Garbanzo Toons

Hate Crimes in Canada

I saw the report, but I forget where I saw it originally, that in Canada, where Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently proclaimed and demonstrated his unwavering support for Israel, that 71 percent of hate crimes of a religious nature in 2009, were committed against Jews. While I appreciate Harper's principled stand on Israel, something needs to be done about the attacks against Jews in Canada. The first thing that needs to be done is to ask the simple question: who is doing the attacking? That was my first question. That was Barry Rubin's question too.

Now the figures for "hate crimes" in Canada have been issued and guess what? Like the FBI's statistics for the United States, the number one victims of hate crimes are...Jews. Indeed, 71 percent of the hate crimes in the religion category are against Jews. The Jewish proportion of Canada's population? Around 1 percent. That's 71 percent of the hate crimes on a religious basis against 1 percent of the population.

For Canada, 4 per cent of the crimes were motivated by race or ethnicity, 29 per cent by religion and 13 per cent by sexual orientation

Makes you think, right?

Apparently not. Because the report is vague about just who might be attacking Jews and why these numbers have tended to rise. Skin-heads? Neo-Nazis? Russian peasant pogroms? Crusaders? The Klu Klux Klan? Peronists? Anti-Dreyfusards? Know-Nothings? Knights of the Camellia? Republicans? Tea-Partiers?

Because if we don't know who did it, then how can the situation be improved? Was it Anglicans? Bahai? Catholics? Dunkers? Episcopalians (oh, wait, they're the same thing as Anglicans), Franciscan monks or Fire-worshippers? Greek Orthodox? Hawaiian traditionalists? Idolotors or Illerati or Inuit? Jacobites? Kansans? Lutherans?

Of course, we know that answer to the question. And for those who are still having difficulty admitting to the answer, let me help by asking, which religion do you desperately try not to think of when you read reports like this?

Right.

Exactly.

But to admit to anti-Semitic attacks by Muslims destroys the "Muslim as victim of Western Society" paradigm that must be upheld at all costs, no matter what kind of mental gymnastics are required to maintain that ridiculous idea. There are people who will fight tooth and nail to force that paradigm on others and battle fiercely against those who point out its falseness. And some of them aren't Muslims. They are the happy dhimmis.

Labels: Barry Rubin, Canada, hate crime, islam, Israel, Muslim anti-semitism, Muslims, Stephen Harper

posted by Harry @ 5:43 PM 0 comments

Getting It and Not Getting It

I meant to post this many weeks ago. I meant to do a lot of things weeks ago, but as we all know, sometimes life has other plans. Nothing major happened, except for my wife's appendectomy a week and a half ago, but just a lot of little things. So while the articles I'm referring to are a bit dated, they're still valuable because they still speak for certain portions of our population and distill their thought processes.

Leonard Pitts is an obviously intelligent writer who, along with millions of others in the Western world, find myriad ways to avoid admitting the truth. You know the truth I speak of. It has to do with Islam and terrorism, that unavoidable connection between the two. The connection that can't be admitted if one is a member of the "What, me islamophobe?" community. Here is Pitts' most recent obfuscation.

Even after Oct. 1, 1910, when a bomb destroyed the Los Angeles Times building and killed 20 men.

And Nov. 24, 1917, when 10 people died in the bombing of a police station in Milwaukee.

And Sept. 16, 1920, when 38 people lost their lives in a bombing on Wall Street.

And May 18, 1927, when 45 people, most of them children, died in a school bombing in Bath Township, Mich.

And Sept. 15, 1963, when four little girls died in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

And Feb. 26, 1993, when a bomb in a basement of the World Trade Center left six people dead.

And April 19, 1995 when a truck bomb destroyed a federal building in Oklahoma City, claiming 168 lives.

And Sept. 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people were killed by hijackers who used captured jetliners as guided missiles.

Read more: here.

