It's the Perfect Blendship!

Here's a marriage made in Hades--that of the freedom-hating Left and the sharia-heeding Islamists. If you listen up you can hear them sing this delightful duet:

[Islamists]
If you're ever up a creek, call a sheik.

[Leftists]
If you're ever get "profiled," we'll go wild.

[Islamists] 
If you ever feel so angry at the "Zionists,"
Let's raise our fists!

[BOTH]
It's friendship, friendship,
Just a perfect blendship.
When other friendships have up and died
Ours'll reign world-wide!
Lahdle-ahdle-ahdle-nyah-nyah-nyah...

An 'Expert' 'Splains Our Reaction to Nekkidness

In the National Post, "expert" Brian Ferris (he's "a psychologist from North Vancouver, B.C.") attempts to account for our aversion to public nekkidness, offering these three reasons:

1 It is the fault of our parents. When we were children, our parents discouraged us from showing our genitals at a certain point, and made us uncomfortable with running around naked. "That's parental teaching and we never quite overcome it," said Dr. Ferris.

2 Nudity causes conflicted feelings. "At one level we want to accept it, and at another level we want to condemn it," Dr. Ferris said. "When we have conflicting feelings inside us, that causes stress that leads to anxiety."

3 Nudity forces us to make the connection between nudity and sex. Dr. Ferris said young children will not feel the least bit self-conscious at a nude beach or a nudist colony. But when they hit their teenage years, suddenly it becomes very weird. "At that point the nude other person can potentially provoke feelings. And we become anxious because we're pushing down our feelings. What makes us anxious is not the feeling of attraction but trying to get rid of the feelings. It has little to do with morality."

Me, I'm no psychologist, but I don't think that 'splains it. From my own experience of seeing nekkid people of both genders on beaches in Europe, I think it's really a question of aesthetics. That is, there is nothing visually appealing--and plenty that's visually assaultive (their nekkidness being literally "in your face")--about the sight of hefty, bare-assed, past their best-before date folks who are over-inflated in some bodily regions and grossly deflated in others.

Simple as that, really.

And I don't know about you but I have never--no, not even once--made the connection between nudity and sex when encountering ugly naked people on the beach. If anything, the sight acts as the equivalent of a cold shower.

Survival of the Fittest Politician?

"Ignatieff evolving into a politician" reads the headline above a John Ivison piece in the National Post. That assertion immediately brought to mind a line of dialogue I've always remembered. It's from an old Hill Street Blues episode and it goes like this: "Some of us evolve. Others of us mutate."

I'd put Iggy in the latter category, I think.

The Perils of Commemoration

I have no problem memorializing the Holocaust. I do, however, have a big problem when the specificity of the Holocaust becomes subsumed into some squishy, "universal," Kumbaya-ish message about generalized hatred against generalized people. I think the Holocaust must be remembered as something that happened to the Jews at a specific time in history for very specific reasons, ones which cannot be equated with what happened in, say, Rwanda or Sudan. If we fail to emphasize the Holocaust's uniquely Jewish nature, the point we are trying to make about it--that it should serve as a warning to mankind to recognize when another Shoah is looming and do its utmost to put the brakes on it--will ultimately be lost.

But, hey, that's just me. And here in Canada, my home and native land, that way of looking at things puts me woefully out of step with those who speak for the Jewish community. For not only are they eager to universalize the Holocaust by having it take its place in the pantheon of genocides, they are so clueless, so hopelessly "multicultural," that they would freight it "human rights" baggage. As if those six million did not die in vain; as if they died so that our planet's and our country's cockamamie "human rights" apparatus could live.

This morning a friend send me a Ceej communique--a reprint of an editorial that appeared in the Halifax paper--in which the outfit pats itself furiously on the back for getting the feds to pony up big bucks (500 Gs, I believe) for a memorial to the St. Louis Jews. In case you haven't seen it, it looks like this and is described thus:

The gears turning on the memorial, called Wheels of Conscience, illustrate how hatred can beget racism, then xenophobia, and then widespread anti-Semitism.

As I commented to my friend, that is utter bollocks, a gross misunderstanding/over-simplification of Judenhass and why the Holocaust occurred. Framing it in this way will do nothing to save the Jews of today from another maelstrom and, in a horrible irony, will ensure that we here in Canada import tons more Jew-hate from the Arab/Muslim world (because to deny these poor people entry--as the Jews of the St. Louis were denied entry--would mean that we're the "racists" and "xenophobes").

Update: For sure let's import lots more Palestinians (they sing such lovely songs).

Grade 7 Fable Time

My son, who's in Grade 7, is learning about fables. This is one of the ones he had to read and answer questions about:

The Mouse, the Frog, and the Hawk

A Mouse who always lived on the land, by an unlucky chance formed an intimate acquaintance with a Frog, who lived for the most part in the water. The Frog, one day intent on mischief, bound the foot of the Mouse tightly to his own. Thus joined together, the Frog first of all led his friend the Mouse to the meadow where they were accustomed to find their food. After this, he gradually led him towards the pool in which he lived, until reaching the very brink, he suddenly jumped in, dragging the Mouse with him. The Frog enjoyed the water amazingly, and swam croaking about, as if he had done a good deed. The unhappy Mouse was soon suffocated by the water, and his dead body floated about on the surface, tied to the foot of the Frog. A Hawk observed it, and, pouncing upon it with his talons, carried it aloft. The Frog, being still fastened to the leg of the Mouse, was also carried off a prisoner, and was eaten by the Hawk.

