Category Archives: Western Hypocrisy

Three Left Wing Myths About Israel (with an extra bonus myth!)

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This essay by Sultan Knish: H/T Solstace reposted with permission of the good sultan with thanks.

Myth 1: “Israel was created because Europe felt guilty about the Holocaust.”
This left wing myth has been widely repeated, most recently by Desmond Tutu. While blatantly false on a level that even the most serious anti-Israel historian can recognize, it persists because its function is to delegitimize as the product of post-war colonial guilt, rather than longstanding Israeli national aspirations.

Israel was not created in 1947. By 1947, Israel already was a functioning country with a language, culture, agriculture, universities, newspapers and military forces which proved capable of defending against the armies of several Arab nations. The only thing that happened after the Holocaust was a UN vote in 1947 was for a partition plan that was never implemented because the Arab world instead chose to try and destroy Israel. Israel however would have declared independence and fought for its own survival, with the same exact outcome, regardless of UN Resolution 181. This vote is often described as creating Israel, but it was more accurately an attempt to settle the borders of Israel that failed because of Arab genocidal hostility that expressed itself not only toward Israel, but toward the Jews living in Arab lands.

Nor did post-war European colonialism create Israel. Britain, which was the colonial power in the region, was against Israel’s independence and abstained in the UN vote. The majority of votes for Resolution 181 came from non-European countries, primarily in Latin America and Eastern Europe, such as Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Peru and Poland, Ukraine and the Soviet Union. 7 European countries voted Yes, most of them Northern European states such as Sweden and Denmark, which experienced only a limited impact of the Holocaust. 12 Latin American countries voted Yes. Twice the number. And all of them countries that had their own national aspirations and had fought against colonialism.

Post-Holocaust guilt was not the reason Resolution 181 passed. Less than a third of the 33 votes came from countries where the Holocaust had taken place. The reasons were varied and different. Some Latin American countries identified with Israel’s national aspirations and some sought economic ties. Truman was influenced by the desire for Jewish votes in an upcoming election. The Soviet Union wanted to sabotage Britain’s colonial program. The motives of different countries were varied and complex. Iran for example voted against the resolution and yet became the second country to recognize the new State of Israel.

Left wing activists may insist that Resolution 181 was a racist act, but in fact half the countries who voted for it were non-white, and most of the countries who voted for it were non-European. Therefore the myth that Israel was created after the Holocaust by guilty Europeans, a myth that has been bandied about by everyone from Desmond Tutu to Wallace Shawn to Barack Obama is just that, a myth. Israel would have existed regardless of the Holocaust or UN Resolution 181, which was voted for primarily by non-European countries in any case. Those who repeat the myth are therefore demonstrating either extreme ignorance or extreme deceptiveness.
Myth 2: “European Nations Gave the Jews a Land Already Inhabited by a People.”
This is one of the more common myths that seeks to strike at the legitimacy of the creation of the modern state of Israel, and treats the Jews as a foreign body within the land. This is a continuation of the anti-semitic stereotypes of the Jews as eternal wanderers and eternal foreigners.

The fact of the matter is that Jews had an ongoing presence in the land going back thousands of years, that was only interrupted by massacres and expulsions, after which the Jews population would once again attempt to reestablish itself. Greek, Roman, Arab and Ottoman colonialism expelled Jewish populations and attempted to replace them with their own populations in order to gain a foothold in the land. Unlike them however the Jews remained the land’s indigenous population. Continue Reading →

Ezra Levant: A great day for freedom of Speech (In Canada)

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From The International Free Press Society:

I decided to post a video clip of Ezra at the HRC answering a rather central question to this debate. Know that in this man’s opinion, it was Ezra Levant who basically single-handedly removed the power that the Canadian Human Rights Commissions had accumulated for itself, and with which they ran an unopposed extortion racket in Canada under the guise of section 13, the ‘hate speech’ laws. This victory of the people over the state belongs to Ezra.
Below the video, the National Post article.

James Cohen.

National Post…

Yesterday, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal did something its never done in its 32-year history. It acquitted somebody of “hate speech” charges. Until now, the tribunal had a 100% conviction rate.

In a 107-page ruling, tribunal member Athanasios Hadjis didn’t just throw out the case against Marc Lemire, he threw out the law, too, calling it an infringement of the free speech guarantees of the Charter of Rights.

