Date: 10 Mar 2011
THE HINDUS OUGHT TO READ THIS CAREFULLY. LET THE MUSLIMS NOT GET AWAY WITH THE IDEA THAT THE HINDUS ARE AN EASY WALK OVER. WE SALUTE THE BRAVE JEWS WHO ARE DETERMINED TO KEEP THE MEMORIES ALIVE. ==============================\\\\\\\\\\\\ JEW-HATRED WEEK \\\\\\\\\\ By Howard Rotberg \\\\\\\\\ My father, now 90 years old, living in a retirement home, is a survivor of Auschwitz, where his parents and then 8 year old sister were exterminated in the gas chambers. Dad has told me of growing up in Lodz Poland, a textile city of some 600,000 population pre-War, of whom some 180,000 were Jewish, mostly working class. Most were rounded up into the notorious Lodz ghetto from which they were shipped, squeezed into cattle cars, to Auschwitz or other concentration/death camps.\\\\\\\ The worst time of the year for Jews in Lodz was Easter week. The then anti-Semitic Roman Catholic priests would sermonize about the vile People who killed, even tortured, the Lord, Jesus Christ, their Saviour. That, on top of the long standing anti-Semitism of the Eastern European and Russian masses, resulted in increased anti-Semitic incidents, including violence, for the week around Easter. Allegations ranged from the Jews using the blood of Christian children to bake the ceremonial matzah crackers for the spring Passover holiday to allegations that it was the Jews rather than the Romans who crucified Jesus. Fortunately, the Roman Catholic Church has made it perfectly clear now that it does not hold the Jews in any way, historically or theologically at fault in any way. However Hollywood, by embracing the work of anti-Semite Mel Gibson, tolerates the movie, The Passion, which I have shown in my book, TOLERism, is a very anti-Semitic movie. My father loves Canada. Although Canada refused to take Jewish refugees during the War, after the War, he was accepted here, married my mother who lived in a small Ontario city, built a successful business, and learned how welcoming and fundamentally decent were the Christian businessman and neighbours who he encountered in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Neither he nor I ever expected that within his lifetime, in Canada, there would arise an officially sanctioned Jew-Hatred Week. Alas, it is true, and it has been so successful, this year it has even been extended to two weeks. It goes by the name of Israel Apartheid Week, but it is not at all a serious and balanced conference discussing intelligently different points of view.\\\\\\\\\\\ Like the children of so many Jewish immigrants, I was strongly encouraged to avail myself of educational opportunities that were not available to my parents. I became completely focused on studying the history of ideologies and values, so that I could better understand how Germany, with all its history of High Culture, and elements of democracy, could turn itself into an industrial-type killing machine of Jewish civilians, and how it was that the other democracies showed less than a 100% commitment to saving the lives of an eventual 6 million lives lost in a genocide, which was done under cover of war, but was not a result of war.\\\\\\\\\\ Aside from playing some intramural hockey, I spent almost all my time in the library learning to understand the role of ideology and cultural values in debasing human dignity – to allow for the unimpeded genocide by educated and supposedly cultured people. \\\\\\\\ I stood first in the History Department in my third year, but decided against being an academic. For Jews who read the Bible, the Torah, we are told over and over again that the most important value of all is Justice, both individual justice and human rights, as well as social justice. It is no accident that my People are over-represented in Law, Medicine, Social Work, academia and all elements of social justice organizations and charities. So, naturally, I followed my study of History with a degree in Law, both from the University of Toronto, because everyone told me that U of T was the best school in Canada.\\\\\\\\\ Twenty years of practicing law was followed by eight years of developing affordable rental housing for low income working people in converted heritage buildings. Something was still missing in my life. I could not ignore the very disturbing trends in the traditional Arab war against the homeland of the Jewish people, Israel, a tiny slip of land dwarfed by Arab countries with 650 times the land mass and 50 times the population. And so, I wrote a 2003 novel called The Second Catastrophe where the lead character was a professor grappling with the suicide bombings against Jews in Israel, Argentina and elsewhere and the delegitimization of Israel by “NGO’s” with shadowy financing and governance – culminating in the Durban Conference where hatred of Israel enabled the PR coup of having the world take seriously the rant that the Jews are now the new Nazis and the Palestinians are the new Jews.\\\\\\\\\\\ My protagonist was obsessed that a new Holocaust was underway, and also obsessed that Iran would acquire nuclear weapons to lead the attack on the Jewish state, which soon will have, coincidentally, a Jewish population of 6 million. There have been ample promises to wipe Israel off the map by Iran, its proxy terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose star is rising as secular authoritarian governments fall in the Middle east. The Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist and Islamist organization, has managed to finance Muslim student organizations and mosques across North America, with little concern on the part of mainstream media and politicians and universities.