An attempt to assassinate Irwin Cotler, the well known Canadian human rights advocate and vociferous critic of Iran’s clerical regime, has been thwarted by legal authorities.

According to a Globe and Mail report, the RCMP informed the 84-year-old who served as justice minister in Paul Martin’s Liberal government, he faced assassination threats from Iranian agents. Cotler has been under RCMP protection since October last year and always travels with security guards and in bullet-proof vehicles.  

On Monday, the House of Commons passed a motion condemning the Iranian plot and saluting Cotler for his human rights work and political contributions.

Cotler, who has never backed down in the face of personal threats, continues to sound the alarm on the human-rights abuses committed by Iran. He first became a target of Iran when he led efforts to draw attention to the actions of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps IRGC, which he accused of engaging in and providing support for terrorist organizations around the world. In June of this year, the federal government announced that it was listing the IRGC as a terrorist group.

“Iran has begun to target, now in a more intensified way, dissidents, human rights defenders, political leaders, etc,” he told CTV News.

In addition, through his Montreal-based human-rights organization Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, Cotler has represented prisoners unjustly imprisoned by the regime. In a cover story in Zoomer magazine (Dec. 23/Jan. 24), he explained that Iran, which he says “arms, trains and finances Hamas,” must be opposed on every front.

We revisit that story – a wide-ranging conversation between Cotler and former McGill classmate (and ZoomerMedia founder) Moses Znaimer that discusses the human-rights champion’s past, his ongoing work and his optimism for the future – below.

Human Rights Lawyer Irwin Cotler On Fighting Hamas and Battling a Rising Tide of Antisemitism

Irwin Cotler is busy saving the world from evil, so the human rights lawyer arrives for his cover shoot at ZoomerMedia headquarters five minutes before he’s due at the Spirit of Hope gala to honour actor Helen Mirren with a humanitarian award. The 83-year-old leader of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal is an oasis of calm, with warm eyes and a ready smile for everyone, especially his high school and university classmate, ZoomerMedia founder  and CEO Moses Znaimer. Cotler is even wearing his McGill University tie, which Znaimer spots immediately. 

His beatific demeanour belies a lifetime battling “the axis of evil” – authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations that bomb, capture, imprison, torture and kill innocent citizens for everything from their religion and gender to their defence of democracy and human rights.

At press time in November, Cotler had been to Washington to talk about political prisoners, the Israeli hostages captured after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and the rising tide of antisemitism. He also sat down with Justin Trudeau in Ottawa and urged the prime minister to help form an international consortium of democracies to fight Hamas, much as the Global Coalition Against Daesh was created in 2014 by 86 member states to defeat the ISIS military campaign in Syria and Iraq. “I’m hoping Canada will move forward and exercise moral political leadership,” he said during a break in the photography session. “It’s not only Hamas. We have to hold Iran to account, which arms, trains and finances Hamas. We have to hold their enablers to account – Qatar and Turkey – who give sanctuary to leaders.”

In December, Cotler plans to visit kibbutzim in Israel to support families of the Hamas hostages and murder victims. “It’s a kind of cruelty that is beyond belief,” he says, his voice hardening as he describes how the dismembered body of a 22-year-old Supernova Festival partygoer – with gouged-out eyes and severed limbs – was recovered 11 days after the attacks. 

On Oct. 29, in a wide-ranging phone interview with Znaimer from Montreal, the former Canadian justice minister and attorney general talks about the people who inspired his work, beginning with his father, who taught him the Jewish precept of tzedek, tzedek tirdof  (justice, justice you shall pursue); Martin Luther King Jr., who described his dream to Cotler minutes before his historic speech; mentor Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize; and, of course, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved 100,000 Jews during the Second World War, proving that, just like Cotler, “one person with the compassion to care and the courage to act can confront evil, prevail and transform history.” 

Moses Znaimer: Irwin. At long last.

Irwin Cotler: It’s been a very crowded day today. What can I tell you? 

MZ: I don’t doubt it. You have the world on your shoulders. 

IC: We all have the world on our shoulders. It’s a collective responsibility these days.  

