In memory of Anne Frank, one of a million Jewish children killed by the Nazis

A critique of Holocaust Universalization in honour of Anne Frank
By Dr. Catherine Chatterley, April 17, 2012


After decades of exposure to the Nazi murder of European Jewry, through education in schools and universities, the production of countless Holocaust histories and memoirs, the wide distribution of Holocaust related films, plays, and television programs, and, the construction of Holocaust memorials and museums, including a prominent federal institution in Washington, we are now facing pressure to include all people who suffered under Hitler into what we know as the Holocaust—the deliberate, systematic, state-sponsored annihilation of Jewish Europe.

How do we explain the apparent paradox of a culture that appears to be suffering from “Jewish Holocaust fatigue,”and yet knows very little about the history of this specific event and the pivotal role played by antisemitism in its conception and execution? To answer the question, we must begin to examine the phenomenon of Holocaust education and its universalizing methods, and try to assess what exactly people have learned about the Holocaust and antisemitism over the last several decades.

Part of the answer can be found in the material used to teach the subject. One of the central texts used by teachers, parents, and professors to educate students about the Holocaust is The Diary of Anne Frank. The book has been celebrated for decades but also criticized for its universalization, and not so subtle elision, of the Jewish experience under Nazism. The Diary was first published in Dutch as Het Achterhuis [The House Behind] in 1947, translated into French and German in 1950, and into English in 1952, with a play staged on Broadway only three years later.¹

Instead of discussing the long and detailed controversies over the book and its theatrical applications, I will examine several trenchant critiques of the text that deserve our renewed attention. In 1960, Bruno Bettelheim wrote a psychosocial critique of the Broadway play (1955) and Hollywood film (1959) for Harper’s Magazine, in which he focused his attention not so much on Anne’s text but upon our use of it and our reaction to it. For Bettelheim, the larger culture’s “universal and uncritical response” to The Diary reflected “our wish to forget the gas chambers,” and instead take comfort in the false belief that Jews could retreat “into an extremely private, gentle, sensitive world” despite being surrounded “by a maelstrom apt to engulf one at any moment.”² Even more offensive was our fetishized treatment of her statement, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart,” to which the story is often reduced, when in fact Anne had written those optimistic words well before the attic had been sold out by a Dutch informant for about a dollar per person, the inhabitants deported to camps, her mother killed, and she and her sister Margot suffered abject death by typhus in Bergen Belsen in April 1945.

This “lesson” about the goodness of people, given the actual history of Anne Frank and her family, is patently false, and Bettelheim believed that it created an equally false sense of optimism, misleading readers to imagine Anne surviving the war. In fact, recent pedagogical studies of The Diary have demonstrated this exact problem. Students have been shown to characterize Anne’s diary as more “hopeful than sad,” as a story of survival, and even a love story. They appear to manifest a deep-seated resistance to the truth of her death in Bergen Belsen, which was described as “ruining” the story for one student in a classroom study.³

Bettelheim also argued that the platitude about human goodness “releases us effectively of the need to cope with the problems Auschwitz presents.”⁴ Writing in 1960, he did not mention antisemitism specifically, nor did he characterize the specific “problems” Auschwitz presents, but today we know that without antisemitism there would not have been a Birkenau, and yet The Diary allows its readers to disregard this reality entirely. Here, then, is a perfect example of the way students, and the larger culture, are exposed to the Holocaust and yet learn nothing in particular about the problem of antisemitism.

Lawrence Langer makes an important observation about the book in this regard. Instead of providing any actual information about the Holocaust or antisemitism, Langer argues, The Diary “enacts in its very text a designed avoidance of the very experience it is reputed to grant us some exposure to [and] thus her work helps us to transcend what we have not yet encountered, nonetheless leaving behind a film of conviction that we have.”⁵

In a devastating critique by Cynthia Ozick, The Diary is described as “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced . . . infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied.”⁶ Like Bettelheim and Langer, Ozick denies the value of this text as a Holocaust document. To make her point, she proceeds to reconstruct the actual fate of the Frank girls, based upon the testimony of Belsen survivors, including Anne’s schoolmate Hannah Goslar: “[Margot] fell dead to the ground from the wooden slab on which she lay, eaten by lice, and Anne, heartbroken and skeletal, naked under a bit of rag, died a day or two later.”⁷

Equally important to Ozick’s graphic truth-telling is her revelation of the very real dejudaization of the book, revealed by the publication in 1995 of additional diary material removed by Anne Frank’s father Otto, subsequent publishers, and translators.⁸ Comparing editions now reveals that Otto Frank removed Anne’s numerous references to Judaism, including those describing Yom Kippur. Additionally, the Zionism of Anne’s sister Margot as well as the Hebrew the family sung at Hanukkah were deleted from the Hackett Broadway script approved by Frank. Additions that distort Anne’s story were invented by producer Lillian Hellman, who inserted lines like “we’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer . . . There’ve always been people that’ve had to . . . sometimes one race . . . sometimes another.”⁹

Even worse, Otto Frank allowed the translator of the German edition, Anneliese Schütz, to either remove or revise Anne’s passages about Germans. For example, in her list of house rules, Anne writes, “‘Use of Language: It is necessary to speak softly at all times. Only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German.’ The German translation reads: “Alle Kultursprachen . . . aber leise!’—‘all civilized languages . . . but softly!’”¹⁰ Schütz justified her methods of distortion and exculpation as necessary because a book “for sale in Germany . . . cannot abuse the Germans.”¹¹

Ozick tells us that a German drama critic admitted that the theatrical version of The Diary allowed Germans to see “our own fate—the tragedy of human existence per se.”¹² And so, as Alvin Rosenfeld observes, “Anne Frank has become a ready-to-hand formula for easy forgiveness,”¹³ and of all things, Ozick argues, a “vehicle of German communal identification.”¹⁴

One is reminded of Theodor Adorno’s discussion of a German woman who left the play in 1959 saying, “Yes, but really, at least that girl ought to have been allowed to live.”¹⁵ The fact that Adorno characterizes this remark as a “first step toward insight,” for which he appears to be grateful, illustrates the pervasive antisemitism in postwar German society and the ongoing complicity of Germans in these crimes as late as 14 years after the war.