Hadjis is no wild-eyed civil libertarian. In the recent past, he himself has convicted people under this same law. And, before Jean Chretien appointed him to the tribunal, Hadjis was the boss of one of Montreal’s largest multicultural lobby groups, which thrived on ethnic identity politics. But even Hadjis has had enough of the human rights industry and their fetish for political correctness. He ruled that allowing Canadian citizens to express offensive ideas is preferable to living under a government that prosecutes people for expressing those ideas.

As of yesterday, it’s no longer illegal to write politically incorrect things on the Internet. Now it’s illegal to prosecute someone for it.

This will have an immediate impact on the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC), which maintains a large censorship department and has other cases under investigation. If the CHRC were a real police force, and the tribunal were a real court, all existing censorship cases would be dropped, and anyone who was previously convicted would have their convictions voided. Dozens of lawsuits against the government for wrongful prosecution, and compensation for costs, wouldn’t be far behind.

But the tribunal isn’t a real court, and Hadjis acknowledged that he doesn’t have the power to strike down the law, only to declare it unconstitutional and to refuse to apply it. The CHRC has ignored the tribunal before: In this same case, Lemire was routinely denied his procedural rights by the CHRC, including its outrageous tactic of waiting until the trial was over before disclosing all of its documents to him. Even worse, some bizarre CHRC conduct came to light, including confessions by their staff that they joined neo-Nazi organizations and published bigoted comments on the Internet to entrap their targets. A real court would have thrown the case out years ago, and a real police force would have disciplined such rogue conduct.

Still, it’s a great day for Charter values like freedom of speech. But how long will it last? The human rights industry knew this was an important case, and over the past six years it spent millions of tax dollars fighting Lemire. The federal government had six lawyers on the case–four from the CHRC and two from the Justice Minister’s office. And there were five lawyers intervening on behalf of Canada’s tax-subsidized Jewish groups, the B’nai Brith, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC).

Yesterday, the CJC issued a bizarre press release in which it states that, despite the tribunal’s clear ruling, it believes the censorship law “remains constitutional.” In the next few weeks, the CJC and the rest of the human rights litigation industry will clamour for the government to appeal this decision.

It was one thing for Justice Minister Rob Nicholson to defend the constitutionality of a government law that was under attack — that’s standard operating procedure. But now that the law has been found to be illegal, it would be quite another thing for Nicholson to positively act to revive such an illiberal law. Nicholson must also put a leash on the disgraced CHRC, and order it not to appeal either. They’ve already done more than enough damage to Canada’s civil liberties, at great expense to taxpayers.

In fact, just leaving Hadjis’s ruling intact isn’t enough–his ruling illustrates a deeper rot in the CHRC. Hadjis found that the CHRC has become much more aggressive and confrontational in recent years, and at the same time it started applying punitive sanctions — such as issuing fines of tens of thousands of dollars. That toxic mix of abusive conduct with criminal-style punishments was specifically forbidden by the Supreme Court when it last reviewed the censorship laws in 1990.

It’s that bullying corporate culture that Nicholson needs to address. Nicholson should start by ordering Jennifer Lynch, the CHRC’s chief commissioner, to stop her expensive campaign of demonization against the commission’s critics. And then he should call in a retired judge — or the auditor-general — to do a thorough biopsy to find out how Canada’s human rights agency became such a threat to our human rights.

National Post

The burqa as liberating choice? not so says Chesler

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From the Chesler Chronicles/Pajamas Media.

August 31st, 2009 8:10 am

The Burqa: Ultimate Feminist Choice?

Naomi Wolf Discovers That Shrouds Are Sexy

Women in chadors are really feminist ninja warriors. Rather than allow themselves to be gawked at by male strangers, they choose to defeat the “male gaze” by hiding from it in plain view.

But don’t you worry: Beneath that chador, abaya, burqa, or veil, there is a sexy courtesan wearing “Victoria Secret, elegant fashion, and skin care lotion,” just waiting for her husband to come home for a night of wild and sensuous marital lovemaking.

Obviously, these are not my ideas. I am quoting from a piece by Naomi Wolf that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago. Yes, Wolf is the bubbly, feminist author who once advised Vice President Al “The Climate” Gore on what colors he should wear while campaigning and who is or was friendly with Gore’s daughter. Full disclosure: I have casually known Wolf and her parents for more than a quarter-century. Continue Reading →

The U.N., Refugees, and the college campus

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As I write this, the government of Yemen is launching attacks on its Shia minority to quell an uprising almost certainly sponsored by The Islamic Republic of Iran. As a result, thousands of Sunni’s are being displaced and fleeing claiming refugee status in Saudi Arabia. The government of Saudi is predictably, sending them back as quick as they come.

