CUFOA

Canadian Unlicensed Firearms Owners Association
Association canadienne des propriétaires d’armes sans permis

Tuesday, 28 April 2009

The Honourable Don Morgan Q.C.
Minister of Justice and Attorney General
355 Legislative Building
Regina, Saskatchewan S4S 0B3

Dear Mr. Morgan,

Re: Yom Ha Shoah and ‘Armes for their Defense’

We appreciated your greetings from the Government of Saskatchewan to the Congregation Agudas Israel Yom Ha Shoah Holocaust Memorial Service on Sunday, 26 April 2009. You admonished us that “we must never forget” what happened sixty years ago in Europe when government-trained attack dogs were used to kill unarmed, innocent men, women, and children whose only “crime” was being Jewish.

On previous occasions when we asked for your assistance in our fight to protect our Right to have ‘Armes for their Defense’, you expressed your support of the licensing scheme of the Firearms Act. The Holocaust was only possible because the German government could disarm the population. But Hitler did not invent “gun control”. The Weimar Republic had passed the Law on Firearms and Ammunition in 1928 - a law that mandated a license to possess firearms.(1) Thus the Nazis knew where to look to confiscate all the firearms in Germany.

We believe our Right to have ‘Armes for their Defense’ is essential to our ability to protect ourselves; not simply from violent home invaders, but as well from a tyrannical government.(2) In Canada this statement on armed self-defense against government tyranny seems to raise eyebrows in some quarters, but as Congregation President David Katzman reminded us, the Nazis are not the only government that kills its citizens:

The Jews are not alone in suffering. Modern history has too many examples of human butchery. One scholar, R. J. Rummel, has estimated that purposeful state killings of civilians … have taken the lives of 169 million people in the 20th century … indiscriminate state massacres, forced labor and concentration camps … imposed and reinforced by the state …
(The) Holocaust … must remain a call for education for all of us.(3)

History teaches us that government “gun control” is inherently evil. And Canada’s unjust, ineffective Firearms Act is no less evil than the law the Nazis used to aid in their murder of over six million people.

You also called upon us to remember the quotation attributed to Edmund Burke, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” We fear that the Government of Saskatchewan is doing too little to oppose the evil of the Firearms Act.

In asking once again for your assistance in fighting the firearms licensing mandate of the federal government, we would offer another quote from Edmund Burke, “Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.”(4)

Sincerely,

Edward B. Hudson DVM, MS
Secretary

Ref:
(1) Nazi Firearms Law and the Disarming of the German Jews
17 Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, No. 3, 483-535 (2000)
Stephen P. Halbrook
http://www.stephenhalbrook.com/article-nazilaw.pdf.

(2) The Canadian Right of ‘Armes for their Defense’
Ed Hudson
http://www.cufoa.ca/articles/armes/armes_17_sept_2007.html

(3) President’s Welcome, Yom Ha Shoah Holocaust Memorial Service,
David Katzman, Congregation Agudas Israel
http://www.cufoa.ca/articles/philosophical/philosophical_12_apr_2008.html

(4) Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790),
Edmund Burke
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke

CC: Premier Brad Wall
Saskatchewan Party Members of the Legislative Assembly
Saskatchewan Party President Gary Meschishnick

Canadian Unlicensed Firearms Owners Association
Association canadienne des propriétaires d’armes sans permis
402 Skeena Crt. Saskatoon
Saskatchewan S7K 4H2
(306) 242-2379 (306) 230-8929
edwardhudson@shaw.ca
www.cufoa.ca

Yom Ha Shoah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_HaShoah

Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laGvura (??? ??????? ????? ???????; "Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day"), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, is observed as a day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, as a result of the actions carried out by Nazi Germany and its accessories, and for the Jewish resistance in that period. In Israel, it is a national memorial day.