It would not be until 1991 that Germans would have the opportunity to discover the original content of Anne’s diary.

Cynthia Ozick describes Otto Frank in what are thought to be stereotypically German Jewish terms: secular, assimilated, and bourgeois, but also accommodating, even deferential in relation to gentiles and especially toward Germans. She interprets his primary role in distorting The Diary of Anne Frank as the result of his “social need to please his environment and not to offend it.”¹⁶ It has always been, and remains today, safer for Jews to avoid confronting gentiles about their antisemitism, and this reality, Ozick argues, is what led him to “speak of goodness rather than destruction,” and to allow The Diary to be “accommodated to expressions like ‘man’s inhumanity to man,’ diluting and befogging specific historical events and their motives.”¹⁷

Furthermore, the memorial he chose to honour his daughter was the Anne Frank Foundation¹⁸ and International Youth Center, both located in Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Ozick argues that this memorial, dedicated to the humanistic goal of bringing young people across the globe into contact with one another, “nevertheless washed away into do-gooder abstraction the explicit urge to rage that had devoured his daughter.”¹⁹

Here, she is referring to Anne’s diary entry from 3 May 1944: “There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill.”²⁰ Obviously, our choice to ignore these words and fetishize their very opposite, and then to present our choice as the epitome of Anne Frank and her experience, says more about the problematic needs of post-Holocaust Western culture than anything else. One can see how truly deceitful this cultural fetish is when the lines immediately following Anne’s comments about human goodness read: “I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions.”²¹

Our misuse of her words is actually perverse, as suggested by Griselda Pollock, in that we make the victim herself provide bystanders (and even perpetrators) “with comfort in our distress at encountering her suffering.”²²

The primary approach of Holocaust education has been to universalize (and, in some cases, to Christianize) the experience of Jewish suffering in an attempt to make the subject matter accessible and meaningful to non-Jews. This was perceived as necessary after the war due to the antisemitic nature of postwar Western culture. There was a general hope that non-Jews would somehow imbibe that antisemitism was wrong from reading these stories and eventually from a curriculum that focused on the general evils of discrimination and racism and that promoted a doctrine of universal human rights.

Today, Holocaust education forms the basis for a new type of civic education. Increasingly, young people are learning about war and genocide in a comparative framework and the new civic values of peaceful reconciliation and human rights. In countries like Canada and the United States this curriculum presents an opportunity to celebrate ourselves in the form of the American Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and our Allied role in liberating Europe from Hitler. This is precisely the conclusion presented in the permanent exhibit of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and it is the basis for the conception of the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

There is no doubt that Holocaust education has had a positive influence on Western society. It has helped to create our contemporary concern with fighting racism and promoting human rights and has helped generate our current interest in the historical and contemporary problems of genocide and war crimes. The problem, however, is that Holocaust education has not produced a corresponding concern about, or awareness of, antisemitism. Rather, what we have produced in contemporary Western culture is a general conviction, to use Langer’s term, that we have learned the “lessons of the Holocaust” when in fact few people outside the academic field know anything in particular about the Nazi Final Solution, its systematic destruction of Jewish Europe, and the nature and history of the antisemitism responsible for this catastrophe, which continues to evolve and is now in fact a global phenomenon.

Given this problematic reality, one wonders if Cynthia Ozick is correct when she suggests at the end of her critique of The Diary of Anne Frank that it may have been better for Anne’s diary to have been lost, and thereby “saved from a world that made of it all things, some of them true, while floating lightly over the heavier truth of named and inhabited evil.”²³

Notes

1 As of 2001, the book had been translated into fifty-five languages and sold over twenty million copies.

2 Bruno Bettelheim, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank,” Harper’s Magazine (November 1960), 45-50: 45.

3 See Karen Spector and Stephanie Jones, “Constructing Anne Frank: Critical Literacy and the Holocaust in Eighth-Grade English,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 51:1 (September 2007): 36-48.

4 Bettelheim, 47.

5 Lawrence Langer, “Anne Frank Revisited,” in Using and Abusing the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 16-29: 20-21.

6 Cynthia Ozick, “Who Owns Anne Frank,” in Quarrel & Quandary(New York: Vintage, 2000), 74-102: 77.

7 Ibid., 79.

8 This is in addition to Otto Frank’s removal of material that embarrassed the family, including Anne’s discussion of the Frank marriage, and material that would have been outside the bounds of decency in the 1950s, such as her discussion of contraceptives, female genitalia, and lesbianism.

9 Ozick, 95.

10 Ibid., 90.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., 98.

13 Alvin Rosenfeld, “Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank,” in Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, edited by Peter Hayes (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 243-278: 271.

14 Ozick, 98-99.

15 Theodor Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, edited by Geoffrey Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 114-129: 127.

16 Ozick, 85.

17 Ibid., 86.

18 Today the Anne Frank Foundation fights discrimination against minorities in Europe, with a specific focus on protecting the rights of Turks and immigrants.

19 Ozick, 86.

20 Ibid., 85.

21 Martha Ravits, “To Work in the World: Anne Frank and American Literary History,” Women’s Studies (1997), 1-30: 16.

22 Griselda Pollock, “Stilled Life: Traumatic Knowing, Political Violence, and the Dying of Anne Frank,” Mortality 12 (May 2007), 124-141: 139.

23 Ozick, 102.

A larger version of this essay was presented at Yale University in 2009.

Congratulations to Thomas Mulcair and to the New Democrats for deciding to become a serious political party

Congratulations are in order for Thomas Mulcair, the new leader of Canada's official opposition. Congratulations are also in order for Brian Topp and the the whole field of leadership candidates. Perhaps most of all, though, congratulations are due to the NDP, which has decided to put aside its history and become a serious political party.

I was half-hoping the Dippers would retreat to the politics of vanity and elect Topp. After all, the party includes many despicable nut jobs (led by Libby Davies), and in some ways it would have been nice to see these people lock themselves back in the dream room.

Indeed by voting for Topp on the final ballot, 43% of Dippers declared that they'd really prefer to look in the mirror and admire their politcal purity rather than try to effect any actual change in the nation.

On the other hand, though, it really is a good thing for the country to have three serious political parties, and in particular to have an Official Opposition that's a force to be reckoned with, rather than being the political equivalent of a fart joke.

