Cross-border Right Wing Nut Job Gathering ...

to be held in Niagara Falls, Ontario in early September.

This. Warning: mute sound on your laptop or device unless glurge-y music and a sermon about the Virgin Mary is your thing.

It appears that Roméo Dallaire's staff didn't bother to google "Fatima: the path to peace" when the invitation for the senator to speak came into the office.

Had someone done that, they would have discovered the deeply gynophobic, racist, homophobic and anti-semitic ideology this organization promotes.

From here:

Beyond the obvious, what do a far-right Italian politician, the president of the John Birch Society and former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul have in common?

In early September, the men are all scheduled to speak – along with a lengthy list of archconservative clergy, lawyers and academics – at a conference in Canada sponsored by the Fatima Center, part of the “radical traditionalist Catholic” movement, perhaps the single largest group of hard-core anti-Semites in North America. 

Senator Dallaire has withdrawn from the conference.  I'm ambivalent about that.  He should have gone ahead and spoken to the religious RWNJ audience before him, and excoriated their medieval asses.

A Convenient Anti-Semitism.

How might one describe a political campaign run by 'people of pallour' intent upon creating division within a historically cohesive community of 'people of colour' - all in a day's work of carefully calculated strategy?

Racist. Yes. Consider the following analogy.

White *war-room* tacticians calibrate the degree of harassment required to get a current Black MP - who has efficiently and compassionately represented the electorate for 12 years - to resign, mid-office. During the last election campaign, the tacticians selected a Black candidate to run against him. They used campaign literature that suggested the incumbent was dishonourable and lying to his constituents, and that he'd become a complacent *Uncle Tom* who advanced his own interests rather than those of his community.

Undaunted by their candidate's defeat, they arranged for his employment in the riding as a "regional aide" for a Cabinet Minister, which provided him with a taxpayer-funded position from which he would continue campaigning for the party.

This is exactly what the Con Party is doing to undermine the honourable Irwin Cotler. Ex-reformaTory insider, current #StunTV infotainer and *ethically oily* Ezra Levant has called him a "porch Jew". The Cons have given a patronage job to their candidate, a religious fundamentalist. And they have punished the riding by rejecting most of the applications from shuls for federal security funding to the Communities at Risk Infrastructure Pilot Fund.

The usual suspects first denied dirty tricks were in play in Cotler's riding then they parroted official talking points.

A Conservative official confirmed to The Globe and Mail that the party is trying to identify the vote in Mr. Cotler’s riding, which it does on a continuing basis across the country. In this case, a company called Campaign Research that has been linked to Ontario and federal Conservatives is behind the calls. [...]

He said the “script” does not mention a by-election. However, if people ask why the party is phoning, callers say “there are rumours that Irwin Cotler may resign causing a by-election,” the Conservative official said.

“It’s an honest answer to the question. There have been rumours for a long time that Cotler is going to step down,” he said.

It's no surprise to observe the flames of such rumours are persistently fanned by the Cons.

Cotler's response: “I am alive, well and working.”

The Con "script" is of course the elimination of all real or perceived *Liberal strongholds*. It makes no difference if the tactics deployed create strife in the Jewish community. Ultimately, since all Con caucus member accept the goals of the reformaTory party - which may or not be dominionist and consequently deeply anti-semitic - the actual damage such political game-playing may wreak is moot; it's ^NOT personal, merely political.

Well, except for that wee Liberal bit.

Lunatic fringe? Just watch him.

UPDATES:

Even NatPo confirms the facts about Cotler's riding.

Susan Delacourt pulls the big scary picture together, here and here.

And Alison at Creekside gives credit to other bloggers keeping track of the Harper Government™©.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sarah?

Sarah Grunfeld, that is. One of her peers tackles that problem, in a zesty manner reminiscent of Molly Ivins' best take-downs of her goofy Texan political foes.

[...]York University senior Sarah Grunfeld [...] made shanda-esque headlines when she put her social science professor’s career in jeopardy over an anti-Semitic remark that turned out to be—well—not. The statement “All Jews should be sterilized,” Professor Cameron Johnston explained in the introductory lecture to his class, was an example of an invalid and dangerous opinion; his point was that in academia especially, opinions must be reasonably qualified. Grunfeld failed to catch that qualifier, though, perhaps because before the prof had a chance to offer it, she had stormed out of class and enlisted the on-campus Israel-advocacy group, Hasbara (Hebrew for “Explanation”), to call for his immediate resignation.

