Quotulatiousness

July 12, 2024

They’ll confidently claim they’re merely “anti-Zionist“

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

James Pew on the disturbing rise of antisemitism in all western nations that got turbocharged by the October 7 atrocities by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians on the Gaza border:

“Student encampments – UofT – Camping at the university” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Jew hatred in this country, and around the world, is something I completely miscalculated. Like so many others, including many Jewish people, I naively thought that antisemitism was a thing of the past. Or at least, it was something that had been greatly diminished to the extent that it ceased to be much of a problem. Tragically, I was wrong about this.

The global expansion of Islamo-fascism and the mixing of pro-Jihadism with leftist critical social justice activism, is something I also, similarly, underestimated.

When I think of October 7th I am overcome with disgust and sadness. The world should be aligned with Israel, and aggressively opposed to Palestine/Hamas (Hamastinians) and the corrupt United Nations Relief and Workers Agency (UNRWA). That in many cases it appears to be the other way around, that many political leaders, media, and insufferable celebrities support Hamas’ terrorist aspirations, their evil nonsensical movement to wipe Israel off the face of the planet, is something that is incomprehensible to me.

In one of the late Rex Murphy’s final National Post columns, he proclaimed that “Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time”. Placing the blame for the “red-ignorant core” of the post-October 7th rise in antisemitism on “woke campuses”, Rex wrote the following concerning the legitimacy of the state of Israel:

    Dear Israel is but a spit of earth on a huge globe. Three years after six million Jews were put to torture, humiliation, whippings, rape, medical experiment, starvation, and vile death, was it not surely time — time for all the nations of the Earth who had reached some moral understanding of life and government — to allow Jewish people time to rest, time to mourn, time to see what and who might be left of them.

While I’m the first to admit that no nation, including Israel, is beyond criticism, I feel there is both a time and place, and an appropriate proportionality that should be reflected in a fair critical analysis of any nation. When Douglas Murray made the point at the recent Munk debate that no serious person ever questions the legitimacy of the nation of Pakistan — a nation founded in a way similar to Israel — like they question and challenge the legitimacy of Israel, so-called anti-Zionists claimed that the audiences’ embrace of Murray’s logic was simply evidence of their Islamophobia.

Murray expanded on his Pakistan/Israel comparison by asking the audience to imagine someone who feels that Pakistan is not legitimate and therefore should not exist at all. Imagine also, that this person holds no antipathy directed at the Pakistani people. Preposterous! Yet the anti-Zionists ask us to believe this in regards to Israel. The anti-Zionist will look you straight in the eyes, and with all the sincerity in the world, express their belief that Israel should not exist, and absurdly, implore this does not mean they hate Jews (the majority of Israelis). Why in the case of an analogy where Pakistan is at stake, is it so clear which position is the correct and moral one? Alternatively, why are such questions involving Israel so difficult to answer?

In Canada, the increase in antisemitism has been going on for years. Record levels of antisemitism were recorded in 2021, with dramatic increases in Quebec and British Columbia.1 B’nai Brith Canada reported the number of antisemitic incidents across the nation more than doubled from 2022 to 2023, now reaching an unprecedented high.2

In February of 2024, Global Media reported that “Homes, businesses, schools, places of worship, neighbourhoods and institutions have all been targeted in what community leaders are calling an unparalleled spike in hate crimes against Jews”. And the Toronto Police warned the following month that “56% of reported hate crimes in 2024 have targeted Jewish people”.3

None of this distracts Canadian Islamists, like Younus Kathrada, from what they feel are the important social issues. Kathrada has been known to the government’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre since at least 2020.4 He preaches to his Islamic followers in British Columbia, “I want our children to understand this well: the non-Muslims are the enemies of Allah, therefore they are your enemies”.5

July 6, 2024

Labour’s “landslide”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I put the scare quotes around the word “landslide” because Labour’s eye-popping total of seats in Parliament was won on a remarkably narrow share of the actual votes cast in the British general election on Thursday (less than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party won in 2019). Fratricide on the right allowed a lot of Labour candidates to squeak in the win as the combined Tory/Reform votes would have been more than enough to top Labour.

Labour has won a landslide and the largest swing in British history without even increasing its vote share in England, and winning perhaps only 35% nationally. Its only significant gains in proportional terms were in Scotland, largely at the expense of the SNP, who have suffered catastrophic losses, meaning they are only 1 seat ahead of Sinn Fein, now the largest party in Northern Ireland — who are in turn 3 seats ahead of Reform, the third largest party in Britain by vote.

But these Reform MPs are — as I write — outnumbered by the five pro-Gaza independents, who won seats in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Midlands and London in reaction to Keir Starmer’s position on Israel. Labour are down an average of 18 points in seats where the Muslim population is 20%, and in seats where that figure is above 25%, they are down 23 percentage points. While Labour lost a huge share of the Muslim vote, what is more worrying is the atmosphere in which this has taken place.

In Birmingham Yardley Jess Phillips held on by 700 votes, and in a remarkably unpleasant – I might even say upsetting, although I’ve only had three hours’ sleep — count she lamented that “This election has been the worst election I have ever stood in”, as she was booed.

“I understand that a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence”, she told her antagonists, and described how opponents had filmed a Labour activist in the streets and slashed her tyres, while another was screamed at by a man. She told how Jo Cox’s family had wanted to come and campaign but she couldn’t let them endure it. “Can you throw them out?” she asked the authorities of her hecklers.

There were similar scenes in Birmingham Ladywood as Shabana Mahmood was heckled as she gave her speech, the returning officer pleading with the supporters of independent Ahkmed Yakoob to stop.

Yakoob was described by the Sunday Times‘s Will Lloyd as “the one man in Britain who embodies the way our politics have changed”. He described “a 36-year-old defence solicitor who wears black Prada trainers, a glittering diamond watch, tinted gold-framed sunglasses and Gareth Southgate-like waistcoats. He has 195,000 followers on TikTok, a platform he understands more intuitively than 99 per cent of the politicians in this country. He speaks in clipped, brutal epigrams that sound like they are only ever a few” and “The word ‘genocide’ is never far from his mouth with ‘For Gaza’ printed on his leaflets.”

Labour hung on in Ladywood, a historic constituency in England’s second city where in 1924 Neville Chamberlain very narrowly beat a rising star of the Labour Party called Oswald Mosley.

Gaza independents also narrowly lost Birmingham Hodge Hill by just 1000 votes, and Ilford North, the constituency of Wes Streeting by just 528 votes.

While the media focus was largely engaged in catching out the musing of some of Reform’s less intellectually capable candidates, this other populist revolt has been carried out in an atmosphere of anger and intimidation perhaps not seen in English elections since the days of Rotten Boroughs.

There was police intervention in Oldham last month, Naz Shah MP was abused as a “dirty, dirty Zionist … paid by Friends of Israel”.