Canadian Government cuts funding to cheerleaders for murderers, the NDP objects

Fern Rykiss of Winnipeg, 1972 - 1989.
An event at Palestine House last year,
celebrated the release of her murderer,
along with the release of 100s of other
murderers and their accomplices.

Palestine House in Mississauga is the political and cultural centre for Palestinians in the Toronto area. It also helps recent immigrants with learning English and integrating into Canadian society. The government has been funding the centre for the past 18 years, including $950,000 in 2011.

That funding has now ceased. “The government of Canada should not be funding groups that promote extreme positions – particularly under a program designed to promote social cohesion,” Kasra Nejatian told the Jewish Tribune. 

As an example, Nejatian, who is the director of strategic planning for Citizenship and Immigration Canada, cited a Palestine House event that celebrated the release of hundreds of convicted murderers from Israeli prisons. The prisoners were released as part of the ransom paid to the Hamas terrorist organization to free Gilad Schalit, an Israeli soldier Hamas had kidnapped some five years earlier.

Nejatian noted that one of the released terrorists, Abd al-hadi Rafa Ghanim, had Canadian blood on his hands; he was convicted of murdering Dr. Shelley Volokov Halpenny of Vancouver and 17-year-old Fern Rykiss of Winnipeg, along with 14 others in a terrorist attack on an Israeli bus in 1989.

A volunteer at Palestine House defended the event in a telephone interview. “As if we are not entitled to celebrate the political prisoners, as the other side celebrated Shalit. At the same time, we are happy.”

“Palestine House also has a history of associating with people who run afoul of Canadian law,” Nejatian continued. “For example, Issam Al-Yamani, the former executive director of Palestine House, was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP), a designated terrorist group. Issam Al-Yamani even raised funds for the PFLP while in Canada.”

Personally, all I can say is that it’s about time! Local Palestinians are welcome to call for the destruction of Israel all they want and even to act as cheerleaders for terrorism – it’s a free country after all. But I do object to using my tax money to fund this extremist organization.

Of course there are moderate Palestinians. But they don't run Palestine House. To get some idea of the politics of the people who do run Palestine House, consider that in 2008, they held an event "to commemorate and honour the life and work of Dr. George Habash."

Habash was the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the terrorist group that in 1968 pioneered the hijacking of passenger aircraft. In addition to numerous acts of terrorism, Habash is chiefly remembered for his political radicalism. In 1970, his group set off the Black September War between the Palestinians and Jordan, which resulted in the deaths of at least 3,400 Palestinians. Subsequently, Habash's group also fought in the Lebanese civil war, which again resulted in the deaths of thousands.

But perhaps above all Habash is remembered for his opposition to any peace with Israel. As noted on the Palestine House website, Habash was "violently opposed the Oslo Agreements" between the Palestinian Liberation Organization, led by Yassir Arafat, and Israel.  In cooperation with Islamist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad that were also forthrightly dedicated to destroying Israel, Habash helped organize Palestinian opposition to the PLO and to any accommodation with Israel.

And at Palestine House, they consider him a hero.


Naturally, Palestine House objects to having their funding cut. They need the million dollars a year the government has been giving them, and they’ve mobilized all their supporters, including the federal NDP. In a statement echoing the main talking points of Palestine House’s press release, the NDP says:

“New Democrats are disappointed by the decision of the Conservative government to arbitrarily terminate funding for settlement services at Palestine House…. This is the just the latest in a long line of politically-motivated funding cuts to public service organizations. From Palestine House to ecumenical KAIROS, this government’s unbalanced approach to the Middle East is hurting Canada’s reputation and isolating us on the world stage.”

In the NDP’s topsy-turvy world, it’s illegitimate to defund an organization just because it supports terrorism and celebrates murderers. Doing so is “politically motivated.” Perhaps. But if so, that sounds okay to me.

It’s also true that objecting to Palestinian terrorism earns Canada little credit on the world stage. After all, the Arab nations have enormous wealth and influence. They all hate Israel, and for the rest of the world, there’s no downside to giving verbal support to the Arab campaign to make the world’s only Jewish state a pariah.

But does Canada's principled stand do us any real harm? Not at all. No one supposes that China – or even Saudi Arabia – refuses to do business with Canada because we won't join in the name-calling against Israel.

In the world of diplomatic make-believe, Canada suffers a few snubs. In the real world, nations follow their best interests. And in the eyes of the world, Canada looks like a country you can count on.

"Welcome to the University of Victoria, a.k.a. Che Guevara U" by Michael Ross

From the National Post

At an espionage symposium at the University of Victoria in 2011, I spoke after a history professor who gave a lecture on the history of the CIA. I realize the CIA has had its share of shady moments, but this was an hour-long diatribe that could have been written by Fidel Castro. When I took the lectern, I told the audience that I’d be talking about the world of espionage, minus the politics, seeing as they’d endured enough ideological indoctrination for one day.


Were I asked to define the mission of a university, I would say it is the pursuit of truth and the dissemination of knowledge through research and teaching. Universities should enjoy autonomy as institutions, governing their own affairs internally and making their own decisions on academic matters. Having said that, some university departments have discarded the ideals of eternal truth in favour of mindless relativism and anti-Americanism/anti-Zionism; essentially existing as moral dead zones where faculty do little more than indulge their basest political biases and engage in what I can only describe as ivory-tower intellectual onanism.

Take for instance, the University of Victoria’s Social Justice Studies Department. (On the departmental website, a nostalgic photo of Che Guevara fades in and out, and readers are reminded that UVic is situated on the “territory of the Coast and Straits Salish people.”) A quick scan of the event list for February includes presentations on the gendered politics of militarization and globalization, the question as to whether the global justice movement is colonial, and of course that “social justice” staple that appears with the frequency of a bad penny: “Israel’s Blockade of Gaza — Canada’s Role.”

That’s right. Syria’s civil war, in which thousands have been killed, including hundreds of children tortured and murdered, apparently is a non-issue on campus. Iran’s nuclear ambitions and terrorism-sponsoring in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria aren’t a priority. Robert Mugabe’s megalomaniacal destruction of Zimbabwe is off the syllabus, and Nigeria’s worsening religious-ethnic bloodshed is outré.