I suppose at this point it does not come as a shock to anyone that college campus’s all over Europe and North America are not screaming at the horrible injustices being committed by the Saudis against fellow Sunni Muslims by sending them back to a conflict zone. Neither would it come as a shock that no one is talking about Yemen’s attacking of fellow Muslims. Or the Shia minority attacks on Yemeni government assets. The Muslim on Muslim atrocities here are legion and on all sides. But if Israel shoots one terrorist in the act of killing Israeli school kids and so on we will all know that man’s name and a street will be named after him in Gaza.

Most people do not even know that the UN has two distinct refugee organizations, one for ‘Palistinians’ and one for the rest of the world with radically different rules. For example, if a person is born to a refugee they are not considered a refugee but a citizen of the country they are born in. However, the great grandchildren of people who left Israel to get out of the way of invading Egyptian or Syrian tanks on the week that Israel was founded as a nation, these people are in a category all their own, and they and all their descendants remain refugees in perpetuity until such time as the nation of Israel is destroyed and they take whatever place their Islamic leaders tell them to. As a consequence we hear endless laments about how the refugees in Gaza are treated, something which puzzles the hell out of me as how can they be refugees in Gaza when Gaza itself is the nation they where born in and are in control of, (Isn’t that like being a Canadian Refugee in a camp just outside Toronto?) but very few of us will be aware of the refugee crisis in Yemen, or Saudi Arabia’s, one of the richest per capita nations in the world, refusal to allow in one Sunni refugee from a conflict they may in fact be responsible for.

Eeyore for Vladtepesblog.

Link: Hate Speech on Campus 09c

Glover, Klein and Fonda on Israel at TIFF; Carter sells peanuts. Such creativity.

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From The National Post.

Artists, authors sign letter protesting Israeli spotlight at TIFF

Mark Medley, National Post Published: Thursday, September 03, 2009

Actor Danny Glover is one of more than 50 people have added their name to what’s being called The Toronto Declaration, a letter condemning the Toronto Film Festival's complicity in "the Israeli propaganda machine.” ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images Actor Danny Glover is one of more than 50 people have added their name to what’s being called The Toronto Declaration, a letter condemning the Toronto Film Festival’s complicity in “the Israeli …

TORONTO — The signatories of a new letter accusing the Toronto International Film Festival of becoming “complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine” run the gamut from an Oscar-winning actress to a rabble-rousing author to a Talking Head.

More than 50 people have added their name to what’s being called The Toronto Declaration, including musician David Byrne, actors Danny Glover and Jane Fonda, and author Alice Walker.

The letter, drafted by a committee that includes Canadian writer Naomi Klein and Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni, is the latest move in a controversy that began when Canadian director John Greyson withdrew his short documentary, Covered, from the festival last week. The veteran filmmaker is protesting the festival’s inaugural City to City Spotlight on Tel Aviv, a 10-movie program that TIFF’s website promises will “explore the evolving urban experience while presenting the best documentary and fiction films from and about a selected city.” This year is Tel Aviv’s 100th anniversary.

Greyson penned an open letter to festival co-directors Piers Handling and Cameron Bailey, as well as to Noah Cowan, artistic director of the under-construction Bell Lightbox, blasting the initiative.

The declaration states that while the signatories are not protesting the individual filmmakers participating in the program and do not seek to exclude Israeli films from the festival, “in the wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza, we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of what South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann have all characterized as an apartheid regime.” Continue Reading →

Lockerbie paper trail leads to Gordon Brown

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H/T Gates Of VIenna Please visit the Timesonline site for more information, including the minutes of the meetings.

red carpet arrival re

Gordon Brown was accused of double dealing last night after an official document emerged claiming that Libya was told that he wanted the Lockerbie bomber to die a free man.

The disclosure threatens to undermine the Government’s determinedly neutral stance over the release of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi.

It could also deepen the rift with the Obama administration, which yesterday demanded answers from the Government over its role in the affair.

Papers released by the Scottish government included the minutes of a meeting with Libya earlier this year during which it was stated that Bill Rammell, then a foreign office minister, told Tripioli that neither the Prime Minister nor David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, “would want Mr Megrahi to pass away in prison”.