Fellow Canadian observer Damian Penny refuses to apologize for his headline “The Sunak Sets over the British Empire” (and I don’t blame him in the slightest):

Canadian readers, stop me if you’ve heard this before: an historically unpopular center-right Tory government heads into an election under a hapless leader running a catastrophically poor campaign and finds that even its traditional support is being badly eroded by an upstart right-wing populist party called Reform.

What happened in Britain on July 4 (weirdly symbolic, that) is not exactly what we experienced in Canada in 1993 – the Tories suffered the worst election result in their history, but they’re left with 119 more seats than the venerable Progressive Conservative party under Twitter-troll-in-waiting Kim Campbell, and at least the outgoing PM managed to hold on to his own seat — but it’s kind of nice to see the Mother Country adopting our traditions for once.

Honestly, 121 seats for Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is much better than I’d expected at the start of this campaign. And had it not been for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, they might have managed a much less embarrassing defeat, because this kind of thing happened many times over last night:

Not everyone who voted Reform defected from the Conservatives – had Farage’s protest party not been on the ballot, many of its supporters would have stayed home or cast their votes for fringe parties and independent candidates — but it might have made the difference between a bad night for the Tories and the worst election in the Tories’ history.

Reform won four seats outright – less than a hyperbolic exit poll predicted, but four more than most observers expected at the start of the campaign. They can’t really affect much at the national level, especially with Keir Starmer’s Labour Party holding an absolutely massive majority of seats in Parliament, but they will make things very difficult for the Conservatives.

Helen Dale summarized the British general election result in a modified Gary Larson image:

Andrew Doyle points at the disproportional share of the vote won by Nigel Farage’s new Reform UK party compared to the tiny number of seats as a condemnation of the first-past-the-post system (also used here in Canada):

Keir Starmer surely cannot believe his luck. He has achieved a landslide victory by doing very little. He received fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and yet has ended up with a whopping 412 seats in parliament. The rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has split the right-wing vote and ushered the Conservatives along to their worst ever election result, plunging them to even greater depths than the disastrous election of 1906 under Arthur Balfour.

This was very much a Conservative loss rather than a Labour victory. There is no great enthusiasm for Starmer, and his majority is an indictment of the “First Past The Post” system which, as I have argued previously, should be abandoned in favour of Proportional Representation. It is unsurprising that upon his victory in Clacton-on-Sea, one of Farage’s first public statements has been a commitment to campaign for electoral reform. His party received over 4 million votes and has returned only 5 seats. So that’s 1% of the seats for 14% of the votes. Compare that with the Liberal Democrats, who have 11% of the seats for only 12% of the votes. Most of us will see that there is a problem here, irrespective of our political affiliations.

Worse still, Labour’s victory will empower the culture warriors, those identity-obsessed activists who have accrued so much power already in our major institutions. While the Tory party claimed to be fighting a “war on woke”, all the while enabling the ideology of Critical Social Justice to flourish, leading Labour politicians have cheered on the culture warriors while pretending that they were nothing more than a right-wing fantasy. We have seen some pushback over the past two years in regards to the worst excesses of this movement, but all of this may soon be undone. Now that the identitarians have their political wing in power, we should expect a few years of regression.

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill thinks the real lesson to be learned from this election is that populism is here to stay:

To see the true quake, you need to look beyond Labour’s mirage-like landslide. As is now becoming clear, Labour has not been swept to power on anything like a wave of public enthusiasm. On the contrary, it won its 412 seats on the second lowest electoral turnout since 1885, and more as a result of people’s exhaustion with the Tories than their love for Sir Keir. No, it is those who refused to vote Labour who have brilliantly unsettled British politics. It is those who took a punt on Nigel Farage’s Reform party who have planted a bomb in the political landscape that will not be easily defused.

For me, the most fascinating stat of the election is the share of the vote received by Labour and the Tories. Labour won around 34 per cent of vote, the Tories around 24 per cent. Let’s leave to one side what a lame landslide it is if only 34 per cent of the people who could be bothered to vote put an X in your box. More striking is the fact that the combined vote share of Labour and the Tories, the parties that have dominated British politics for a century, was 58 per cent. That is staggeringly – and, if you will allow me, hilariously – low.

To put it in historical context: at the last General Election, in 2019, their combined vote share was 75.8 per cent. In 2017 it was even higher: 82.4 per cent. In the elections of the 2000s it hovered around 70 per cent. Why has it now dropped to less than 60 per cent, giving rise to the possibility that in the next few years the two parties that have run this country for decades might see their combined vote drop to less than half of all votes cast? Largely, because of Reform. And a few independents, too. Reform’s vote share is around 14 per cent, enough to shatter the Labour / Tory duopoly and to unravel the two big parties’ arrogant belief that they and they alone have a right to rule.

The speedy turnaround of the Reform revolt was extraordinary. It was only a few weeks ago that Farage ditched his plans to go to America to assist the Trump campaign and instead decided to become leader of Reform. He has now been elected MP for Clacton. Reform has won four seats in total. What’s shocking is that the Liberal Democrats won 71 seats despite getting fewer votes than Reform. The Lib Dems got around 12 per cent of the vote, to Reform’s 14 per cent. That the democratically less popular party of the two will wield far greater power in the Commons is a testament to how busted our first-past-the-post electoral system is. This is unsustainable. It is outright undemocratic.

And yet, even without the parliamentary representation their vote share deserves, Reform has struck a blow for democracy. Their voters, in thinking for themselves and rejecting both the Labour and Tory variety of technocracy, have forcefully created a new opening in political life. They have burst a few of the buckles on the political straitjacket that is our two-party system. The last time this happened was with Farage’s UK Independence Party, in the 2015 General Election, when it won 12.6 per cent of the vote, reducing the Tory / Labour vote share to 67.3 per cent. But where UKIP was mostly a one-issue party, dedicated to getting Britain out of the EU, Reform has broader policy goals. The millions of working-class people who voted for it are saying something very clear indeed: “We want something different”.

July 5, 2024

“Private property rights? How do they work?” (U of T students, probably)

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Law, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Josh Dehaas rounds up the concept of private property rights for the University of Toronto students (and non-student antisemitic fellow occupiers) who have been squatting for Palestinian terrorists on university property for the last while:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

After Justice Koehnen delivered his ruling Tuesday ordering the occupiers to dismantle the People’s Circle for Palestine at the University of Toronto, one of the protesters accused the school of hypocrisy.

“It’s quite interesting that a university that claims to practice decolonization is falling back on this claim of private property,” master’s student Sarah Rasikh told a journalist on the day before the students began taking down their tents.

“U of T and the Court more specifically is quite literally telling Indigenous students to leave and get off of their own land,” she added.

Rasikh has a point, sort of.