What is important to the UVic Social Justice Studies Department, however, is Ehab Latoyef — this being the Captain Ehab of the “Freedom Waves to Gaza aid flotilla” — who will be speaking at the university later this month. The university describes Mr. Lotayef as a “Montreal-based poet and long-time solidarity activist, who was on board the Canadian humanitarian aid boat, the Tahrir, which was heading to Gaza when it was hijacked by the Israeli navy in international waters.”

This is what the university considers social justice: A ridiculous pantomime that sailed last November to ostensibly break the Israeli blockade of Gaza, but instead made fools of themselves after the UN Inquiry found that Israel’s blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza is entirely legal under international and maritime law.

It’s a sad reflection on any university that it has allowed its core principles to be subsumed into a self-perpetuating political and cultural subset of its faculty that is less intent on illuminating young minds than perpetuating their own ideological control of the syllabus.

Michael Ross is a former deep-cover officer with the Israel Secret Intelligence Service (Mossad).

We're funding politcal extremists

In Canada, almost no one supports those who hold extreme political views – they comprise perhaps 0.1 per cent of the population. But despite this near total lack of popular support, extremists continue to thrive.

Why? Because universities and granting agencies give them money.

The latest example of this comes from Queen’s and Simon Fraser universities, where professors Dorit Naaman and Dana Olwan have received a $223,000 grant to set up a multimedia installation in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Qatamon (also spelled Katamon).

Before the establishment of Israel, Qatamon was a well-off Christian Arab neighbourhood. However, in 1947, the UN mandated the creation of two Palestinian states – one Jewish, the other Arab. The Jewish community accepted this deal, but the Arabs rejected it. Instead, Arab militias and armies from the surrounding Arab countries attacked the new state of Israel, intending to kill it at birth.

During the war that followed, Israeli forces captured Qatamon, and most of the neighbourhood’s residents fled – mainly to Beirut, Damascus and Alexandria, cities where they used to vacation. Those who remained became Israeli citizens, as happened throughout the territories Israel controlled.

However, the Jordanian army captured the old city of Jerusalem, including the Jewish Quarter, and the rest of the West Bank. The Jordanians expelled all Jews from their territory. A thousand or more of these refugees moved into Qatamon, and it has been a predominantly (though not exclusively) Jewish neighbourhood ever since.

That’s the history. Here’s what Dana Olwan said about her $223,000 multimedia project in the Queen’s University Journal:

“It’s important to understand that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hasn’t ended yet.... Palestinians are being dispossessed from Jerusalem right now through the building of apartheid walls.... Understanding and challenging the contemporary nature of the occupation is a key aim of this project.”

Notice how extreme Olwan’s language. The "apartheid wall" is a security barrier Israel built to keep out suicide bombers. It's actually mostly a fence, but is a wall where needed to prevent Palestinian snipers from firing at Israelis as they walk down the street.

Notice also that Olwan’s language is entirely political. There’s nothing academic about her project – no spirit of inquiry or even pretence at open-mindedness. It’s purely a propaganda exercise.

The project’s aim, she said, is to challenge “the occupation,” which to Olwan’s mind includes Qatamon, even though this neighbourhood has been part of Israel since its founding.

Professors Olwan and Naaman have long been involved in anti-Israel politics. They both support Israel Apartheid Week, an annual campus event intended to exclude Israelis from humanity, and have both been speakers at Apartheid Week at Queen’s.

For her part, Professor Naaman has trouble grasping that terrorism is a bad thing. She signed a petition supporting Tali Fahima, an Israeli convicted of aiding Zakariya Zubeidi, who was a chief of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades during the height of the terror war against Israel.

In more recent years, Zubeidi has put away his bombs in return for amnesty from Israel and has even applied to enter Israel for medical care. Because he’s abandoned violence, Tali Fahima now calls Zubeida a “whore” and has transferred her allegiance to Raed Salah, an unreconstructed Jew-hater and a leader of the extremist Islamic Movement.

In an apparent bid for the useful idiot of the year award, Professor Naaman describes Fahima as merely “seeking dialogue with Palestinians.”

Professor Naaman also wrote a learned paper titled In the Name of the Nation: Images of Palestinian and Israeli Women Fighters.

In this paper, Naaman puzzles over why Israeli women soldiers are “considered a sign of progress, equality and modernity” while Palestinian women suicide bombers are considered “monsters.”

To Naaman, this reflects bias, a “serious cultural discrepancy.” She’s unable to grasp the difference between a soldier who protects the innocent and a suicide bomber who deliberately murders men, women and children.

As for Professor Olwan, she believes that Israel’s creation “was legitimized through racist Zionist narratives” and is dedicated to reversing that original sin.

In 2008, Olwan was a speaker at the Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood conference at York University. Although dressed up as an academic conference, its purpose was political, aimed at promoting a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conference – a solution that replaces Israel with a majority Palestinian state.

Like Olwan’s and Naaman’s proposed propaganda exercise in Jerusalem, the conference at York was also funded by me and you through our taxes. And that is what I really object to.

Why is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council giving Olwan and Naaman $223,000 of our money to create what looks to be pure propaganda?

All I ask is for universities and granting agencies to distinguish between academic projects and propaganda exercises. If they did, the extremists would disappear for lack of funding and there would be more money for scholars genuinely interested in expanding human knowledge. It would be a win-win all around.

This article was originally published in the January 31, 2012, issue of the Jewish Tribune.

"Social justice" in our schools singles out some kids as the villains

Excellent article in today's National Post about teaching "social justice" in the classroom. The problem is that some teachers are simply converting children to their political views, which is always wrong. And sometimes the teachers are bigots and use the classroom to teach hatred of Israel...

Alternative classrooms may not be as inclusive as they claim to be
Kathryn Blaze Carlson Jan 27, 2012 – 10:47 PM ET
Last Updated: Jan 27, 2012 10:57 PM ET
C.J. Gunther for National Post

Rachel Adelman, seen in her office at Harvard University’s campus in Cambridge, Mass., says her Israeli son was robbed of his sense of self through anti-Zionist materials distributed by a pro-Palestinian club at Toronto’s Student School.

She learned soon enough, though, that those promises of open-mindedness and equality “sounded nice,” but that the reality in the hallways would nearly cost her son his sense of self.

Eitan, then 17 years old and described by his mother as shy, came home from his first day at Toronto’s Student School in a “state of dismay,” his mother said.

“He said, ‘Ima [Hebrew for mother], the walls of the school are plastered with posters saying Israel: Apartheid State,’ ” said Professor Adelman, who now teaches at the Harvard Divinity School, referring to flyers mounted by a pro-Palestinian student club.

At the first all-school assembly, the students were shown Occupation 101, a controversial film that has been accused of portraying Israel as equivalent to Apartheid-era South Africa. Prof. Adelman said the school’s administrator defended the showing, saying the school had a policy of allowing students to voice their ideological bents. Two months later, Eitan switched schools.

But The Student School is just one of several Canadian schools that have moved “social justice” education onto the timetable. In launching nine alternative academies last week, one of this country’s boldest education directors touted “social justice” education as a way for children to gain social status and self-esteem. Proponents also say the approach teaches tolerance and respect for diversity — that it grooms socially conscious students prepared to fight against injustices they see in their communities.

‘What social justice really means is trying to create some sort of egalitarian system. That’s a political standpoint — it’s basically socialist’

— Frank Furedi

Unlike lessons about long division or photosynthesis, however, there are competing versions of what “social justice” actually looks like — and about which vision of it should end up on school curricula. That has left some parents and education advocates increasingly uncomfortable with the trend of trying to teach a subject that, virtually by definition, aims to challenge dominant cultural values. It can often, then, end up crossing into the kind of ethical and ideological instruction that has traditionally belonged at home.

“I worry about confusing the idea of teaching children about a just society with teaching a political viewpoint,” said Annie Kidder, executive director of People for Education, a parents’ advocacy group focusing on the public school system.

Yet school officials have not exactly shied away from putting a distinctly progressive stamp on their social justice programming. In one of its teaching guides, the B.C. Department of Education says social justice “extends beyond the protection of rights” and aims for a “just and equitable society.” Teaching equality in society, it explains, includes teaching ways we can all “attain the same achievements.”

In its 2010 Social Justice Action Plan, the Toronto District School Board defines social justice as a “specific habit of justice that is based on the concepts of human rights, equity, fairness and economic egalitarianism.” One prominent education magazine in the U.S., meantime, characterized social justice education as “teaching kids to question whoever happens to hold the reins of power at a particular moment.”

But certain education experts also question whether grade schools are even prepared to confront the challenges inevitably associated with social justice education. In New Brunswick, one Grade 4 teacher drew ire for trying to impart moral values by asking students to decide in 10 minutes or less who they would save if the Earth were about to explode — an Acadian francophone, a Chinese person, a black African, an English person or an aboriginal. The director of the district’s school board said at the time he believed the teacher aimed to send a message on racial tolerance.

In Ontario, one school sent Grade 1 students home with day-planners that highlighted an “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” and “International Day of Zero-Tolerance on Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting.” A school board superintendent said the aim was to “promote conversation between our students” but admitted it should have happened in a more “sensitive and age-appropriate manner.”

Last year, another Ontario school sent Grade 7 students to a protest hosted by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, a notoriously confrontational activist group that advocates militantly for economic equality. Several years ago, the head of the coalition was arrested after a bloody protest at the provincial legislature, where demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails and bricks at police and demanded more action on social housing.

In Quebec, one eco-friendly elementary school excluded a six-year-old boy from a teddy-bear contest because his lunch box contained a plastic bag rather than a reusable container.

“That’s an illegitimate use of the school’s authority,” said British sociologist Frank Furedi. “It’s not up to the schools to determine the behaviour and values of the family. A child’s education should not be confused with politicization, nor is it about internalizing the values of their teachers.”

The debate over the boundaries of a public school education is not new, with policy-makers and parents holding myriad views on how far teachers should tread into the realm of character education, ethics, justice and civic engagement. But it flares up particularly, and most vividly, whenever a particular parent accuses a particular teacher of directly contradicting the values the family teaches at home.

“We’re almost trying to do too many things at school,” said Doretta Wilson, executive director of the Society for Quality Education, a Waterloo, Ont.-based non-profit working to improve education in Canada. “School becomes the social manipulator rather than the place that says, ‘Let’s make sure kids learn the fundamentals when they’re in primary school so they can go on to learn and think for themselves.’ Sometimes schools force-feed a perspective. As a parent, it feels like that sometimes.”

However, Charles Ungerleider, a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia and former B.C. deputy minister of education, thinks it’s important that schools get into teaching ethics and values because that is “one of the strengths of schooling in a democratic society.”

“Parents are the primary educators of their kids and the primary communicators of values,” he said. “But the reason that we send children to public school is, in fact, to develop and inculcate the values we all share and to overcome any limitations a parent may have in exposing kids to alternative points of view.”

But while the idea of human rights may be a prevailing Canadian value, there is a gulf of difference between how some of us interpret it: whether or not the Israelis are denying Palestinians their human rights; whether or not Ottawa is denying First Nations theirs. Equality sounds inoffensive enough, until it raises more divisive questions about affirmative action or if it starts meaning equality of outcomes, instead of just equal opportunities.

“What social justice really means is trying to create some sort of egalitarian system,” Mr. Furedi said. “That’s a political standpoint — it’s basically socialist. If you want to sign up for it then that’s fine, but it’s not something that children should automatically be exposed to. Their parents never asked that their children be indoctrinated with that kind of ideology.”

What The Student School saw as “diversity” — tolerating even views hostile to Zionism — Ms. Adelman said seemed more like anti-Semitism.

“I was upset that the principal didn’t see that [the portrayal of the Arab-Israeli conflict] needs to be more balanced, and that he and the school had clearly taken a side on the issue,” she said of the principal, who was eventually investigated by the school board and is no longer listed as staff on the school’s website.

Ms. Kidder said teachers hold personal views just like anyone else, making it inevitable that their own biases will influence their lessons. “Maybe not when you’re teaching two plus two equals four,” she said. “But nearly everything after that may have some kind of value-based context or spin.”

Danielle McLaughlin, a director at the Canadian Liberties Association and Education Trust, a non-profit research and educational organization, said sinister headline-grabbing stories on social justice gone awry have actually had a “chilling effect” on some teachers who fear angering parents. She said many Ontario teachers are surprised to learn, too, that the province’s Education Act explicitly says it is a teacher’s duty to instill in children a respect for “the principles of Judeo-Christian morality and the highest regard for truth, justice, loyalty, love of country, humanity, benevolence, sobriety, industry, frugality, purity, temperance and all other virtues.”

While Catholic schools have long taught their version of social justice in the classroom — service to others, for example — public schools across the country have launched courses such as Social Justice 12, which was introduced as an elective in B.C. in 2008 and broached issues of homophobia and gender identity. When 90 students signed up for the class at W. J. Mouat Secondary school in Abbotsford, it was cancelled three weeks before it was to begin, reportedly over complaints from parents in the conservative community. A year later, it was brought back with the condition that students needed parental consent to attend.

Last week, a Prince Edward Island public school district was the subject of controversy for handing out Bibles to Grade 5 students unless their parents opt out of the practice. One father told the local CBC that he should be held responsible for his child’s belief system, not the school.

“There are certain values we all respect — the sort of Golden Rule ‘do unto others’ type thing,” Ms. Wilson said. “But ultimately, I believe parents should have the decision-making power over what values their children learn.”

National Post

Egyptian soccer fans call for new Holocaust

Watch this vdieo of hundreds (thousands?) or Egyptian soccer fans hoisting a huge banner calling for a new
Holocaust. It's chilling...
 

Palestinians celebrate the release of mass murderers & their accomplices

Every now and again, I feel moved to send an email to Esther Enkins, editor in chief of the CBC, pointing out the CBC's bias or an error in their coverage of the Middle East. If you want to try it yourself, her email is esther.enkin@cbc.ca.

Here's an example...

Dear Ms. Enkins:

Re “Israel set to release final batch of prisoners in swap”
(http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/12/18/israel-palestinians-prisoners.html)

and “Who gains from Israel's prisoner swap with Hamas?”
(http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/10/17/f-vp-petricic-shalit.html)

I found that the text of both these articles met CBC’s usual high standards, but with this exception: The term "prisoner swap" is grossly misleading.

Gilad Schalit was a kidnapping victim held for ransom.

The Palestinians being released are convicted criminals. Indeed many of them were convicted of multiple murders.

An ill-informed person might say, but surely it's not “kidnapping” when it's an armed conflict situation and the person held for ransom is a soldier? But it is. The Geneva Convention expressly forbids hostage taking and gives soldiers the same protection as civilians. Such kidnappings are also forbidden by the UN’s 1979 International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, which correctly refers to such acts by non-state actors as terrorism.

Of course no one expects Hamas to obey any laws, but Canadians should expect more of the CBC than to create a false equivalence between convicted criminals and a kidnapping victim.

This point is particularly important in regard to “Israel set to release final batch of prisoners in swap” which is illustrated by a work of Palestinian propaganda larger than the article itself. The image illustrates the released Palestinians as breaking free of their chains. Surely if the CBC gives such prominence to this image, you should also remind readers that these Palestinians aren't being justly liberated (as suggested by the image), but really are criminals being sprung from jail by the actions of other criminals.

Yours truly...

Since I complained, the CBC has updated the story and improved it, removing the Palestinian propaganda photo and adding a line that reads: "The prisoners freed in the first round included dozens of militants serving life sentences for involvement in bus bombings and other deadly attacks on Israeli civilians that killed hundreds."

However, the article still inaccurately refers to a "prisoner swap," rather than accurately identifying the Palestinians as convicted criminals freed in exchange for a kidnapping victim held hostage.

And the new photo for the article shows a released Palestinian prisoner joyously reaching out to embrace well-wishers. The photo conveys the message that this is a joyous occasion.  For balance, the story should include an equally large and emotional image conveying the reality of the situation; such as a photo of the terrrorists' burned and mutilated victims.

Alternatively, the photo used could just be given a more accurate caption: "Palestinians celebrate the release of mass murderers and their accomplices."

The OISE cult of conformity

OISE, the Mordor of Education

The Ontario Institute for studies in education trains teachers. Unfortunately, its been largely taken over by a far left cult that believes white people, particularly straight men, are oppressors.  Sociologist Werner Cohn has written an excellent series of blog postings about this. See here.

Below, I've pasted in one student's report of her year spent at OISE. I suspect my views on many matters might be closer to the views of her far left professors than to hers. For example, I think it's important that all children feel at home in our schools, which means our school must affirm their identities.

So it's important for kids to see their holidays recognized: Christmas for Christians, Rosh HaShannah for Jews, Eid for Muslims. Gay kids should be able to be who they are without being bullied. Girls should be able to walk the halls of high schools without having their asses grabbed. And no kid should ever have to put up with being harassed about their race. 

For the most part, Toronto schools seem to be doing a do good job - particularly on the multicultural front (though I do hear extremely disturbing things about bullying, sexual harassment and violence in some schools).

But to get back to OISE, while supporting a diversity of identities, OISE draws the line at allowing diversity in thinking.  There is a party line at OISE that's taught to new teachers. It includes explicit support of the NDP, hatred of Israel and tolerance of antisemitism if it's dressed up as anti-Zionism, and hostility toward straight white males as oppressors. (Again, see Cohn's postings here.)

With teachers being educated in bigotry at OISE, is it any wonder that now we have a Toronto teacher connecting his students to antisemitic websites, as I noted in this recent article.
 
Here's one woman's experience of her year at OISE....

OISE, Indoctrinating the Teachers to Indoctrinate the Children
By: Ruthann Attia

I am sure that many of you have heard about the liberal and leftist agenda that has taken over our institutions of higher learning. I would like to share some of what I experienced attending the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

It was my first real experience in a Canadian public education institution as I had previously attended a small private high school, followed by attendance at a university in the United States. I can say now that I am very thankful that the time I did spend in the Canadian public education system was not lengthy.

I began my year at OISE with my mind open and ready to learn, with no previously conceived notions about the political atmosphere of teachers college; I had simply heard that, in general, it was often boring and easy. However, my experience at OISE was anything but boring. In fact, it left me feeling angry, deflated and, most of all, deeply saddened about the direction in which Canada is headed.

Initially, I was entirely shocked by the blatantly obvious political agenda. On the first day I noticed that my classroom wall had a poster listing the main Canadian political parties. It then listed each party’s supposed track record with major Canadian issues, such as health care and education. Unbelievably, the poster went on to proclaim, that, as future teachers, we should be sure to “Vote NDP.”

I looked around for other posters proclaiming the same for Conservatives and Liberals: I could find none. I was so shocked that I pulled out my cell phone and took a photo of it, as proof of the propaganda! Sadly, this poster was the least of my concerns by the year’s end.

Classes began and I was repeatedly baffled by the content of discussions being held in my classrooms. Such issues included why universities and high schools lacked transgendered washrooms, how to not stand for the national anthem, and censoring the celebration of Christmas in schools because it is too “painful of an experience for non-Christians”.

After speaking out numerous times and trying to create a more even-keeled discussion about several issues raised in class, I realized that what was most upsetting about this whole situation was that the door to discussion had been closed. Permanently.

My classmates and professors at OISE had absolutely no “tolerance” for anyone who opposed their views on tolerance, equity, diversity and social justice. I was fighting a losing battle. It was obvious that my classmates and professors were on a mission.

This mission involved indoctrinating each student teacher, and eventually each high school student, with the tenets of their secular religion. The religion’s highest objective was to attain “equity, diversity and social justice” in all aspects of education and social life.

While it sounded great, when seen through an OISE lens it was actually a very totalitarian policy, with a complex language and some very self-righteous believers. I could not even speak about a possible doubt without being cast out of the group altogether and labeled a diversity-hater and an enemy of social justice.

I desperately tried to fight this belief that I did not care about the issues discussed in class, simply because I approached them from a different angle. I was consistently shut down by shallow arguments and silly comments that implied I simply hadn’t developed as far as the rest of the group on the “progressive path”.

One of my classmates even began crying and told the class she found it very hurtful when people (looking in my direction) did not pay attention to issues she found to be of profound importance (this particular class focused on homosexual education). It was all very demeaning and, by the end of the year, I had mentally and emotionally checked out and no longer spoke in class at all.

Fighting against 30 classmates every day took its toll. The last comment I made in class was to let my peers and future colleagues know that it frightened me that they could not deal with my questions or my disbelief in their policies without ostracizing me, for how would they treat the high school students that disagreed with them? As you can imagine, this did not lead to an increase in my popularity.

Needless to say, the year passed by at a dreadfully slow pace. I found myself sitting through classes on how to get hetero-normative language out of the schools, reading countless documents that had been reviewed for “equity”, and reading mandatory Marxist and feminist literature.

I was urged to attend equity/diversity workshops, and asked to volunteer in Gender Construction workshops that were mandatory for grade 10 students, where issues like “straight supremacy” would be discussed by curious 15-year-olds.

At one point, a classmate asked the professor: “So, are we supposed to be activists, or teachers?” and the professor promptly replied, “Can the two really be separated?”

...

Looking back on my experience now, I realize that, as a student attending OISE, I was subject to what should be described as indoctrination. This indoctrination is of great concern not only to me, but also to all Canadians, no matter what side of the political spectrum.

It is institutions such as OISE that educate the educators, who will in turn educate the nation. It is scary and sad to think of the thousands of students who will be indoctrinated in the classrooms of all my like-minded, unquestioning, and intolerant OISE-educated peers.

Radio Canada (the CBC in Quebec) chastised by Ombudsman for broadcasting Palestinian propaganda

Everyone interested in the issue has long recognized that the CBC is biased against Israel and in favour of the Palestinians. In English Canada, though, this bias has been less pronounced since Tony Burman, the former editor in chief, left the CBC to work for al-Jazeera, a network where Burman's bias is entirely at home.

Also, CBC journalists sometimes attempt to give even-handed reports on the middle east despite their bias. (Certainly the CBC does a better job of being even-handed than the Globe & Mail.)

But that's not the case in the CBC's French language service, Radio Canada, where anti-Israel reporting is simply the norm. Last summer, though, Radio Canada broadcast several reports that were so obviously and outrageously biased that the CBC's Ombudsman upheld a whole series of complaints. The Canadian Jewish News has the details....

Radio-Canada Ombudsman raps Middle East reporting
Janice Arnold

MONTREAL — The Radio-Canada ombudsman has upheld a series of complaints made by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) about the network’s Middle East coverage.


Most of the complaints concerned reporting by the French-language public broadcaster’s Middle East correspondent, Ginette Lamarche, between June 5 and 7 on the deadly clash at the Syrian border between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and the Israeli army.

Ombudsman Pierre Tourangeau concluded that two reports by Lamarche did not respect the network’s standards for impartiality and accuracy.

Most significantly to CIJA, she failed to report that the Israeli army had issued several warnings before opening fire and that the demonstrators were violent and attempting to force their way across the Israeli border.

CIJA’s predecessor organization, the Quebec-Israel Committee, objected to Lamarche’s reference to the Qalandia checkpoint as a “symbol of [the Palestinians’] daily humiliation,” not making clear that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is also considered a terrorist organization, that Ahmad Saadate was convicted of ordering the murder of an Israeli government minister, and that some information was from a non-corroborated Syrian source.

CIJA also objected to Lamarche’s reference that the Palestinians “tried to claim their right of return.” The ombudsman agreed that this “right,” while central to the conflict, has not been confirmed by the United Nations Security Council.

“On an issue as controversial as that of Israeli-Palestinian relations, the choice of words, the precision of the information given and the identification of its source takes on particular importance,” wrote Tourangeau, who became ombudsman on Nov. 14, replacing Julie Miville-Duchêne, who left in July.

Even though some of Lamarche’s reporting was live, which made it more difficult for her to verify the information, the journalist is still obligated to ensure “in a reasonable manner” that it is accurate.

The ombudsman also agreed with CIJA that a June 7 broadcast entitled “Des Juifs du Golan appuient l’attaque d’Israël contre les manifestants pacifiques” (“Golan Jews support Israel’s attack on the peaceful demonstrators”) didn’t meet Radio-Canada’s standards.

Specifically, Lamarche paraphrased an Israeli, identified only as Maurice, as saying: “The army maybe shot live bullets on the civilians who were demonstrating peacefully. If that is the case, it is only doing its duty.”

