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I got a press release from the Canadian Jewish Congress today, and what struck me immediately was the weirdly insecure boastfulness of the headline:
CJC Exposes Incitement To Hatred And Violence At Pro-Hamas Rallies
What a strange angle to prioritize. Not the "hatred and violence", but the fact that the great CJC has taken the lead into bringing it to public attention.
Er, no, you didn't. In fact, Bernie Farber and the rest of the CJC honchos have been so hors de combat these last two weeks that their retiring nature has been remarked upon by commentators at home and abroad. There was even a phrase applied to Bernie & Co - the "Jews of silence" - and a song written for them. One charitably assumed they were unable to take time out of their hectic schedule of deciding whether to give Richard Warman or Warren Kinsella the CJC Greatest Hero of the Century award, and then someone said, "Well, maybe we should upgrade it to Greatest Hero of the Millennium", and you know how these meetings can drag on.
But just for the record the CJC did not expose the "hatred and violence". For one thing, Bernie, Warren & Co didn't bother going to the Hamas rallies. Kathy Shaidle did, and Girl on the Right did, and Point de Bascule did, and Kate McMillan and others spread the news about what they saw. Bernie Farber said nothing. Even the great Nazi Hunting Toilet Warrior lui-meme was silent.
What's interesting about that group is how many of them - Kate, Kathy, Ezra - are being harrassed by Richard Warman, the guy Bernie Farber thinks is the greatest Nazi hunter of all time. The cardboard hero gets garlanded by the CJC, the real friends of Canadian Jews get sued. Ezra makes a sharp point:
The problem with Burny and Freiman is that they don't actually know how to fight real anti-Semites, because they've been fighting Internet anti-Semites for so long. It's like the difference between playing Guitar Hero really well, and then being asked to play a real guitar. They only know how to fight "hate" on the Internet, like a video game.
Indeed. The Section 13 fetishists are the go-to guys if you think Marc Lemire and whoever drew the lonely swastika at knee height in that public toilet are the real threat to the peaceable kingdom. But, if your priority is mobs marching through the streets making explicitly genocidal, eliminationist threats, then the Toilet Warriors are no use.
Incidentally, remember the way certain folks (including that dimwitted Canadian Press reporter) noted that Section 13 was opposed by certain unsavoury types and then damned not just me and Ezra but even "the brown guy" Keith Martin for making common cause with Nazis? They're strangely silent about scenes like this.
It's time for the membership of the CJC to clean house and suggest a long overdue retirement for the present leadership.
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