As someone who did law school relatively recently, I can attest that many university professors are downright hostile to the concept of private property. They commonly claim that all of Canada belongs to Indigenous people and that Indigenous peoples don’t believe in private property. Rather, they believe in “sharing”. Decolonization therefore requires that land be treated communally, or so the theory goes. University administrators who pay lip service to the concept of decolonization shouldn’t be surprised when students try to turn theory into action.

Thankfully the law still protects private property rights. Students who didn’t get taught how that works by their professors ought to give Justice Koehnen’s decision a read.

As Justice Koehnen explained, “in our society we have decided that the owner of property generally gets to decide what happens on the property”.

“If the protesters can take that power for themselves by seizing Front Campus, there is nothing to stop a stronger group from coming and taking the space over from the current protesters,” he went on. “That leads to chaos. Society needs an orderly way of addressing competing demands on space. The system we have agreed to is that the owner gets to decide how to use the space.”

“If it is not the owner who gets to determine what happens on the property it will become a brutal free-for-all,” Justice Koehnen added.

June 22, 2024

“We can learn a lot about our betters from looking at each exception to their rules”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Soccer — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Julie Burchill isn’t a soccer fan, but she points out that the “exceptions” to the usual “rules” that the kakistocrats allow during international soccer tournaments tell us a lot about them:

Patriotism is not the only “bad” thing we’re suddenly “allowed” to do in the weeks when the national team plays on the world stage. The BBC in particular reminds men that they can disregard the finger-wagging for a few brief weeks. In EastEnders, male characters cringingly ask their mates to “get the beers in for the game”. Alcohol would generally be condemned as a public-health menace by Auntie, but during “The Game”, one more “cheeky” tipple apparently won’t hurt you.

We can learn a lot about our betters from looking at each exception to their rules. Don’t be racist – except against Jews. Believe all women about sexual assault – unless they’re Israeli. Oh, and be careful not to “culturally appropriate” the slightest thing from any other nationality, even to the point of never wearing a sombrero in a Mexican restaurant – but it’s fine to be a cross-dressing man culturally appropriating my sex. Meanwhile, if you’re a woman, be a good little Transmaid and stand by smiling, even if you call yourself a feminist.

Like most other places in the West in these dog days of civilisation, England feels like a nation devoid of hope and pride. Even so, being allowed to take pride in some overpaid ball-kickers, but not in the fact that this country contributed massively to ending slavery – lest we be called out as White Saviours – is a somewhat surreal situation to find ourselves in, after all those centuries of blood, sweat and struggle.

Flying the flag for the duration of the Euros is like being a eunuch who’s permitted to have his nuts back for a couple of weeks – for old times’ sake – and wear them as earrings. But those who indulge must be sure to tear their St George’s down sharpish once the festivities are over, lest they be fingered as a fascist for liking their own flag more than others. Remember, the only flag that can be flown constantly now is the Pride flag. This must be saluted respectfully wherever it pops up – failure to do so may identify you as an unworthy citizen of Soft Play Pit Nation.

June 15, 2024

The Ford Foundation and the far left

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

N.S. Lyons looks at the vast amount of money the “philanthropic” Ford Foundation donates to organizations pushing far left agendas:

It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution”. Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people”, she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city”, surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power”.

It’s May 2023, and protesters have stormed the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to demand that lawmakers not accept spending cuts during negotiations to lift the debt ceiling. Many are so disruptive that the police arrest them and drag them out. These are activists of the Center for Popular Democracy, an extreme left-wing organization that has collected $35.2 million from the Ford Foundation since 2012. Four months later, they will be imitated by 150 youth activists from the “climate revolution” group the Sunrise Movement, 18 of whom will be arrested after occupying the Speaker of the House’s office. The Sunrise Movement also receives Ford Foundation money—$650,000 for “training and organizing”.

It’s April 2023, and, a world away, the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF), a think tank set up and directed by the Chinese state, is hosting a conference in Beijing to discuss how to “promote the formation of an internationally accepted ESG system with Chinese characteristics”, including through China’s globe-spanning influence and infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative. But this effort by America’s top geopolitical adversary isn’t too far afield for the Ford Foundation to fund; it has given CDRF $600,000 to help realize its ambitions.

These examples from just the last year — collected via a semi-random tour of the Ford Foundation’s vast Grants Database — represent a tiny fraction of the nearly $1 billion that the foundation gives away yearly, on average. Almost a century old and sitting on a mountainous $16.4 billion endowment in 2022, the foundation is a “philanthropic” giant — one of the five largest in the U.S. If it were a for-profit firm, its market capitalization would rank it among the Fortune 500. Instead, “guided by a vision of social justice”, as its mission statement puts it, the Ford Foundation’s enormous flood of untaxed money flows annually to an immense ecosystem of overwhelmingly left-wing — and often outright revolutionary — causes.

Yet the foundation’s activities remain largely below the public’s radar, the extent of its malign history mostly unknown. This should change. America today faces a multitude of escalating sociopolitical crises that are rapidly tearing apart the body politic: a rapacious strain of tribal identity politics; spreading legal, cultural, and moral chaos; lawlessness in the streets; and the entrenchment of an oligarchic managerial elite, increasingly willing to cast aside any remaining shred of democratic or national sovereignty in its pursuit of top-down global “progress”. Behind every one of these fractures, one finds the ongoing work of the Ford Foundation.

In 2020, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a “racial reckoning” swept the United States, kindling fiery riots across the nation, abrupt moves by municipalities to defund police departments, and the near-wholesale capitulation of public institutions — from universities to government agencies to major corporations — to a culturally revolutionary ideology of identitarian grievance and racial separatism. To some, this came as a shock. To the Ford Foundation, it marked the fulfillment of decades of effort.

The foundation has long seen itself as uniquely dedicated to progress and social justice, its stated mission from as early as the 1950s being the “general purpose of advancing human welfare” and to “eradicate the causes of suffering” worldwide. But after current president Darren Walker took the helm in 2013, it began more fully to embrace a public identity as a “social justice foundation” and reoriented its mission to “disrupt the drivers of inequality” in every sphere of life and across the globe.

June 11, 2024

Mark Steyn on Nigel Farage

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is from his Friday round-up post at SteynOnline:

“Nigel Farage” by Michael Vadon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Demography is relentless. Douglas Murray notes that the BBC is always warning that the “far right” is “on the march“, but in the west it is demographic transformation that is truly on the march, quietly and unreported, picking up pace every month. By comparison, the wretched Sunak/Starmer dinner-theatre of the UK election campaign is completely irrelevant to Britain’s future. So I am glad to see that Nigel Farage has had a change of heart and opted to join the battle. Back in 2016, in the days after the Brexit vote, I said he was the most consequential figure in UK politics since Mrs Thatcher. Which was true. Alas, people most Britons have never heard of then set about subverting Brexit, and very effectively.

