Focus on Issues the Pathology of Hatred

It’s been more than five months now since a jury of his peers found Eckville high school teacher James Keegstra guilty of violating Canada’s anti-hate statute. Despite the conviction and the fine imposed upon Keegstra, there is little evidence that he is in any way contrite or repentant.

According to two journalist-researchers, David Bercuson and Douglas Wertheimer, in their new book “A Trust Betrayed: The Keegstra Affair” (Doubleday Canada, Toronto, and Doubleday and Co., New York), this is not an unexpected development because the pathology of hatred which actuates Keegstra is deep-rooted.

In their account of the affair, Bercuson, a professor at the university of Calgary, and Wertheimer, editor of the Jewish Star of the same city, display a dispassionate and highly commendable objective attitude. There is a minimum of editorializing in their treatment of what was undoubtedly one of the most squalid interludes in recent Alberta history.

Although the authors were unable to secure an interview with Keegstra himself, they were able, through an unremitting diligence, to track down and speak to almost everyone else who was involved in the incident.

Their treatise encompasses for more than the pedagogy of Keegstra; it is an inquiry into the nature of high school education in Alberta, the canons of modern journalism, the politics of the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA), the response of political personalities in the province, and the reaction of Alberta’s Jewish communities to the threat of Keegstra.

THE MALIGNANT SOURCE OF ANTI-SEMITISM

The latter, of course, is the central focus. Bercuson and Wertheimer display magisterial control of the literature of Judaism and of its antagonist — anti-Semitism. They show in their book that which newspapers were unable to delve into — the malignant sources of so much of Keegstra’s virulent anti-Jewish sentiments.

Tracing the history of anti-Semitism to a radical fringe of Christianity, they show how in the medieval period a whole corpus of literature developed depicting the Jew in demonic terms. By the eighteenth century, there was a full-blown library of books denigrating not only Judaism and the Talmud, but depicting Jews (along with Masons and the Illuminati) as conspiratorial agents out to undermine Christendom and supplant it with a Judaeo-Masonic confederation.

The Bercuson-Wertheimer volume is the first serious attempt to explore the lunatic fantasies which flowed from these theories and which were adopted uncritically and malevolently by an Eckville high school teacher who, for more than a decade, taught as unimpeachable fact what was hysterical rubbish.

Despite assertions to the contrary, Keegstra used the trust emplaced in him by an Alberta school board to transform a social studies classroom into a laboratory with some very combustible experiments in the inculcation of hate. The documentation which surfaced during the hearings on Keegstra’s dismissal and during the subsequent trial showed that any student who failed to regurgitate Keegstra’s party line on Jewish iniquity was penalized with low marks.

Failure to reproduce Keegstra’s delusional theories meant that students had used materials found in libraries rather than the anti-Semitic pap which he made available to his charges from the library of anti-Semitica which he possessed.

A PECULIAR CIRCULAR LOGIC

The various confrontations which Keegstra had with students, principals, school supervisors, the media and the court show quite clearly the way in which the classical anti-Semitic mind works — and it does, with a peculiar circular logic of its own.

Starting from the “revealed truth” that Jews are part of a demonic conspiracy to rule the world, Keegstra reasoned that the absence of this truth in conventional history books was ipso facto proof that the conspiracy had succeeded in capturing the book publishing industry. Any pressure brought to bear against him by the school board, by the province or by the courts was interpreted by Keegstra as additional evidence of the diabolism of the agents of conspiracy.

One of the merits of the Bercuson-Wertheimer volume is the patient reconstruction which they effect of the complaints which were first lodged against Keegstra, the warnings which were issued to him and the hearings which finally revoked his permission to teach.

It seems astonishing that Keegstra was able to use his classroom for the inculcation of hatred for Jews for more than a decade before his performance came under critical scrutiny. This occurred because of a number of contributory factors: the inertia of the educational establishment, the real affection which many Eckville residents had for the teacher (he was a sincere, honest Christian, the refrain went) and the reluctance of the ATA to sanction a dismissal of any teacher, under any circumstances.

This latter somewhat delicate issue is brought to the surface in the Bercuson-Wertheimer volume. The authors do not find much integrity or moral stamina in the ATA. They flatly reject the organization’s defense that it was interested only in the question of peremptory dismissal and that it represented Keegstra as it would any teacher in such circumstances.

The authors cite chapter and verse to show that the ATA has more discretionary power than it let on and that intervention is not automatic on behalf of a teacher. They conclude that the ATA is more akin to an industrial union out to protect job security than a professional organization.

A CASE OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISM

With regard to media professionalism, the Edmonton Journal scores high in the inventory by the two authors, of the Alberta press during the incubation, development and bursting forth of the Keegstra affair. While the authors have some critical comments to make about the reluctance of the press in the province to play up the affair as nothing more than a local happening, they are complimentary towards Steve Hume, editor of the Edmonton Journal.

Hume’s background in British Columbia and his humanist concern for the native peoples in that province prompted him to see the Keegstra affair in its true light, as an incitement to bigotry and hate. He was led to this realization in part by some of the phone calls he received implying not so subtly that Keegstra was correct.

Thanks to Hume’s sense of integrity, the Edmonton Journal more than any other Alberta newspaper began to utilize its editorial page and op-ed sections in order to sensitize readers to the horrors of the Holocaust and its breeding ground, anti-Semitism. For this mature coverage, the Journal won a prestigious journalism award.

DIFFICULTY FACED BY THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

One of the great quandaries explored in the Bercuson-Wertheimer chronicle was the difficulty faced by Alberta’s Jewish community. When rumors of the Keegstra affair began to drift into the Calgary and Edmonton communities, there was a tendency on the part of the communal leaders to ignore the whole thing for fear of aggravating a potentially harmful public ventilating of the controversy. In the final analysis those anxieties proved to be predictive of what actually occurred.

The Jewish communities in Alberta were slowly but ineluctably drawn into the conflict by the rush of events and by the leadership of two main individuals in Calgary and Edmonton who resolved to fight Keegstra out of a sense of injury and the belief that resistance to outrage was better than silent acquiescence.

One of the things which emerges from this book, however, is that the Jewish communities in Calgary and Edmonton were very poorly organized to deal with an event of the Keegstra magnitude and had, moreover, very little liaison between them. It took the pressure of Keegstra to develop an intercommunity sense of camaraderie and a healthy relationship at the same time with the Canadian Jewish Congress of Toronto — which helped the Alberta communities with legal opinions and other documentation.

The book which Bercuson and Wertheimer have written is a fine study of the sociology of hatred. Their deliberate effort to avoid hysterics and editorializing in the recounting of the Keegstra affair is both a merit and a failure. A merit because it permits the reader access to facts from which he can draw his own conclusions.

It fails in one way, however, because it does not confront the central issue, namely, how is it possible for a sincere practicing Christian to entertain such perverted ideas about Jews and Judaism, and what is more alarming, to make that perverse preoccupation the central preoccupation of his life ? The answer to this question may be impossible to provide, but in raising it the authors would have added an additional dimension to their discourse.

What did the Keegstra affair teach? According to this book, “bigotry will not be eliminated by the Criminal Code of Canada.” The importance lies not in Keegstra’s conviction but in the fact “that a handful of school officials, outraged parents, the Jewish community and a sensitive media were willing to wage a public battle against the danger.”