Word of Johnston’s so-called racism exploded virally online by way of what National Post columnist Jonathan Kay has dubbed the “Bubbie-net” (Jewish grandparents frantically emailing their kin with fresh findings of alleged anti-Semitism); at the same time widely-respected Canadian Jewish civil rights association, B’nai Brith (Children of the Covenant), leaped in with equal gusto to champion Grunfeld’s claim. Then came the big reveal: Ms. Grunfeld had made a mistake. Not only was professor Johnston not an anti-Semite, he was a Jew. To borrow a more accessible Yiddish phrase, political correctness at York University had effectively schtupped itself.

Another take on the Sarah Grunfeld problem, here.

Why the pic of Sarah Palin? (which I found at this great blogpost, btw) Well, I couldn't locate a photo of Sarah Grunfeld and Palin looked so ... ah, piquante in pink - well, there it is.

Grand merci to Dr Dawg for the link to Emma Teitel's witty item.

A is for Anti-semitism and Apartheid (with update)

My father and mother shared the history of growing up in Ottawa's multicultural Lower Town with their daughters. It was thus I learned of the bigotry that francophone Catholic priests spread from the height of their pulpit, preaching - and deliberately planting seeds of violence - against the Irish, the Protestants and particularly, their Jewish neighbours. Later on, I discovered research documenting the hateful manifestions of anti-semitism.

My parents' choices as well as their open minds allowed me to understand the life experiences of immigrants to Canada as well as the vital and dynamic role the Jewish community held in Ottawa since its foundation. As an adolescent, I had the privilege of attending a religious service in the old synagogue, now closed.

When my cousin who converted to Reformed Judaism in her 30s invited me to her daughter's Bat Mitzvah, I felt honoured then moved by the beauty and spiritual force of the ritual. The women and men of this congregation are equally and fully engaged in all practices of their religious traditions.

Recently a friend's mom stated the film "An Education" sugar-coated its anti-semitic depiction of anti-semitism; after watching it I agreed with her impression, though some Jewish reviewers had a different perspective.

Today my friend lagatta directed my attention to powerful opinion piece by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, one of the original founding mothers of Ms magazine. It concludes:

As a life-long, Israel-loving, peace-seeking Zionist, I disdained the hyperbolic label and the facile, incendiary parallels to pre-Mandela South Africa that, for years, have been propagated by Jimmy Carter and some pundits on the left. I’ve made at least two dozen trips to Israel since 1976 and, though strongly critical of its government’s policies toward Palestinians within and outside the Green Line — whether under Labor, Likud or Kadima leadership — I never felt that extreme indictment was warranted by the facts on the ground. Then again, until last month, I had never been to Hebron.

Justice-loving Jews cannot keep denying what is happening under Israeli auspices in Hebron; we can never say we didn’t know.

It is painful to discover that a person, an institution or a belief one respects is wrong. It takes courage to say so.

Via our feminista consoeur AntoniaZ, a link to a strong and timely opinion piece in Haaretz.

(updated) Galliano: What not to swear

when your apology is neither sincere nor binding, such as those regularly proffered by Pope Maledict.

John Galliano, probably as the result of prodding by his agent and advice from his legal counsel, produced a waah-waah statement regarding his latest anti-semitic rants, this one recorded and posted on YouTube. His list of regrets was published in the Wall Street Journal (!) and its self-flagellating pose would look good on a member of Opus Dei.

Here's a man who says he was victimized for being and looking different, yet seethes with anti-semitism and gynophobia. His contempt for women evident, in the fashion he creates and the way he displays it on anorectic models who deliberately look like concentration camp survivors. His men's clothing models are well-muscled and buff.



One stylist flew to his defense with a barely coherent statement of her own: "People in fashion all they do is go and see John Galliano theater every season. That's what he gives them. To me, this was the same except it wasn't in a theater or in a movie. John lives in theater. It's theater. It's farce. But people in fashion don't recognize the farce in it. All of a sudden they don't know him. But it's OK when it's Mel Brooks' 'The Producers' singing Springtime for Hitler."

So. A gay bully goy screaming foul and vile anti-semitic slurs is theatre, and it should be celebrated like the comedic work of acclaimed Jewish director∕writer Mel Brooks who parodied white-supremacy first in a clever and brilliant film, and then in a Broadway musical.