MZ: Where have you been recently?

IC: I’ve been in Washington, to meet with the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and the U.S. Helsinki Commission, where I testified on the issue of political prisoners, specifically Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian patriot who has recently been sentenced to 25 years in prison for doing nothing but criticizing Russia’s domestic repression and its external aggression against Ukraine, and then the U.S. Helsinki Commission added on the issue of the hostages being held by Hamas. Then I met with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and we dealt with those two issues, as well as the issue of antisemitism, and why antisemitism is now a threat to democracy. 

I also met with members of the administration and Congress regarding the 230-plus hostages being kept by Hamas, and shared an action plan. I was representing Noam Peri, the daughter of one of the hostages being held by Hamas. They are from Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel, which was one of the most devastated by Hamas’ multi-pronged attack of Oct.7. Of 400 kibbutz members, over 100 were murdered and abducted, and right now there are 73 hostages from that kibbutz alone. Our Wallenberg Centre has been asked to represent some 100 hostages by a coalition of families. 

I don’t think people realize this is a humanitarian imperative of the first order. Among the hostages are toddlers, children, elderly, disabled and Holocaust survivors. States are obliged to secure their release, because what Hamas is doing is a standing crime against humanity, to add to their initial criminal aggression against Israel of Oct. 7.

MZ: I can only imagine how exhausted you must be. I marvel at your endurance – the physical endurance, the spiritual endurance – to keep at this, even though, in the wake of that first strike, more and more people are saying that there are no words to fully encompass the current moment. 

IC: As it happens, we were in Israel on Oct. 7, and that Saturday was supposed to be a particularly festive Jewish Sabbath, not only celebrating our son’s marriage, but it was taking place on Sukkot, a holiday when we are reminded of our mutual obligations to each other. As we were to depart for the synagogue, the air raid sirens began foreshadowing the launching of some 500 rockets in the first few hours alone. 

We ended up being shepherded into a bomb shelter, and the day’s atrocities began to unfold in real time, because Hamas were uploading on social media and celebrating. More cruel than that, you can’t get. Three weeks later, we had more than 1,500 murdered, 5,000 wounded and 220 hostages. That’s why we have called for – in a plan of action that we shared with the American and Canadian governments –  a multilateral coalition for the release of the hostages. We’re setting up an international parliamentary alliance, launching international criminal actions against the Hamas leadership, and also holding Qatar and Turkey – who have been enablers and given sanctuary to Hamas leadership – to account.

MZ:  But, don’t you find that the body count in Gaza is already overtaking the question of the hostages? Don’t you feel the public interest and sympathy already seeping away?

IC: You’re correct, the narrative is shifting and now focusing on the Palestinian civilians. What many people don’t appreciate is that Hamas is an antisemitic, genocidal terrorist organization. Not because I say so, but because they say so – having affirmed it initially in their founding charter in 1988, which called for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews, “wherever they may be.” The other part of this is that Hamas is not just a standing threat to Israel and the Jewish people, it’s a threat to the Palestinian people themselves.

One of the problems today is that we have an intensifying axis of evil. We have Iran, which is supportive of Russia in its criminal aggression in Ukraine. Part of that axis of evil is increasingly Xi Jinping’s China, which recently welcomed Vladimir Putin to China, even though Putin is under an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. That axis of evil includes the terrorist proxies of Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and others, like North Korea.

For some time, we have been witnessing and experiencing a resurgent global authoritarianism – a backsliding of democracies, assaults on human rights – something I’ve been speaking about for years. We’ve got, in China, mass atrocities in the Xinjiang region against the Uyghur Muslims, which constitute acts of genocide. We have, in Sudan – which is no longer even on the radar screen – an incipient genocide, because the same threats and actions that were there 20 years ago are taking place again now. We’ve forgotten about the genocide in Myanmar. There are mass atrocities in Ukraine, which constitute acts of genocide. The fact that “never again” [an international promise made after the Second World War to prevent genocide in the future] – and I don’t compare anything to the Holocaust – is happening again and again, tells us something about the nature of the universe we’re living in and why it is so imperative for the necessary moral, political, juridical and international leadership to hold these génocidaires to account.

