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I think I can stand anything except Bernie Farber channeling showtunes. Protesting the decision of Toronto's LGBTTIQQ2S (seriously) parade to reverse its decision to ban Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, the head honcho of the Canadian Jewish Congress gets out the spangled leotard version of his Queer Tee For The Straight Jew in this morning's Toronto Star:

QuAIA's place in the Pride march sends a disturbing message. In good Orwellian fashion, the rights of some in the community apparently trump those of others.

Fanny Brice said it best, “Don't bring around a cloud to rain on my parade”.

As Scaramouche points out, Fanny Brice never said any such thing. Barbra Streisand did*, thanks to Bob Merrill and Jule Styne (who talks about working with Frank Loesser in our centenary podcast). Aside from Broadway trivia, Scaramouche also notes Bernie's total lack of self-awareness:

There's something utterly risible about one of the biggest boosters of state censorship and the "human rights" system, someone who has foolishly assumed that in the pecking order of victim groups the Jews would always rank numero uno (because of the Holocaust), making this statement.

Indeed. The CJC were Canada's most prominent promoters of the "Orwellian" concept that "the rights of some in the community trump those of others". That's the basis of their support for Canada's "human rights" regime: The rights of Jews not to be offended trump the right to free speech of some knuckledragging moron. Farber's mistake was to assume Jews would always be the principal beneficiaries of rights-trumpery. In Maclean's recently, I wrote about the identity-group hierarchy:

The other day, upholding the sacking of a black Christian for declining to provide “sex therapy lessons” to gay couples, Lord Justice Laws ruled that “law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds is irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary.” Actually it’s the law of Lord Justice Laws that is increasingly “irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary.” Or as George Orwell, in Animal Farm, formulated it: all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. In the land of Laws, a gay is more equal than a Christian. A Muslim is more equal than anybody. A black man is more equal than a white man, unless the white man is gay and the black man a Christian. An eco-zealot is more equal than an Anglican.

In the world Bernie Farber helped enthusiastically to build, Jews are sliding further and further down the Identity-Group Hit Parade. As we see in Toronto, gays are more equal than Jews. Indeed, anti-Israeli gays are evidently more equal than gays who are entirely indifferent to Israel and just want to march up and down in leather shorts with cutaway buttocks. More seriously, as Scaramouche reminds Farber, an explicit genocidal Jew-hater like Salman Hossain is more equal than Jews: The "human rights" regime the CJC thought was its house pet is too timid to take on eliminationist Muslims.

That leaves what? After 40 years of "human rights" fetishization, Jews are more equal than a penniless white supremacist posting to the Internet from his mum's basement. Congratulations, Bernie. That worked out well. Now you're beginning to get the picture, why not get off the book-burning team and stand for real freedom? The Canadian state won't help you against Salman Hossain. Free speech will. Jews prosper when they stand with liberty, not when they form malign alliances with state bullies that always prove short-sighted and self-defeating. What does the CJC have to show for Bernie Farber? Israeli Apartheid Week is Canada's gift to the new judenhass. It started on his watch, in his backyard.

Fanny Brice didn't say it best. Kathy Shaidle did. But she didn't sing it, so here's Barbra Streisand's other glittering parade number:

All of those lights over there
Seem to be telling me where I'm going...

Before the parade passes by.

(*In the drollest analysis of the day, Scaramouche suggests that Bernie credited the line to Fanny Brice rather than Barbra Streisand because he wanted to sound gay-friendly but not actually gay. You know how touchy he can be about this stuff.)  

Jennifer Lynch, QC (Queen Censor), Chief Commissar of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, recently gave a speech to the Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals 5th International Conference.

Incidentally, did you know there was a "Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunals"? And, if so, did you know they held "International Conferences"? And, if you did, are you wondering why? And specifically, if you're a Canadian taxpayer, why you should pay for them?

YouTube has removed Caroline Glick's pro-Israel parody song "We Con The World".

PayPal is threatening to deny its services to Pamela Geller.

