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FAST launches school anti-racism initiative A coalition of non-Jewish business and community leaders formed earlier this year by Elizabeth Comper and her husband Tony Comper, president and CEO of BMO Financial Group, to fight anti-Semitism and racism has launched its first educational initiative. Choose Your Voice, a project of FAST (Fighting Anti-Semitism Together), made its debut Sept. 19 at Lord Lansdowne Public School to an audience that included local educators and grades 6, 7 and 8 students, at whom the program is aimed. The event included a preview of the Choose Your Voice DVD, introduced by Ben Mulroney, host of Canadian Idol, and featuring survivors of the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and students from Montreal’s United Talmud Torah, which was firebombed last year. Elizabeth Moore, a former hate group member, and Herb Carnegie, the 85-year-old former pro hockey player who was denied entry into the NHL because he is black, also appear in the DVD and were present at the launch. Sheila Ward, chair of the Toronto District School Board, said that it is not easy, but necessary, to speak out against hatred. “There are many diseases in the world today that strike fear in all our hearts, but [none] comes close to killing as many people as the diseases of hatred and its cousin bigotry,” Ward said. “Hatred killed six million in the Holocaust, almost a million in Rwanda, a million and a half Armenians between 1916 and 1923, and in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, about 1.75 million.” Canada is not immune to the damage that hatred does, she added. In fact, Elizabeth Comper, a former elementary school teacher, was galvanized into founding FAST by reports that 2004 was the worst year in more than half a century for anti-Jewish activity in Canada, with 857 reported incidents of harassment, violence and vandalism. “We felt we had to do something,” she said. “We believe that no Canadian children should ever have to feel afraid to be who they are. Nor should they have to worry whether anyone out there really cares.” She urged the audience to lobby local school officials to get the program into schools across Canada. The project, which was developed in partnership with Canadian Jewish Congress, Ontario region, is being distributed to Ontario schools this fall. Plans are in the works to launch the program in both French and English in Quebec in 2006, said Tony Comper. “Choose Your Voice reminds us to learn from the past, be aware of what is happening to date around us and stand tall in the face of any bigotry, prejudice or intolerance,” said Elana Aleinikov, principal of the multicultural downtown school that dates back to 1888. The DVD, with accompanying lesson guides, meets Ontario curriculum requirements, said Elizabeth Comper. It is divided into four parts that deal with stereotyping; racism and anti-Semitism in Canada’s past; more recent incidents; and strategies for responding to prejudice. Reproduced with permission from the Canadian Jewish News |
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