So here we are eight years later, with half-a-million Anglo-Celts abandoning the UK each year and a million Pushtun warlords and Sudanese clitoridectomists and Albanian sex-traffickers taking their place. Demography is relentless, and the hour is late.

Over a decade ago — in fact, closer to two, as I estimate it — Nigel Farage said to me that the first thing you have to do when you found a new political party on the right is to accept the burden of being its only member — at least for a while. Because the first 10,000 people who want to join are neo-Nazis and skinheads and the like. It was a clever insight, and he spread it around. So I had it told back to me many times over the years by populist politicians from all over the Continent, Danes and Dutch, Swedes and Spaniards alike.

Nigel took his gatekeeping seriously — and not just on the domestic front, “distancing” himself from Tommy Robinson and Tommy-associated issues such as Islam and the industrial-scale sex-slavery of thousands of English girls. As Gavin Mortimer reminds us, a decade ago Farage also rejected any Euro-collaboration with Marine Le Pen because her party had “anti-Semitism and general prejudice in its DNA“. Geert Wilders (for whose fine book I am proud to have written the introduction) was furious with Farage and attempted to broker a rapprochement. Nigel was having none of it.

So here we are a decade later:

    * in the Netherlands, Wilders is currently the most powerful politician, leading the most popular party, and has helped move the electorate significantly;

    * in France, Mme Le Pen’s party will, in just two days’ time, win the European elections. She is the de facto leader of the opposition, and her caucus in the National Assembly is the largest and most effective opponent to Macron. She has also helped move the electorate significantly;

    * in the United Kingdom, by contrast, voters are about to elect a left-wing government led by a fellow, Sir Vics Starmer, who thinks men can have a cervix.

I think Nigel over-gatekept.

He has been very good at founding personal vehicles (Ukip, the Brexit Party) that deflate like punctured soufflés when he steps down as leader. Yes, he was very watchable in the jungle on “I’m a Celebrity — Get Me Out of Here”, and, in my GB News days, he certainly handed me a bigger audience at 8pm than any of his guest-hosts. But, as that station’s currently Farageless ratings reveal, you can’t build a sustained movement on one man. Nigel’s advice was clever twenty years ago. Wilders, LePen, Meloni et al were wise to recognise its limitations.

So I’m pleased Farage changed his mind on this election. He should change his mind on the over-gatekeeping, too.

Time and demography march on.

May 18, 2024

Antisemitism is far from a new problem

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle on some of the historical relics of antisemitism in European history down to today’s revived fascism of the left:

In his memoir Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens considered “why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring”. Many of us in the west have grown complacent, assuming that the horrors of the Holocaust would prevent this ancient prejudice from re-emerging. But as the conflict between Israel and Hamas escalates, few of us can be in any doubt that antisemitism has once again goose-stepped into the spotlight.

Of course, criticism of the Israeli government and its military strategy is entirely legitimate. So too is our profound concern for the innocents of Gaza and the many thousands of non-combatants who are losing their lives. But there is no denying the explicit anti-Jewish hatred that has accompanied these discussions in certain quarters. Criticise Israel all you like, but don’t try to tell me that Monday night’s daubing of the Shoah memorial in Paris with handprints of red paint was anything other than antisemitic.

Social media has opened our eyes to the prevalence of such sentiments. The other day I posted a link to my Substack piece about the Eurovision Song Contest on that hellsite now known as X. My focus in the article was on the narcissism of the “non-binary” performers, but one feminist activist decided to make it all about Israel. Underneath my post, she added an image of Eden Golan, the Israeli entry to the competition, with bloodstains photoshopped onto her dress. She went on to dismiss the victims of the October 7 pogrom as “silly ravers” and to blame the massacre on the IDF. Whatever else one might say about such views, it is clearly evidence of a complete absence of basic humanity.

This is sadly not uncommon. Recently we have seen protesters openly supporting Hamas, or even praising its acts of barbarism. A new poll has found that 63% of students currently protesting at US universities have at least some sympathy for Hamas. There have been overtly antisemitic statements, and Jews have been harassed on campus. It has been reported that at Columbia University, one protester cried out “We are Hamas” while another shouted at a group of Jewish students: “The 7 October is about to be every fucking day for you. You ready?” These are the very people who have spent the last few years calling anyone who dissents even slightly from their worldview a “fascist”, and yet they are blind to actual fascism when it emerges within their own ranks.

All of this has taken me by surprise, which perhaps reveals the extent of my naivety. Antisemitism is nothing new, and has assumed myriad and outlandish forms over the centuries. Our own country has not been immune; Jews were deported from England in 1290, only to be readmitted in 1656. Before then, only those who had converted to Christianity were allowed to remain; specially, they were able to reside at the Domus Conversorum in London, established by Henry III in 1232. Anti-Jewish sentiments were reignited by a plot to poison Elizabeth I in 1594, which was blamed on her physician Roderigo Lopes, a Portuguese man of Jewish ancestry who was executed for treason. This is the context in which the forced conversion of Shylock at the end of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice ought to be understood.

Unpleasant myths about Jews have abounded throughout history, some of which still linger in Islamic regimes and the darker crannies of the internet where neo-Nazis gather to wallow in their bile. The poisoning of wells by Jews was thought to have initiated the Black Death epidemic in 1348. This notion was still pervasive by the time Christopher Marlowe wrote his play The Jew of Malta in 1589 (consider Barabas’s mass extermination of an entire convent of nuns by means of “a precious powder”, or his boastful claim: “Sometimes I go about and poison wells”).

May 14, 2024

The Eurovision non-binary song contest

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Unless you’re very tuned in to all things Euro, you might not have known that the gala Eurovision Song Contest has again come and gone (I only noticed after the fact myself). It wouldn’t be a televised pan-European event if there wasn’t at least a tiddly bit of controversy, so that role appears to have been eagerly filled by the Irish contestant, in whom Brendan O’Neill is unimpressed:

What a thing of beauty that Israel beat Ireland in Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest. That Israel’s serene songstress, Eden Golan, got more points than Ireland’s warbling, gurning, pseudo-Satanic they / them, Bambie Thug. That an actually decent song trumped the caterwauling of a fake punk who mistakes having tattoos, identifying as “nonbinary” and saying “I’m queer!” for a personality. More importantly, that a singer who was harangued by baying mobs of Hamas fanboys did better than the “singer” who helped to whip up this orgy of cruelty by saying she cried when she heard Israel had made it to the final. Boo-fucking-hoo. I bet you’re crying even more now, Ms Thug.

