Intellectual freedom in Canada: News roundup

- Blazing Cat Fur published Laura Rosen Cohen's response to this predictable nonsense in the National Post (January 27, 2010), helping those of us who are concerned about anti-Semitism understand the c ontext: Why do so many "Jews for a living", as civil rights lawyer Ezra Levant calls them, support the "human rights" shakedown:

Time after time, when Jewish “leaders” resort to their default position on hate speech and fatuous accusations of anti-Semitism, I am called upon by my exasperated pro-Israel gentile friends to explain why these “leaders” seem so hell bent on alienating them with their knee-jerk anti-Christian biases and their frankly completely un-Jewish moral support of censorship-such as the Canadian Jewish Congress’s support of the CHRC “Hate Speech” and other “Hate Crime” legislation.

Some of these “leaders” are Holocaust survivors, and some are children of survivors. Many are Jewish only in name, and use their Jewish-sounding names to invoke a certain sense of kindred, or communal values even while aligning themselves with the issues of the most marginal importance to the Jewish community. Indeed, barely a month after the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner by yet another Muslim terrorist, and several months after the worst jihadist terror attack on North American soil since 9/11 at Fort Hood, Mr. Farber puzzlingly turns his organizational focus once again back to Darfur, Rwanda, Kosovo and Cambodia.

The whole is well worth reading. It's good news that a few people somewhere in the Jewish community are starting to talk about this problem. No decent person needs reminding that anti-Semitism is a very serious problem, but in that case, the last thing the Jewish community needs is people who are still fighting the battles of the last century, and ignoring the ones of today.

I've said before that it probably has to do in part with age. When I was at a meet on these problems a while back, I noted that - quite honestly - too much of the Jewish leadership on these issues is just too old. Old people can bring wisdom, but they can also bring hardened attitudes and an inability to adapt to changed times.

Most anti-Semitism in Canada today is not coming from the Christian community, but from Middle Eastern Muslim sources, doubtless angry about conflicts over there.

But we Canadians have never accepted the idea that new immigrants should bring their violent conflicts to Canada. If you want to live here, you want to live in peace and prosperity and get along. If you want to fight other ethnic and religious groups, stay where you are and be happy being miserable and poor, and making others so.

Hat tip: Blazing Cat Fur