Kathy Shaidle makes an important point:

Those who trumpet the advent of YouTube, Google etc as tools that have "permanently changed the media landscape" and will make it easier for right thinking people to get their messages past the legacy media blockade, take note:

These sites are all just tools, privately owned by individuals with fears, weaknesses and a perfectly commendable desire to make money.

These tools belong to people who are not like us and don't like us in many ways; we must develop our own independent YouTubes and Googles to ensure that developments like these will have minimal impact in the future.

There will be a lot more of this. YouTube et al have "permanently changed the media landscape" if you have a band without a record deal or an amusing video ready to go viral, but they have no commitment to anything more challenging than that. In the realm of ideas, they shy away from anything more contentious than vapid boosterism for conventional wisdom on "climate change", etc.

If I understand Caroline correctly, someone in the Warner-Chappell legal department thinks "We Con The World" infringes their copyright. I've dealt with Warner-Chappell innumerable times over the years and I cannot believe any of their lawyers seriously believes that. Rather, somebody has decided they don't want any trouble. And, instead of pointing out that Warner-Chappell's complaint has no merit, YouTube (an enterprise founded on widespread copyright violation) has gone along with it. Because they also don't want any trouble - of a certain kind.

They don't want to deal with belligerent Muslim lobby groups and similar sorts, and they will inevitably find it easier just to cave to them. Their technological iconoclasm is, alas, all too often accompanied by soft-left squishiness on broader philosophical points such as freedom of expression. I long ago lost count of the number of places, from Toronto Airport to Marriott hotels, that have SteynOnline blocked as a "hate" site. Oddly enough, jihadist networks calling for death and destruction of western civilization, including the crappy Marriott round the back of the airport, never seem to fall into the "hate" category.

A few years back, a propos Salman Rushdie, I wrote:

The Rushdie fatwa established the ground rules: The side that means it gets away with it. Mobs marched through Britain calling for the murder of a British subject - and, as a matter of policy on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity, the British police shrugged and looked the other way.

One reader in England recalled one demonstration at which he asked a constable why the "Muslim community leaders" weren't being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer told him to "f--- off, or I'll arrest you."

A decade and a half after the Rushdie hit contract, Islamic supremacists decided enough with the legalistic fatwa stuff, let's just kill the guy in the street:

To express his disgust at Theo van Gogh's murder, the artist Chris Ripke put up a mural outside his studio showing an angel and the words "Thou shalt not kill". But the cops thought this was somehow a dig at the local mosque and so came round, destroyed the mural, arrested the TV news crew filming it, and wiped their tape.

A couple of years later, it was the Danish cartoons:

There was a photograph from one of the early Muslim demonstrations in London that I cut out and kept: a masked protester promising to behead the enemies of Islam, and standing shoulder to shoulder with him two Metropolitan Police officers, dispatched by the state to protect him and enable him to incite the murder of others.

I think this is what old-school coppers would call a pattern of behavior. This weekend, the blogger Blazing Cat Fur went along to an anti-Netanyahu protest at Palestine House, a taxpayer-funded den of Jew-hating genocidal eliminationists. He was assaulted by Ali Mallah, local heavy from the Canadian Union of Public Employees and Vice-President of the Canadian Arab Federation. The Toronto Sun's Michael Coren takes up the story:

Surely this isn’t legal – at least not in countries where Sharia Law doesn’t apply. The bully then told the police that the awful man with the camera was a racist and the cop told the blogger to “keep things peaceful.” Surely this officer should be reminded of the law and that a man who crosses the road to insult and threaten another person is the one not keeping things peaceful.

I'm afraid Mr Coren's view of law enforcement is hopelessly outmoded. The enforcers of the modern "tolerant" "multicultural" society will tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, but they won't tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. From Rushdie to van Gogh to the Motoons, law enforcement has guarded the thugs and harrassed those who draw attention to the thuggery. This is PC policing: There are identity groups who merit the solicitude of the constabulary, and there are the rest of you who don't. Mass Muslim immigration will impose severe strains on the Euro-Canadian welfare states in the years ahead. In increasingly fractious societies, the police will be out in force - upholding not the law but the dopiest fatuities of the multiculti delusion.