Posts Tagged ‘Palestinian’

 

On January 22 Israel held elections for a new Knesset. Despite the small size of the country, the event received worldwide coverage. Both those who hate and who admire Israel were looking into the results for confirmation of their views. Israel has the unique position of being a tiny island of sanity within an ocean of Muslim barbarism.

Even the most ignorant people can predict the results of the elections in the Muslim countries surrounding Israel (many of them don’t even hold elections). In the Israeli democracy that’s much harder. The low threshold (a party needs only 2% of the votes to get a seat in the Knesset) makes it possible for many tiny political parties to enter the competition successfully.

That makes the Israeli political life very complex. If you go through the lists of the past Knesset members, you’ll find small parties that don’t exist anymore; large parties that split into smaller entities; parties that have quickly gained influence and then just as quickly disappeared.

The whole thing resembles a huge maze, where most people feel lost without a guide. Such a knowledgeable guide is Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a prominent scholar from Bar-Ilan University (Israel). In a lecture at Temple Sinai Congregation in Toronto on January 27, he patiently led his audience through the election maze, making sense of the results.

He is uniquely qualified to discuss the complicated realities of the Middle East. Representatives of the organizers – David Freedman (from the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research) and Shirley Anne Haber (from The Speakers Action Group) – introduced us to his background.

 

 

Dr. Kedar is a descendant of Polish Jews, who immigrated to the land of Israel before the Shoah. All of his relatives, who remained in Poland, were killed. He speaks fluent Arabic and is often interviewed on Arab TV and radio stations, including Al-Jazeera. Unlike many other journalists and scholars, who don’t speak the local language, and rely on the disinformation provided by their handlers, Dr. Kedar has first-hand knowledge about the events in the Middle East.

He started by stating that unlike many other elections in the past, those in 2013 clearly show deep changes taking place in the Israeli society.

 

The results, which still are not final (although any additional changes will have a minor effect) show a distribution of seats which is different from what many analysts expected: Likud-Beiteinu – 31; Lapid – 19; Labor – 15; Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) – 12; Shas – 11; the Tzipi Livni party – 6; Meretz – 6; Haredim – 6; Kadima – 2; Arab parties – 12.

The main news is the failure of the Likud-Beiteinu block to win the expected seats in the Knesset. Netanyahu and Avigdor Liberman signed their agreement expecting that their coalition would gain at least 42-43 seats, which was the combined number for the both parties in the previous Knesset.

Why did Likud lose so many seats? The centerpiece of their election platform was the national security, yet the Israelis didn’t buy that. What was the reason?

The main reason for Likud’s unsatisfactory performance, according to Dr. Kedar, was the so-called Arab Spring. That process, which started as a series of riots demanding better life, caused such deterioration within the social structure of the Arab countries that they are no more the threat they were before.

After overthrowing Mubarak, the Egyptians are much worse off. The poverty is rampant – in many areas people live in “houses” resembling boxes with no phone, no internet or even electricity. (Does anybody still remember the imaginary “Facebook revolution” in Egypt, which CNN and Time Magazine promoted?)

The new government is even less competent than the old one. The World Bank refuses to lend them money, unless Egypt ends the subsidies for foods, which in the case of the bread reach 80% of the price. If they do so, there will be riots again; if they don’t, the riots would come a little bit later when the country gets bankrupt. Either way the results will be horrible – Egypt is slowly but surely approaching an abyss and its next revolution will be driven by hunger.

Egypt has practically lost its tourism industry, which was a major source of foreign currency. The foreign investments have dried up as well, because nobody wants to invest in a country controlled by unpredictable Muslim fanatics. The only remaining source of income is the tax collected from the ships that pass the Suez Canal.

Egypt is not a threat, because it is barely capable of feeding and equipping its army.

The situation in Syria is even worse – so far over 70,000 people have been killed in the fighting. There are thousands of refugees; whole towns have been totally destroyed. It would take a long time before the country recovers enough to become a military threat to Israel.

Although Jordan is still relatively peaceful, there are already demonstrations calling the King to go. The ancestors of the Jordan royal family were Saudis brought to power in Transjordan by the British. The locals still dislike that family. The domino effect of the Arab world events will soon reach Jordan. It’s just a matter of time.

Although Hezbollah in Lebanon is still a real threat, its positions have been weakened. Israel has dealt with them before and it may happen again. The turmoil in Syria changed the situation – the country was the corridor that Iran used to deliver weapons and supplies to Hezbollah. The situation makes it very unlikely for the terrorist organization to attack Israel when they can’t rely on steady supplies from Iran.

That’s why the Israelis, who are carefully watching the situation within the countries surrounding Israel, didn’t take Netanyahu’s position seriously. They wanted the government to put emphasis on dealing with social issues like poverty, affordable housing, etc.

The pressure to deal with those problems started a few years ago – there was an “Occupy Rothschild Boulevard” movement, which was the prototype of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Some of the people, who took part in it, are now new members of the Knesset from Lapid and Labor parties.

Likud failed to read the map – they didn’t pay attention to the change in the young generation. The party lost its support, because they didn’t understand how to address the housing and other concerns. That transition in the social values and concerns found its way in the election results.

The case of Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) deserves special attention. Dr. Kedar described their constituency as people like his late old father – who had very traditional views. The party, which was called before National Religious Party, was losing support, but under its new leadership it managed to get new blood and enhance its appearance.

Naftali Bennett was the person who contributed most to that change. He was a member of a very elite unit of the IDF and not just a simple soldier, but a Major. That gave him good credentials with most Israelis. He even worked in the Netanyahu government. He is a multi-millionaire, who founded, developed and sold a highly-successful high-tech company. Many people in Israel see him as a leader, who won’t need to get secret envelops with cash to pass legislations or do favours. He is the dream of many Israelis.

Bennett introduced a new type of people into the party, who are not religious. Ayelet Shaked, a young-looking woman married to a combat pilot, is one of the new secular leaders of Bayit Yehudi. The new faces and the ideology, which is now based more on national than purely religious values, showed that everybody who shared those values was welcome. That contributed to the growing popularity of the party.

As of the religious party Shas, its popularity remained the same. Maybe even many of their voters (the Orthodox Jews) moved to Bayit Yehudi. The main purpose of Shas is to defend the interests of the Orthodox Jews, so they could join either a right-wing or left-wing coalition, if it supports their demands like religious school funding, etc.