Isn't that a delightful tale? And so full of important "moral" lessons, too. Were you to ask me what its moral was, I might reply it's that animals should shun inter-species friendships, since look where they ultimately lead. (I'm sure, in excruciatingly "multicultural" Ontario classrooms, that is most definitely not the teachable moment the curriculum-devisers had in mind.)

Apparently, though, the real lesson is: "Harm hatch, harm catch." Meaning that if you're a dickhead to your friends--like the frog is to the mouse--you're going to get your comeuppance from an animal that's bigger and stronger than you.

Or something like that.

I won't share all my son's responses to the questions he was asked (some of which made me laugh as loud and as long as I did upon reading the "animal manslaughter (so to speak)" tale. I will merely share one of them. When asked for a word to describe the mouse, my son wrote, "The word I would use to describe the mouse is 'dumb.'"

Which is a lot smarter, I think, than this silly, silly tale.

Mohammed Ashraf: Karma Chameleon

File this one under "He Who Laughs Last...": Mark Harding reminds me that Mohammed Ashraf, the ISNA Canada chief whose allegedly shady financial finagling have recently come to light, is the same dude who took it upon himself to "re-educate" Harding about Islam's teachings vis-a-vis believers and kafirs. Harding had been been send by a judge to ISNA Canada to perform menial office tasks--licking envelopes and the like--as part of the community service he had to do following a conviction for "hate speech" against Muslims. (Really, the prescient Harding had been warning people pre-9/11 of the possibility of impending attacks in North America by violent jihadis--so obviously remote a possibility in those blissfully ignorant times that what else could it be but "hate speech"?)

Continuing with the "last laugh" theme: if and when Ashraf has to perform community service, the judge should send him to do menial office tasks at, say, the church Harding attends, or at AISH.

An Ahava Update

The Bay claims it removed Ahava products from its shelves due to falling sales and because the products are currently being reformulated. The manufacter denies any reformulation is in the works. Meanwhile, the Zion-loathers are claiming a major victory in their odious BDS efforts, insisting that it's because of them that an English retailer and The Bay were persuaded to make their stores Ahavarein. (h/t VZ)

So who's telling the truth here? And will Canada's Official Jewry, which accepted The Bay's reformulation story with no questions asked, bother to seek further clarification?

Pending that clarification, I will hold off making any purchases at The Bay family of companies.

The 'Ancestral' Deception

Of all the bruited falsehoods aimed at delegitimizing the Jewish claim to Israel (and legitimizing the Arab one), the one about Arabs living in Israel "from time immemorial" (the title of a book that proves the falsity of the claim) is arguably the one with most traction. Here it is, for example in a piece in the Guardian about the Palestinian Papers leaked by Al Jazeera:

Palestinians have expressed shock and dismay at the US suggestion to settle Palestinian refugees in Argentina and Chile rather than let them return to ancestral land in Israel.

In fact, many of their "ancestors" arrived sometime in the 20th Century, because there were jobs to be had once the Jews got the place up and running. In that case, I guess "the land" could be considered "ancestral" in the "my granddad/great-granddad from Syria/Jordan/Lebanon etc. worked there in the 1920s" sense, but not in the Old Testament "Hashem led the Jewish people out of Egypt to the Promised Land" sense.

In other words, our claim predates yours, Arabs, so you have no "right" to "return" and transform the Jews' ancient, ancestral land into another failed Arab state, another member of the modern-day caliphate.

'United Nations Home Security'

Too funny! (H/T: TS)

Ugly Nekkid People Have 'Rights', Too

The "right" to flap their kit and caboodles at the unsuspecting chick manning the drive-through window at Tim Horton's, for instance. From the National Post:

Canadian laws prohibiting public nudity are an infringement of constitutional rights, an Ontario court will hear Tuesday.

Prominent defence lawyer Clayton Ruby was expected to argue current laws in Canada prohibiting nudity in public places, or on private property exposed to public view, are overly broad, and should be struck down and the laws under the Criminal Code updated.

According to the Federation of Canadian Nudists, these laws are archaic because they define nudity as generally "indecent" and intended to cause "harm" to those who witness it.

The challenge is being launched on behalf of Mr. Ruby's client, Brian Coldin, a nudist resort operator in Bracebridge, a small cottage country town about two hours north of Toronto. Mr. Coldin, who has been arrested numerous times over the years for public nudity, was charged last year with five counts related to incidents between April 2008 and May 2009 near his resort and at both Tim Hortons and A&W drive-throughs.

The criminal trial, which began last fall, heard testimony from one of the restaurant workers who cried on the stand when she described how Mr. Coldin and two others drove up to the pick-up window completely nude. She said Mr. Coldin and the driver both pretended to reach for their imaginary wallets to pay for their orders, causing their genitals to sway back and forth...

Oh those nudists! Such jokers, no?

Update: I think oppressed nudists deserve their own space in Canada's "human rights" mausoleum, don't you. It could be called "the Nudity Zone." I have no doubt it would quickly become the edifice's most popular exhibit.

A Clockwork Awful

Every eight hours, someone is hanged in Iran.