Britain is already under pressure over its decision to strike a prisoner transfer deal with Libya in defiance of a decade-old pledge to Washington. The Foreign Office insists that the US was never given an absolute commitment, but revelations that Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, believed that such a deal would be in the “overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” have infuriated US diplomats.

Philip Crowley, chief spokesman for the US State Department, told The Times: “In the late 1990s, as the US and the UK were putting in place the legal framework for the trial of the perpetrators of Pan Am 103, it was our collective view that any suspect found guilty would serve out his entire sentence in Scotland. The US did not change its position but the UK did . . . It’s really up to the UK to explain its current position.” Continue Reading →

British Lion Muzzled

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By Robert Spencer: Jihad Watch

Britain is sinking fast, and in too many ways its government is its people’s worst enemy.

Jihadists struck London on July 7, 2005 and Glasgow on June 29, 2007, and many still operate in Britain — but how bad is it now? To begin finding out, I spent the last week in London, visiting mosques and discussing the situation with locals.

What I saw wasn’t shocking, but quite depressing.

I went to London to work on a documentary on the Islamization of Europe with operatives from the Christian Action Network, which last year produced the shocking documentary Homegrown Jihad: The Terrorist Camps Around the U.S. For that film, CAN’s Jason Campbell visited many of the Jamaat ul-Fuqra terror compounds which dot the rural American landscape, generally to the consternation of the locals and in the face of the indifference or impotence of law enforcement authorities.

Last week, Jason and I walked around inside some of the most notorious mosques in Britain. One by one, we visited them. The North London Central Mosque, aka the Finsbury Park Mosque, the old haunt of the one-eyed, hook-handed jihadi Abu Hamza, who now faces extradition to the U.S. for his role in terror plotting. The expansive and prosperous Islamic Cultural Centre on Baker Street. The likewise large (and rapidly expanding) East London Mosque and London Muslim Centre, and the Stockwell Green Muslim Centre, where teenagers are recruited for jihad. There Jason and I both felt a distinct level of menace as we passed through the place.

We also went by the Masjid-e-Ilyas near the site of the 2012 Olympics, where Muslims want to build the largest mosque in Europe, capable of holding 70,000 people. But there we were not allowed in.

Unrecognized inside the mosques we were able to enter, I was warmly received as a potential convert and laden with books and pamphlets explaining the wonders of Islam — including, courtesy the Finsbury Park Mosque, a copy of the Koran with illuminating commentary: “The purpose for which the Muslims are required to fight,” we’re told, “is not, as one might think, to compel the unbelievers into embracing Islam.”

Feel better? Don’t. “Rather, its purpose is to put an end to the suzerainty of the unbelievers so that the latter are unable to rule over people. The authority to rule should only be vested in those who follow the Truth Faith; unbelievers who do not follow this True Faith should live in a state of subordination.” So much for liberty and justice for all.

The current state of Britain came most clearly into focus, however, not when we visited the mosques, but when we tried to have dinner. I had an illuminating dinner with a group including the notable British author and freedom fighter Douglas Murray that turned out to offer a bracing introduction to British dhimmitude: the dinner had to be moved at the last minute since the proprietors of the George Restaurant in the aptly-named Isle of Dogs district of London didn’t like us discussing jihad and Islamization on the premises. This was despite the fact that the dinner had been planned to be on-camera and had been cleared with the George in advance.

In fact, when I returned to the George the next night with the producers of the film, we were not allowed entry because the previous night we had been discussing jihad and Islamic supremacism.

Were the proprietors of the George Restaurant hard-line Leftists who viewed jihadists as their allies in the struggle against American imperialism? Or were they frightened by the prospect of the local Muslims, who live in that area in considerable numbers, exacting revenge against the place for daring to host a meeting of the Resistance?

Most likely they were afraid of their own government, which frowns upon those who question the wisdom or viability of the multicultural paradise they are intent upon creating. For when we finally tried to assemble in another place a roundtable of concerned British citizens to discuss the problem of the Islamization of Britain, one by one the British participants dropped out. If they appeared on camera, we were told, the government could and probably would threaten their livelihood.

If the British government makes the stakes too high for its own people to speak publicly against the policies that have brought into Britain thousands of people intent upon destroying the British state and imposing Islamic law, then all is nearly lost.

It’s no wonder that British citizens are turning to noxious racist parties like the BNP: the elites have abandoned them. This is a time for the British people to summon untapped resources of courage, and for the British government to recover its vision. Otherwise all will be lost, and soon.

PJTV history of political correctness. This is truly excellent.

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Please take the twelve minutes to watch this superb analysis of modern American leftism and it’s genesis. At the end of this short clip, they suggest going to youtube and searching for a documentary which is broken into three parts on the history of political correctness as a deliberate strategy for undermining western civilization. I took the liberty of finding them and adding them here so no need to search. Please enjoy and send the link far and wide. I believe this needs to be commonly known.

Also, please consider joining and supporting PJTV

Eeyore

PJTV The Narative plus History PC from Vlad Tepes on Vimeo.

NGO: Academic should quit Cast Lead inquiry

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U.N Watch does it’s usual excellent job of cathing the absurd and the biased. I doubt at this point anyone would be surprised that The U.N. would appoint someone who openly denies Israel the right to defend itself against rocket attacks to a commission to determine the legality of events in operation Cast Lead.

Eeyore
Analysis and Commentary from UN Watch in Geneva
August 24, 2009 — Issue 200

UN Watch today sent a request to UN Human Rights Council President Alex van Meuwen, asking him to take action within seven days, if necessary, on its motion to disqualify Prof. Christine Chinkin from the council’s inquiry on Gaza on grounds of bias. Today’s Jerusalem Post features the following report on the UN Watch legal brief.
NGO: Academic should quit Cast Lead inquiry

Jonny Paul, correspondent in LONDON
Jerusalem Post
August 24, 2009

A European non-government organization has called on the UN to remove a British academic from its recent inquiry into alleged human rights violations in Gaza, over statements made rejecting Israel’s right to self-defense against rocket attacks.

Geneva-based UN Watch submitted a 28-page legal brief to the UN last week calling on the UN fact-finding mission to disqualify London School of Economics law professor Christine Chinkin over prior statements she made that bring her impartiality in question. Click here for PDF of UN Watch legal brief Continue Reading →

The Canadian Bar Association has a crush on Omar Khadr

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This column written by Ezra Levant, appears in today’s National Post. It perfectly describes the left’s ongoing love affair with Canada’s #1 poster-boy of terrorism, Omar Khadr.

Ezra Levant: The Canadian Bar Association’s Khadr fetish

Posted: August 19, 2009, 9:45 AM by NP Editor ,

The Canadian Bar Association (CBA) has a crush on Omar Khadr. The left-leaning lawyers’ club held its convention in Dublin last week, but even Ireland’s charms couldn’t get their minds off the accused terrorist, still detained in Barack Obama’s prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The spark for the CBA’s latest pronouncement on the matter was a decision of the Federal Court of Appeal, ordering the Canadian government to seek Khadr’s repatriation (the government is considering an appeal). But the CBA doesn’t need a reason to talk about their favourite cause. Khadr has been the subject of more CBA press releases than everyone else on the planet combined.

The CBA is obsessed. A search of its website yields 232 items about Khadr. What about other Canadians trapped overseas, such as Huseyn Celil, a Canadian citizen currently being held on trumped-up charges by China, or William Sampson, who was held and tortured in Saudi Arabia? They are non-persons to the CBA — no press releases for them, and no mentions on its website.

Continue Reading →

Shut Up! feminists silent on honour killings, rape, oppression

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Naomi Lakritz writes in the Calgary Herald on how feminists in the West prefer navel-gazing, book-promoting and self-interest to defending women who face extreme oppression, rape and murder in the name of honour’.

From the Ottawa Citizen.

Feminists who don’t defend women

By Naomi Lakritz, The Calgary HeraldAugust 10, 2009 3:02 AM

All’s been quiet on the sisterhood front. Too quiet, considering how many horrifying stories about women have made the headlines.

There were the alleged honour killings of the three teenaged Shafia girls from Montreal, along with one of their father’s two wives. The father, the mother and the girls’ brother are charged with murder.

Then there was the eight-year-old girl in Phoenix whose Liberian refugee family disowned her after she was raped. They claim she had dishonoured the family.

And there was Saudi beauty pageant winner Aya Ali al-Mulla, who won her crown without anyone ever seeing her face; she was draped from head to foot in Saudi Arabia’s traditional black abaya. Pageant officials pronounced al-Mulla, 18, the Queen of Beautiful Morals. She had to pass rigorous quizzes on her morality, her obedience to her parents, and other such virtues, to win her title.

All of these incidents have as their theme oppression and the quashing of women’s right to autonomy and self-determination, by the males in their milieu. My question is, where are the queens of beautiful morals here in the West?

I checked out the websites of the usual suspects. Naomi Klein is busy tooting her own horn with an announcement that her book, The Shock Doctrine, won the Warwick Prize for Writing! (Exclamation point hers). I did a search for “honour killing” on her site and came up with “Your search yielded no results.”

It’s possible that my good old namesake is unclear on the concept of oppression.

Klein, who is Jewish, is calling for boycotts of Israel in support of the Palestinian cause whose leaders have declared they want to kill Jewish people. Maybe if she supported the Palestinian people via protesting their oppression by their terrorist Hamas leaders, she’d have a worthy cause.

Then I looked at Judy Rebick’s blog. Like Naomi, she’s preoccupied with flogging her own book, Transforming Power. One recent post, dated July 28, was titled: The Toronto Municipal Strike: Who Do We Get Mad At?

I don’t know who to get mad at about the garbage strike in Toronto, Judy. Living in Calgary, it doesn’t cross my mind that much.

But shouldn’t we all be even a teeny bit mad at the way women are being denied their selfhood by the patriarchal environments they live in, be it in Canada, Phoenix or wherever it’s happening?

Judy does have a post from June titled “Take action in solidarity with the indigenous people of Peru.”

What about a little solidarity with four dead women whose car ended up in the Rideau Canal near Kingston? How about a show of solidarity with that beauty queen in Saudi Arabia who’s obviously a brilliant girl because she plans to go to medical school, but who can’t show her face to the world because to do so might dishonour her family and lead to a fatal consequence?

And is there nary a tear to be shed or a word to be spared for that poor child in Phoenix whose family has tossed her aside like so much trash for something that was not her fault?

Meanwhile, on Rose’s Place, which bills itself as a blogsite for Canadian feminists, recent discussions centred around Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s birth certificate and U.S. health reform, with Toronto Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias complaining about Muslim-bashing regarding the alleged honour killings.

It is not Muslim-bashing to acknowledge that a crime has allegedly happened in a Muslim family.

It is not Sikh-bashing to say that some of the alleged honour killings in Canada in the past few years happened in Sikh families.

Shall we just ignore the United Nations Population Fund’s estimate that 5,000 women a year die in honour killings, to avoid casting aspersions on any culture? Shall we pretend it’s not happening in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Morocco and Pakistan, to name just a few countries?

There seems to be no problem with denouncing Christian culture for decorating trees at Christmastime, or displaying crosses on Remembrance Day, but when members of another culture engage in actual evildoing, we’re supposed to pretend it all just falls under the rubric of domestic violence. Since domestic violence occurs in all cultures, honour killings can be conveniently lumped into that category and we can keep pretending it’s not particular to certain cultures.

Nobody’s even mentioned the fact that Mohammad Shafia was living in this country with two wives, one of whom died with the girls. Let’s just pass completely over that form of oppression visited on these two women, for fear of offending someone.

As Judy Rebick says in another June blog posting: “The revolution will be tweeted or whatever.” Yeah, Judy. Whatever.

Naomi Lakritz writes for the Calgary Herald.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

A hatemongers guide to conversion: the United Church of Canada plays to Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism

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From The Ottawa Citizen.

Pray for the United Church

The Ottawa CitizenAugust 7, 2009

Reports that anti-Semitism is incubating in some corners of the United Church are generating anger toward the church, from both Christians and Jews. But the anger might be misplaced, because the church could end up the principal victim.

Anti-Semitism is a virus that destroys its host organism. In this case, the anti-Semitism seems to be masking itself as “anti-Zionism,” that is, hatred of Israel. Now, it is absolutely true that criticism of Israel does not automatically signal antipathy toward Jews. Many Jews themselves question Israeli government policies. It’s wrong to assume that critics of Israel are by definition anti-Jewish.

But it’s also true that every anti-Semite is most assuredly an anti-Zionist, so there is overlap between the groups. Identifying instances when the campaign to delegitimize Israel is a cover to attack Jews has always been a challenge. One giveaway is the appearance of age-old anti-Semitic tropes.

Which brings us back to the United Church of Canada. Beginning this weekend, the church will hold its General Council in Kelowna, B.C. The church will consider numerous resolutions, among them several that express extreme hostility to Israel.

It’s not just the double standard — singling out Israel, a liberal democracy, as the world’s greatest outlaw state? — that raises old memories of scapegoating the Jews. No, it’s the language in the background materials, available on the United Church’s website, that has shocked so many people.

One document warns that “some Members of Parliament are affiliated with the State of Israel” and “have sensitive roles in Canada.” Is this a coded reference to Jewish MPs, in an attempt to raise the ancient accusation that Jews are duplicitous and have dual loyalties?

It gets worse. The church document accuses the Canadian Parliament of harbouring MPs who are actually citizens of Israel. This is a lie. So far as anyone knows, there are no MPs who hold Israeli citizenship. But what if there were? Parliament is a multicultural and diverse place, like Canadian society generally. It’s conspicuous that the United Church is not witch-hunting South Asian or Muslim MPs to out those who hold dual citizenship. Only Jews constitute an enemy within.

The head of the church, moderator Rev. David Giuliano, acknowledged Tuesday that all of this is causing “pain and hurt to Jewish people in Canada,” yet he refuses to disown the architects of this campaign. Instead, he said that a rabbi will be invited to have “full speaking” privileges at the Kelowna conference. Will the rabbi be expected to answer the charge that Jews — sorry, people “affiliated” with Israel — should not have “sensitive” government jobs? Or that the Canada Revenue Agency should stop allowing tax deductions for respected Jewish charities, another idea that can be found in the materials posted on the church’s website?

Admirers of the United Church are right to be despondent. As one newspaper letter-writer put it, even if the proposals are rejected in Kelowna, “severe and irreparable damage has been done to the credibility of the (church) as a viable and doctrinally sound organization.”

The United Church of Canada isn’t the first organization that hatemongers have tried to convert into a vehicle for attacking Israel. Labour unions, student associations, even a camping store (Mountain Equipment Co-op) have had to fight off similar hijackings, not always successfully.

People with radical or hateful ideas know that by themselves they will remain marginal voices, so they infiltrate respectable institutions in order to give legitimacy to their agenda. The United Church is a great institution, and Canadians should pray that it is able to fight off those who would shame it.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

Obama White House: Ahmadinejad elected leader of Iran

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From the Ottawa Citizen

————-

White House calls Ahmadinejad elected leader of Iran

Iran opposition to keep pressure on

By Parisa Hafezi, Reuters

The White House called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the 'elected leader' of Iran on Tuesday when asked whether President Barack Obama recognized the Iranian president after the country's disputed election.

The White House called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the ‘elected leader’ of Iran on Tuesday when asked whether President Barack Obama recognized the Iranian president after the country’s disputed election.

Photograph by: Behrouz Mehri, Getty Images

The White House called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the “elected leader” of Iran on Tuesday when asked whether President Barack Obama recognized the Iranian president after the country’s disputed election.

“This was a decision and a debate ongoing in Iran by Iranians, they were going to choose their leadership,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. “He’s the elected leader.”

The White House has been careful not to comment on the legitimacy of the Iranian election and has condemned the government for its crackdown on opposition demonstrators.

Meanwhile, two prominent defeated Iranian presidential candidates said they would maintain their campaign against Ahmadinejad’s re-election, which has sparked Iran’s worst unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Ahmadinejad will be sworn in by parliament on Wednesday, and the authorities will want to avoid any repeat of the street unrest after the disputed June 12 poll in which at least 20 people were killed and hundreds were detained.

Leading moderates have accused the government of electoral fraud and have branded the next Ahmadinejad administration as “illegal”.

The wife of Iran’s opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi said on Tuesday he would continue to contest the election result.

“Despite all the hardship, we will continue our path to fight against the result (of the election),” Zahra Rahnavard was quoted as saying by the reformist website Mowjcamp.

Mehdi Karoubi, the most liberal of the presidential candidates, was quoted by the Spanish El Pais daily as saying he too would continue to oppose the government.

“Neither Mousavi nor I have withdrawn. We will continue to protest and we will never collaborate with this government. We will not harm it, but we will criticize what it does,” Karoubi said in an interview.

“Quite honestly, if the authorities had acted in a different way, we would never have had these problems, because the majority of those protesting only did so for that reason.”

U.S. President Barack Obama and the leaders of France, Britain and Germany have all decided not to congratulate Ahmadinejad on his re-election.

“In view of the circumstances of the controversial re-election, the chancellor will not, as usual, write the normal letter of congratulation,” said a German government spokesman.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said: “I don’t have any reason to believe we will send any letter.” The Iranian government says the presidential election was fair and transparent and has accused Western nations, especially Britain and the United States, of being complicit in the bloody post-election unrest, a charge they deny.