The Livni party and Kadima is what’s left from a party that a few years ago held the power in Israel. The Kadima position is shaky, because they barely passed the 2% threshold and they may lose their seats if the final vote count changes the percentages. The Meretz leftists increased their seat numbers, but that doesn’t make them a factor in the political life.

The Arab parties deserve a special note. Arab citizens are 20% of the population of Israel, so theoretically they could get 24 seats in the Knesset. However, they never reach that number for several reasons. First of all, the Knesset is not their game – many of them wouldn’t want to vote for a budget, which includes expenses for defense and security. Most militants would consider that treason. Also, they don’t want be a part of any Jewish coalition. Those who take part in the elections want to be in the Knesset to disrupt, protest and shout “Discrimination!”

Of course, that’s good – opposition is necessary in every democratic parliament. Another reason for underrepresentation is that the militant groups urge Arabs not to vote – they say that the Arab voting de facto legitimizes Israel and their main purpose should be its destruction and establishing of an Arab state.

Again – it is important to stress the fact that we are witnessing a shift from a security-oriented to socially-oriented society.

In the future we may see an increase in the popularity of the religious parties, because of demographics. Compared to the secularists, the religious people in Israel have many more children.

Dr. Kedar also mentioned the threat of Iran as seen by the people in Israel. Many of them are against its public discussion – they acknowledge the threat, but think that it is an issue, which should be dealt with by the army and the security forces behind the scenes. The constant open discussion of the Iranian nuclear threat destroys the element of surprise that is necessary when handling such issues. They are actually saying: “Deal with it and let us know when it’s done.” Besides, the general public doesn’t have enough data to form a credible opinion about the nuclear capabilities of Iran.

During the Q&A session the listeners asked quite a few questions, some of which were out of the scope of the lecture.

Asked who is going to be a member of the new government coalition, Dr. Kedar replied that it was impossible to predict, because nobody is a prophet. The forming of a coalition is a complicated psychological warfare between the parties in the Knesset, complete with secret dealings and deceiving moves, but that’s how the political culture in Israel works.

Of course, somebody asked the question, which is on the mind of so many people – what is the situation with the two-state solution in Israel and who is promoting it?

That was a complex question, so Dr. Kedar’s answer was long. He bluntly stated that no reputable Israeli politician wants to get engaged with that issue – the people in Israel saw what happened after the “peace initiative” in Gaza. After winning elections and a war with PLO, Hamas took complete control and now is a major threat. Doing the same in Judea and Samaria would almost certainly produce the same result. Nobody in the world is capable of preventing a repetition of what happened in Gaza.

No Israel would take the risk and see the same thing happening. Hamas control over Judea and Samaria would mean that the whole territory of Israel could be attacked by the terrorists’ rockets. And if the things go that way, none of the promoters of the two-state solution around the world is going to help Israel. The only person taking this seriously is Shimon Peres, who still thinks that Abu Mazen is going to put the people of Hamas in jail.

Nobody has a viable solution – even annexation for one-state solution is not good.

Dr. Kedar has proposed his own solution, based on the nature of the Arab society, which he explains on the website http://PalestinianEmirates.com

His point is that the Arab societies are tribal. All Arab countries are artificial creations, most of which have been established by the colonial powers. The population there thinks first and foremost from the point of view of the clan – people trust or mistrust each other depending on the clan or tribe they belong to. Belonging to a nation is a secondary consideration (if ever considered). This is a very basic element of the Arab culture, including among the people under the Palestinian Authority.

The “Palestinian nation” is an artificial construct, in fact those Arabs are divided into clans. The only viable solution is to establish emirates in the West Bank, which will unite the Arabs from the same clans living in the urban areas. There are 8 such clans, which will provide the basis for that new structure. Then Israel can provide security to the people who live outside of those emirates.

Another important question was about the relations between Obama and Netanyahu.

Dr. Kedar answered that although they are not as cozy as the relations between Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush were, the Obama administration has no other choice but to face the reality of the Middle East, so the differences are not always that deep. During the last two years the White House figured out how incorrectly they evaluated and handled the situation in the area. When the demonstrations in Egypt started, Dr. Kedar was contacted by people from the State Department asking what the best way to handle Mubarak is. He told them that whether they support him or not, it will not make any difference, because the people are against him for their own reasons and the position of the USA is not going to change anything. It has been a while since the USA has lost its positions there and is considered just a paper tiger.

 

© 2013 Blogwrath.com

Last Sunday I attended a conference on combating the delegitimation of Israel organized by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR). I am going to write about it in detail later, but in this post I just want to talk about the strange appearance of Mr. Tarek Fatah (he received at the conference the “Lion of Judah” award).

I have covered many events involving Tarek Fatah and I respect him. His decisive stand against Muslim fanaticism, which has brought him many threats, is more than admirable. I have never paid too much attention to his claim to be a “secular Muslim” (an oxymoronic term) or to his socialist worldview. However, his speech at the conference and the confrontation with one of the participants, Mark Vandermaas, that followed it, left me puzzled (to say the least).

Let’s see what exactly happened (the quotes were transcribed from the actual recordings):

Tarek Fatah started:

“Look at the people of Thailand where Obama is now. There is a state for the people of Burma, there is not a single person who says that the Burmese people don’t deserve a state of their own. And all the Jews do is quote me the Bible… I am telling you your case is so simple, you’re a people and you deserve a state! That’s got nothing to do with Judaism. I don’t have to tell you that most of your founders were atheists – I have been inspired by communists, who were all Jews, I didn’t know they were Jews, I just knew they were Marxist… Shlomo Avineri, I didn’t even know that was a Jewish name. When I was 16 years old I was stealing a book by him from the library, then I found out he was at the Israeli Foreign Ministry… There is not one guy amongst you who is talking to those who you have to be friend [with]. You’re talking to friends, you’re talking amidst yourselves. I urge you to take your kids out of private school and put them in public school. And even when you do so, all of you kids are in neighbourhood schools, 80% of them are Jewish… “

After talking more about the public education, he unleashed his wrath against the right-wingers:

“You are less than 1% of world’s population. You see that you have 195 countries to convince. You have been able to convince them when the General Assembly vote took place in 1947 – from Paraguay, the Philippines, Liberia… There were three rounds of voting. You managed that. Why? You were with the United States and Europe on the left. Now you got the Republicans to support you. Do you know that the fact that a Republicans support you is your undoing? The same person who is against abortion, the same person who thinks that the immigrants should be thrown out to Mexico, the same guy who doesn’t want black people to come in, the same guys who want gated communities, the same guys who are against the civil rights movement, are supporting you! That’s a kiss of death!”

