have rights worthy of protection.

It should be no surprise, then, that the interim president of ICHRDD has now appointed Peter Stockland as his contracted-out director of communications. Stockland is, not to put too fine a point upon it, a right-wing religious zealot who used to write a column for the Sun chain a million years ago, and in that capacity (declaration of interest here) tried to smear me as anti-Catholic when I took on a local homophobe who was trying to shut down a university radio station for being too gay-positive.

Stockland is presently the Executive Director of the Centre for Cultural Renewal, and runs a Montreal communications firm. What is the Centre for Cultural Renewal? In their own words:

The Centre for Cultural Renewal is an independent, not-for-profit, charitable organization that helps Canadians and their leaders shape a vision of civil society. To this end, we focus on the important and often complex connections between public policy, culture, moral discourse and religious belief, and produce discussion papers, forums and lectures on key issues affecting Canadian society, public policy and culture.

Our goal is to provide a vision of civil society that addresses the fundamental connections between public policy, culture, moral discourse, and religious conviction. We provide journalists, politicians and the interested public with quality resources, and believe that the quality of contemporary public dialogue is improved with the inclusion of many aspects of the rich and complex vision of the human person viewed in relationship to others, and bearing rights and responsibilities. [emphases added]

What does that mean in reality? This sort of thing:

In late 2009, the Quebec government published its new policy to combat homophobia. Though far-reaching,the policy has generated little commentary of substance. The Centre for Cultural Renewal, in keeping with its mandate to build understanding between faith and culture, has agreed to post a provocative critique written by Douglas Farrow, professor of Christian Thought at McGill University in Montreal.

After analyzing the policy and the thinking behind it, Professor Farrow warns “no society that adopts such (thinking) can hope to survive for long, for along with the reforming and redemptive effects of religion it has rejected the natural, self-replenishing diversity that is the root of its own vitality, in favour of an artificial, stifling “diversity” that can only degenerate into a culture of compulsion and despair.” He further urges citizens inside and outside of Quebec to make public their vigorous dissent from the policy. Whether or not those who read Professor Farrow’s document dissent from the policy or from his critique, we welcome all thoughtful, fair-minded responses and will try to publish a representative selection. [emphasis added]

What does the organization stand for? No boundaries between public policy and religion, and genteel homophobia, for starters. Extreme religious ideology, in other words, if cloaked in relatively moderate language. And now the organization’s Executive Director has been injected directly into the on-going Rights and Democracy war.

More oil, as Yogi Berra might have said, on troubled flames. And the fire is not by any means confined to a small office in Montreal.

Dawg’s Blawg

David Matas is a recent Harper appointment to the troubled Rights and Democracy Board. In the interests of fairness and transparency, Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells reproduces a new communication from Matas, whose previous defence of the agency came to the public via far-right activist Ezra Levant.

One can’t fault Matas for attempting to apply varnish to wood in the last stages of dry-rot. It’s his job, as a Board member, to defend the current administration, and he does. Shorter Matas: move along, nothing to see here, it’s the usual institutional jockeying between a staff and a Board. Policy isn’t at issue, everyone’s on-side, Israel has nothing to do with it.

The day before [the late President Remy] Beauregard died, the Board passed a motion repudiating the grants. The vote was nine in favour and one abstention. None opposed. Beauregard not only voted in favour of repudiation; he spoke for the motion saying “we could have done our homework better”. All that remained in dispute was the manner in which both sides had acted in resolving this policy disagreement.

Recall that this came after several months of browbeating by pro-Israel hawks on the Board, including its Chair, Aurel Braun. A negative evaluation of Beauregard by the Braun faction, then in a minority, was obtained by Beauregard through a Freedom of Information request and distributed at a Board meeting last June, causing no end of consternation to the folks who had thought they could undermine him in secret.

At the January meeting, Beauregard reached the end of his tether. The grants had been made, the money spent long ago, and what was at issue was administrative: new rules by which the President, already in the process of cleaning upmanagement practices, could make discretionary expenditures.

To quote the Braun faction:

The freeze decision is meant to allow the staff time to complete a redesign of decision-making processes to help the organization avoid such situations in the future.

Reading between the lines, tighter administrative processes were continuing to be implemented, and the President went along. As to the “homework” that should have been better done, we have no idea of the full context of that remark. Perhaps it was a last-ditch effort to be conciliatory.