This is the news – the beautiful news – that Israel came fifth and Ireland sixth in the Eurovision Song Contest. Of course – because they are racist and mentally unstable – Israel haters on social media are saying the Zionist octopus helped to bump up Israel’s points. One pictures Mossad agents taking a break from hunting down the anti-Semites who slaughtered a thousand of their compatriots to post memes on Facebook saying “Screw Bambie, Vote Eden!”. In truth, the reason Israel did so well in the public vote – getting the maximum “douze points” from no fewer than 14 of the 37 nations eligible to vote in Eurovision – is because normal people don’t share the Euro-bourgeoisie’s feverish loathing for the Jewish State. It wasn’t only the emotionally incontinent Israelophobe Bambie Thug who took a beating last night – so did the entire anti-Israel middle class whose cries for a boycott of Eurovision clearly fell on deaf ears.

We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, of course, given it’s only Eurovision, and given that some people (me, for example) were highly motivated to vote for Israel in order to wind up the wankers of Europe. But it is undeniably delicious that, despite the pompous pleas of drag queens and other paragons of morality for everyone to switch off Eurovision this year, millions watched. Around 7.6million Brits tuned in. Yes, that’s lower than last year – when we were the hosts – but it’s higher than every year between 2015 and 2021. It will be a source of mirth for me for some time that while the LGBTQ lobby was self-importantly putting away the glitter, locking the drinks cabinet and doing their very best not to check X for Eurovision updates, the general public were watching and enjoying the daftness of it all. Rarely has the moral gulf between us and our preening cultural overlords been so starkly exposed.

Then there were the votes for Israel. It felt like a tiny rebellion against the hysteria of the elites. Brits gave Israel 12 points. So did France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and others. This was people saying “We don’t agree with your bullying of a young woman and your obsessive hatred for her homeland”. Even the good people of Ireland gave Israel 10 points. As someone who knows and loves Ireland, it would not surprise me one iota to discover that people there are as yawningly vexed by Bambie Thug as everyone else in Europe who enjoys the sense of hearing. The land that gifted Eurovision Dana, Johnny Logan and Riverdance now finds itself represented by a self-styled “goth gremlin goblin witch” who does “primordial screaming” (shorter version: she can’t sing). What a mess. I’ve been listening to Logan’s “Hold Me Now” (winner in 1987) to try to liberate my brain from Thug’s narcissistic howling.

Andrew Doyle also commented on the “non binary” emphasis of many participants:

This year the trophy went to Switzerland’s Nemo, a man in a skirt who identifies as “non-binary”. The UK entry, Olly Alexander, calls himself “gay and queer and non-binary” but magnanimously accepts the pronouns “he” and “him”. And then there is the “queer” and “non-binary” Irish entry Bambie Thug, a woman who came sixth in the competition but first in the award for the sorest of losers. Having being beaten by Israel, whose very presence in the competition was a source of outrage for Thug, she had the following to say:

    I’m so proud of Nemo winning. I’m so proud that all of us are in the top ten that have been fighting for this shit behind the scenes because it has been so hard and it’s been so horrible for us. And I’m so proud of us. And I just want to say, we are what the Eurovision is. The EBU [European Broadcasting Union] is not what the Eurovision is. Fuck the EBU. I don’t even care anymore. Fuck them. The thing that makes this is the contestants, the community behind it, the love and the power and the support of all of us is what is making change. And the world has spoken. The queers are coming. Non-binaries for the fucking win.

One might argue that all of this is simply an extension of the high-campery of old. Thug certainly looks pantomimic, with her Christmas-cracker devil horns, and the layers of makeup piled on to what used to be a face. But what were once the glittery fripperies of gay culture have been hijacked by the acolytes of gender identity ideology, a movement that has appropriated this whimsical sheen to advance its authoritarian and sinister goals. It is this same movement that has successfully lobbied governments to introduce draconian speech laws, has hounded people out of their jobs for wrongthink, and has normalised bullying and threats of violence in the name of “social justice”.

The very notion of “non-binary” is a reactionary concept dressed up in the guise of progressivism. Most of those who identify as non-binary are embracing, rather than rejecting, sex stereotypes. They claim to feel neither sufficiently masculine nor feminine, which is simply another way of reinforcing what it means to be male or female.

The same ambiguity goes for “queer”. Many gay people see this as a anti-gay slur, associating the term with the practice of “queer-bashing”. But now, many young heterosexuals are identifying themselves into this category as a means to claim the high status that now accompanies victimhood. Dannii Minogue, a lifelong heterosexual, recently “came out” as “queer”. To those who have been the victims of homophobic abuse and violence, it’s galling to see straights embracing the term as a fashion accessory. Minogue may as well have come out as a “faggot” or a “dyke”.

May 5, 2024

The protests “will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Sullivan, the very model of a never-Trumper, sees the ongoing student protests feeding into a repeat of the 1968 and 1972 US Presidential elections:

“Patriotic students hung up an American Flag at George Washington University after pro-Palestine protesters trashed the campus, defaced the statue of George Washington, and removed an American Flag.”
Twitter image posted by Chaya Raichik – https://twitter.com/ChayaRaichik10/status/1786504098746958103/photo/1

As readers know, I’m deeply sympathetic to the argument that Israel has over-reached, over-bombed, and over-reacted in its near-unhinged overkill of Palestinian civilians, especially children, in the wake of 10/7’s horrors. It has been truly horrifying. I begrudge no one demonstrating passionately to protest this. But as I watch the rhetoric and tactics of many — but not all — of these students, I’m struck by how this humane concern is less prominent than the rank illiberalism and ideological extremism among many.

Preventing students from attending classes, taking exams, or even walking around their own campus freely is not a protest; it’s a crime. So is the destruction of property, and the use of physical intimidation and violence against dissenting students. The use of masks to conceal identity is reminiscent of the Klan, and antithetical to non-violent civil disobedience. It’s a way for outsiders to easily infiltrate and a way to escape responsibility for thuggishness. It’s menacing, ugly and cowardly.

It did not have to be this way. Imagine if students simply demonstrated peacefully for a cease-fire, placed the victims and hostages at the forefront of the narrative, and allowed themselves to be arrested proudly on camera and face legal consequences for their actions, as the civil rights movement did. Imagine if they were emphatically non-violent and always open to debate.

But they aren’t, because they are not the inheritors of the Christian, universalist civil rights movement but its illiberal, blood-and-soil nemesis, long curated in the Ivy League. The key group behind the protests, Students For Justice in Palestine, doesn’t mince words. It celebrated the explicitly genocidal murder of Jews on October 7:

    National liberation is near — glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people! … Resistance comes in all forms — armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.

The “our” is interesting. If you think these protests are only about Gaza — and not America — you’re missing the deeper context. Here’s a masked, keffiyeh-wearing spokeswoman for the UCLA protest:

    Given the fact that the University of California is founded on colonialism, it’s inherently a violent institution. There needs to be an addressment of US imperialism and its ties to the UC system and how it perpetuates war and violence aboard — not only abroad, but also here, locally.

So violence is justified in response. Here’s a keffiyeh-clad spokesman at CUNY:

    This revolution, which includes the mass demonstrations and encampments, are not just exclusively for students. It is for the masses. … It is for the free people of the world who are able to resist however you can — whether it be with a rock and other tools of liberation.

