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The 61-year-old former Soviet prisoner grabbed the hand of the young Darfuri refugee, made a fist, raised it in the air, and yelled "Darfur! Darfur!" Soon, the Darfuri man was shouting "I am a Zionist!"

Far from a street protest or a sit-in, this was taking place in the United Nations council chambers in Geneva. The scene, describing the famous refusenik Natan Sharansky and a refugee from the genocide in Darfur, was one of the stories told by Canadian parliamentarian and human rights activist Irwin Cotler at an event sponsored by the David Project on Manhattan's Upper East Side April 23, just hours after Cotler returned from the United Nations Conference on Racism -- known as Durban II -- in Geneva.

"We have taken back the narrative and taken back the street," Cotler told the audience.

Though the event was to raise awareness about the mass forced exodus of Jews from Arab lands mid-20th century, the story was relevant, Cotler said, because they both illustrate a new momentum in Jewish activism -- one that is focused on justice for Jews and "the docket of the accused" for leaders like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"While justice has been delayed, it can no longer be denied," Cotler said.

The David Project Center for Jewish Leadership is a non-profit organization dedicated to Israel education and activism in middle schools, high schools, and on college campuses. The April 23 event, held at the Edmond J. Safra Synagogue, attracted 200 people for a screening of "The Forgotten Refugees," an award-winning documentary about the forced exodus of about 1 million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa since 1947.

Edmond J. Safra Synagogue Rabbi Elie Abadie addressed the crowd as well. Abadie's parents were refugees from Aleppo, Syria; he was born in Lebanon and the region's Arab anti-Semitism pervaded his childhood until his family left. In 1990, Abadie became a citizen for the first time in his life, as a citizen of the United States.

Introducing justice and accountability

Cotler, former justice minister and attorney general, spoke with The Jewish State after the event about Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Cotler said that while the phrase "never again" is associated with the Holocaust and genocide in particular, the spirit of the motto should permeate discussion of anti-Jewish injustice.

"Never again should people be disenfranchised, dispossessed of their property, beaten, imprisoned, tortured, expelled," Cotler said. "The title of the film is 'The Forgotten Refugees,' but it really is the forced exodus."

The forced exodus, he said, was a result of state sanctioned repression, harassment, abuse, and expulsion, and there must be some accountability. Cotler isn't opposed to discussion of Palestinian refugees during Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but said it must be made clear that Palestinian refugees aren't the only victims.

"It's disingenuous to say that there's only one victim group for which the Israelis are responsible, without realizing that there were two victim groups for which the Arab and Palestinian leadership were also responsible," Cotler said. "And therefore, if we're going to talk in terms of accountability rather than impunity -- and in particular if we're going to talk about truth rather than a selective narrative -- then we have to look at what, in fact, happened and who was accountable."

The acceptance of this selective narrative, Cotler said, has led to the creation of a false paradigm concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict. According to this paradigm, Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the source of the Arab-Israeli conflict and conflict in the Middle East in general; the Israeli "occupation" is the source of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the "apartheid" state of Israel is the source of the occupation.

In addition, he said, Israel is not only considered an apartheid state, but a Nazi apartheid state. That is the justification for calls for Israel's destruction.

"So what do you do with an apartheid Nazi state? You dismantle it," Cotler said.

Identifying the new anti-Semitism

If the Arab-Israeli conflict operates on a false paradigm, so does the understanding of modern anti-Semitism, according to Cotler. Classical anti-Semitism, he said, involved discrimination against Jews with regard to housing, education, and employment. Using those indicators, he said, would lead you to believe that anti-Semitism is declining. But using updated indicators would show that modern anti-Semitism is actually increasing, he said.

For example, Cotler said, Jews are readily accepted to American colleges. But once they arrive on campus, they are often subjected to a hostile environment in which they experience intimidation in order to silence their views -- on Israel, for example.

"The same way that you can't cry 'fire!' falsely in a crowded theater -- that's not protected speech -- you can't just indiscriminately accuse a people of perpetrating a genocide and a Holocaust, and engage in that moral inversion and then denigrate the supporters of that 'Nazi' state and silence them by that type of tactics," Cotler said.

A new paradigm for that, he said, should accept that the source of conflict is the state sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide. At its epicenter stands Ahmadinejad, but Cotler noted that radical Islam in much of the world, especially the Middle East and North Africa, partake in that, via groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Such groups, Cotler said, "are not only terrorist groups, but have genocide as their objective, anti-Semitism as their ideology, terrorism as their instrumentality, and a global design in terms of an Islamic caliphate as a whole. That is the source and root cause of not only the Arab-Israeli conflict but of conflict in the Middle East and beyond. If there were no Israel, you'd still have the problem."

The new indicators

State sanctioned anti-Semitism is the first indicator of modern anti-Semitism, he said. The second indicator is political anti-Semitism, such as the denial of Israel's right to exist among the nations. The third indicator is anti-Semitism laundered under the struggle against racism, such as the U.N. conference in Geneva.

"Here's where you join bigotry to hypocrisy," Cotler said. "You take a legitimate human rights cause like the struggle against racism and you then indict Israel with the twin evils of the 20th century -- apartheid and Nazism -- and the very labels supply the indictment, no further proof is required, the conviction has already been secured, only the sentence needs to be passed. And what's the sentence? The sentence is to dismantle that state."

And the fourth indicator is legalized anti-Semitism, such as anti-Semitism advanced with the imprimatur of international law, in venues such as the U.N. Security Council and U.N. Human Rights Council. Since its inception in 2006, Cotler said, the Human Rights Council has adopted 32 resolutions of condemnation -- 26 of them against Israel, with countries like Iran, Sudan, and China enjoying exculpatory immunity.

"We have to unmask what these state sanctioned anti-Semitic incitements are, rather than always be on the defensive," Cotler said. "We have to take back the narrative, articulate the indicators, and hold the real offenders to account."

Preserving the memory of the 'forgotten'

With regard to the "forgotten refugees," Cotler said local communities should hold showings of the film, and invite witness testimony from any such refugees in their community.

"Each of us has to see ourselves as what are called the bearers of Jewish memory, in this instance the bearers of Jewish refugees' memory," Cotler said. "We have to see ourselves as the trustees of the Jewish historical experience. We have to see ourselves as the embodiment of those values that need to be transmitted and conveyed."