that makes us Canadians. In the abstract, the prime minister was right, but what was the name of the school that was actually bombed? Well, it’s the United Talmud Torah School in Montreal.
The
Talmud Torah
. I cannot see how it is possible to get more Jewish, more quintessentially expressive of Jewishness, than in the combination of those two words that refer to the absolute foundational text and commentaries of the Jewish faith. So let’s be very clear: the bombing—not a word we’re used to hearing in Canada, I note in passing—was directed very particularly at the Jewish community in Montreal, at its
Jewishness
, and to walk away from its immense particularity is to diminish its very concrete outrageousness.
It wasn’t a school. It was a Jewish school, and it wasn’t
any
Jewish school, but the United Talmud Torah School. It was bombed because of its intimate identification with being Jewish. The second part of the crime was the note that accompanied it, which read that the bombing was prompted by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and that more attacks were being planned.
Now, I know that there are very strong opinions on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and with opinions as opinions, neither I nor any other Canadian can have any real problem. But there really does seem to be a tilt, that some of those who most see themselves as critics of the Israeli side of this conflict (and please note I said
some
of those) seem to thinkthey have some extra warrant or righteousness in how far they can go to express their detestation of Israel’s policies, its government and, by extension, of Jews.
And as is the case in the bombing of the Talmud Torah library in Montreal, they also feel that tormenting and intimidating Jews anywhere is an earned licence because of where they stand on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. So we have swastikas on Jewish homes in placid Toronto, we have the upsurge in assaults on Jews in Europe, and we have all too frequently, in demonstrations almost everywhere in the world, the placards and chants equating Israel and its government with its own demonic anti-type, the Nazism of Adolf Hitler.
We have, in effect, the Holocaust thrown in the face of the people who were its targets. I salute the prime minister for the civic nobility of what he had to say, but by attempting to generalize what happened in Montreal yesterday, he has in effect diffused its horror. It was a piece of hatred for the Jews of Montreal. It was an expression on Canadian soil of that simmering anti-Semitism that takes some camouflage, some protective colouring from asserting a solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
Anti-Semitism, springing from whatever source, is the most toxic political virus in the world. That’s something we’ve already learned in that other school—the school where six million went to their death.
CASTRO’S USEFUL IDIOTS | August 5, 2006
Fidel Castro’s parlous condition this week brought me to an online review of a film biography of him.
Fidel
was released in 2002, and it is clear early on that the reviewer, A.O. Scott, was not too impressed by filmmaker Estela Bravo’s enthusiasm for her subject.
I detected a skeptical gleam, for example, in this line: “This is an exercise not in biography but in hero worship.”
Nonetheless, hero worship of Fidel Castro, however perplexing, is despairingly common. Over the forty-seven years of Castro’s dictatorship, whole contingents of Hollywood types have given themselves over to Castro idolatry, which—considering his regime is a one-party state solidly in the mould of every one-party state that has ever been—is odd even for the moralists of Bel Air.
But then, Castro, much like his early colleague in revolution and arms, Che Guevara, has always—bizarrely, in my view—possessed an unfathomable fashionability among the sophisticated and “right-thinking” classes. No less than our own Pierre Trudeau seemed to have harboured an affection for the
The
Talmud Torah
. I cannot see how it is possible to get more Jewish, more quintessentially expressive of Jewishness, than in the combination of those two words that refer to the absolute foundational text and commentaries of the Jewish faith. So let’s be very clear: the bombing—not a word we’re used to hearing in Canada, I note in passing—was directed very particularly at the Jewish community in Montreal, at its
Jewishness
, and to walk away from its immense particularity is to diminish its very concrete outrageousness.
It wasn’t a school. It was a Jewish school, and it wasn’t
any
Jewish school, but the United Talmud Torah School. It was bombed because of its intimate identification with being Jewish. The second part of the crime was the note that accompanied it, which read that the bombing was prompted by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and that more attacks were being planned.
Now, I know that there are very strong opinions on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and with opinions as opinions, neither I nor any other Canadian can have any real problem. But there really does seem to be a tilt, that some of those who most see themselves as critics of the Israeli side of this conflict (and please note I said
some
of those) seem to thinkthey have some extra warrant or righteousness in how far they can go to express their detestation of Israel’s policies, its government and, by extension, of Jews.
And as is the case in the bombing of the Talmud Torah library in Montreal, they also feel that tormenting and intimidating Jews anywhere is an earned licence because of where they stand on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. So we have swastikas on Jewish homes in placid Toronto, we have the upsurge in assaults on Jews in Europe, and we have all too frequently, in demonstrations almost everywhere in the world, the placards and chants equating Israel and its government with its own demonic anti-type, the Nazism of Adolf Hitler.
We have, in effect, the Holocaust thrown in the face of the people who were its targets. I salute the prime minister for the civic nobility of what he had to say, but by attempting to generalize what happened in Montreal yesterday, he has in effect diffused its horror. It was a piece of hatred for the Jews of Montreal. It was an expression on Canadian soil of that simmering anti-Semitism that takes some camouflage, some protective colouring from asserting a solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
Anti-Semitism, springing from whatever source, is the most toxic political virus in the world. That’s something we’ve already learned in that other school—the school where six million went to their death.
CASTRO’S USEFUL IDIOTS | August 5, 2006
Fidel Castro’s parlous condition this week brought me to an online review of a film biography of him.
Fidel
was released in 2002, and it is clear early on that the reviewer, A.O. Scott, was not too impressed by filmmaker Estela Bravo’s enthusiasm for her subject.
I detected a skeptical gleam, for example, in this line: “This is an exercise not in biography but in hero worship.”
Nonetheless, hero worship of Fidel Castro, however perplexing, is despairingly common. Over the forty-seven years of Castro’s dictatorship, whole contingents of Hollywood types have given themselves over to Castro idolatry, which—considering his regime is a one-party state solidly in the mould of every one-party state that has ever been—is odd even for the moralists of Bel Air.
But then, Castro, much like his early colleague in revolution and arms, Che Guevara, has always—bizarrely, in my view—possessed an unfathomable fashionability among the sophisticated and “right-thinking” classes. No less than our own Pierre Trudeau seemed to have harboured an affection for the
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