It was quite a gathering in January. Three grants to human rights groups in the Middle East were “repudiated,” an international Board member was shown the door by the Braun Board, and two other Board members resigned on the spot. The battered President left the meeting, went home and died of a heart attack.

Matas couldn’t confine himself to an administrative argument, in any case. Instead, he began a tirade about “anti-Conservative polemicists” who have allegedly “concocted facts.”

…Haroon Siddiqui, in an opinion piece published in the Toronto Star, January 31, 2010 under the heading “How the Harperites ambushed the rights agency” wrote that the Board “voted 7-6 to repudiate the three grants”. A vote of 7 to 6 for repudiation sustained a story line that recent Tory appointees to the Board were bringing to the Board the Tory’s pro-Israel agenda. So that was the assertion, in spite of the fact that the vote was nine to none with one abstention.

Moreover, Siddiqui when he wrote about the 7-6 vote, knew it not to be true. I had written an analysis of the controversy in Rights and Democracy where I recounted the repudiation vote. In my analysis, I pointed out that the motion had passed handily and that Beauregard had voted in favour of the repudiation motion. I sent my analysis to Siddiqui by e-mail. He responded on January 27 by thanking me and indicating he had already read my analysis on a website.

Yet, four days later he wrote an opinion piece suggesting that the Board/staff dispute over the three grants remained alive and that the change in policy was the result of a Harper “hostile takeover” of the Board. Those imaginary facts fit better into the opinion he wanted to express than the real facts. So the imaginary facts prevailed.

7-6, 9-0. Matas’ colleague Aurel Braun, meantime, says the vote was 8-0. Surely there are Minutes to put this matter to rest. In the meantime, Braun and Matas themselves disagree on the facts.

(I have contacted Rights and Democracy to obtain the coordinates of the person responsible for FOI requests so that I can initiate a request for the Minutes of the fateful January 7 meeting. Given the Centre’s unwillingness or inability to respond to date, I would welcome any brown-paper envelopes that people might want to send my way.)

There is no reason, in any case, to quarrel with Siddiqui’s assessment. To claim that policy isn’t involved in the goings-on at Rights and Democracy stretches credulity. The staff has complained bitterly, not only about office administration (and even there, it is rare for an entire shop, maybe minus one or two people, to rise up in protest in this manner about merely administrative matters), but about outright racial profiling. Matas doesn’t address this question, nor, whether the policy issue is allegedly settled or not, why the top echelon of management has just been suspended.

In a similar vein, Ish Theilheimer, at the website PublicValues.ca, wrote that the letter from the staff asking three Board members to resign was directed not to the leadership of the Board, but rather to a trio he characterized as recent political appointees – myself, Michael Van Pelt, and Jacques Gauthier. Yet, Jacques Gauthier was appointed to the Board two years ago.

Michael Van Pelt and I are the new appointees. The January Board meeting was our first. The staff did not ask us to resign. The Theilheimer commentary which criticized the Harper government for using the appointments process to pursue an ultra conservative agenda both quoted and had a link to an article by Maclean’s reporter Paul Wells. That Wells article stated correctly who the three targeted Board members were.

So again here we have an imaginary fact, which the writer knew to be false, being using to buttress an opinion which the real facts could not sustain. The suggestion of a hostile political takeover is more compelling if the staff resignation demand is directed to the new members. The narrative Theilheimer wanted to build is that the staff today still support funding for the three organizations but the Government does not; so the Government appointed people to reverse the funding policy.

This is an amazing display of disingenuousness. Let’s deconstruct:

First, the three people named in the staff letter were Braun, Gauthier and Elliot Tepper. It’s entirely fair to point that out (and Theilheimer provided the link) but it shouldn’t be conflated with the larger narrative: a minority, hawkishly pro-Israel faction had been increasing its numbers on the Board thanks to recent Harper appointments, and the arrival of Matas and Michael Van Pelt gave Aurel Braun the majority he had been looking for. The majority flexed its muscles this January: the scheduled October meeting of the Board had been cancelled by Braun, likely to allow the majority to be created.

Let’s not play semantic games about Van Pelt, either. If “evangelist” is not precise, “fundamentalist Christian” would fit more exactly. And then there is Jacques Gauthier, with his PhD thesis effectively supporting the confiscation of East Jerusalem by Israel: thanks to the Braun Board, he’s now the interim President of Rights and Democracy.

