"He Had an Erotic Relationship With Big Ideas"

Part of Leon Wieseltier's moving tribute to his friend, Leonard Cohen.

How Very, Um, "Inclusive"

Extremist Cleric Banned in Pakistan but welcomed in the UK

Good rule of thumb: when it comes to banning extremist clerics, it's probably not a bad idea to take your cues from Pakistan.

G&M Editorial Downplays Canada's Looming Refugee Crisis

An editorial in the Globe & Mail agrees with a Senate report which notes that many thousands of Syrian refugees who were brought to Canada aren't learning one of Canada's two official languages quickly enough, and will therefore require further support from the feds:

It’s not the government’s fault, nor that of the refugees, that many have not fully absorbed a new language in a year, the length of the time that the government has indirectly budgeted for. English isn’t an easy language, and what’s more, it’s distant from Arabic. It’s not like the differences between Italian and French, or even German and English. 

Women refugees, in particular, run the risk of falling behind. If they stay at home, they are apt to become isolated, and they may not learn much more than rudimentary English or French. They can’t learn a language well if they don’t have jobs and daycare. 

The senators found that almost all the Syrian refugees were glad to be in Canada, and to have permanent status here. Still, this is part of the biggest displacement of people since the Second World War, and there’s bound to be some degree of post-traumatic stress syndrome that will further complicate matters, the senators said. 

There is little likelihood that Syrian refugees to Canada will become an underclass, and there is no need for quasi-permanent subsidies. But more funding to help all refugees break the language barrier would be wise. It’s a sound investment. When new Canadians succeed economically, all Canadians benefit.

Two thoughts: many of these Syrian families have a lot of children, making it next to impossible for them to shoulder the financial burden of daycare. That, along with the fact that most refugees follow a strict form of Islam which requires women to stay at home and take care of the kids, means you can be sure that more than a few of these women refugees will be "falling behind."

Also--why is there "little likelihood that Syrian refugees to Canada will become an underclass"? Doesn't the Muslim experience in places like France and Germany prove otherwise?

It all sounds like the most dangerous sort of wishful thinking to me.

UNRWA's Appeal Unpacked (And How It Impedes Any Sort of Viable "Solution")

The Hamas-linked UN agency takes care of people free of charge, an offer that many Palestinians--including those living in the overcrowded Shuafat "refugee" camp (where half the residents are not even refuges)--find irresistable:

According to this article at the official Shuafat website, since the mid 1970s, Israeli authorities have tried to get camp residents to move to other, less crowded areas of Jerusalem, especially the Arab neighborhood of Wadi el-Joz. Yet “the residents of the camp have categorically refused the Israeli offer,” claiming that it would somehow impact their “right of return.” 

In reality, it would mean that they’d have to pay rent instead of getting free housing from UNRWA. That’s the real reason they won’t move. 

The same article says that more than half of the residents at the camp are not “refugees.” They are squatters taking advantage of the lawlessness of the area. 

UNRWA should take responsibility for expelling these people — but of course UNRWA hasn’t done that for 60 years. Arabs have been moving into UNRWA camps since the 1950s to take advantage of free services, and UNRWA just lets it happen. 

The bottom line is that Israel has tried to fix the problems of Shuafat for a long time, and UNRWA has let them fester, to follow the Palestinian master plan of keeping “refugee camps” forever as a propaganda weapon against Israel.

In plain words/the appropriate cliché: UNRWA is part of the problem, not part of the solution (because that's the way to perpetuate the problems--along with UNRWA itself).

Some Common Sense From Tarek Fatah: It Isn't an Irrational, Racist "Phobia" When Some Muslims are Engaging in Armed Jihad

Partly out of leftist guilt and partly as a means of pandering to an ever-growing Muslim population, Canada's Socialist party recently spearheaded a move in parliament "condemning all forms of Islamophobia."

Tarek Fatah explains--and lambastes--the folly of measure here:

Canada’s parliamentarians led by NDP leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal MP Frank Baylis recently passed a motion “condemning all forms of Islamophobia”. 

Initially, some Conservative MPs declined to give unanimous consent, but under threat of being labelled “racist” and “Islamophobic”, unanimity was eventually achieved. 

Had the motion also denounced the Islamist doctrine of armed jihad and Islamic sharia as a source of public law, it would have met the test of good faith. 

Unfortunately, it did not and thus the motion made a mockery of the facts on the ground. 