But notice how far back in time Pitts has to travel in order to find his non-Islamic terrorist (or should I say "extremist", or "militant", or "activist"?) attacks. He is unwilling to face the fact that since 9/11, there have been over 15,000 terrorist attacks by "a tiny minority" of members of the Religion of Peace. Does it make a person "islamophobic" to keep track of these attacks? Or even to notice them and point them out? Apparently to Pitts, it does. And it also destroys the moral equivalency argument that so many on the left who don't want to slight the Muslim community for excusing or ignoring the terrorists in their midst.

On the other hand, there's Mark Steyn. He is brave enough to even face Obama.

Like a lot of guys who’ve been told they’re brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, and doesn’t always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl, upon signing the “Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act.”

Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That’s how I’d put it.

This is what the president of the United States said: “Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.”

Now Obama’s off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he’s talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased’s family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it’s the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving, and true. Indeed, for Obama, it’s the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above. Which, in its clumsiness and insipidness, is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: “The loss of Daniel Pearl.” He wasn’t “lost.” He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his “loss” merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

But then, Obama gets it about as well as Pitts does. The tragedy of Obama not getting it is that he is the leader of the free world.

Of course, Steyn has paid for being politically incorrect, for pointing out that, not only is the emperor wearing no clothes, but the terrorists are wearing Islamic garb. He was sued by a Canadian Muslim organization and brought up on charges by the misnamed Canadian Human Rights Commission. That's what you get when you refuse to submit, and when you refuse to exchange the truth for lies and then believe the lies and condemn the truth.

But those are the people we need to get us through these troubled times . . . and into the next troubled times.

Labels: Canada, islam, Leonard Pitts, Mark Steyn, terrorism

posted by Harry @ 2:35 PM 1 comments

George Orwell on Anti-Semitism

George Orwell had this to say about British anti-Semitism sometime during World War Two. Among some of the more interesting points of his essay:

I could fill pages with similar remarks, but these will do to go on
with. Two facts emerge from them. One--which is very important and which
I must return to in a moment--is that above a certain intellectual level
people are ashamed of being antisemitic and are careful to draw a
distinction between "antisemitism" and "disliking Jews". The other is
that antisemitism is an irrational thing. The Jews are accused of
specific offences (for instance, bad behaviour in food queues) which the
person speaking feels strongly about, but it is obvious that these
accusations merely rationalise some deep-rooted prejudice.

Notice anything familiar? Today's Jew haters insist that they are only "anti-Zionists". They love Jews, that is Jews who will denounce Zionism and Israel.

It so happens that the war has encouraged the growth of antisemitism and
even, in the eyes of many ordinary people, given some justification for
it. To begin with, the Jews are one people of whom it can be said with
complete certainty that they will benefit by an Allied victory.
Consequently the theory that "this is a Jewish war" has a certain
plausibility, all the more so because the Jewish war effort seldom gets
its fair share of recognition.

So the only reason the allies fought against the Nazis during WWII was because of the Jews? Sure it sounds stupid, but it's no more idiotic (well, maybe it is) than the fools today who insist that anti-Zionism is not Jew-hatred and that 9/11 benefited Israel (how?), that the U.S. invasion of Iraq benefited Israel, even though Israelis would have been much happier to see the Iranian government being overthrown. Back in March, a Fatah official was killed by a car bomb in Lebanon. So, using the typically twisted logic of Jew-haters throughout history, there is at least one idiot insinuating that Israel must be the culprit, because - yep - Israel benefits from a dead Fatah official.

Apparently anything that has happened throughout history that has been good for Jews or for Israel is suspect, and was probably carried out by Jews or encouraged by the shadowy Israel lobby. The founding of the United States has certainly been good for both Jews and for Israel. Therefore the Mossad/Jews/Israel/AIPAC/Israel Lobby must have had their sinister hand in it. After all, except for benefitting the Jews, what good has the United States done in the world? I'm sure that Columbus would not have taken his voyage had it not been for the urging of Spanish Jews.