\\\\\\\\ I continued to write books and articles and soon found that many great writers in the West are now shunned by publishers who do not wish to publish “politically incorrect” material or material which may result in those publishers being bombed or otherwise attacked by the aggressive Islamist lawfare and PR machine. So, I founded a publishing house, Mantua Books, which now publishes such great writers as Jamie Glazov, David Solway and Pamela Peled. \\\\\\\\ What I recognized when I wrote my first novel is that the threat of a renewed genocide against my people does not come from a bunch of skinhead neo-Nazis who never have attained any kind of critical mass or influence. Instead, it comes from radical Islam which has now a massive influence in academia, mainstream media, the United Nations and its pathetic organizations such as its Human Rights Council (formerly chaired by Gaddafi’s Libya and other Muslim countries. These Muslim counties have expelled some 800,000 Jews from their ancestral homes in Muslim countries and are now in the process of terrorizing and expelling their Christian populations.)\\\\\\\\\\\ But even mainstream Jewish organizations were so much the prisoner of their liberal relativistic wishful thinking, that they continued to advocate putting resources into fighting neo-Nazis, and would not raise any red flags about the immigration to our countries of people who had been brainwashed, and still believed in, the most vile anti-Semitic nonsense. Funding of university chairs and student groups and NGOs by seriously anti-Semitic organizations or countries was simply ignored even by Jewish organizations. As I have written in my book, TOLERism, Jews started adopting the irreligious western liberal value of “tolerance” as the most important value, instead of “justice”. Because of that ideological confusion, it was considered “intolerant” to even inquire whether new immigrants from Muslim countries were trying to get away from the anti-Semitic, anti-feminist, anti-gay and anti-liberal and pro-Sharia Muslim countries (in which case they should be welcomed) or whether they were immigrating to help spread Jihad and Sharia Law in connection with the goal of a global Caliphate, in which case our immigration officials should say “no thanks”. Imagine how it feels to watch the country you love import people who have been trained to hate you. With what is perceived by too many confused people as a relentless march of Islam to primacy in much of the world, there is a disturbing trend for our intellectual elites to not just appease Islamist hatred and terrorism, but to in fact embrace it. Radical feminist organizations have turned their backs on such intellectual and moral leaders as the great Phyllis Chesler in their rush to support countries that oppress women as wives, and daughters, who practice genital mutilation, honour killings and a culture of rape. Gays who are more about hatred than gay rights are running out of targets in the West that is fast accepting their equal rights, and so they make common cause with Islamists who torture gays as they promote violence against the one country in the Middle East that respects and honours gays (where they have been allowed to serve openly as gays when most Western armies forbade it, or like America, had a “don’t ask, don’t tell policy.” Newspapers with complete freedom of the press advocated on behalf of movements that will not tolerate such freedom and university professors in the thousands obsess against real or imagined slights by Israel, as it fights against the eternal aggression of much of the world. These professors have no sympathies with Israel’s free media, parliament, and universities as they debate where or in fact whether some freedoms must be limited in times of security threats. (The United States, even under Obama, differentiates between the rights of enemy combatants and citizens, and Canada, in the face of minor violence by Quebec Separatists, suspended freedoms in its War Measure Act, but the Western academics focus only on Israel, a land so small that from higher elevations you can see right across the width of the country.)\\\\\\\\\\\ Alas, all of these confused people advocate unrestricted tolerance for everyone except the state that must continuously fight for its very existence and for whom Islamists and their leftist sycophants still challenge its very right to exist.\\\\\\\\\\ It has been left to those who have experienced the totalitarianism of the left in Communist Russia like Natan Scharansky (or those whose parents were leading Soviet dissidents, like Jamie Glazov) to explain the facts of life to those who have only known freedom and who are willing to sacrifice freedom to twisted notions of tolerance. I have written that this tolerance may in fact be based on a type of Cultural Stockholm Syndrome, or a feeling that liberals cannot win this fight (partly because of the significant amount of self-hatred in our elites) and that we have fallen in love with our tormenters.\\\\\\\\\\ Israelis have found that it is terrible to be facing endless existential concerns, where the international community through the pathetic United Nations spends most of its time passing resolutions against just one country, while ignoring active genocides by Islamists (Darfur, Kurdistan, against Coptic Christians in Egypt and Orthodox Christians in Iraq and even the genocides against Christians in Indonesia – another Muslim country bizarrely praised by Obama recently for being tolerant and respecting diversity).