As I observed over at ProgBlogger gay persons of colour - alcohol unblocks self-censorship; it doesn't plant beliefs or attitudes in people's brains. Galliano expressed opinions that he held and felt; the disinhibitor of his choice simply loosened his tongue. But Patricia Field may want to use the Twinkie defense to justify her inane comments.

Nathalie Portman is said to be deeply shocked and disgusted by the video (of Galliano's hateful rant), and that "as an individual who is proud to be Jewish, [she] will not be associated with Mr. Galliano in any way."

Galliano is a venal example of a fashion designer who patently loathes women who don't meet the physical requirements of a perambulating clothes racks for his creations.

Some feminist fashionistas deconstruct the pervasive and persistent gynophobia implicit in the hegemonic representation of a specific ideal female body type which is nubile, thin and malleable.

From here:

Crystal Renn, photographed so memorably in her voluptuous curves by Glamour magazine in September 2009, when her spare tyres (shock! horror!) provoked headlines, and who wrote a memoir about her recovery from anorexia [...] is now a U.S. size two [...] These girls have been used as a smokescreen, so that the gay men who run the industry can continue to peddle the idea that women should look like adolescent boys (it was no coincidence that nerdy, weedy boys walked the runway in womenswear this season). This is their dream, not ours.

Why does what goes on in this elite bubble, this hall of mirrors, matter? Because even though Renn enjoyed fame as a plus-size model, the fact she is now a size [two] reveals that, deep down, women want to be tiny, no matter how much we protest. It confirms the fact that once anorexia nervosa or even yoyo dieting has you in its grip, it is hard to ever be free of it.

Renn has explained her weight loss by saying she has ‘got into hiking’, but then anorexics and those with body image issues always say things like that. [...] Sad for all those women out there who are easy prey to these overpaid idiots. Who will go on a diet, and fail, and binge. Who will worry about fitting into that bikini come summer. Who will look at these impossible, clearly harmful images and find they just don’t measure up, and never will.

[...]one of the women in the audience, Nita Dickson [...] is the mother of Sophie, who died in her 40s from anorexia-related illness. I had become friends with Sophie — who in the end weighed 3st — while working with her on a documentary. I remember sitting talking to her, in her South London terrace house, and gasping when two of her teeth clattered to the floor. This is what these beautiful fashion shows don’t show you, the ugly side of being thin.

Nonetheless, it was his virulent explosion of anti-semitism, and not his ongoing visual assault on women's bodies that got Galliano fired from his job.

Update: Women, in all their gorgeous fleshiness and their wildly different configurations, are more likely to respond to publications and photographs that depict them as they actually are.

From here:

Look's editor Ali Hall: [...] "about five months ago I started using curvy models every week. The response was unbelievable. I've never had anything like it on a magazine. "People were quite emotional about it, saying 'thank you, it's changed the way I dress' and talked about the confidence it gave them.

[...] In Germany, the market-leading women's magazine went further; Brigitte stopped using professional models altogether in January last year, and now uses a diverse range of readers in its fashion pages. Sales have gone up 4%. "It wasn't a strategic decision, it was a natural development," says editor-in-chief Andreas Lebert. With the boom in fashion blogging, and sites where street style is celebrated, it isn't just designers and magazine editors who can create trends. "The traditional image of a model to show women what they should look like has become redundant.

[...]Will any of this really change the way women are portrayed in fashion magazines? Ben Barry, a PhD student at Cambridge University, thinks eventually it will. His research, to be published in a few months, is on whether female consumers are more likely to buy something when an advertisement (and by extension, a glossy magazine fashion spread) features a model who is more reflective of them.

Using mocked-up fashion adverts, Barry surveyed 3,000 women in the UK, US and Canada, "and the vast majority of women significantly increase purchase intentions when they see a model that reflects their age, size and race. If you speak to consumers on the street about my research, nobody is surprised – consumers are light years ahead of the fashion industry in that they want to see diversity.

So. Will haute couture featuring emaciated models garbed in esoteric, absurd and Grand Guignol-flavoured schmattas persevere? Probably just as polo does, as a form of entertainment for the very rich and really vapid.

Anti-Zionism and pro-semitism.

Anti-zionism - the expression of opposition to the Israeli government's genocidal actions that endanger Jewish residents, and that target Palestinians, Bedouins and others for elimination.

'Our lives became something we'd never dreamt': The former Israeli soldiers who have testified against army abuses have for the first time given up their anonymity, to make their voices all the harder to ignore. For anyone who has covered Israel, the West Bank and Gaza over the past few years, reading Occupation of the Territories, the new book from the Israeli ex-soldiers organisation Breaking the Silence, can be an eerily evocative experience.

From here.

Pro-semitism would be the opposite of anti-semitism.

Via Morton's Musings, this inspiring story about a very special photography exhibit.

An untold story of the Nazi Holocaust is on display at a Jewish temple in St. Louis, Missouri. It's a photography exhibit, featuring portraits of elderly Albanian Muslims - men and women who helped save nearly 2,000 Jews who fled to Albania during World War II. [...]

Basri Hasani sheltered his next-door neighbor and best friend, Moshe Rubenovic, who fought the Nazis throughout Albania and Kosovo. "I am a true Muslim," says Hasani. "My door is always open to anyone in need."

For the past six years, Gershman, a fine art photographer whose work is typically displayed in museums, traveled throughout Albania and Kosovo. He photographed most of his subjects in their homes, often with objects that were significant to the people they sheltered.

I hope that Gershman finds funding that will allow his photographs to travel across North America. This exhibit should tour as widely as possible, to counter the shrieeeking of islamophobes.

A subtle though sulfurous stench of anti-semitism

Two weeks ago Blob Blogging Wingnut defended in the comments to this blogpost, DooDooCanSmell's description of Mayor Bloomberg of New York City as a

"money-loving Jew who has sold his soul"

The Fetus©™ fetishist SUZIE CAPS-ON is currently regurgitating truthiness from LiesSite regarding Dr Bernard Norman Barwin and allegations against him, calling him 'pro-abort' and observing:

"There appears to be a pattern of dishonesty here."

The least contentious account of the facts of the litigation case is found here.

An Ottawa fertility doctor is being sued for allegedly mixing up sperm samples and inseminating the wrong one into two of his patients.

Trudy Moore launched a civil lawsuit against Bernard Norman Barwin last year after she learned that her daughter, Samantha, is not a genetic match to her husband, Matthew Guest, the statement of claim said. Recently, another woman also came forward and filed a statement of claim against Dr. Barwin.

Jacqueline Slinn found out in April that her five-year-old daughter Bridget is not a genetic match to her intended sperm donor, the statement said.

Other "news" gathering agencies mention several times that lawyers have petitioned the judge to force Dr Barwin to provide sperm, in order to verify if his DNA 'contaminated' samples from other donors. From Natsy Post:

Lawyers for two families suing a well-known Ottawa fertility doctor for allegedly using the wrong sperm samples to create their children say they believe other patients of the clinic may be in for a surprise.

Dr. Bernard Norman Barwin and the Broadview Fertility Clinic, which he owns, are the targets of two lawsuits launched in Ontario Superior Court seeking a combined $3-million in damages for “heightened anxiety, depression and frustration,” among other things, suffered by the families.

I expect in HER next screed Blob Blogging Wingnut will remind us that Doctors Barwin and Morgentaler are both pro-choice AND jews.

Shrieeeekkkk!!!

As for Jacqueline Slinn, given the "heightened anxiety, depression and frustration" she claims as well as the MASSIVE embarrassment she's inflicting upon her daughter, she should petition OHIP to cover the nose job she probably fears her daughter will need.

The curious case of Ezra Levant.

I once watched a CBC interview with Ezrant.

Ewww. Afterwards I would have washed out my eyes with bleach but my ears were already bleeding from listening to his shrieeeking, Craig Russell-esque performance. Though greater minds than mine have nailed his scrofulous prevarications and obfuscations to the wall, there is one issue that remains nebulous.

His pre-emptive attack on George Soros, delivered without a soupçon of irony, heralds a new era of deeper cesspools for Ezrant to plumb in service to the media empire created by Pierre Péladeau, a supporter of Adrien Arcand as well as an ardent admirer of Hitler and Mussolini.

Ezrant's ability to swallow offal and regurgitate bile is no doubt his most iconic accomplishment. His piece about Irwin Cotler is typical of his speudo-erudite spewing about fellow Jews who do not share his ideological beliefs:

And this is the point of the within blog post -- besides an opportunity to point out that Irwin Cotler has become an Uncle Tom Jew [...] I used the phrase "porch Jew", an anology to the dichotomy between field slaves and house slaves.

No matter. I'm sure Ezrant will look fetching in a jockey outfit, holding high his lantern, outside the corporate headquarters of Quebecor. After all, Péladeau once declared that Jews take up "too much space", so recruiting Ezrant to guard against the wrong kind will be good for their business.

"... not a class story. It’s a crime story."

Greed. It's the underpinning of that oft-quoted christian aphorism "The poor will always be with us". The consequence of letting the greedy run roughshod and unchecked is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - and recently, in increasing numbers.

Matt Taibi has written an impassioned response to a NYT Op-Ed by David Brooks who defended wealthy bankers and, by implication the MASSIVE scams they engineered. Taibi expertly fillets tedious and disingenuous arguments that rationalize and justify the bottomless greed of financial manipulators.

Brooks here is trying to say that by criticizing, say, Goldman Sachs for mass thievery — criticizing a bank for selling billions of dollars worth of worthless subprime mortgage-backed securities mismarked as investment grade deals, for getting the taxpayer to pay them 100 cents on the dollar for their billions in crap investments with AIG, for forcing hundreds of millions of people to pay inflated gas and food prices when they manipulated the commodities market and helped push oil to a preposterous $149 a barrel, and for paying massive bonuses after receiving billions upon billions in public support even beyond the TARP — that in criticizing the bank for doing these things, people like me are primarily interested in being divisive and “organizing hatreds.” [...]

What’s so ironic about this is that Brooks, in arguing against class warfare, and trying to present himself as someone who is above making class distinctions, is making an argument based entirely on the notion that there is an lower class and an upper class and that the one should go easy on the other because the best hope for collective prosperity is the rich creating wealth for all. This is the same Randian bullshit that we’ve been hearing from people like Brooks for ages and its entire premise is really revolting and insulting — this idea that the way society works is that the productive “rich” feed the needy “poor”, and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for “excesses” might inspire Atlas to Shrug his way out of town and leave the helpless poor on their own to starve.

That’s basically Brooks’s entire argument here. Yes, the rich and powerful do rig the game in their own favor, and yes, they are guilty of “excesses” — but fucking deal with it, if you want to eat.

Taibbi also identifies an implicit bias in commercially oriented media:

The propagandistic argument [Brooks] makes about the dangers of “populism” is spelled out here as clearly as you’ll ever see it expressed in print, and this exact thing is a key reason why so much of the corruption that went on on Wall Street in the past few decades was allowed to spread unchecked.

That’s because this argument is tacitly accepted by almost everyone in our business, and most particularly is internalized in the thinking of most newspaper editors and TV news producers, who over time develop an ingrained habitual fear of publishing material that seems hysterical or angry.

This certainly has an effect on the content of news reporting, but perhaps even more importantly, it impacts the tone of news coverage, where outrages are covered without outrage, and stories that are not particularly “balanced” in reality — stories that for instance are quite plainly about one group of people screwing another group of people — become transformed into cool, “objective” news stories in which both the plainly bogus version of events and the real and infuriating version are given equal weight.

There's another aspect to the media coverage of the bankers' debauchery that has bothered me. Throughout it all, most if not all the engineers of these fraudulent investments remained anonymous and faceless. Understand this - the Wall Street financiers who masterminded the complicated schemes that left hundreds of thousands of US citizens bankrupt and homeless won't be held accountable for their crimes. They have walked away from the carnage with fat bonuses in their pockets.

Not so Bernard Madoff. He has become the scapegoat for Greed, diverting attention away from the blue-bloods and their wannabees at the top of the food chain.

There's a wide vein of anti-semitism in our North-American societies; exploiting the case of Bernard Madoff to draw attention away from the structural causes of the financial collapse is so very convenient. And so repulsive to many Jews, given that the majority of Madoff's clients/victims were members of, or connected to the social and cultural networks that he navigated.

Unfortunately the institutional champions of judaism are too busy attacking the critics of Israel to note a most insidious and repugnant populist display of anti-semitism shrieking at them in headlines, news items and prurient stories on TV, publications and the Internet during the last year.

Madoff has become the new Shylock. Is this happenstance? I don't think so. This is judeophobic opportunism, in my humble opinion. But don't expect rightwing socons David Frum or Mark Steyn to point this out. They know how their bread is buttered - and they like it that way.