It was last night when I read Joanne Hill's article in the Jewish Tribune about Bernie Farber and how helpful he is being to the Roma community in preparing a dossier for the police, with the express hope of having Ezra Levant criminally charged with hate propaganda.
Kathy has covered it off nicely, as have Blazing Cat Fur and scaramouche.
If you read the Tribune article, you will also note that Farber is waging a war against Jason Kenney, for trying to curb the abuse of the immigration system by faux Roma refugees.
I did a little bit of research about Bernie's longstanding love affair with the Roma. He used the offices of the Canadian Jewish Congress as the headquarters for a long list of ridiculous liberal causes that had absolutely nothing to do with Jewish issues in Canada, or in Israel for that matter. Roma, Darfur, Aboriginal rights, scholarships for Somalis, etc..
Due to copyright issues, old articles can't be posted here-but believe me, they do paint a very interesting picture. This love affair goes back a long time.
Here's a piece dating back from 2003 from NOW Magazine.
Lots of energy and money (donations to the Jewish community) and public funds (appeals) have been expended on this pet cause and on the 'hate speech' and 'hate propaganda' files in general by Bernie and his ilk. It's just very unusual.
Bernie has a lot of strange friends, like his friends at ISNA.
There is also, for example, an interesting Toronto Star article from a number of years ago by Old Guard lefty Jew Michelle Landsberg in which she notes that Bernie Farber helped railroad the building of a mosque in Mississauga, despite the objections of the local politicians-and that he got a standing ovation for that at the ISNA conference for that.
This is a very troubled person-a liberal who just happened to be born Jewish, looking for virtue in all the wrong places.
He wants everyone who is not of his liberal mentality (more like a religion actually) to just shut up.
And a lot (if not most) public bodies have done the bidding of the left for a long time, so I guess that is what people like him are used to. The freedom of the internet gives us the freedom to disagree publicly in an unprecedented way. That disturbs Lefty's totalitarian equilibrium.
So how dare we speak out and blog, and how dare we elect a Conservative majority! How dare our Minister of Citizenship and Immigration curb abuse of our refugee and immigration system!
Of all the nerve!
Uppity knuckle-draggers!
Haters!
White supremacists!
Raaaaaacists!
Antisemites!
The truth is that Stephen Harper's Conservative government is the most philosemitic and pro-Israel government ON THE PLANET except for Israel's.
How dare Farber go after Kenney and the government that is, without a doubt, the most friendly to Israel and to Western values in Canadian history.
It takes a very special kind of leftist arrogance mixed with Jewish liberal chutzpah to pull off such a stunt.
Brian Mulroney of course was also a good friend of Israel, but the stakes are higher now with Israel facing existential threats from Iran on a daily basis (maybe Irwin Cotler could send another memo to Ahmedinejad or something telling him to back off).
Stephen Harper has proven to be a visionary leader with values firmly grounded in Judeo-Christian civilization-and unapologetically so.
This drives leftists like Bernie bananas.Therefore, we need to all shut up.
Look at the names of the people who are supporting Jason Kenney and the University of Haifa!
Maybe some of them should tell Bernie to shut up??
Good on the University of Haifa (Canadian Friends) for not capitulating, and more power to Ezra Levant , Jason Kenney and the Harper government. for all that they do.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
