The Big Bump Theory

The Toronto Star's Martin Knelman details the unanticipated bumps along the way in fulfilling the Asper family's dream of building a national "human rights" mausoleum in the heart of frosty Winnipeg:

Bump One: Not all the wealthy friends Izzy was counting on were willing to invest in a museum.

Bump Two: Costs escalated alarmingly and frequently for 11 years.

Bump Three: When Paul Martin became prime minister, he was reluctant to honour Chretien’s commitment — although in the end he came through with $100 million to help build the museum, marvelling like everyone else at Gail Asper’s powers of persuasion.

Bump Four: Convincing Stephen Harper (who won the 2006 federal election) to make the CMHR a national museum and provide $22 million of annual federal operating funds.

Bump Five: When it did become a national museum, the Aspers had to give up control of some key matters. Stuart Murray became CEO, and many people were hired — some of whom eventually left.

Bump Six: A nasty, image-damaging public spat seemed to spin out of control after the Canadian Ukrainian Congress demanded that the Holodomor (the famine suffered by the Soviet-controlled Ukraine in 1932-33) be given a separate gallery and equal treatment with the Holocaust.

Ultimately, sanity will prevail, as expressed in a Winnipeg Free Press editorial, which called the Ukrainian campaign parochial and said it had lost credibility in its effort to reduce the destruction of European Jewry to just another genocide...

Alas, I highly doubt sanity will--or even can--prevail due to the biggest bump of all: how "human rights" has been perverted in our time; how every day this perversion is used as a sledge hammer by some of the rottenest people on the planet in order to: stifle "blasphemous" speech about Islam (a requirement of the sharia version of "human rights"--see the Cairo Declaration); trash the world's sole Jewish state; and generally lord it over those who refuse to get with the agenda of the Islamist/Leftist/ UN control freaks. The Aspers' project--originally intended to be the Canadian Holocaust Museum--was ill-conceived from the get-go, and, bump, bump, bump, it has nowhere to go but down.