MZ: Among the places where Israel, and now Jews, are continuously vilified, is the United Nations. I mention it in the context of your apparent still firm belief in the axis of goodness, and the axis of due process and the axis of moral people and moral states. So, I come back to my earlier question. I marvel at your stamina, and I wonder what is the source of your ongoing conviction and strong spiritual belief that this is a fight that may yet end in the good?

IC: First, it was my parents of blessed memory. My father, while I was still a young boy unable to understand the profundity of his message, would repeat to me that tzedek, tzedek tirdof – [Hebrew for] justice, justice you shall pursue – has to be the overriding commandment, equal to all the other commandments combined. This, as he put it, must be your moral compass, and this is what you must teach unto your children. When my mother would hear my father saying this, she would say to me that, if you want to pursue justice, you have to feel the injustice around you. You have to go in and about your community and beyond, otherwise the pursuit of justice will just be a theoretical abstraction. These were the kinds of lessons that mandated my involvement in the trenches of human rights all these years: the teachings of my parents; teachers we had at Herzliah High School [in Montreal] when you and I were students there together; my friendship with Elie Wiesel, who became my lifelong mentor and colleague, and his teaching that indifference always means coming down on the side of the aggressor, never on the side of the victim, and that silence in the face of evil ends up being complicit with
evil itself.

I believe the optimism comes from looking at the history, as Martin Luther King Jr. said. Sixty years ago, I was at that famous “I have a dream” speech. I was there as a young law student, because they invited whoever was the editor-in-chief of The McGill Daily and I was the editor. I was a guest of Martin Luther King Jr.’s family. I can still hear [gospel singer] Mahalia Jackson saying, “Martin, tell him about the dream.” Then came that incredible speech, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s dictum that I always remember: the arc of history bends toward justice. But it won’t happen on its own. We have to bend it toward justice. I believe that we can, because whatever 2023 may be, it’s not 1943. There is a Jewish state today as an antidote to Jewish powerlessness. There are diverse Jewish people united in confronting the criminality of Hamas. And there are non-Jews – civil society, parliamentarians, political leaders, U.S. President Joe Biden’s calling-out of the moral depravity of Hamas – sounding the alarm [about] the importance of democracies uniting. I believe, if that kind of leadership anchors the community of democracies, we will bend that arc toward justice.

MZ: We see the monsters among us. Some of them are in the schools, some of them are on the street, some of them are among the new populations this country has recently taken in. What are we to do about all that? 

IC: We have to call out, shame and hold accountable all those who support, let alone glorify and celebrate, Hamas’ atrocities. They are a looking glass into the age-old hatred of antisemitism, which is not only the oldest, most toxic and lethal of hatreds, one which mutates and metastasizes over time, but one which reflects the zeitgeist. When the zeitgeist was religion, Jews were said to be guilty of deicide. When you had the Black Plague, Jews were said to be the poisoners of the wells. The contemporary application is when the Jewish people and Israel were said to be responsible for manufacturing the COVID-19 virus, for causing its spread and, in yet another trope, profiting from it. 

In the ’70s, when human rights emerged – and, as a law professor and human rights lawyer, I celebrated it as a new secular religion – we gradually began to see antisemitism laundered under the very rubric of human rights. As Special Envoy for Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism for Canada for the last three years – where, in the last year, we’ve witnessed the most alarming rise in antisemitism since audits began 50 years ago – the most significant finding was the increasing legitimization of antisemitism in political culture, popular culture, sports culture, entertainment culture, media culture and, in particular, campus culture and academia, which represents the leaders of tomorrow.

Canadian Jews – one per cent of the population of Canada – are the targets of 67 per cent of religiously motivated hate crimes. We’ve had an incendiary explosion of antisemitic hate on social media, and we know that hate online ends up in hate crimes offline. So, we need to mobilize to combat it. We need a constituency of conscience.