These are not fringe figures; they have been chosen to speak to the public. They believe in violence because there is nothing in their worldview that could prohibit it against certain “oppressor” races of people. As one of the “queer” leaders of the Columbia protest has said: “Zionists don’t deserve to live”, and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists”. He took his classes in decolonization seriously, even if he is now backtracking from their logical conclusion.

The illiberalism is deep and endemic. The civil rights movement was desperate for the press to show up; these thugs follow observers menacingly around, holding up barriers to prevent even fellow students from filming them. The civil rights movement ended physical borders between groups of human beings; these thugs create borders and police dissent. The civil rights movement asked America to live up to its ideals; the woke believe America is a source of evil in the world, and needs to be “decolonized”. “I love Osama [bin Laden]”, one pro-Palestinian demonstrator in New York City said. “I want to suck his dick”. That mix of evil and scatology is a woke trademark.

And these protests are clearly as much about the abolition of the Jewish state as they are the horror of Gaza. They are driven by the neoracist idea that “white-people-are-bad-but-black-and-brown-people-are-good”; they are about a blood-and-soil “anti-imperialism” that requires the abolition of any state not reflective of ancient indigenous populations. (The SJP refers to the US as “Turtle Island”, an allegedly indigenous name.) They are against “cultural appropriation” but prance around in keffiyehs. They glibly use the word “genocide” to trigger and re-traumatize Jews, while ignoring the genocidal goals of Hamas; and chants of “There Is Only One Solution: Intifada Revolution!” ring with echoes of Nazism.

And they will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972.

It tells you something when even Al Sharpton is rattled by these violent fanatics. “How do the Democrats — how do all of us on that side — say January 6th was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses?” he asked on MSNBC. It feels like 2020 again. Replacing Old Glory with the Palestinian flag or defacing a statue of George Washington (see above), is not how you win over the country. But the more you know about these fanatics the more you realize they don’t want to win over the country; they want to destroy it as mindlessly as the pro-Trump fringe. And they’d welcome the even deeper polarization he’d bring.

May 3, 2024

“Columbia Delenda Est“

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From late last month, Robert Graboyes, who is an alumni of Columbia University, thought it appropriate to follow Cato the Elder’s prescription for Carthage in this case:

Low Memorial Library, Columbia University, 1921.
From Wikimedia. Textured and rendered as ruins by Robert Graboyes.

As an alumnus of Columbia University (MPhil and PhD), I recommend that every peaceful, legal means available be employed to destroy the reputation of my alma mater — an institution that has chosen to make itself Ground Zero for Jew-hatred in America. Paraphrasing Cato the Elder:

    “Columbia Delenda Est” — “Columbia Must Be Destroyed.”

Cato’s entreaty — “Carthago Delenda Est” — was intended not only to punish the Carthaginians, but also to warn other states from behaving as Carthage had. Laying waste to Columbia’s prestige would send a chilling message to other institutions choosing to tolerate, appease, and celebrate threats and acts against Jews.

WHY COLUMBIA SPECIFICALLY?

America’s elite universities are awash in antisemitism. When Rep. Elise Stefanik repeatedly asked the presidents of Harvard, Pennsylvania, and MIT whether they would discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews, the feckless trio humiliated themselves before an international audience — though they seem unaware of that fact.

Recently, a Jewish student at Yale was stabbed in the eye by a protestor wielding a Palestinian flag. At Berkeley, students invited to the (Jewish) law school dean’s home decided that was an appropriate setting for a pro-Hamas demonstration and refused to desist or leave when asked. Encampments similar to Columbia’s are ongoing at Emerson College, MIT, NYU, Rutgers, the New School, Tufts, UMaryland, UMichigan, UNC-Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt, Washington U, and Yale. Thousands of antisemitic incidents have been recorded at hundreds of schools. The University of Southern California has surrendered to the mob by canceling this year’s commencement ceremony.

Use the wrong pronoun or wear a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo, and your university will consider bringing out the firehoses and German shepherds; but assault Jewish students and call for their extermination (along with the eradication of a sovereign nation), and the same university will defend your actions as representing the sacred right to free and open speech. Antisemitism has spread like ebola across American Academia. But there are at least three good reasons to single out Columbia.

FIRST: With antisemitism blooming at so many American universities, it is impractical to try attacking the phenomenon everywhere all at once. It is better to choose one prestigious university, inflict as much pain as possible on that lone institution, and let the stinking carcass of its reputation stand as a warning to other universities — leaving all of them to wonder which university is second on the list. This strategy reminds me of a passage from Hagakure: Way of the Samurai:

    According to what one of the elders said, taking an enemy on the battlefield is like a hawk taking a bird. Even though it enters into the midst of a thousand of them, it gives no attention to any bird other than the one that it has first marked.

Or, more prosaically, as activist Saul Alinsky wrote in his Rules for Radicals:

    Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

SECOND: Columbia is located in New York City — the world’s leading media market. No doubt, that geographic locale has contributed to the school’s outsized prominence in the current wave of on-campus pogroms. Any blowback falling on Columbia as a result of its moral collapse will also will attract blaring coverage by the press and/or by the denizens of social media. The school’s locale will guarantee maximum publicity as the school’s reputation crumbles, brick by brick.

THIRD: The offenses at Columbia have been especially egregious. Even by today’s standards, the number of offenses at Columbia (some violent and threatening, some merely hateful) are breathtaking. The examples reported on a single day (April 20) illustrate the lie that “anti-Zionism” is anything other than rebranded Jew-hatred:

  • A protestor holding a sign saying “Al-Qasam’s [sic] next target” who stood in front of a group of Jewish students holding Israeli flags and singing
  • A Jewish student wearing a yarmulke being shoved and screamed at by protestors, “you’ve got blood on your hands!” when he attempted to recover an Israeli flag stolen by a protestor, who then ran to a cheering crowd of anti-Israel protestors that attempted to burn the flag. (The student additionally claims a rock was thrown at his face and protestors screamed, “Kill the Zionist”)
  • Protestors screaming “go back to Poland!” and “yehudim, yehudim [which translates to Jews, Jews]” at Jewish Columbia students trying to leave campus
  • Protestors circling around the main gates and entrance to campus, with one stating, “I am Hamas”, which was documented in video
  • Crowds screaming “tear down the gates” and various hateful chants in English and Arabic as individuals unaffiliated with the university climbed the University’s gates
  • A Jewish Columbia student being splashed with water by a protestor
  • Protestors chanting, “Al-Qassam you make us proud! Take another soldier out!”, “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!”, and “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!”
  • A protestor delivering a speech on campus that exclaimed, “We are here today because on October 7 the Palestinian resistance in Gaza broke through the walls of their open air prison, shattering the illusion of the invincibility of their occupiers. [Cheers from the crowd.] By setting up this encampment in the heart of the Zionist stronghold of Columbia University, we intend to do the same”
  • A protestor standing immediately outside Columbia’s gates leading a crowd in Arabic chants glorifying terrorism and encouraging students to become terrorist “martyrs” after which he explained in English that the chant translated to “mother of the shahid, mother of the martyr, I wish my mother was in your place”.

