Monday, February 21, 2011

PC and Zionhass a Marriage Made in Hades (and on Campus)

Lumpy, Grumpy & Frumpy reports that a move to boycott Israel is underway at the University of Ottawa. You may recall that this is the domain of Francois Houle, the raving loony/PC inquisitioner who warned Ann Coulter, prior to her delivering a speech that never came to pass, to tailor her comments in keeping with Canada's "hate speech" laws. It is thus no surprise that Zionhass would take hold in such an excruciatingly sensitif environment--and so it has. Here's a description of zany BDS types, of the kind you'll find at the U of O and other Canuckian campuses, doing what they do best (i.e. worst), from the exhilaratingly anti-PC British novel Crump 
[Crump] saw that the protesters were almost exlusively bearded and robed men and burqa women, presumably from the Abdullah building, and the Centre for Islamic Studies. There were a few non-bearded and non-burqa-ed students too, who were supposedly 'socialist workers' according to their placards, though their absence from lectures seemed to suggest they were more socialist than worker. The placards this time did not display anti-fascist and anti-BNP designs. Instead they displayed anti-Israel slogans, including several accusing Israel of being a Nazi state with swastikas and stars of David intertwined, and lots of references to concentration camps and Israeli fascism and 'innocent' Palestinian Muslims.
From what Crump could see, some bordered on the anti-Semitic. In fact, some were anti-Semitic, but carefully used the word 'Zionist' instead of 'Jew' in their insults - (the latter would have broken the Race Relations Act and got the protesters arrested) - and they seemed to be accusing Israel of being the equivalent of Nazi Germany, or even worse...
It seemed strange to him that Israel was being singled out for exclusion like this. It was, after all, the only democracy in the Middle East, where freedom of worship was allowed, and which had a free press and freedom of speech, unlike the Muslim-ruled countries surrounding it, most of whom were rather brutal dictatorships which actively wanted to destroy Israel and rid the world of all Jews - this was, perhaps, the cause of occasional Israeli paranoia.

The Abdullah building and the Centre for Islamic Studies had been funded but a Saudi Arabian regime that was fascist in all but name, which publicly beheaded people without trial - (often poor foreign nationals from Asia who hadn't even been given an interpreter in their show trials) - every Friday after prayers, and which had only outlawed slavery in the 1960s. And yet Arab academics or universities weren't banned, and neither were academics from other totalitarian states like China, or Russia, or the multifarious others in the Third World. It seemed to Crump, though he was no expert, that Israel was being picked on and unfairly singled out for criticism, and wondered if this was because of the traditional siding of many left-wingers with the Arab world, much as the Soviet Union had done with its traditional anti-Semitism, or perhaps because of the political influence of the large Muslim community in the UK.
A man who manifests reason and common sense: you know he's going to be squashed like a bug in this inhospitably Orwellian climate. (I'm not sure how well Crump stands up as literature, but as a satire on the current scene, it is probably without peer.)

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