Ottawa riot revealed antidote to racist hate
It was a cool evening in Ottawa on May 29, 1993. The weather, however did nothing to cool the fury of a white supremacist rock concert held that evening in the downtown area.
RAHOWA, or “Racial Holy War” banged out a set of racist, antiSemitic hard rock sounds that whipped the fans into a frenzy.
They heard racist lyrics like: “These boots are made for stompin’ and that’s just what they’ll do, and one of these days these boots are going to stomp all over Jews.” They sang using the N word.
The young thugs were primed for action.
Following the concert, lead singer George Burdi, the youth leader of the white supremacists, and its adult mentor, longtime neo-Nazi Wolfgang Droege, led their followers onto the Ottawa streets, toward Parliament Hill. Many counter demonstrators, mostly young people from AntiRacist Action and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, confronted them.
The white supremacists chanted “Sieg Heil” and gave Nazi salutes. It turned into a full-fledged riot in the shadow of the Peace Tower. Burdi and Droege charged at the counter demonstrators. People were injured. Burdi was convicted of assault causing bodily harm. It was the largest, most violent neo-Nazi riot in modern Canadian history.
This sounds reminiscent of a riot last weekend in Charlottesville, Va. where Heather Heyer, was killed.
I have spent the last week responding to media inquiries about the “emergence of white supremacy” in the United States and Canada, as if this were a unique phenomenon. Far from it. What we witnessed last week in Charlottesville had its precedents 17 years earlier in our nation’s capital.
In fact, since the end of the Second World War, there have always been peaks and valleys of white supremacist activity in Canada.
After the war, the fresh evil of Nazism briefly silenced its growth.
However, by the mid 1960s, white supremacy made a small but important return. John William Beattie and David Stanley became leaders of what they called the Canadian Nazi Party. Their numbers were infinitesimal, but their impact was devastating. A short publicized appearance by Beattie, Stanley and less than a dozen followers wearing Nazi uniforms in Toronto’s Allen Gardens erupted in a counter demonstration led by Jewish Holocaust survivors, trade unionists and hundreds of others.
Minor eruptions of white supremacy followed, but it really wasn’t until the antics of anti-Semitic school teacher James Keegstra and the recently deceased Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel in the mid-1980s that we saw a peak again in Canada.
Zundel and Keegstra helped spawn the new look of neo-Nazism in a group calling itself the Heritage Front. It in fact took the combined efforts of CSIS, police and anti-racists to finally shut it down.
The lesson: Hate can be muscular. Unlike this week’s disgusting words from U.S. President Donald Trump that seemed to defend the Nazi rioters, government leaders must speak out forcefully against hatred.
It was only nine months ago that white supremacist hatred made an unwelcome return to Ottawa with a spate of incidents in which a youthful offender scrawled hateful slogans on synagogues, churches and mosques.
But here is the good news: Ottawans reacted with expressions of solidarity and love for the victims. Today we see the same across Canada and the U.S. White supremacy may be back, but decent folk are speaking out.
Peaceful but passionate responses against hate are, in the end, the real and only antidote to ensuring that hateful white supremacy is eliminated — at least until next time. — Bernie M. Farber is executive director of the Mosaic Institute and former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress.