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[UPDATE: Scaramouche has a very good precis of the CJC's tortuous journey:
Upset over the final solution and their embrace of “sha shtil,” Canadian Jews in the ‘60s whipped themselves up into a frenzy over a bogus “threat” and then insisted the government step in to defend them from the phantom menace they themselves had concoted (“reasoning” that Hitler started out small, too, and it’s a well-known fact that “hate speech” invariably leads to genocide.)
And that, my friends, is how we got from there to here, and why official Jewry clings e’er tightly to its fraying security blankie—state censorship—even as mobs of angry Jew-haters are given free reign to rage in downtown Toronto, and police tell counter-protesters to flee for their lives because there’s no way to protect them.]
If you've been following the back-and-forth between Ezra Levant and the Canadian Jewish Congress re the latter's role in organizing and funding the "Canadian Nazi Party", you may be wondering about something. Not why liberal Jews are bankrolling dress-up Nazis - that's just par for the course in the wacky world of Canadian "human rights", where the likes of Richard Warman and Dean Steacy like nothing better than whiling away a quiet afternoon by climbing into the cyber-jackboots and virtual brownshirts and posting on "right-wing" "neo-Nazi" sites. The very book that the CJC's spokespersons cite to defend their role accurately conveys the scale of the Nazi threat to Canada:
On page 133 he tells the hilarious story of how John Beattie, the unemployed, 24-year-old Nazi 'leader,' was acquitted of the charge of unlawful assembly because he was the only person at his own rally.
Good to know that even in Canada it's not unlawful to assemble all by yourself.
No, what you may be wondering is not why the CJC was the principal backer of an otherwise all but fictional "Canadian Nazi Party", but why they're so frantically defensive about their long forgotten acts of 40 years ago. Ezra hardly mentions it and then only en passant, yet the CJC send out its president and other eminences in full attack mode. Ezra suggests that they needed to over-inflate the "Canadian Nazi" threat in order to justify the erection of a "human rights" regime at odds with Canada's legal inheritance. In the wake of the CJC's "Nazi scare", Mark McGuigan, a protean liberal censor of the day, wrote:
Group defamation was unknown to the traditional common law because that law had no awareness of groups themselves. But in the twentieth century we have come to recognize that a man's personality is formed by his primary group membership...
Really? Good thing Professor McGuigan became a Liberal MP. If a British National Party candidate said that sort of thing, he'd get a much worse press. As it happens, one of the things I like about Common Law is its lack of interest in "group rights", especially "group defamation". That's why I brought it up in my testimony at Queen's Park a few weeks ago: The ultimate minority group is the individual, and English Common Law affords him more protections than most other systems. But, of course, once you accept the principle of "group rights", you need someone to speak for the group. The Canadian Jewish Congress claim to speak for Jews. But they don't speak for Ezra Levant. The Canadian Islamic Congress claim to speak for Muslims. But they don't speak for Tarek Fatah. The concept of "group rights" is vital to these groups' status and the deference it brings.
But the CJC's defense of its actions in the Sixties goes beyond that and speaks to a kind of peculiar psychological displacement. The more the new judenhass metastasizes across the western world through a malign Islamo-leftist alliance, the more feverishly the CJC insists that the real enemies are "Nazis": No, no, you silly Jews, pay no attention to those government-funded imams or corduroyed college professors, Ontario union leaders or Guardian columnists. We need to redouble the fight against rightwing aryans in uniform before they sweep the prairies! As Kathy Shaidle says, there are more Nazis in the average "Hogan's Heroes" episode than the whole of Canada. If you're interested in pursuing phantoms in an alternative universe, cardboard heroes like Warman and Bernie Farber are your go-to guys. If you want to do anything about the rampant anti-Semitism in the real actual western world today, you need to look elsewhere.
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