Columbia has allowed the mobs and tents to linger, rather than speedily removing them and restoring order and safety to campus. Professors have endorsed and participated in the encampment, as have legions of students. The university chose to shut down in-person classes rather than taking steps to assure the safety of Jewish students. Recognizing this, a rabbi associated with the university urged Jewish students to leave for the sake of their safety.

April 26, 2024

Out – “GenZ”: In – “Waffen ZZ“

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Peachy Keenan invites us to meet the new hotness, the Zoomerwaffen:

These crazy Zoomer kids are bringing back all the old trends: baggy jeans, the band Sublime, and casual, no-big-deal, fanatical anti-semitism. When I was in college, the only people who still hated Jews were Arabs and skinheads. In 2024, hating Jews is even cooler than having retarded pronouns!

“Never again” was the promise Jews made to themselves after the Holocaust and it held for almost 80 years, but it looks like we are in fact about to do it again. It’s starting, ironically, on the same elite college campuses that were the birthplaces of the “inclusion” movement of recent years. Our finest universities have spent the last 30-odd years “abolishing hate”, establishing “safe spaces”, and forcing tolerance down students’ throats until they gagged on it.

Columbia’s Hamas encampment is a safe space. Not for Jews, though.

But also we have to acknowledge that demands from Jewish students for special protections against hate speech, harassment, violence, and bigotry, while totally justified, tend to stick in the craw of other identity groups who have been the target of widespread vilification and hate on campus for years, right here in the United States.

The Zoomerwaffen are here and they are coming for the Jews — the same way their college came for the straight white males.

Zoomerwaffen SS officer Klaus Von Chad in his Amazon keffiyeh cheers as the American flag is taken down and burned.

Yes, some of the Zoomerwaffen even look like Nazis, apparently. These wild-eyed Ivy League coeds have taken a break from rizzing each other up and accidentally overdosing on fentanyl so they can goof around in keffiyahs, call for the slaughter of a persecuted religious minority, and ululate in their Lululemons as they are arrested for insurrection. (Insurrection is good now, Grandpa!).

I had to laugh when I saw Ilhan Omar’s unfortunate daughter arrested at Columbia for leading some anti-semitic protest. Bit on the nose, even for the Omar family, isn’t it? Ilhan’s little nepo meeskite got kicked out of her dorm and suspended from school, which means she can expect a job offer from MSNBC any minute now.

Since October 7th, Jews have been under attack everywhere and literally Hamas has replaced BLM as the coolest club in America for progressive, “love is love”, white kids.

Welcome to the Swiftie-to-Jihadi pipeline!

April 25, 2024

“… good Lord, is [Chrystia Freeland] ever terrible at politics”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney recounts Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s terrible response to a topical question from a reporter:


Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in October, 2022.

In fairness, noting that Freeland, she of the infamous Disney+ flop, is bad at politics is not an original observation. I confess that. But, still. Yikes! What the hell was that?!

I’m referring to Monday’s unfortunate gaffe. Freeland was in Montreal doing post-budget stuff with the small business minister, and after touring a business, took questions from reporters. Sarah Leavitt from the CBC asked a question related to a particularly vile eruption of overt antisemitism at a protest in Ottawa last weekend. A man leading the crowd in chants said “Our resistance attacks are proof that we are almost free … Oct. 7 is proof that we are almost free. Long live Oct. 7, long live the resistance, long live the intifada, long live every form of resistance.”

Oct. 7, of course, means the Hamas rape-and-murder pogrom of Oct. 7.

By the time Leavitt quizzed Freeland, the comments in Ottawa had already been widely disseminated and, critically, condemned. Among the condemners: Freeland’s boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He’d commented via Twitter a day before Freeland faced Leavitt’s question. This ought to have been an extremely easy exchange for Freeland.

As it turns out, though, not so much, actually.

In the interests of transparency, let’s simply see in full both what Leavitt asked, and how Freeland replied.

The question was clear enough: “Over the weekend, protesters in Ottawa were heard chanting, among other things, ‘Long live October 7’ and ‘October 7 is proof that we are almost free’. Is this hate speech?”

[…]

Let’s walk through her answer, putting her reply into the discrete points she’s been trained to hit.

Phase One: Ass covering. “I wasn’t in Ottawa over the weekend. And I’m not aware of those specific reports. And so it would be just wrong of me to comment on something that I am not specifically aware of.”

Phase Two: Banal statement that favours no group in particular but mentions the key stakeholders. “What I will say is, today is a time in Canada, when antisemitism and Islamophobia are on the rise. When we have a lot … there are a lot of Canadians who are not feeling safe. In my own riding of University-Rosedale, the JCC, a really important centre for Jewish Canadians but also for all Canadians, has faced a lot of pressure. And I’ve been there to meet with people there. There’s also a mosque in my riding that faced pressure and attacks and I’ve met with the leaders there.”

Phase Three: Attempt to sound like you’re engaging with the actual question, even though you are not. “Hate speech is absolutely not acceptable. Glorifying … I mean, I can’t even say the word because it’s … you shouldn’t. It’s too terrible. And what happened on October 7 was a heinous terrorist attack. People were killed. People were raped. Women, men, children … totally unprovoked attack on civilians. That is not acceptable.”

Phase Four: Pivot back to approved talking points. “Canada recognizes Hamas as a terrorist entity and our government is very, very clear on that. We have also been really clear that there needs to be a ceasefire, that a humanitarian catastrophe is happening right now in Gaza, and Canada and Canadians are there to support the people, the suffering people, there, too.”

This is how the PM answers questions, too. It’s a pattern that, once seen, will never been unseen. The problem for Freeland is that the PM is better at it. He’s smoother and quicker on his feet. His evasive non-answers sound more natural, but have begun to get old in recent years, as foreign journalists are generally better at pointing out than Canadian ones. Freeland has never been comfortable doing talking-point politics, and has always sounded extremely unconvincing when she tries.

March 26, 2024

Montreal’s La Presse issues apology for antisemitic editorial cartoon

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Caroline Glick discusses the blood libel cartoon published by Montreal’s La Presse on 20 March, 2024:

According to Canada’s La Presse, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a vampire, and he is poised to suck the life out of the Palestinians in Rafah, Hamas’s final outpost in southern Gaza. The publication that was once a paper of record in Canada ran a political cartoon on March 20 portraying Netanyahu as a vampire, with a huge hooked nose, pointy ears and claws for fingers, dressed in Dracula’s overcoat while standing on the deck of a pirate ship.