After that he jumped to the issue of who the real threat to Israel is, saying that Iran is overrated – they are idiots, who haven’t been able to develop a simple missile for ten years. The real danger comes from Pakistan, which has a large nuclear arsenal and even sells nuclear materials on the black market. It has also trained most of the terrorists in the world. Then he returned to the Jewish question:

“You are not fighting any of the fights you can win. You basically have to win the war of truth over lies, it’s as simple as that! I’m standing here, I’m a strong defender of the Palestinian right of statehood, and defend that because every Israeli prime minister has defended it whether it is Olmert, Ehud Barak who I admire greatly. I am the Labor Party supporter, I am left of centre and I am proud to be a socialist. That’s why as long as the right supports you, you don’t have a case in the rest of the world, because 99% of the people are struggling to make ends meet. As long as the Polish in Warsaw supported you, you stood up with dignity, you stood up to the Nazis as left-wing Jews. You show me one right-wing Jew in Nazi Germany! Show me one! Give me a name! Every Jew was respected because they were fighting for the working class! Today, today you have the Republican Party, the guy who said he doesn’t give a damn about 47% of the people, who said I lost because I didn’t give tips to the black people, that’s the guy supporting you?

“You better get out of that! You better get inside the Democratic Party and the NDP. I am telling you that originally NDP, in 1967 when you won the war, the NDP had a convention, and the entire council of the NDP celebrated, standing applause for the great victory of Israel over Egypt. You come back to just 3 years ago, one member of the parliament from the NDP stood up and she was booed. That was the woman with the complicated last Polish name. She was not allowed to speak! And this is the same party from over 35 years – have you accomplished anything or have you lost something? Don’t deceive yourselves – you lost out on the NDP that was the single biggest supporter of the state of Israel and the Jewish community… I have argued with people who don’t like that I learned from the Jews…

“You are being supported by right wing Nazis for crying out loud! This is a problem; we cannot accept that, you cannot get somebody from the religious right. You have to get back to the roots that created you. People who created [Mark leaves; noise] [inaudible]… I am saying this as a friend, there are people like for example Ateek who was mentioned here, I have known him for 20 years, he is outspoken, he has been for the Jewish state and has told so to the Palestinian students. Please don’t offend your friends. Thank you very much!”

Although the second part of the speech was met with whispers of disapproval and Mark Vandermaas left outraged, there were people who clapped at Tarek’s words. When the Q&A session was announced, Mark was the second person to ask a question:

Mark: “This is for Mr. Fatah. I grew up in a non-Jewish household; my parents lived under the Nazi occupation during the Holocaust. I served in the Middle East as a UN peacekeeper. Recently, in 2011 I conducted a 28-day vigil outside of a mosque in London to protest their direct support for the boat to Gaza. In 2012, in response to students being intimidated at the Western Ontario University, I created the first Israel Truth Week Conference [applause], also, after the conference the Canadian Society of Yad Vashem suggested to me that if I get 50 people together, they’ll provide a bus to take Christians to the national Holocaust ceremony, where I received the honour of my life being asked to participate in the candlelight ceremony. And I came here today from London, which is two hours drive, hopefully to hook up with members of CIJR to talk if they can help me produce the next Israel Truth Conference in 2013, which will be in one of the largest Christian churches in Hamilton. My parents were very active in the NDP. Throughout my entire adult life I voted conservative, and I hold conservative values today, and if I were in the United States, I would vote for Romney and Ryan [applause] and my question to you is: we don’t know each other and you don’t know anything about me, am I a Nazi, Sir? Am I a Nazi?”

Tarek: [inaudible]

Moderator: He asked if he is a Nazi.

Tarek: That’s obviously a question in extremely bad faith and manners and it reflects a lot of your hostility. I would be very dishonest, if I said that you asked this question in good faith.

Mark: Sir, I asked this question at the urging of the CIJR Chair Mr. Kincler as I was standing by the door, after asking what I should do, but please don’t accuse me of dishonesty.

Tarek: [yelling] Don’t bully me! I am no one’s patsy and I am not taking bullying from anyone, you understand that? I have had my family fight for the Jews, don’t give me that crap! How dare you play games with me! You think you can bully me? That’s why the Republicans… you support the Republicans and the people become anti-Israeli, because bullies like YOU who try to intimidate ME and then support… [booing]

Moderator: [moves to another question]

Obviously, Tarek was following the principle “it’s my way or no way”. Otherwise it would be difficult to explain the rude emotional outburst with which he reacted to the calmly asked question. This was supposed to be a scholarly conference and he could’ve used the opportunity to clarify his position in the answer, but his behaviour was at odds with the atmosphere of the event.

I’ll get back to his extreme leftist position – he invoked the Occupy Movement terminology. 99% of the people struggling to make ends meet? That sounded like a phrase from the mouth of somebody who crawled out of an Occupy Wall Street tent.

Let me say something about Mark’s character. I have known him for a while – he is an open, honest and straightforward person. Everything he said in his question was true. He may not be a TV personality like Tarek, but he has made significant contributions to the cause of Israel in Canada. And he definitely doesn’t belong to the mythical 1% and hasn’t made any money with his activism. It was horrible to see him being viciously attacked by Mr. Fatah. Many of the participants, who came to Mark to shake his hand and congratulate him after that, thought the same way.

No matter how hard Mr. Fatah tries, he can’t separate anti-Semitism from Marxism. Marx had clearly defined anti-Jewish views. As a convert, he tried hard to prove that he was just like the other Germans. In his article “The Jewish Question” (quoted from “Karl Marx: A World without Jews”, Philosophical Library, New York, 1959) he wrote:

“What is stated as theory in Jewish religion, namely, contempt for theory, art, history and man as an end in himself, is an actual and conscious point of view, held to be virtuous by the man of money. Even the relations between the sexes, between man and woman become an object of commerce. The woman is auctioned off…

The law of the Jew, lacking all solid foundation, is only a religious caricature of morality and of law of general, but it provides the formal rites in which the world of property clothes its transactions…

The social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Jewry.”

Not much new here – Marx simply perpetuates the stereotype of the evil money lender, who sits in his dark chambers thinking how to enslave mankind. That was not that different from the position Hitler took. Hitler didn’t invent anti-Semitism, he expanded it and found eager supporters among the progressives, including the peasants and the working class, who voted him into power. But of course, that’s a phenomenon that the narrow-minded Marxist “class analysis”, cherished by Mr. Fatah, is not able to explain.

