Monday, August 22, 2011

Three Bollocksy Letters and One That's Right On

These letters, responding to Saturday's article in the Globe and Mail about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (a.k.a. the "human rights" mausoleum), appear in today's paper. The first one, by David Schatzky of Toronto, thinks the Holocaust is a genocide like any other, and thus should not get preferential treatment:
We may call ourselves the “chosen people” but no Jew, including my grandmother murdered by the Nazis at Dachau, chose to be a victim of genocide (Rights & Wrongs – Focus, Aug. 20). Nor did 6 million Ukrainians, 2 million Cambodians, or hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, Igbos and Kurds.
The Canadian Museum of Human Rights must acknowledge mass slaughter of all human beings as having the same meaning. If not, the message will be one of racial superiority, quite opposed to the museum’s stated purpose.
Spoken by the type of Jew who either has no inkling about the singularity--the particularity--of the Holocaust, or who does, but who thinks that acknowledging it somehow goes against Canada's spirit of multiculti.

Next up: R.W. Zakaluzy, Chair of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association. For obvious reasons (i.e. that in its current configuration, the mausoleum doesn't give equal space to the Ukrainian Holodomor), R.W. grouses about the unfairness of it all. He wants the government to step in and rectify the muddle:
All 12 galleries in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights should be comparative, inclusive and thematic. No community’s suffering should be elevated above all others.
Yet the CMHR’s CEO, Stuart Murray, and most of its board ignores this. The only remedy now is for the federal government to remove Mr. Murray and reconstitute the board to make it more representative. Then, as Michael Marrus suggests, the government should find someone of sufficient intellectual integrity and experience to rethink what the CMHR should be about..
What is it about? More to the point, why are we validating "human rights" at a time time when the entire concept has been hijacked and thrown into disrepute by the control freaks of the UN "human rights" racket along with our very own appalling "human rights" apparatus?

Neither of those queries are posed by the next letter-writer, a gent who, in a rather Obamaesque manner, draws a direct line between the  Holocaust and what Arabs call their "Nakba":
 As victims of the victims of the Holocaust, the Palestinians played no part in the tragedies that befell the Jews in Europe. Yet the victims of the Holocaust punished them through ethnic cleansing, dispossession, discrimination and occupation, resulting in what the Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe).
Both the Holocaust and the Nakba are thus intimately linked. Were they twinned as organically connected acts in one installation, the museum would go some way toward earning its name.
Karim Durzi, Toronto
"Twinning" the Shoah and the Naqba: how perfectly mad--and what a perfect example of the deranged Zionhass that threatens to bring about a second Holocaust.

Finally, here's a welcome blast of common sense and erudition courtesy Michael Johnson of Toronto:
The classic definition of “museum” is “a place dedicated to the muses.” These were the nine acolytes of the Greek god Apollo, the god of art and learning. Human rights was not one of the categories, although Clio, patroness of history, would surely be relevant to the Winnipeg institution.
However there is one Greek mythological figure with more relevance: Eris, the goddess of discord. Perhaps Winnipeg is the site of the world’s first Eriseum.
Good one, Mike.

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