Agenda? What agenda? asks Matas, with wide-eyed innocence. Nobody told him what to do. Sure, he’s a lawyer for B’nai Brith, but he’s a Liberal. But he doesn’t mention the fact that the extremist pro-Israel stance of B’nai Brith has been adopted, holus-bolus, by the Conservative government. Whether he’s holding his nose or not, Matas is completely on-side. His enemy’s enemy, the Harper government, is presently his friend.

And of course no official comment from the current Rights and Democracy Board majority would be complete without the obligatory smear:

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Al Haq, Al Mezan and B’Tselem have gained a reputation for their method of operation – develop a theory first, in their case “Israel is to blame” and then twist or invent the facts to fit the theory. The current round of polemicist attacks on the Tories seems inspired by this method of operation. If the facts cannot sustain their theory – a Conservative party hostile takeover of Rights and Democracy to pursue a right wing ideological agenda – then the facts must be changed to fit the theory.

Whatever, David. But there’s a backstory developing that may have some bearing on the situation.

Michael D. Behiels, of the Department of History at the University of Ottawa, has claimed that the government, in what looks like a wrecking operation at Rights and Democracy, is simply “pandering to B’nai Brith.” He’s right, but there’s more to it than that. The Centre, in fact, appears to be a casualty of the alliance of B’nai Brith’s Israel-can-do-no-wrongers and the fundamentalist Christian Right.

In broad strokes, the nature of that alliance is sketched out here. It goes well beyond Canadian borders, of course. It occupies a twilight space in which Jews who do not toe the line are maniacally denounced as evil traitors, while Christian evangelists seeking the proper unfolding of Biblical prophecy, and who inconveniently believe that Jews will meet their deserved end during the Rapture, are Israel’s current BFFs.

Now, B’nai Brith Canada has been having its own factional dispute going on for several years, and this has just culminated in a lawsuit by nine former members of the organization this past January 20.

These nine members were expelled from the organization in 2008. They include past BB national presidents, and 93-year-old Lou Ronson, the longest-living member of B’nai Brith up to that time, who received his expulsion notice while he was mourning the recent death of his wife. They are suing for $990,000 in damages and reinstatement. As reported in the Canadian Jewish News:

The case arises out of a dispute between several longstanding senior members of the organization – who were expelled – and the organization’s leadership over a number of alleged irregularities. The former members contend that B’nai Brith directors have wrested control of the organization from its members, who are organized in lodges, and that B’nai Brith “has used tactics amounting to intimidation” to silence opposition.

–

The plaintiffs were expelled from B’nai Brith after a disciplinary committee hearing in January 2008 for “conduct unbecoming a member.” The plaintiffs …allege the disciplinary committee hearing was fraught with legal and procedural errors “such that the plaintiffs were thereby denied a fair hearing conducted in accordance with the principles of natural justice.”

They say they were never informed who laid the complaint against them or what specific conduct merited expulsion. As well, they say they weren’t permitted to cross-examine their accusers, they weren’t allowed to present submissions on their own behalf, and that the hearing was adjourned with a request for disclosure of documents still pending.

“The plaintiffs state and the fact is that the directors of the BBC have effectively taken control of the organization from its membership, and in part by way of the taking of such control, failed to provide details of contracts involving themselves and other associated bodies of which they have direction.”

–

The defence acknowledges that “many of the plaintiffs were longstanding members of BBC and BBI. However, the plaintiffs’ tenure and past accomplishments did not insulate them from subsequently engaging in conduct unbecoming a member of these organizations.”

What’s up? Just a common-or-garden institutional struggle, much like the one at Right and Democracy, as Matas is attempting to portray it?

Well, no. The B’nai Brith fracas, as it turns out, is about policy, too–policy that has a direct bearing upon the politics presently at play at Rights and Democracy.

Stephen Scheinberg is a former senior B’nai Brith official. He and Aurel Braun–small world–were co-authors of abook about the far right, but that was then (1997) and this is now.

Factional fighting within the upper echelons of B’nai Brith broke out in 2007. Part of it had to do with how the organization was being run, and part of it arose from the close ties its President, Frank Dimant, was attempting to build with the Conservative party.

In the Fall of that year, Scheinberg broke with the organization and published an article entitled “Partners for Imperium: B’nai Brith Canada and the Christian Right” (HTML version here).

Scheinberg contends that the struggle within B’nai Brith was not ideological, and he also tries to distance Stephen Harper from the religious fundamentalism addressed in his article, fingering Jason Kenney as the PM’s point man in that respect.