MZ: Recently, I was preparing to introduce and honour you at a special showing in Parliament of the new documentary about you called First to Stand. And yet, our government and Parliament have been, only briefly, vocal, but then strangely silent. Can I ask you about that?

IC: When I was a parliamentarian, for 17 years, I always said my first responsibility was to Parliament and to the Canadian people, and not to the party. My first job was as a special assistant to John Turner when he was minister of justice. Turner was a great parliamentarian, and he taught me a lesson when he said democracy doesn’t happen by accident; that we have to nurture it, we have to protect it, we have to defend it. Where it was warranted, I opposed my own party, the Liberal Party, when I felt it was not sufficiently standing up to the horrific mass atrocities in Syria.

 I think here, too, at this point, we have to exercise the necessary leadership. I’ve noticed every prime minister in the G7 has gone to Israel to show support. I’m hoping the prime minister of Canada will also do so, because he is the only one, up to now, who has not yet done so. He’s made strong statements in condemnation of Hamas and antisemitism, and mentioned recently the need to combat the delegitimization, demonization and double standards re: Israel. But we have to give expression to that in our actions. And when you have the proliferation of hate, as we have now in our own streets and neighbourhoods in Canada, we need the strongest possible leadership.

MZ: People reading this may be surprised to hear you refer to Syria. The work of your centre is not just focused, as you are today, on the situation in Israel, or the situation of Jews in a world of antisemitism, but you extend your reach to all manners of human rights violations. Among the most famous of your clients was Nelson Mandela. Could you tell us a bit about how you came to see in Raoul Wallenberg a symbol that you wanted to hold high?

IC: The Raoul Wallenberg Centre was named in remembrance of the Swedish non-Jew who saved more Jews [in the Second World War] than almost any single government. We are approaching the 80th anniversary of Wallenberg’s heroism. From mid-May to the beginning of July 1944, 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to the Auschwitz death camp, the most cruel, efficient killing machine in all of the Holocaust. Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in mid-July, 1944, and by a mixture of bluff and bravado and mobilizing other diplomats, saved 100,000 Jews; something the entire international bystander community did not do. Wallenberg showed how one person with the compassion to care and the courage to act can confront evil, prevail and transform history.

Before these Hamas atrocities, I would say 90, 95 per cent of our work was related to combatting, for example, the Russian criminal aggression in Ukraine, as well as Russia’s domestic aggression. Before he was imprisoned, Kara-Murza was a senior fellow at our Raoul Wallenberg Centre, and an architect of the global Magnitsky [Act] sanctions.

And it’s not only Kara-Murza. It’s Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian human rights lawyer who’s gone to the wall for women in Iran who are victims of gender apartheid, juveniles destined for execution, media whose speech has been silenced and other political prisoners and their lawyers who’ve been arrested, until she herself became a political prisoner five years ago – a woman in her late 50s sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. In China, we represent Dr. Wang Bingzhang, one of the longest-serving political prisoners. We represent Swedish Eritrean Dawit Isaak, who’s the longest-serving imprisoned journalist in the world, a reflection of another priority of the Wallenberg Centre, and that’s the promotion and protection of media freedom and combatting the imprisonment of journalists.

If I sum up the compelling priorities of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre, these
are: resilience and renewal of democracies; promoting and protection of media freedom; defending and protecting political prisoners; combatting racism, hate and discrimination; working for Indigenous peoples.

MZ: Do you have a regimen that helps you keep going? How do you stay healthy?

IC: I don’t have a regimen. The political prisoners inspire me, energize me, motivate me. I’ve always said a political prisoner’s worst fear is to be ignored or abandoned, so, every night, the thing that preoccupies me is have I done enough today on behalf of these political prisoners languishing in prison, of whom we don’t even know of their torture and their pain? They are, for me, the lodestars of our times: Kara-Murza, known as the Mandela of Russia, Sotoudeh, known as the Mandela of Iran, and Wallenberg himself, who ended up being disappeared in the Soviet gulag.

MZ: Who is listening to you? Who is there to work with in the Arab and Muslim world, who may understand and have the fortitude to come forward and say that if the Palestinians are occupied, it’s by Hamas and Hezbollah and so on.
Do you see anyone on the other side with whom to work toward some end to these endless wars?