I agree with Mr. Fatah that we can’t name any right-wing Jews in Hitler’s Germany. That’s because there were no Jews, neither left-, nor right-wing. For the luckiest few, who were still useful, Hitler found a loophole declaring them “Honorary Aryans” (like Herbert von Karajan’s wife). The less lucky ones managed to escape, often with just the clothes on their backs. And we all know where the rest ended up and why so few of them came back… As of Germany before Hitler, there were Jews in many different positions in the government, culture, science, etc., it’s laughable to claim that they all were left-wing.

Jews haven’t done well even in places where the “progressive Jews” have been in charge. When Lenin’s gang took over Russia, the large number of Jews in the government – like Trotsky, Sverdlov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek, etc. – other than feed the conspiracy theories about the Jewish worldwide takeover, did very little to improve the plight of the Russian Jews. The truth is that they were faithful followers of Marx in trying to “emancipate the society from Jewry” – they stopped the pogroms, but destroyed Judaism along with the other religions and the well-off Jewish peasants and merchants were persecuted just like all other “class enemies”. Under Stalin, when the repressions expanded tremendously, the Jews became targets of the spy trials along with millions of others, although Jews like Yagoda and Kaganovich were part of the repressive apparatus. Thousands of Jewish actors, artists, writers and ordinary peasants and workers perished or languished for years in the camps. The last large purge, which happened just a few months before Stalin’s death, targeted specifically the Jews.

The NDP (that’s short for New Democratic Party) itself has been anti-Israeli for decades, in addition to bringing financial ruin to every province, where it formed a government. Sure, there were lefty Jews among its supporters, who were more than willing to accuse Israel of every sin under the sun. At the last year’s opening night of the Israeli Apartheid Week, the far-left Jewish activist Judy Rebick proudly called Israel a “shitty country”. But the presence of such hostile Jews still hasn’t changed the situation. In a notorious interview from 2010 Libby Davies, deputy leader of NDP, said that Israel’s occupation started in 1948, thus wiping the country from the map.

I wonder if this is the party that the Jews have to get into…

Even the socialists in Sweden and Norway are hostile toward the Jews and Israel. Painting the Republicans as a gang of Nazi villains is beyond stupid – I wonder how an educated man like Mr. Fatah could justify it. At the same time he ignores the welfare underclass, which is the powerbase of Obama.

As of Naim Ateek, whom Mr. Fatah mentioned in the end of his speech as a great friend of Israel, he was discussed in the presentation of Prof. Paul Merkley on the Christ-killer motif in some churches. Ateek is a founder of the “Palestinian Liberation theology” and a virulent critic of Israel. When Mr. Fatah’s favourite Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to the Palestinians everything they wanted, including Jerusalem, the “grateful” old terrorist Arafat unleashed one of the largest waves of Arab terrorism. Instead of condemning it, Ateek used the opportunity to blackmail Israel for defending itself, comparing the country with the “baby killer” Herod and the Palestinians to the crucified Jesus.

How can you call him a friend? With the friends that Mr. Fatah recommends, Israel doesn’t need enemies.

Other than the distortion of reality caused by the Marxist lens through which Mr. Fatah observes the world, there is another important issue, which is not limited to him.

I call it “boxing of the Jews” (like putting them in a confined space). The problem is that so many different people are trying to put the Jews in a box to fit their own agenda – for people like Marx and Hitler Jews epitomize the pure greed (an old anti-Semitic image). For well-meaning progressives like Mr. Fatah, all misfortunes of the Jews and Israel come from the fact that they are not left-wing enough.

Despite having different agenda, both attitudes display the same flaw – they paint the Jews like a class of kindergarten kids, who must behave in a certain way to be liked. In both cases they are expected to lose their specific individuality.

It never occurs to them (or they simply don’t want to admit it) that the Jews are a people like every other people – there are smart Jews and stupid Jews…

Educated Jews and ignorant Jews…

There are Jewish bankers and Jews on welfare…

The fighters in the Warsaw ghetto were Jews and many of the police guarding it were Jews as well…

Albert Einstein was a Jew and so was Bernie Madoff…

Ayn Rand was Jewish just like Abbie Hoffman…

Presenting the Jews as a monolithic group, which would solve all of its problems by going to the NDP or the Democratic Party (or any other ideological flavour of the day) is beyond ridiculous. But that’s how the socialists, communists and the followers of every other ideology, which tries to “solve” mankind’s problems once and for all, see the world. There are no individualities, but little cogwheels, which must follow the imaginary laws of the theory.

Mr. Fatah might get offended if I call his “advice” to the Jews patronizing, but that’s what it is. The Jews are not a flock of sheep, which could be pushed from one political party to another. During the last 2,000 years they have proven that they could survive under almost impossible circumstances (unfortunately paying a hefty price).

Living at the mercy of enemies and do-gooders is not a sustainable way of life. If you, like Blanche DuBois, always “depend on the kindness of strangers”, you won’t go very far.

That’s why the existence of the state of Israel is so important – that is the place where the Jews can live and support any party, conservative or progressive (and, boy, didn’t they come up with such diverse political parties), regardless of what Mr. Fatah and his friends prescribe as best for them.

It is also important to be a Jewish state, “a national home for the Jewish people” as the Balfour Declaration stated, not some kind of a federation, where the Jews would have to once again depend on the imaginary kindness of the Arabs.

A Jewish state is the only real insurance that nothing of what happened before would be repeated. Many of those who see Jews as stereotypes have a hard time reconciling the yeshiva student with the IDF soldier, but they are two sides of the same coin – education and spirituality are worth very little if you don’t possess the force to defend them.

Jews don’t need to justify their existence or be lectured about what side they have to take. Just like everybody else, they are making their own decisions.

There is one statement of Mr. Fatah I agree with: “Please don’t offend your friends!” But first the Jews must decide who their friends are.

© 2012 Blogwrath.com

 

This was a busy week for the anti-Israeli “forces” in Toronto. Last Tuesday I stumbled upon their “nakba” rally, whose attendance was nothing to brag about, considering all the pro-Palestinian “luminaries” who spoke at it. It was painful to watch such a lacklustre event organized by a movement that claims millions of supporters in the civilized countries.