Two former presidents, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, who backed Mousavi’s failed presidential bid, boycotted Monday’s endorsement of the president by the Supreme Leader although they were present at such events in the past.

After the ceremony a witness said hundreds of Mousavi supporters, some of them honking car horns, gathered near a central Tehran square, where riot police and Basij militia were assembled to prevent any demonstration.

Mousavi’s credentials as a loyal servant of Iran’s revolution may help explain why he has escaped arrest for leading protests against an election he says was stolen to keep Ahmadinejad in power.

The 68-year-old moderate may lack charisma, but he has not hesitated from speaking out, castigating authorities for their handling of the election and its tumultuous aftermath. He has even defied his relative, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who backed Ahmadinejad.

“What has endeared him to the public is the fact that, contrary to former President (Mohammad) Khatami who would be reluctant to stand up to Khamenei and others, Mousavi has stuck to his guns,” said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, an Iran scholar at New York’s Syracuse University.

Mousavi has previously demanded the elections in the world’s fifth biggest oil exporter be annulled, but may need a new goal once Ahmadinejad is reinstalled.

“The plan should be to call into question the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad’s administration at every turn, through civil disobedience, and also to press for some revisions to the constitution,” Boroujerdi said.

The president now faces the difficult task of assembling a cabinet which is acceptable to the mostly conservative parliament, which may object if he just picks members of his inner circle. Parliament has in the past rejected some of Ahmadinejad’s cabinet choices.

Mousavi has yet to unveil a promised new political front with his reformist and pragmatist allies, perhaps partly because so many leading figures are in jail, including 100 whose trial for inciting unrest began on Saturday and resumes on Thursday.

Karoubi backs talks with the United States and other Western governments to attempt to open up the channels of communication with Iran, which is locked in dispute over its nuclear program that it says is for energy and the West suspects is for arms.

“The most beneficial thing for the Iranians is negotiations. Nobody benefits from our ongoing problems with the United States,” said Karoubi, highlighting one of the fissures in the clerical leadership that the election has exposed.

Another potential source of friction with the United States arose on Saturday when Iran arrested three American hikers who an Iraqi Kurdish official said had strayed across the border and who were being questioned by the Iranians.

“They are definitely Americans. They were detained four days ago. We don’t know whether they are tourists or not. We are questioning them,” security official Iraj Hassanzadeh told al-Alam state television on Tuesday.

© Copyright (c) Reuters

The pope even speaks about it now. “No desecration of Quoran?”

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It is a good bet that behind closed doors world leaders all think what we do on these matters. When an ‘art exhibit’ encourages people to desecrate a bible most of us think to ourselves or say to the fellow next to us, “I wonder why they don’t do that to a Quoran.” But world leaders have to watch what they say in public as it tends to have more serious consequences. So there is usually silence on these things from high up as anoying as that often is to most of us. So when the Vatican actually took a public position, it is remarkable.

From The Daily Mail:

It wouldn’t happen to the Koran: Pope attacks Glasgow art gallery’s invitation to vandalise a Bible

By Graham Grant
Last updated at 10:53 AM on 28th July 2009
Pope Benedict XVIPope Benedict XVI believes the stunt would not have been contemplated with a copy of the Koran
The Pope has condemned a ‘ disgusting’ taxpayer-funded exhibition in which visitors are urged to deface the Bible.

Visitors were offered pens by gallery bosses so they could scrawl comments on the text – leading to a host of puerile and obscene remarks.

Pope Benedict XVI believes the stunt would not have been contemplated with a copy of the Koran.

His anger over the show, organised by council-funded arts body Culture
and Sport Glasgow, was expressed by a senior Vatican priest.

The adviser to the Pope said: ‘It is disgusting and offensive. They would not think of doing it to the Koran.’

Public complaints about the exhibit at the prestigious Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow have forced organisers to put the vandalised Bible on show in a locked case, while still allowing visitors to write comments on blank sheets of paper.

The Made In God’s Image exhibit is the work of Glasgow artist Anthony Schrag.
He wanted gays and transsexuals who felt left out of religion to ‘write their way back in’ to the holy text.

Mr Schrag worked with members of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) in Edinburgh on the project. But MCC minister Jane Clarke said: ‘I had hoped people would show respect for the Bible.

I am saddened some have chosen to write offensive messages.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1202632/Pope-attacks-art-vandalising-Bible.html#ixzz0Mf4kqdQQ