Condemning or harassing anyone solely on the basis of their religion is wrong. 

But public concerns and fears about so much death and destruction being caused around the world by terrorists who claim to be guided by Islam is not Islamophobia. 

Nor is it racism or bigotry. 

It is a rational response to a real threat to western civilization, even though the preponderance of so-called “white guilt” in our Parliament, eventually coerced all MPs to back the Islamophobic petition...

Personally, I am more disturbed by parliamentarians' pusillanimity--does no one in the House of Commons have a functioning backbone?--than I am by the actual motion.

Update: This bracing jolt of reality is brought to you by Dennis Prager:

It is reality that “Islam” means “submit,” but this meaning conflicts with left-wing wishful thinking that all cultures are morally equal. Thus, virtually every left-wing professor and publication says that “Islam” means “peace.” (To the extent that it has any connection to the word for “peace” — salaam — it is the peace that ensues after all of humanity has submitted to Islam.) The amount of left-wing reality-denial concerning the Islamic world is about equal to the number of assertions leftists make about it. (Thus, the Obama administration labeled the Fort Hood massacre of 13 soldiers by a radical Muslim as “workplace violence.”)

Thus, Canada's MPs hew to the comforting fiction that the problem is "Islamophobia" and not the problematic (i.e. the supremacist) teachings of Islam. 

A Victory for Free Speech In, Of All Places, Quebec

An Islamic school sued a Montreal-based feminist for slander--and lost:

A feminist, secular author did not slander a Montreal private Muslim school when she likened it to military training camps, a Quebec Superior court has found. 

Author and activist Djemila Benhabib told 98.5 radio host Benoît Dutrizac the Muslim Schools in Montreal "resembles the kind of indoctrination similar to what goes on in a military camp in Afghanistan or Pakistan." 

In the same interview, she also said the school's religious teachings were a form of indoctrination that conveyed sexist values. She used the example of Quranic verses which made reference to the importance of young women remaining pure. 

The school accused her of "greatly tarnishing" its reputation and sued her for $95,000. It was represented by human rights lawyer Julius Grey, who argued that comparing a local school to terrorism was a dangerous tactic. 

Shortly before her trial began in September, Benhabib showed little remorse. 

"I regret nothing," she said in a separate radio interview.

No intent to harm 

In her decision, Justice Carole Hallée noted Benhabib did not say "terrorist" when talking about the military camps, and wrote she did nothing wrong by accepting to do a radio interview on a subject she's passionate about. 

Hallée also found there was no intent to harm the reputation of the school...

BOO Hoo: Anti-Zionists Want the Jews to Go Back to Being Stateless "Ghosts"

This is an excellent analysis, I think:

Anti-Semitism exists because people are naturally afraid of ghosts: The Jews in exile are a “ghostlike apparition of a living corpse,” and so the widespread “fear of the Jewish ghost” is a natural consequence of their statelessness, explained Leon Pinsker, who made this disturbing argument in his 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation. The human fear of ghosts renders anti-Semitism—or Judeophobia, as he called it—a hereditary and incurable “psychic aberration” common to the whole of mankind. It is impossible to combat this superstitious prejudice, argues Pinsker, but independent statehood would enable the Jews to cease being despised aliens: only this could exorcise, or at least soothe, this historic psychosis. 

In hindsight, on what would have been his 195th birthday today, one might argue that history has proved Pinsker wrong. The Jews resumed sovereignty nearly 70 years ago, and anti-Semitism persists—against diaspora Jews and, more worryingly for Pinsker’s case, against the resurrected Jewish state itself. Far from diffusing antipathy against Jews as homeless aliens, the Jewish state is a magnet for this rage. Its very right to exist is challenged incessantly. 

Such a position, however, fails to do justice to Pinsker’s perspicacity. His flaw was not in his diagnosis of anti-Semitism, but in his prognosis: not in his premises, but his failure to take them to their logical conclusions. For if people are naturally afraid of ghosts, they must be even more afraid of ghosts that come to life. As much as they might fear ghosts, they are used, at least, to seeing ghosts as disembodied and ethereal. For ghosts to assume flesh and blood and wander the Earth is an act of necromancy. 

Indeed, for two millennia, the West grew accustomed to seeing Jews as dependent minorities. As David Nirenberg outlines in his masterful Anti-Judaism, the way that societies defined themselves in relation to the Jews throughout the years was central to their own self-imagination. So central was the image of Jews in Western thought that if they did not exist, the West would have had to invent them—indeed, even in Judenrein medieval European societies, the trope of the Jew remained the ultimate Other.