To publicise the exploits of Jewish soldiers, or even to admit the existence of a considerable Jewish army in the Middle East, rouses hostility in South Africa, the Arab countries and elsewhere: it is easier to ignore the whole subject and allow the man in the street to go on thinking that Jews are exceptionally
clever at dodging military service.

Today's mainstream media have certainly been complicit in desperately trying to avoid bruising the delicate feelings of our Islamic neighbors. Facts can be twisted into lies to avoid humiliating or insulting Muslims. In some countries, Canada and the Netherlands come to mind, one can be put on trial for insulting Islam. Not all freedoms are restricted though. It's still OK to attack Jews.

There are things that don't change, but only evolve. Anti-Semitism is one of them.

Labels: anti-semitism, Canada, George Orwell, Jews, Netherlands

posted by Harry @ 7:44 PM 3 comments

Of Course She Wants It Both Ways

This editorial by Michael Coren needs no comment.

It's the age-old question that all young Canadian university students have to face as they enjoy their publicly funded years at college pretending to receive an education. How do we guarantee a woman's right to abort a Zionist?

The issue is particularly troubling to Gilary Massa, vice-president external of the York Federation of Students in Toronto. She and her friends have introduced a ban on all student organizations that oppose abortion and believe that life begins at conception.

"You have to recognize that a woman has a choice over her own body", said Comrade Massa, presumably hoping to graduate in Hilarious Cliche Studies. "We think that these pro-life, anti-choice groups, they're sexist in nature. Is this an issue of free speech? No, this is an issue of women's rights."

Idiocy aside, there are some problems here with what used to be known as good old hypocrisy. Just a few months ago the same young lady was one of the leaders of a campaign to allow the term "Israeli apartheid" to be used on Canadian campuses. Jewish students and the mass of their non-Jewish colleagues considered the phrase deeply offensive when applied to a democratic country founded by victims of international racism and genocide.

For the record, I don't think the term "Israeli apartheid" should be censored. Yes, it is offensive, stupid, and factually inaccurate, but it does tell us a lot about the idiot who uses it and tries to pass it off as the truth.

If Canadians (and I know this is not true of all Canadians) want to live in a society where thoughts can be considered criminal, and thereby suppressed they are welcome to it, but they shouldn't be surprised if they end up on the wrong end of a thought crime lawsuit. At the very least, they will lose rights once considered sacred in a free society.

P.S. You can find more liberal fascist mental gymnastics from Gilary Massa here.

The student government at York University yesterday voted unanimously to deny "resources, space, recognition or funding" to student clubs or individuals "whose primary or sole purpose" is to oppose abortion.

"Our summer quorum is eight [members], so we surpassed our quorum," said Gilary Massa, vice-president external of the York Federation of Students, who said she did not know how many people actually voted.

"The York Federation of Students respects and affirms a woman's right to choose," the policy reads. "No YFS resources, space, recognition or funding will be allocated to enhance groups or individuals whose primary or sole purpose is anti-choice activities. Such activities would be defined as any campaign, action, distribution, solicitation, lobbying efforts, etc., that seeks to limit the individual's right to choose what they can or cannot do with one's own body."

However,

She said the student body was outraged in March when a member of the Genocide Awareness Project -- a university -targeted poster campaign of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a privately funded U. S. organization with a Canadian branch in Alberta -- came to campus for a debate hosted by the debating club. The ensuing controversy led to this policy, which Ms. Massa said is not a ban of antiabortion groups, but rather a "limitation of resources."

"They are able to conduct their activity, they just are not able to take advantage of the student union resources," she said.

She said the YFS has democratic processes in place to ensure application of the policy will be fair.

The scary part, of course, is that Massa is not and cannot do this alone. She has the support of the student government at York U. in her quest to destroy freedom in order to save it.

Labels: Canada, censorship, Gilary Massa, hypocrisy

posted by Harry @ 7:47 PM 2 comments