But readers may wish to draw their own conclusions from the contents of his piece. Here are some excerpts, with emphases added:

Presiding over B’nai Brith’s declining fortunes since 1978 has been Executive Vice-President Frank Dimant, the son of Holocaust survivors who was born in Munich just after the war. Dimant matured within Montreal’s Betar, the extreme right-wing Jewish youth group associated with the Revisionist-Zionist movement of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin. Revisionism advocated an Israel on both sides of the Jordan (that is, including much of today’s Jordan).

Dimant took his present position thirty years ago, an extremely long tenure in such a position but testifying to his skill at wielding power. He distributes offices and awards, and even helps his loyal followers gain places in B’nai Brith International, organizes meetings with government officials, and also has ties to the Conservative Party, which could help secure a nomination for parliament. At least two of his followers, to my knowledge, have nominations for the next election.

In the 1980s, when I first came to BBC, attracted by its work for human rights, it was a pluralistic organization. Around the League for Human Rights table I found mostly liberals—a few, such as myself, with more activist backgrounds—and a sprinkling of conservatives. Most of the conservatives were part of the other side of BBC political work, the Institute for International Affairs, and since most of that group’s work was Israel advocacy, it was where Dimant’s own Betar views predominated. I think many, like myself, in the League accepted this, believing that the Institute was Frank Dimant’s small corner of B’nai Brith, but unfortunately that corner has become what today’s B’nai Brith is all about.

This state of pluralism in B’nai Brith lasted until about five years ago. It has now been totally eliminated with the expulsion of eight dissenting members. At a rump national board meeting, with a bare quorum, Dimant introduced a resolution to forge an alliance with the Christian right in Canada. Knowing something of their American counterparts, I challenged the motion, but was the only one to do so. I turned to well-known Liberal human rights lawyerDavid Matas of Winnipeg, but he was not similarly alarmed, perhaps because his own unabashedly pro-Israel position was consistent with such an alliance, or perhaps he did not share my fears. Dimant and others tried to assure me that the alliance was only for Israel advocacy. [emphasis added]

I soon learned that was not the case. One day I received a phone call from NDP MP Svend Robinson, inviting me as Chair of the League for Human Rights to come to Ottawa to testify in favour of his bill to include gays and lesbians among those protected from hate speech. I readily agreed, because it had always been BBC policy to support their inclusion, but I was in for a surprise. It was clear that the main group opposed to Robinson’s bill was the Christian right, and that BBC, that is Mr. Dimant, would not support the bill without protection being given to the speech of anti-gay clergy. I, though much embarrassed, had to notify Robinson that I was unable to appear at the hearings as a representative of BBC. It would have been a good time to resign, but perhaps mistakenly, I hung in.

Meanwhile, Dimant received a honourary doctorate from the Canada Christian College, but unlike most recipients of such degrees, he often uses the title “Dr.” Joint tours of Israel, exchanges of speakers and of course mutual support of the Conservative Party have furthered the linkage. The anti-gay, anti-feminist, pro-censorship stance of Reverend Charles McVety of the Canada Christian College did not seem to bother Dimant, who heads a League for Human Rights.

[That name! Where have I heard it before? --ed.]

A key person in furthering the alliance was Joseph Ben-Ami, a bearded, pleasant individual and an Orthodox Jew who took on the role of BBC’s government affairs representative in Ottawa. He had worked previously for Stephen Harper and then for Stockwell Day as a policy aide, and played a leading role in Day’s leadership campaign. I believe that Ben-Ami was central to the effort to build this alliance. He would go on to work for two of the numerous front organizations established by Rev. McVety—the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies and the Institute for Canadian Values. McVety seems to believe that his multiple groups will further the belief in the power and influence of the Christian right here in Canada. According to a 2006 article in Walrus, McVety’s Institute was established as “a direct riposte to bill C-38” which legalized same-sex marriage.

In any event, McVety and some of his pastoral colleagues, especially Reverends John Tweedie and Dean Bye, became favoured speakers at BBC events. They helped create the illusion that, at long last, Canadian churches were giving their unconditional support to Israel.

That would seem to connect most of the dots. The writing is on the wall, I think, for Rights and Democracy.

Dawg’s Blawg

Who is blogging?

BigCityLib Strikes Back: Spector on Rights and Democracy
Montreal Simon: The Sad Last Days of a Human Rights Campaigner
Public Values: Rights and Democracy shake-up an “extraordinarily serious scandal” – Broadbent
The McGill Daily: Rights and Democracy undermined by feds