Holocaust Monument Desecrator Treated Leniently |
Last June, the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, was vandalized by Iain Aspenlieder, a middle-aged lawyer formerly employed by the city. He daubed the words “FEED ME” in blood-red paint on the memorial, which commemorates the victims of the Holocaust and recognizes the 40,000 or so Jewish survivors who found a new home in Canada after World War II.
My late parents, David and Genia, were among the survivors who immigrated to this country following the war. As their only child back then, I accompanied them on the voyage from Germany to Halifax and the rail trip to Montreal in the winter of 1948. So I have a very personal interest in this unsettling incident.
The memorial that Aspenlieder so brazenly violated is architecturally striking. Consisting of monumental walls of varying dimensions and angles, it is laid out in the shape of an elongated Star of David and sits across the Canadian War Museum. Inaugurated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on September 27, 2017, it was designed by a multidisciplinary design team composed of Studio Daniel Libeskind, Claude Cormier Associés, the photographer Edward Burtynsky, Lord Cultural Resources, and the University of Toronto historian Doris Bergen.
Aspenlieder, in a reckless act of solidarity with the Palestinians, defaced the monument as the Israel-Hamas war raged in the Gaza Strip. Like some supporters of the Palestinian cause, he conflated Jews in the Diaspora with the State of Israel and appears to have blamed them for the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians during Israel’s fierce but just military campaign in Gaza.
Arrested shortly after his attack, he pleaded guilty to one count of mischief relating to war memorials. It was the first time this penalty had been applied to a sentence........