I thought things could not get worse, but the reality proved me wrong. Earlier today I came across another protest event at the Israeli Consulate, which was beyond sad. Unlike the “nakba” event, which included quite a few Arabs, this one was dominated by white Westerners (probably a good part of them Jewish), with just one token Arab guy holding a “Canada Recognize Palestine!” sign (I had to use my phone to take the pictures, sorry for the quality).

 

Other than calling for an end to “Israeli apartheid”, they also had a sign announcing: “Israeli Consulate Is Here”, needed just in case if the terrorists or the revolutionary masses of the world want to storm it. However, at the time nobody looked interested in that information.

It was really sad to look at those people, who wandered around like zombies, who have long ago outlived their glorious years, the 1960’s. Now they desperately try to find another cause that could make them feel alive again. I would suggest to them that boycott and destroy Israel is not that cause – recycling old Fatah terrorist clichés and tired communist propaganda is not going to create a mass movement. Those elderly ladies would be much better off if they retire the revolutionary rhetoric and concentrate on raising their grandkids (little bit of knitting and crocheting on the side won’t be bad either).

 

© 2012 Blogwrath.com

 

The pin above (sold at the event) summarizes the nature of today’s nakba rally, which took place across the Israeli Consulate in Toronto. I had no idea it was scheduled for Tuesday.  Compared to the last year’s noisy event, the attendance was much more modest.

As usual, the event was organized by the usual strange bedfellows –the International Socialists (who are actually hard-core communists), Palestine House, the Israeli Apartheid Week crowd, and the Hamas-supporting “celebrities”.

I saw the weird lady, who always carries a stack her comrades’ publications at such events. As always, she tried to sell me a communist paper for a buck:

 

The organizers brought a lot of signs (among which I saw “Zionism=Racism” and another one condemning the “racist state of Israel”) but they were wise enough to leave them near the benches in front of the museum and stick to their immediate demands:

 

Of course, the Palestine House guys were there. At far left you see one of their officials, who, at the opening night of this year’s IAW, delivered a speech promising that they are going to march next year into Israel and “liberate” Jerusalem and the whole Palestine:

 

Soon after him arrived the incredible Khaled Mouammar, the former president of the Canadian Arab Federation. He was definitely happy to be among his lefty buddies:

 

I also spotted in the small crowd Ali Mallah, the anti-Israeli activist (and BCF nemesis). He managed to combine in his demeanor both the pride of his influence over the movement…

 

…and irresistible charm:

 

As I was standing there, an aging communist lady next to me pointed at a young woman and explained with excitement that she was Eva Bartlett, Canada’s Rachel Corey, who often travels to Gaza to protest against the Jews and serve as a human shield when they attack the Palestinians (her husband is a Gaza Arab).

 

Eva’s face looked strangely familiar – only later I realized that I saw her at the opening night of this year’s IAW.

She was one the main speakers, who brought some videos depicting the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Those films were some of the crudest examples of Palliwood’s fake propaganda, which showed false confrontations and shootings conceived and executed so clumsily that they could make an impression only on the die-hard lefty dimwits.

Miss Israeli Apartheid Week herself opened the event:

 

Then Khaled grabbed the microphone and switched to his usual repertoire of Israel bashing and Jew-hate rhetoric thinly disguised as an attack against Zionism.

 

At that point I left. I think it wasn’t only me who felt disappointed – maybe if Miss IAW, NDP Ali, anti-Zionist Khaled and Hamas Eva had something of value to say, they would have attracted many more people of their own kind. Hopefully, next year they may come up with something more entertaining…

 

© 2012 Blogwrath.com

Aid needed! The UN agency, which provides assistance only to the Palestinian “refugees”, is $75 million short and appeals to the goodness of the hearts of a few additional donor countries.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNWRA) was created specifically to provide money to the constantly swelling number of its clients. Other than being one of the largest UN agencies, it is also known as one of the worst managed. Theft and misuse of funds have marred its existence ever since it was created in 1950.

The money, which comes from a few UN donor countries, has often been redirected to the pockets of its bloated staff or to the coffers of terrorists like Hamas and PLO. UNWRA’s disregard for honesty didn’t go unnoticed – many of the regular suckers, like the USA and Canada, are reluctant to waste their taxpayers’ money on supporting terror anymore.

That’s why the funds are short $75 million and new donors are needed. And that’s why Filippo Grandi, the commissioner general is appealing to new countries, like Brazil, China, and India. It is questionable whether he would get the desired response.

The usual donors, among which are the USA, Japan, Canada, Germany, and France, have that very valuable trait, which allows any unscrupulous Third World schemer to exploit them. It is very easy to make them feel guilty over past or present, real or imaginary, deeds to extort a good chunk of money. However, observing the way the savages and the fanatics, who run the UN, spend the donors’ money, those countries have smartened up. The fact that many of them are in a not-so-good economic situation doesn’t help either.

 

But Signor Grandi will have hard time using the same approach with the other countries. It would be very difficult to make China feel guilty about anything (actually it would be impossible). I don’t see how anybody can force them to give money to people who do nothing. If China had the opportunity to create a few sweatshops with Palestinian employees, they’ll be more likely to chip in, but in that case UNWRA would be the first to raise a stink about the poor exploited Palestinians (and the organization itself would become useless).

Actually, the Palestinian refugee issue is one of the largest international scams ever perpetrated. And, as with many of the problems in the Middle East, it’s a “gift” from Great Britain. The same British, who gradually robbed the Jews from the historic land allocated to them in the mandate determined at the San Remo conference, came up with the idea of UNRWA. After the Arabs tried unsuccessfully to exterminate the Jews in 1948, the British helped to create that large welfare organization.

Normally, when we talk about refugees, it is self-evident that those are people who are displaced – they are usually returned to the place where they came from or absorbed by the country, which gave them shelter. In almost all cases, the refugee status is temporary.

That’s not so with the Palestinian “refugees” – the original (inflated) number was about 750,000. Instead of being reduced due to death from old age, that numbered had mushroomed to nearly 5,000,000. The Holy Land has seen plenty of miracles, is that one of them? Not really. According to Daniel Pipes, we owe this to the creativity of UNRWA:

UNRWA’s staff has taken three major steps over the years to expand the definition of Palestine refugees. First, and contrary to universal practice, it continued the refugee status of those who became citizens of an Arab state (Jordan in particular). Second, it made a little-noticed decision in 1965 that extended the definition of “Palestine refugee” to the descendants of those refugees, who are male, a shift that permits Palestine refugees uniquely to pass their refugee status on to subsequent generations. The U.S. government, the agency’s largest donor, only mildly protested this momentous change. The UN General Assembly endorsed it in 1982, so that now the definition of a Palestine refugee officially includes “descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children.” Third, UNRWA in 1967 added refugees from the Six-Day War to its rolls; today they constitute about a fifth of the Palestine refugee total.