\\\\\\\\\\\\ Israel’s politics can be brutal, and I have hypothesized that the reason is that when you are facing eternal threats, every policy has existential ramifications, leading the parties to allege that its opponents are not just wrong, but are endangering the existence of the country and the very lives of its citizens. Might the never before seen levels of acrimony between the Left and the Right in the United States be attributed to this same worry – that the existence of the U.S. as the historical beacon of freedom and liberal justice in the world is giving way to a mushy Obamaistic worship of “tolerance” and cultural relativism, and the notion that radical Islam may ultimately become a stronger force in the future of the world?\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Scharansky has patiently and completely answered those who seek to differentiate their “anti-Zionism” and “anti-Israelism” from “anti-Semitism”. He has famously written that the criticisms of the Jewish homeland transition from political or cultural criticism to outright anti-Semitism by the measure of his “3D Test”. Such criticisms, says Scharansky, pass into anti-Semitism when they are based on one of the following D’s:\\\\\\\\\\\ 1. The remarks demonize Israel, by saying, for example, that the Israelis are “Nazis” or “Nazi-like” in response to the constant terrorism and states of war against it. 2. The remarks delegitimize Israel by saying, like most Muslim majority countries do, that it has “no right to exist” or should be “wiped off the earth”.\\\\\\\\\\\ 3. The remarks apply a double standard to Israel that is applied to no other country. And so we live in a world that praises Islamist backed revolutions in the Middle East where democracy is confused by our media with liberal democracy (with which radical Islam is incompatible and with which any Islamic government has yet to comply). Our media fails to report on anti-Semitic chants and posters on the streets of Cairo, and many failed to mention that when non-Jewish CBS reporter Lara Logan was gang raped by supposedly pro-freedom demonstrators, they taunted her with the words, “Jew, Jew” as they attacked her to show their utter contempt.\\\\\\\\ This world advocates helping revolutionaries in Egypt or Libya, regardless of their positions on liberal and human rights, women’s rights, Christian or Jewish rights, or rights for gays. But this world does not want to “meddle” when anti-Islamist revolutions arise in Iran. (Such was Obama’s excuse for not helping Iran’s green movement in its attempt to cast off the Islamofascist government of the mullahs fronted by the nasty Ahmadinejad.)\\\\\\\\\\\ Now, back to Jew-Hatred Week. A coalition of Islamist student groups and radical Leftists a few years ago came up with the brilliant idea of creating an Israel Apartheid Week. No matter that Apartheid is a completely inappropriate term when applied to Israeli matters. Gender apartheid, religious apartheid, sexual orientation apartheid are of course attributes of Arab or Islamist governments, not Israel. We all know that often the bigger the lie, the more easily it is believed. Israel had to put up a big wall separating some Arab towns from the rest of Israel, but that of course was the result of two years of suicide bombing by Arab young people walking across where there was no wall, killing women and children, and remembered by their proud parents, and promised “72 Virgins in Heaven”. So that wall is not symptomatic of Apartheid, just a security barrier which has vastly decreased the number of suicide bombings. Imagine being hated for protecting your citizens with a wall that you never wanted to build, but which was forced upon you. Then, there is the allegation that Israel is guilty of Apartheid because Jews can automatically move to Israel and acquire citizenship but the millions of Arabs who want to come and turn Israel into more Muslim territory cannot. Never mind that there are 22 Arab countries and never mind that the Jews, probably the most persecuted people in history, and who lived historically in Israel, need to have a safe haven, thanks to the very types of intellectuals, religious figures and professors who are leading the charge against Jewish rights today.\\\\\\\\\\\\ But thanks to Noam Chomsky and a handful of self-hating Jews like the failed academic Norman Finkelstein, words today are unashamedly bastardized to stand for the opposite of what they should mean. Orwell’s predictions have come true. \\\\\\\\\ Radical leftists like the hateful Canadian mother-daughter team of Bonnie and Naomi Klein obsess about Israel. Naomi (whose Jewish husband now reports for the very illiberal Al-Jazeera) says in fact Israel “profits” from terrorism because it has had to develop expertise in anti-terrorism measures and its sells such expertise and consulting around the world). Bonnie was recently quoted in the Vancouver Sun saying that the leftist feminist organization Code Pink is a new and delightful approach that is both “powerful and hilarious.” An organization which in any other era would be indicted for treason by supporting America’s enemies in the War on Terror (sic) is termed by Mother Klein to be delightful and hilarious.\\\\\\\\ While Code Pink escapes the consequences of its fundamentally treasonous character, a Jewish American named Jonathan Pollard who passed military secrets to Israel, which American presidents keep referring to as an American ally, has been rotting away in jail with a life sentence for a crime whose average jail term was theretofore 2.5 years. Palestinians and their leftist supporters continue to make allegations that are untrue and that have been well studied and proven to be untrue: for example, the allegations that Arabs cannot buy land in Israel, that there was a massacre of Palestinian civilians in Jenin, and the various staged videos that are fictional attempts to show Israel attacking civilians, when Israel goes further than any other country when it comes to avoiding civilian casualties, even to the point of jeopardizing the lives of their own soldiers.