As the years dragged on, the thought that this dispersed minority could ever be embodied as a nation-state grew more and more incongruous and absurd. With the Emancipation, the different European states sought to mold the Jews into a culturally assimilated community with a different religion, rather than a discrete people. Indeed, Zionism was such a revolutionary idea at its inception that the idea appeared far-fetched even to many Jews. 

Now the Jews have a state, and there are many who wish to roll back that achievement. Yet, unlike the anti-Semites of old, today’s anti-Zionists do not necessarily want to annihilate the Jews. They just want the Jews to return to being stateless minorities, as they have always known them. In short, anti-Zionists want their Jewish ghosts back...

The Wolf-Sheep Advisory Council

What's that? Read this, where all is revealed.

Oh, Brothers, What a Useful Idiot for the Anti-Israel Jihad!

Karin Brothers is the sort of Israel-loathing shrew who has no problem voicing her animus towards iniquitous Zion during the Khomeinists' annual Rage Against Israel day. Here she is, useful idiocy personified, in highest dudgeon during last year's Zionhass-a-palooza in Toronto:

And here she is in the pages of the Toronto Star where, just last week, she penned this "gem," a complaint about the "exclusivist" nature of Shoah remembrance:

Holocaust week is the height of hypocrisy. It implicitly supports the State of Israel, which is currently committing a slow genocide (according to the Kuala Lumpur tribunal) against the two million Palestinians under its military occupation in Gaza. To object to it is not racist. 

Publicly funded institutions should be commemorating genocides in general rather than the politically motivated and exclusivist Holocaust events, which imply that similar tragedies do not deserve the same international response.  

A study of current genocides might lead to saving the lives of thousands of people. 

Karin Brothers, Toronto

It's fitting that Brothers cited the Kuala Lumpur tribunal. It was every bit as biased against Israel as she is.

It's also heartening to see that's there's been some pushback to Brothers' twisted views. For instance this letter, which appeared in yesterday's Star:

While I agree that studying current, and past, genocides might help save thousands of lives, Karin Brothers’ Dec. 8 letter wrongfully conflates the idea of Holocaust week with Zionism. Acknowledging and remembering victims of the Holocaust does not in any way carry an implicit support of the State of Israel.  

Additionally, Brothers falsely claims that Israel has been carrying out “a slow genocide against the two million Palestinians under its military occupation of Gaza.” Israel returned the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in the summer of 2005. Palestinians then chose Hamas as their leaders. Since then, Hamas has shown that it will use anything and everything it possibly can as weapons against Israel and, more disturbingly, against its own people. They knowingly hide behind their own people.  

It is not Israel that is committing the genocide here. It is Hamas. 

Shulamit Heisler, Toronto

Update: According to the impassioned "Sister" Brothers, Israel is not against terrorism.

Update: Talk about strange bedfellows (but maybe not so strange when you consider that when it comes to Israel, their ideas are simpatico): a notorious alt-right website high fives our K.B.

Best News I've Heard All Day

Justin Trudeau risks alienating both right and left

The obvious question: who on the right isn't already alienated?

New "Apartheid Wall" in Calais, France?

Next time some Israel-hater kvetches about the "apartheid wall," direct his/her attention to this:

A wall funded by Britain to try and stop migrants from the former Calais "jungle" camp reaching its shores has been completed -- seven weeks after the site was cleared, a French official said.  

The four-metre-high (13-foot) wall runs along a kilometre-long stretch of the main road leading to Calais port, next to the area that used to house the sprawling camp.

   

The concrete barrier -- estimated to cost €2.7 million ($3 million) -- aims to prevent new arrivals stowing away on trucks bound for Britain.

   

Work on the wall, which is covered with plants on the traffic side, began in September. The squalid camp was razed after thousands of migrants were taken to shelters around France in October.

   

The structure is complete, a spokesman for the local prefecture told AFP late Monday.

   

The wall was built to boost a network of wire fences that had failed to prevent near nightly attempts by migrants to waylay trucks en route to Europe's second-busiest port.

   

This year alone, several migrants died after falling off trucks or being run over.

   

Calais has for years been a staging post for attempts by migrants to sneak into Britain by stowing away on trucks or trains crossing the Channel.

If that's not "apartheid"--and, clearly, it is not--then neither is that security system in Israel.