What an elegantly simple solution! It shows that when large sums of money are changing hands  (UNWRA’s budget is $650 million), the bureaucrats would always find a way to get it.

If we project those trends into the future, the situation becomes even more insane:

In other words, rather than diminish 5-fold over six decades, UNRWA has the population of refugees increase almost 7-fold. That number could grow faster yet due to the growing sentiment that female refugees should also pass on their refugee status. Even when, in about 40 years, the last actual refugee from mandatory Palestine dies, pseudo-refugees will continue to proliferate. Thus is the “Palestine refugee” status set to swell indefinitely. Put differently, as Steven J. Rosen of the Middle East Forum notes, “given UNRWA’s standards, eventually all humans will be Palestine refugees.

Unlike the guilt-ridden industrial countries, which provide the bulk of the UNWRA budget, the Arab countries pay very little. Not only that, but they also do everything to keep those refugees in the cramped camps built on their territories.

In the clumsy game of checkers the Arabs play with those people (the game is too simple to be called chess) the whole scheme is seen as providing a triple benefit.

Firstly, as long as the Palestinians live in those camps, the situation will feed the anger of the anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic leftists and Muslim fanatics.

Secondly, they give them the false hope that one day all 5,000,000 of them will return to Israel, which would commit a collective suicide by allowing in millions of people more than willing to hunt Jews.

Thirdly, those unemployed people in the camps are a fertile environment for creating and supporting of every imaginable organization ran by Muslim fanatics or terrorists.

As with everything in the UN cobweb, here we have an agency, which has created many more problems than it has ever resolved. Isn’t it time to get rid of UNWRA and let those “refugees” become a part of the Arab countries, which host them?

And while we are at it – why don’t we get rid of that sinister organization called “United Nations”, which has proven over the years that it is much better in disuniting nations than bringing them together?

© 2012 Blogwrath.com

 

 

The picture above was taken during a JDL protest at Palestine House following the brutal murder of the Fogel family and their little children by Palestinian security officers. It is a symbol of the confrontation that has been going on for years, with people and organizations demanding that the charitable status of that terrorism-supporting organization be stripped.

After ignoring the concerns of those who had collected extensive files of facts on the real activities of Palestine House (the blogger Blazingcatfur has contributed more than anybody else to revealing the truth), the Government of Canada finally took action.

On February 14 the Immigration and Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney announced that Palestine House had been defunded. It is not going get anymore nearly $1 million each year to fund its questionable activities.

Its leaders were quick to issue a statement that no convincing explanation was cited for the decision. What else did you expect? As usual the Palestinian activists rely on the ignorance of the Canadian public to spread their phoney victim propaganda.

They want to present themselves as that great charity that provides English as a Second Language (ESL) and settlement services to new immigrants. And of course, they don’t want you to know how heavily involved they are supporting the causes of terrorist organizations.

The laws in Canada are straightforward – if you are a charity, you must stay out of politics. David Suzuki had a quite unpleasant experience when he did those election commercials in support of McGuinty’s idiotic green projects, which are bankrupting Ontario. Since that tiny movie venture threatened the status of his beloved cash cow, the David Suzuki Foundation, our green fear-monger went out of his way to prove that he has nothing to do with the foundation, which bears his name.

Apparently, the people from Palestine House were not that smart – they never separated their pro-terrorist politics from the work they did for the immigrants.

Blazingcatfur has an extensive coverage on what the organization did over the years, but here is something from that list, which shows in a nutshell their political position. In October 2007 they organized and promoted an event titled “Palestine: The Canadian Connection in the Current Crisis”, and on their website made the following statement in support of Hamas (I think I don’t need to remind you that Hamas is designated in Canada and many other countries as a terrorist entity):

“Stephen Harper’s Tory government shamefully led the international community in imposing a siege on the Palestinian people for exercising their democracy under Israeli occupation, the first time in human history that sanctions have been imposed on a people under occupation. Since then, the US,EU, Canada and Israel have worked to bolster the regime of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as he works to negotiate away the historic rights of the Palestinian people to the delight of the Israeli apartheid regime.”

Can you believe that? If a charity says that Abbas, a former terrorist (whose only difference from Hamas’s leaders is that he wears a suit and a tie), is a meek Israeli servant, we really have a problem. Going against a global opinion, based on facts, just to defend a murderous organization shouldn’t be the position of a tax-funded charity in Canada.

Then the angry Palestinians brought in the heavy artillery – Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star’s resident islamist, wrote what he thought was a devastating article.

Using action movie imagery, he claimed that “Hitman Jason Kenney” stroke again and got the government involved in a new “scandal”. Here is what he said:

“In December, the centre received a letter from Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. He accused it of having “a history of taking positions that could be interpreted as extreme or supportive of terrorists and terrorism”.”

According to Haroon, Kenney cited three instances “that could arguably be seen as extreme”: map on the site showing the Palestinian state encompassing all of Israel; the celebration of the release of about  1,000 prisoners in exchange for soldier Gilad Shalit, among which were “convicted terrorists and at least one individual who murdered two Canadian citizens”; and the appearance of Abdul Bari Atwan, a “journalist” who once stated celebrate if Iran’s missiles hit Israel.

Of course, none of the other instances of direct support for terrorism are mentioned.

Here is the map in question, part of the Palestine House logo:

 

 

The whole Israeli territory is covered by a kafiya – you can’t get more blatantly hateful than that.

Haroon has a “good” argument against that interpretation:

“The “map” is not exactly a map. It’s a logo that shows the outline of the ancestral land of the Palestinians. It does not even mention Palestine. Still, if the minister has strong feelings, the logo can be dropped.”

There is no “ancestral land of the Palestinians”. Before the restoration of the Jewish State, the area was controlled by different countries and no “Palestinian people” ever existed there. This is a clear provocation – imagine if Turkey published a map, where Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Albania were covered with a Turkish symbol as an “outline of the ancestral Ottoman lands”. I can visualize the horrible scandal that would develop. Why should Israel be treated in a different way?