The caption, written in blood-dripping red letters, read: “Nosfenyahou: En Route Vers Rafah.” Nosferatu, the Romanian word for vampire, was the title of a proto-Nazi German silent horror film from 1922 chock-full of anti-Semitic poison. The film, which became something of a cult flick, featured a vampire with a long Jewish nose. He arrived at an idyllic German town with a box full of plague-carrying rats that he released on the innocent villagers as he plotted to suck his realtor’s blood.

La Presse‘s cartoon didn’t leave any room for imagination. It wasn’t making a political or military argument against Israel’s planned ground operation in Rafah. Its goal wasn’t to persuade anyone of anything.

The Netanyahu-the-vampire cartoon asserted simply that Netanyahu is a Jewish bloodsucker and, more broadly, the Jewish state — and Jews worldwide — must be vigorously opposed by all right-thinking people who don’t want Jewish vampires to kill them.

As the paper no doubt anticipated, the cartoon provoked an outcry from Canadian Jews and some politicians. And after a few hours, the newspaper took it off its website and apologized. Anyone who thinks that means that the good guys won misses the point of the move. The Jewish outcry and pile-on by politicians and media coverage proved the point. Jews are evil and control everything, even what a private paper can publish. Like Nosferatu in its day, the cartoon will become a piece of folklore, additional proof that the Jews are the enemy of humanity.

In other words, the cartoon was a blood libel.

We’re seeing lots and lots of it these days. And so, it is worth recalling what a blood libel is.

In its original form, of course, the libel was specifically about blood. About 1,000 years ago, Christians in England began accusing Jews of performing ritual murders of Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzahs.

The accusation was inherently insane. Jewish law prohibits murder. It prohibits cannibalism. It prohibits child sacrifice. It prohibits eating food with blood. But none of that mattered. Like the cartoon in La Presse, the blood libel didn’t seek to persuade anyone. It presumed that its target audiences already hated Jews or had a latent tendency to hate Jews, which the blood libel aimed to unleash. The purpose of the blood libel was to scapegoat the Jews and to incite target audiences from London to Damascus to act on that hatred. Over the millennium, hundreds of thousands of Jews were massacred in Europe and the Islamic world in response to blood libels.

January 30, 2024

York University’s CUPE local apparently cribs their homework from the Völkischer Beobachter

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

York University’s contract and part-time instructors are represented by CUPE local 3903, who’ve distributed an eye-openingly anti-semitic document with the (implied) order to interrupt normal tutorials and replace the content with Palestinian propaganda:

Detail from an official “toolkit” distributed to York University contract and part-time faculty which claims that their employer is complicit in “genocide” by the mere tolerance of Jewish groups on campus.
Photo by A Toolkit on Teaching Palestine

A new toolkit circulated to York University teaching assistants instructs them to denounce Israel at every available opportunity, even when it has no apparent relevance to the subject being studied.

“Let us collectively divert this week’s tutorials to teaching on Palestinian liberation,” reads the 15-page document circulated by CUPE 3903, the union representing York’s contract and part-time faculty.

The document adds that tutorials should be diverted to condemnations of the “Zionist Israeli state” regardless of the course that the TA is supposed to be discussing.

“It is a medical issue. An arts issue. A feminist issue. A society issue. A political issue. A cultural issue. A geography issue. An engineering issue. An architecture issue,” it reads.

The document is filled with claims denouncing Israel as a genocidal “colonial project”. Canada is treated much the same, and is referred to alternately as the “Canadian settler state” or “Turtle Island”.

The mere presence of Jewish groups on campus is also referred to as evidence of York University’s “complicity” in genocide.

The document denounces the existence of sanctioned “Zionist cultural institutions”, making explicit reference to Hillel, the world’s go-to Jewish campus organization. York is also called an accessory to genocide because of its research links with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The pamphlet even provides a script for TAs to read as they inform students that the tutorial will be cancelled in favour of becoming a “teach-in … for liberation.”

“Today, I open up our classroom to bring our attention on Gaza, to speak up and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement, and contribute in ending Canada’s and York’s complicity with genocide and the settler-colonial occupation of Palestinian land and life,” reads one introductory line.

January 19, 2024

Those passionate Houthi and the Blowfish fans

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley wonders why the rest of the Canadian legacy media are being so careful to proactively curate and “contextualize” the violent and hateful message of the pro-Hamas and pro-Houthi protesters in our cities:

The Houthi Ansarullah “Al-Sarkha” banner. Arabic text:

الله أكبر (Allah is the greatest)

الموت لأمريكا (death to America)

الموت لإسرائيل (death to Israel)

اللعنة على اليهود (a curse upon the Jews)

النصر للإسلام (victory to Islam)

Image and explanatory text from Wikimedia Commons.

The record will show I had little sympathy for the Ottawa convoy crowd, especially once they had made their point and refused to go away. You can’t occupy the downtown of a G7 capital for a month. Sorry, you just can’t.

At the same time, I cringed at the media’s fevered attempts to cast the entire crowd as neo-Nazi oafs, based on what seems to have been two observed flags — one Confederate, one Nazi.

I recalled this while watching video footage of protesters in Toronto over the weekend chanting “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud! Turn another boat around!” Because the Houthis, who control Yemen’s Red Sea coast and have been waging war on commercial shipping, are about as neo-Nazi as it gets in the world nowadays.

The movement’s official slogan: “Allahu Akbar! Death to America! Death to Israel! Curse the Jews! Victory for Islam!” As if to drive home the point, there is ample video evidence of Houthi fighters chanting that slogan with their hands raised skywards in a Nazi salute.

The Houthis use child soldiers (as video evidence also makes horrifyingly plain). They are literally slavers. I have seen it suggested, by way of context, that they really don’t have that many slaves. Just a few slaves. It’s so hard to get good help.

But I haven’t seen anyone try to “contextualize” the Houthi slogan, the way Palestinian supporters will tell you “from the river to the sea” isn’t a call for Israel’s destruction and cheering for “intifada” doesn’t mean further terrorist attacks against Jews. Perhaps it’s just too big a job for even the most dedicated and creative of apologists.

Outside of the Postmedia empire, so far as I can see, not a single Canadian media outlet has seen fit to mention the chanting in Toronto streets in support of a rabidly antisemitic death cult. You can read several articles, however, about how Canadian media are terribly biased against the Palestinian cause. It’s ludicrous.

A nice little illustration, as the National Post‘s Tristin Hopper noted in November: When the convoy crowd appropriated Terry Fox’s statue, just opposite Parliament Hill, for their “mandate freedom” message, the Laurentian bubble nearly burst with righteous fury. When pro-Palestinian protesters draped a keffiyeh over Fox’s shoulders and had their kids pose with him, there was all but total silence.

Of course, flamboyant media double-standards aren’t the worst of our problems.

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