IC: When I was a law professor, I used to go for four months each year – in ’75, ’76, ’77, ’78 – to Egypt, then Syria, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and end up in Israel. My friends would ask, “Why are you doing this?” I’d say, “As somebody who wants to be involved in the Israeli-Arab peace process – and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, in particular – I have to have a better understanding not only of the term ‘Arab,’ but a better understanding of the people, the culture, the families.”

I remember visiting Dr. Haidar Abdel Shafi – who was head of the Palestinian [delegation] in 1991 at the Madrid conference – in Gaza. I remember his warning that if Hamas ever took over Gaza, they would be an enemy of the Palestinian people, which, tragically, is what took place in 2005 after Israel withdrew. Hamas became not only the government in Gaza repressing the Palestinian people, but a terrorist entity terrorizing the Israeli people. We came close to Israeli-Palestinian peace then, when Abdel Shafi was negotiating with Judge Elyakim Rubenstein from Israel. I was part of some of that. History could have been different, but history might yet witness an Israeli-Palestinian peace in the same way that we witnessed an Egyptian-Israeli peace. That, too, played an important role in my life.

When I was in Egypt in ’75 and ’76, I began my visit at the Institute of Islamic Studies. It was presided over by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who went on to become the foreign minister for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and then secretary-general of the UN. We became friendly.

I was back in Egypt in ’77, when the Likud government got elected in Israel, and Boutros-Ghali arranged for me to meet with Sadat. The raison d’etre for the meeting was Sadat asking me if I thought he could make peace with Menachem Begin, and I said, “I don’t know the Israeli prime minister, but he’s known as a parliamentarian, a democrat. I believe he would want to make peace with the most important and significant Arab government and leader – yourself – President Sadat.”  Then, he gave me a note to bring to Begin.

He said, “Boutrous-Ghali says you end your trip to Egypt and to the Arab countries with a visit to Israel. I believe that you’ll find a way to get this message to Begin. I want to give this note to somebody who the Israelis will trust and whom I will trust.” The day I arrived in Israel, I met a friend who invited me to a lunch with young Israeli members of the Knesset. I was invited to speak, and spoke in Hebrew. At the lunch was my wife-to-be [Ariela Zeevi], whom I did not know at the time. She was a parliamentary secretary to Begin. After lunch, she asked me questions and I realized she thought me a spy, because I was a young Jew travelling in Arab countries. I then told her a story about my meeting in Syria with Damascus Jews who celebrated Begin becoming prime minister, who said with him would come their redemption. She said, “You have to speak to Prime Minister Begin.” She arranged the meeting. I was sitting in his office the next day, and shared with him the note. 

He looked at the note, which said Sadat was prepared to make peace with Israel based on two conditions, mainly Israeli withdrawal from all of the Sinai and recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. Begin was very skeptical, and said, “No, we can’t do this.” Then he asked me, “Do you think I can make peace with President Sadat?’ I said, “Yes, in particular, because President Sadat’s wife wants it.” He sent me back with a note to Sadat, and negotiations began. The rest is history, and I married the person who thought I was an Arab spy. So, you never know how history can develop. That’s why I end up being an optimist and believe we can bend the arc of history toward justice. 

MZ: What a great story, Irwin. When you and I were palling around the McGill union and debating society, I could see you were going to have a future in law, and, I thought, possibly, as a law professor. But never did I imagine what you’ve done and what you’ve established in the world. So, stay strong, Irwin.

IC: I just want to say, Moses, we both had the same inspiration. We both had Irving Layton, the great Canadian poet, who taught us; we both were inspired by Leonard Cohen, a joint friend and colleague, whose passing we both lament and at whose funeral we both spoke. More importantly, I celebrate our friendship.

MZ: Irwin, thank you so much. Chazak, chazak [stay strong].

IC: Chazak, chazak is right. Great speaking with you Moses. Take care. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

A version of this article appeared in the Dec 2023/Jan 2024 issue with the headline ‘Why He Stands’, p. 35.

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