\\\\\\\\\\ Last year, I realized that the very first Israel Apartheid Week (it has now spread to 55 campuses) took place at my alma mater, the University of Toronto. I checked on the internet, and I saw that David Naylor, the University of Toronto President, was defending his university’s hosting of this event, by citing freedom of expression and respect for diversity. This was not only offensive to me, but I thought this was puerile (even accounting for the fact that Naylor’s background is in science and medicine rather than the social sciences or the humanities.) I wrote a protest letter that the issue was academic standards, not freedom of expression. I argued that the university would hardly agree to host a conference claiming that all professors are fascists and the reason for that would not be restricting freedom of expression but restricting the university’s facilities to those whose agenda met certain standards of intellectual honesty, fairness and respect. Alas, I could have been talking to the wall. It was not a dialogue he wished to enter. And so, I returned both of my degrees to the University, stating that I was ashamed to have them on my wall, indicating my affiliation with the first university in the world to host Israel Apartheid Week.\\\\\\\\\ This year’s Israel Apartheid Week has just started. It has even spread to a small satellite campus of Waterloo’s Wilfrid Laurier University situated in Brantford Ontario, where I do some of my affordable housing and other development. Brantford is also home to one Mahmoud Issa Mohammad, who in the 1970s was part of a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine squad that hijacked an El Al Israel airlines plane in Athens and killed a passenger. He was jailed temporarily in Greece, until some of his colleagues in turn hijacked a Greek Olympic Airways jet and threatened to blow it up, unless he and the others were released, which of course Greece did. He illegally entered Canada, and one of my law school classmates acts as his lawyer and has successfully tied up our Government in court for 17 years delaying his extradition from Canada. It is strange to label Israel “Apartheid” when:\\\\\\\\\ 1. Omar Barghouti, a leading advocate of boycotting Israel and a resident of Ramallah is also a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University. 2. Haifa University is 25% Arab and the Hebrew University is 10% Arab, and yes, they attend the same classes and use the same washrooms. 3. Arabs vote and have representation in the Israeli parliament and there are Arab Israeli diplomats and an Arab member of the Israeli Supreme Court. 4. An Israeli Arab is captain of the HaPoel Tel Aviv soccer team. 5. Tens of thousands of Black Jews from Ethiopia and Brown Jews from India have all been welcomed into Israel. 6. An Arab Israeli young woman singer represented Israel at the 2009 Eurovision song contest. 7. Rona Raslan, an Arab, is the former “Miss Israel”. 8. Druse Arabs (who support the state of Israel) have served as ambassadors, army officers, even as Deputy Prime Minister. 9. Thousands of non-Jewish black African refugees make a long trek through Egypt on foot and try to immigrate to the Jewish state because they would rather live there than in Africa. 10. There are discriminatory laws against Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan and few Israeli Arabs would want to trade Israeli citizenship for Jordanian or Egyptian. 11. The Palestinian Authority has said that any Arabs who sell land to Jews should be put to death, (and have in fact put some to death), but when a far-right wing Israeli Rabbi told his followers not to sell land to Arabs, there was a national outcry and wave of condemnation against him. 12. Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority has said that no Israeli Jew should be allowed to live in a future Palestinian State on the West Bank, but he will not sign a peace treaty unless Israel accepts about a million Palestinians. As I walk through Brantford and Toronto this week, I definitely feel the cold chill of Israel Apartheid Week, which for both my father and I, is really Jew-Hatred Week. Are we in Canada and the U.S. far off from the situation in France and some other European countries where it is unsafe for identifiable Jews to walk near Muslim neighbourhoods? And so the circle extends from 1930s Lodz Poland to 2011 University of Toronto and 54 other universities around the world. To those who hate me, my 90 year old father, my one year old grand-daughter and all the rest of my People, we see right through your stupid Israel Apartheid Week; we know it is another Jew-Hatred Week. You are not at all original; you are just the latest in a long line of immoral people who seek to escape their own responsibility to improve the world by scapegoating the world’s most consistent champions of Justice and making us the most consistent objects of hatred. \\\\\\\\\\\ Howard Rotberg is the author of various books including The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author and TOLERism: The Ideology Revealed. He is president of Mantua Books (www.mantuabooks.com) and is an active developer of housing, with a special interest in affordable housing for low income working people. 000000000\\\\\\\\