FAST Initiatives - Related Reading

June 23, 2005 (Canadian Jewish News)

They are changing the World
From the Editor’s Desk - MBD

It would be singularly difficult to overstate the importance of the event that unfolded last week at the Empire Club of Canada luncheon in Toronto.

Tony Comper, the president and chief executive officer of BMO Financial Group, was given the dais at the Empire Club to speak to a broad Canadian audience about FAST, a coalition of corporate citizens and business leaders he and his wife, Elizabeth, recently founded to join in, if not spearhead, the fight against anti-Semitism.

An acronym for Fighting AntiSemitism Together, FAST has attracted to its membership some of the top- echelon of Canada’s corporate community, people such as Courtney Pratt, president and chief executive officer of Stelco Inc., Michael J. Sabia, president and chief executive officer of Bell Canada Enterprises and Dominic D’Allesandro, president and chief executive officer of Manulife Financial. They are all representative of the high-level achievement of the members of the coalition.

They are also all representative of the fact that the founding members, at least, of FAST are not Jewish.

And that was purposefully one of the key aspects of the organization’s design and one of the key messages delivered by Comper last week.

“I am here,” Comper told the hundreds assembled at the Empire Club, “because my wife, Elizabeth, and I believe that in the end, this is a crisis [the rise of anti-Semitism] that must be resolved by non-Jews.

“That is why we founded FAST… as one way of crying, ‘Enough!’ And why we recruited an all-star cast of non-Jewish Canadian business leaders… to the cause.”

The resolve that stirred their hearts has now been transformed into an utterly unique, first-of-its-kind plan of action that now inspires and stirs the hearts of others. That is why it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of the luncheon address last week at the Empire Club.

That the initiative is from private citizens, that the citizens embody the highest levels of the Canadian “establishment” and that they publicly proclaimed the program in a forum that symbolizes the historic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority elite of Canadian society is without precedent.

The promoters of all forms of hatred – not simply the anti-Semitic variety – will now have to take notice that there will be no shelter for their prejudices and hatred within Canadian society. The alleyways, coffee houses, schoolyards and the boardrooms will now be closed to them. Their only recourse will be to slither at night like the roaches beneath the rocks, cowering from the light of day.

“We realize that this initiative – and for that matter, any others that FAST may undertake – is unlikely to touch the hearts and minds of the real hard-core crowd, the ones who most likely learned their hatred at the parental knee,” Comper said.

“But it could serve to further marginalize them, which sometimes is the best you can do when dealing with bullies and bigots… First, by stripping them of their potential power base, the people who really don’t know any better; and who, for whatever reasons, haven’t sought out the truth for themselves.

“Second, by going one step further and helping to encourage active opposition to the Jew-haters and racists and assorted other bigots and bullies the moment they start telling their despicable lies or making their ugly, pathetic ‘jokes’. We believe if the truth can make us free, it should also make us bold.”

As was widely reported last month in this and other newspapers, when FAST was launched, the group’s first educational project, which it hopes to begin in the fall, is a curriculum-based learning program called Choose Your Voice that it is developing in close partnership with the Canadian Jewish Congress, Ontario region, for use initially in Ontario schools.

Comper spoke movingly of his and his wife’s resolve in their campaign against anti-Semitism.

He concluded his remarks by invoking the famous articulation by the late scholar, philosopher Emil Fackenheim, of a 614th commandment that Jews are forbidden to give Hitler posthumous victories.

“I am here today,” Comper told the hushed and utterly attentive audience, “because I believe that this should not be a lonely battle – as it has so often been, for so many, for so long. And because I believe that this 614th commandment is something we all should be living by.”

Last week in The CJN, we wrote about the new phenomenon of social, as opposed to corporate, entrepreneurs who respond to the call of conscience by marshalling their managerial skills and corporate talents to try to make a positive difference in the world.

Corporate entrepreneurs at the elite level, Tony and Elizabeth Comper, are social entrepreneurs, too, now also changing our world for the better.

Reproduced with permission from the Canadian Jewish News

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