Xtra's Ad Hominem Attack

Gay rag Xtra does a hatchet job on Martin Gladstone, the gay mover and shaker who got "Israeli aparatheid" thrown out of the Pride parade. Interestingly, Xtra uses Jonathan Kay's contentions about B'nai Brith anti-Semitic "hate crime" stats to try to discredit Gladstone, here demonized as a "right-wing" trouble-maker:

...Enter Martin Gladstone, who at least is gay, (his website tells us he lives in the upper beach with his partner and their two dogs).

Gladstone, who seems to have done a quick study of basic propaganda techniques, whipped out a video camera and produced his movie. Whenever the QuAIA contingent is shown, menacing music is played. The sound of chants is distorted so that Gladstone can substitute his own version with subtitles, and to mask the cheers heard from the crowds as QuAIA passes by. His film obsesses on a single anti-Nazi T-shirt (showing a crossed out swastika) worn by one marcher, that he has alternately characterized as “Nazi memorabilia” or an accusation that Israel is a Nazi state. (The right wing media has now distorted that T-shirt into a veritable army of pro-Nazis.) But central to the movie’s strategy are interviews with people who recount how frightened QuAIA made them feel.

One interview, however, unwittingly gives the game away: Justine Apple, ED of Kulanu Toronto, a Jewish LGBT social group, recounts how she received a call from the police Hate Crimes Unit before the parade. “The tension in my heart just increased as soon as I received phone calls from the Toronto police…these people who were holding these anti-Israel messages in the parade suddenly had been built up in everyone’s heads, that it was a serious thing that they might pose a security risk, that there might end up being violence, and that’s why it led to a lot of tension and fear.”

Gladstone, like B’nai Brith, created a threat where one never existed. There were never any problems between QuAIA and Kulanu, and we posed no threat to anybody in the parade. But because of Gladstone, the Jewish social group was terrified and Pride was forced to waste money for extra police; and then these facts became talking points in his ongoing campaign with the city to cut funding...

In its zeal to defend Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, Xtra has conflated--and grossly misrepresented--two separate things: BB's "hate" stats, and Gladstone's activism. For while the BB stats may indeed give a false picture of Canadian Judeophobia, obsessed as they are with capturing every last swastika scrawled on buildings and in public washrooms, the fact is that Queers Against Israeli Apartheid do pose a threat--a real one, and a big one. They are the tip of the iceberg and emblamatic of the Judeophobia of today, the hate that focuses obsessively and irrationally not on the "Jew" (because that would be bigoted) but on the Israel, the Jewish State, and the Jew of nations.

That Xtra outright refuses to acknowledge this threat is an indication that its leftist world view has fatally compromised both its integrity and its judgement.