'An idea of what hell is all about'

Holocaust survivor speaks to students

BY JANET FRENCH, THE STARPHOENIXAPRIL 25, 2009
http://www.thestarphoenix.com/Cars/idea+what+hell+about/1533074/story.html
Early Friday afternoon, Desirae Witt was grumbling about walking to a school field trip in a late April snow shower.
Within an hour, she and friends Anastasia Conly and Kathryn Spehar were dabbing tears from their eyes, feeling awed but guilty about how easily they are caught up in teenage trivialities such as boyfriends and test scores.
"I think we're too soft, and too spoiled," said Spehar, a 15-year-old student in Grade 10 at Holy Cross High School.
The girls were among a crowd of 500 students who listened Friday afternoon to Holocaust survivor David Shentow, who recounted horrifying tales of Nazi concentration camps.
Six million Jews are believed to have died in the Holocaust.
Sitting on the stage at Congregation Agudas Israel alongside his wife Rose, the Toronto man matter-of-factly recounted how his family's happy life in Antwerp, Belgium, degenerated into a three-year-long nightmare.
"We'll just give you an idea of what hell is all about," Shentow told the packed synagogue.
When the German invasion of Belgium began in the Second World War, Shentow's family tried to flee to France. It was too late -- the German army was there already.
At first, the occupation wasn't so bad, he said. Jews weren't allowed on park benches and in street cars, but life carried on. Then, Shentow's family was packed onto a train and sent to a work camp in France.
Although they rose at 4 a.m., worked 13 hours a day and got little food, Shentow said prisoners still had their clothes, their suitcases and their hair.
But when Adolf Hitler's SS men showed up, mothers, brothers and uncles were reduced to animals focused only on survival. Shentow was no longer his 17-year-old self, but No. 72,585 -- a tattoo that remains on his arm to this day.
The SS men terrorized the captives with German shepherd dogs trained to attack and kill, Shentow said. Moments after stepping off a train following a torturous four-day journey, soldiers made it clear rules of civility were nowhere to be found at Auschwitz. One persistent man asked to retrieve his luggage, and soon, a dog was flying at the man's neck, Shentow said.
When a young mother could not get her baby to quiet, a soldier grabbed it by the legs and threw it against the side of a train car, Shentow said.
Older and infirm Jews were sorted out to be sent directly to the gas chambers. Smoke emitted from an incinerator around the clock, he said. "The sweet smell of burning bodies made all the new prisoners vomit."
One day, a prisoner ran into the electric fence surrounding the camp, seeking a quick death. He was followed by another, and another, Shentow said, until half a dozen people had committed suicide.
"I envied these people," he said. "They're not suffering anymore."
Despite the horrors Shentow endured from 1942 to 1945 in Auschwitz, then Warsaw, then Krakow, he says he wanted to live, sustained by the hope he might see his family again.
On April 19, 1945 -- Shentow's 20th birthday -- an American tank rolled into the Krakow death camp and an American soldier poked his head out. He threw Shentow a piece of gum and said, "Take it easy, young fellow."
"It's a miracle I survived," he said.
And he had endured it all because he was Jewish.
The three Holy Cross students couldn't stop talking about what they heard.
"We are so lucky to be in Canada, because we can believe whatever we want to believe and we have that freedom. . . . We take it for granted," Spehar said.
Conly and Witt said they pictured people they knew playing the roles of characters in Shentow's tales.
They were amazed he's able to smile and talk about his wife and family after what he'd been through.
All three thought they aren't strong enough, or too outspoken to have survived a concentration camp.
"You've got to hope it can never happen again, when you can do something to stop it," Conly said.
Although he says it pains him to relive these memories, Shentow feels compelled to tell his story, especially when deniers insist tales from the Holocaust are exaggerated, or made up.
Following Shentow's speech, Holocaust committee education co-ordinator Ari Avivi showed students graffiti left on a bench underneath a cushion during a similar talk several years ago.
It reads, "Heil Hitler."
He told the students not to let Shentow's tales leave them feeling glum, but to do something about bullying and discrimination surrounding them.
On Sunday, the public is invited to Agudas Israel's annual Holocaust memorial service, which includes another chance to hear Shentow speak. The service begins at 1:30 p.m. at the Jewish Community Centre, 715 McKinnon Ave.
jfrench@sp.canwest.com