A curious glimpse into Palestine House’s consistent attempts to demonize Israel is provided by their Google listing. The listing, which appears after you search for “Palestine House”, is supposed to provide directions, map and a short description (called “at a glance”) to benefit the potential clients. Last year, as you can see in the screenshot below, their “at a glance” information showed the following:

 

Their position, which will be of interest to the customers, is clear: “Meir Weinstein-war criminal-jewish defence league”.

Earlier this month they came up with a new description:

 

At least they are consistent: “coalition to stop the war-palestinian people-war criminal-israeli occupation-israeli apartheid”.

And on February 14, they changed the description again:

 

Meir Weinstein appeared again: “Palestinian people-israeli apartheid-meir Weinstein-globe and mail-canadian government”.

Is it just me or do you think that all these are strange business descriptions for an organization, which is supposed to teach English and help new immigrants to settle in Canada? What kind of an immigrant would find such a description useful? Never mind…

Let’s get back to the article – to bring in some legal “credibility”, Haroon quotes Barbara Jackman, a Toronto lawyer who is suing Kenney over the defunding of the Canadian Arab Federation:

She told me yesterday: “Palestine House, as also the Canadian Arab Federation, have long provided ESL and other immigrant settlement services — a completely apolitical activity — and both were doing a good job. Their funding was cut not because they were not doing the job or not delivering the services but because this government and this minister, in particular, do not like their political views.”

If this is the advice she gives to the Canadian Arab Federation, they should get back their money from her. Ms. Jackman must decide whether she is a lawyer or a “progressive” activist. Following her logic, a neo-Nazi group has all the rights to apply for government funding, if they start an educational institution. I find it odd that I have to explain to a lawyer that political views matter very much, especially for organizations that rely on tax-payers’ money. If Palestine House wants to support Hamas, they can do it on their own dime, as long as they don’t cross boundaries of funding terrorism.

For some strange reason, another huge violation of the law remained out of the attention of everybody involved. A few months ago the Canadian government started a crackdown on people who obtained their citizenship by fraud; there were over 1,000 of them. In the course of the investigation, it was revealed that:

“More than 300 people who claimed to live at the same address in Mississauga are being investigated by the RCMP in what police suspect may be a massive case of citizenship fraud. The case revolves around an address located in the same building as Palestine House, a Mississauga centre that offers language classes and settlement services to new immigrants and also acts as an advocate for Palestinian and Arab causes.”

What’s going on? Is this a part of the “misunderstood” political views of Palestine House, to which different laws should apply? Or do they have some underground dwellings (like in Gaza) where they have accommodated those 300 “new Canadians”?

I don’t expect any answers from Haroon Siddiqui and Barbara Jackman on the issue, but as usual, the government keeps us in the dark about that massive fraud. Don’t the taxpayers deserve an explanation?

 

© 2012 Blogwrath.com

 

It was a rocky week at the United Nations, dominated by the Palestinians’ offensive to bully their way into statehood.

Aside from the frantic diplomatic work behind the scenes, focused on advancing the viewpoints of the both opposing sides, we were treated to many speeches by world leaders. We even witnessed some genuine action – the people of the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan got into a real fight with the security of UN. Obviously, the Sultan of the New Ottoman Empire wanted to remind the kaffirs who calls the shots.

The “historic” speech of the Palestinian “President” Mahmoud Abbas (whose term had expired long time ago) was nothing more than the usual whining about the “plight” of his people, mixed with meaningless phrases designed to avoid the discussion of any real issues about how his organization sabotaged every attempt to resolve the conflict through negotiations.

The little madman from Tehran, who employs the worst barber and tailor in the world, managed to attack in his speech again every Western value.

With his speech Barack Obama reminded everybody why he is totally unfit to be the President of the USA. His wishy-washy presentation, which he read, was carefully crafted to present no real opinion. While giving a lip service to the cause of Israel, he was careful not to offend his newfound Muslim friends.

It was sad to watch the leader of the once most powerful country in the world speak like a Swedish Green hippy.  I don’t know who advises him, but the advice he gets is bad – by trying to stay in the middle with no opinion, he is guaranteed to be disliked by both conservatives and lefties.   

Sadly, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the only one to bring up clearly all the issues the other leaders carefully avoided. It was an emotional speech, which showed his strong personal position behind the questions discussed.

He bluntly pointed out the real intentions of the Palestinians, which they hide behind the peace mask:

“President Abbas just said on this podium that the Palestinians are armed only with their hopes and dreams. Yeah, hopes, dreams and 10,000 missiles and Grad rockets supplied by Iran, not to mention the river of lethal weapons now flowing into Gaza from the Sinai, from Libya, and from elsewhere.”

Then he went on to state the real issue Israel had with the Palestinian behaviour – the Arabs never wanted to give any guarantees about the safety of Israel. They don’t even want to acknowledge the Jewish state. While over a million Arabs live in that country, who are citizens, Abbas pledged that when the Palestinian state is established, he won’t allow a single Jew to live there.

That hostility is precisely the issue, which doesn’t allow the Palestinian leadership to be trusted. When coupled with the pathological anti-Semitism in the Muslim countries surrounding Israel, it is impossible to believe in the good intentions of the Palestinians if they don’t offer any tangible steps to resolve the security issue.

Every concession that the Jewish state has made, had been seen as a weakness and mercilessly exploited by the Palestinians. When the army withdrew from Gaza completely, it was taken over by the fanatics from Hamas, which resulted in thousands of rockets sent into Israeli territory.

If the Palestinians achieve the same independence in Judea and Samaria, that means even more problems. The terrorists will be able to shoot easily at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The promise that it would never happen is just a bunch of empty words – the Palestinian leadership has never, ever kept its word.

At first sight, such an attitude looks bizarre – PLO has rejected several offers made by Israel, which would’ve provided them with everything they wanted. However, the attitude becomes perfectly understandable when you look at it from the point of view of the real Palestinian goal, which is the destruction of Israel.

The other Arab nations tried to achieve that goal several times and the Palestinians are not different. Why should they accept peaceful solution, if they are sure that they’ll get the whole country? Of course, such a position is delusional, but most of their leaders are stubborn enough to perpetuate it.

They used to follow every power, which would promise help in the destruction. In the 1970’s Arafat was a secularist, true to the Soviet Union. He also sought the support of secular Arab leaders like Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein.  When in 1990 he supported the Iraqi aggression against Kuwait that caused the suffering of hundreds of thousands of his own people, who were expelled from the Arab countries.

 When communism collapsed and it became clear that the secular help would not work, the Palestinians turned to the Muslim fanatics. That’s how Hamas became so powerful.

At the same time Palestinians are trying to delegitimize Israel through falsifying its history. With the help of the useful lefty idiots and organizations like UNESCO, they make pathetic attempts to deny the long and unquestionable record of the Jewish presence in the Holy Land.

Last year UNESCO went as far as denying the Jewish character of ancient Israeli holy sites. The old terrorist Abbas went even further and denied the historical and religious importance of the Western Wall for the Jews.

I am not sure if the Palestinian leaders sincerely think that they can destroy Israel, but the impasse caused by their stubbornness affirms their image of victims, which results in hundreds of millions of dollars sent to them, most of which end up in their personal banking accounts.

At the same time, millions of ignorant Palestinians are led to believe by the PLO and Hamas propaganda that the destruction of Israel is the only path toward solution of all their problems. Many of them still live as “refugees” in other Arab countries. They are used like pawns by their Arab hosts to discredit Israel and aggravate the conflict. And those are supposedly their Muslim “brothers”. Imagine what the outcry would be if Canada treated refugees the same way…

The West pretends that it doesn’t notice the absurd situation. The refusal of the Palestinians to recognize Israel is not the only problem they have. They can’t even stop quarrelling with each other before demanding statehood – there is no real reconciliation between Gaza and the West Bank.

The fact that the whole circus is played at the United Nations is a good indication of the bias and uselessness of that organization. Founded by delusional politicians to serve as a beacon for mankind’s progress, now UN is a cesspool of corruption and hatred controlled by the Muslim fanatics from OIC and the African dictators. Yet 75% of its budget comes from the contributions of five civilized countries, which often are attacked by the backward countries, which keep most of the budget money.

But the Muslims and their Western supporters fail to notice a very important fact – Israel must survive regardless of the sinister political games of UN. Simply there’s no other option. The demolition of the Jewish state would bring the same disaster that happened seventy years ago (especially when you consider the frightening levels of the modern anti-Semitism).

When a country is in a position of life or death, losing is out of the question. Israel is in such position. The troubling results of the “Arab spring” are more fanaticism and war, democracy is as far from the Arab countries as ever.

Israel must be supported, because the Muslim hostility that threatens it is going to turn against the West very soon.  

© 2011 Blogwrath.com

 

 

On October 28, 2010, Norman Finkelstein delivered a lecture in Toronto sponsored by CJPME (Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East). He is an American Jewish scholar, who has been a supporter of Hezbollah, Hamas and few other questionable organizations. At the event he proudly displayed on his jacket’s lapel a pin with the Palestinian flag (thus the title of this post).

For his support of those Muslim extremist organizations, they have bestowed upon him the highest possible “honour” in their hierarchy of values – that they consider him a non-Jew. That’s very similar to what Hitler did. In the cases when he reluctantly wanted to keep a Jew, who was useful to his regime, he used to resolve his moral dilemma by declaring him or her an “Honorary Arian”. That was the case with the conductor Herbert von Karajan’s wife, who was of Jewish background. We could only guess what would have happened to those “Honorary Arians”, had Hitler survived beyond 1945 and they were no longer needed.

The audience was the usual assortment of the types of people common for such an event. There were numerous ladies with hijabs (but unfortunately no niqab/burkas), angry looking young Arab men, tattooed lefties with purple or orange-coloured hair, nostalgic old hippies with white hair, and many others that wore different versions of that ugly chequered scarf, which Arafat utilized to hide his baldness.

Although the organization that put together the event claims that they are supporters of peace, the image they created at the beginning was anything but peaceful. The lady who opened immediately directed the audience’s attention to their website’s “BDS Centre”, i.e. the boycott page. Right now they are boycotting the Mountain Equipment Co-op for its links with Israeli companies. (So far the boycott has been an utter failure, rejected both by the co-op and its customers. No wonder, how can the lefty cyclists afford the higher prices of other bike retailers?)

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Raphaella Segal, Assistant Mayor of Kedumim, gave a talk at the Toronto Zionist Centre, October 19, 2010. Kedumim is an Israeli settlement located in the so called West Bank.

Meir Weinstein from JDL-Canada introduced the speaker. In his short introduction he mentioned that the people like Raphaella have worked under unbelievably harsh conditions to build modern communities, schools, agriculture and industry. He stated that the word “settlement” is not a good term, it implies that Israel is moving to other people’s territory and that land actually belongs to Israel (you can get much better idea about the legal status of Israel from Salomon Benzimra’s research on the topic).

There is no doubt that the problem with the settlements has been distorted for many years. If you believe the Arabs and the “progressives”, the average Israeli settler is a huge man with a long beard and a big black hat. He lives in a large house stolen from the Arabs and probably keeps Palestinian children caged in the basement. He doesn’t work because he receives an unlimited supply of money secretly provided by the Illuminati. His only job is to roam the hills armed with his Uzi machine gun and kill defenceless Palestinians.

As usual, the truth is different. The settler we saw was a petite woman with a charming smile (and without a gun). She is ordinary in almost every way, except for her passion about her country, which came out of almost every word she spoke. Raphaella Segal was born in South Africa, her parents brought her to Israel as a child. One of the founding members of Kedumim, she has 9 children, 7 of which are married, and over 30 grandchildren (despite that, she still looks young).

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Last week I attended a lecture organized by the Speakers Action Group and the Canadian Jewish Civil Rights Association. Prof. Richard Cravatts’s presentation was titled The Campus War against Israel and dealt with the rising anti-Semitism in the American and Canadian universities.

Prof. Cravatts has a very successful career teaching marketing and advertising at the Boston University. He has the classical academic look, thoughtful and logical in his speech and is impeccably dressed Yet he has chosen to follow the thankless task of exposing hatred (publishing over 300 articles on anti-Semitism), which makes him hated in many circles, a position that he would have avoided if he stuck to his original career.

On the other hand, have you heard about the coal mine canary?  Long time ago the mining workers would carry down into the mine caged canaries. If poisonous gases leaked into the mineshaft, the gases would kill the canary before killing the miners.

So what is the link between these two things? Is Cravatts the coalmine canary? Yes, to some extend, but there is much more to that metaphor, which makes it much more disturbing. We will come back to it, but let’s first see what Richard Cravatts had to say.

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