An audio recording of her interview with the man showed that her paraphrasing was not faithful to what he actually said, Tourangeau wrote.

The ombudsman also found that “this morally questionable attitude” was presented without sufficient grounds as being representative of the Jews of the Golan.

Finally, the ombudsman concluded that RDI, Radio-Canada’s news speciality channel, used erroneous maps March 19 on the program 24 heures en 60 minutes to illustrate the Arab-Israeli conflict. CIJA had termed the maps “propagandist.”

The maps were used to show what a guest described as the loss of Palestinian land between 1945 and 2000.

Tourangeau describes the maps as “erroneous, confusing and incomplete, whose source was not identified.”

RDI’s management admitted that the maps should never have been used, while the ombudsman recommended that a correction be made.

http://www.cjnews.com/index.php?q=node/88925

Antisemitism in Canada – Why Now?

I originally published this piece in the Canadian Jewish News, April 21, 2004. It remains just as relevant now as then.

Across the country, the firebombing of a Jewish day school in Montreal appalled Canadians. Why did it happen? Why now?

I see four root causes.

First, the terrorist attacks of September 11 radicalized anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment in Canada and around the world. Much of the far left has always considered America and Israel as a single enemy and the primary source of evil in world affairs. While September 11 demonstrated to most people that there are much nastier people around, the far left wasn’t prepared to give up their vision of America the evil.

For example, in his essay, “The War in Afghanistan,” Noam Chomsky claims that America’s war of self-defence was a far greater moral wrong than the terrorist attacks themselves. Much of the left followed Chomsky’s lead. But many people, some Canadians among them, defended their vision of American evil by adopting the notion that the U.S. and/or Israel (or simply "the Jews") were responsible for the September 11 attacks.

Such conspiratorial thinking, which in Canada used to belong exclusively to neo-Nazi propagandists like Ernst Zundel, suddenly became mainstream. Three Toronto Star columnists have promoted the notion of September 11 as an American plot - Michelle Landsberg, Thomas Walkom, and Antonia Zerbisias. Zebisias went so far as to praise an antisemitic web site and recommend it to her readers (a recommendation that she partially disowned after B’nai Brith called her on it.)

Second, opposition to the American-led war against Saddam Hussein popularized anti-Americanism throughout Canada and licensed its expression. When MP Carolyn Parrish said, “Damn Americans, I hate those bastards,” she likely generated more support for the Liberals, not less. And when Canadians opened the door to anti-Americanism, its anti-Jewish twin also snuck in.

Why did America invade Iraq? The answer, according to some conspiracy-minded Canadians, is that America is controlled by Jewish, neo-Conservatives - a cabal that puts Israel’s interests ahead of America’s and, more generally, plots for America to conquer the world.

For example, in an article titled, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They’re Jewish?” Kalle Lasn, editor of the Canadian magazine Adbusters, produces a list of American neo-conservatives with a bullet (or perhaps it’s a little yellow star) beside each Jew. “Half of the them are Jewish,” he writes, in case his readers can’t count. And he says, they control “Rumsfeld’s Defense Department.”

Lasn adds, rather darkly, “One wonders what Israeli-American relations, and indeed what American relations with the rest of the world would look like if [they] … were also in charge at [the] State [Department].”

This idea of Jewish puppet masters is simply a rehash of the century old myth of the Elders of Zion, which in times past was so fervently embraced by Adolph Hitler.
Third, the train bombings in Madrid demonstrated that terrorism works. The bombers of the Montreal day school simply followed the Madrid example, but fortunately burned only books, not people. Next time, according to the note left by the fire bombers, they might do worse.

Fourth, and most importantly, antisemitism in Canada has been activated by the continual portrayal of Israel as murderous and monstrous and not just by the far left but in mainstream media and by mainstream politicians.

To give just one example, the CBC’s Mary Lou Finlay opened a recent interview with a representative of the Palestinian Authority by asking him for his reaction to the Israeli "murder" of Ahmed Yassin. I assumed she’d made an embarrassing slip until Russ Germain introduced a later segment of the program with a clearly scripted line about the world crying "bloody murder."

Have you ever heard anyone on the CBC refer to any of Hamas’s deliberate killings of Israeli civilians – men, women or children – as “murder”?

The CBC’s condemnation of Israel’s “murder” of Ahmed Yassin and Canada’s foreign minister’s condemnation of the assassination were mere peeps in the worldwide outcry against Israel. That outcry was louder, more widespread and vastly more heated than have been any objections to the hundreds of killings and thousands of injuries Yassin’s terrorist organization has inflicted on ordinary people going about their daily lives.

That outcry was surely heard by the people who firebombed the Montreal Jewish day school. When they wrote that their attack was retribution for the Israeli assassination Ahmed Yassin, I imagine they expected praise for their actions. Surely, they were surprised that Canadians unanimously denounced their attack, with the Toronto Star and the CBC as appalled as everyone else. Then again, perhaps the bombers are familiar with hypocrisy.


Afterword
From the trial of the bomber, we now know that my cause #4 was spot on. The bomber himself explained how the frenzied reporting of the Israeli assassination of the leader of the Hamas terrorist organization, Ahmed Yassin, incited him to go and firebomb a Jewish primary school.

On the other hand, with the benefit of hindsight, I’d cut cause #3 – the Madrid Train Bombing. All successful terrorist acts encourage further terrorism; in that respect the Madrid bombing wasn’t special.

Occupy Wall Street, a tale of the .1 percent

Unlike in Canada, where the Occupy movement has aroused nothing more than mild annoyance or weary tolerance, in the United States, Occupy Wall Street has a lot of support. Many Americans see the movement as a manifesation of their outrage over the country's deep economic troubles.

However, while many Americans identify with the anger of the Occupiers, their claim to represent the 99% who aren't rich is ludicrous. A mix of anarchists, Marxists, anti-imperialists and Israel-haters - the Occupiers themselves represent the deeply delusional point one percent.

In the New Yorker, Mattathias Schwartz has written an excellent piece on the leaders of the Occupy Movement and in particular that noted Canadian purveyor of antisemitisem Kalle Lasn...

Pre-Occupied
The Origins and Futue of Occupy Wall Street

Kalle Lasn spends most nights shuffling clippings into a binder of plastic sleeves, each of which represents one page of an issue of Adbusters, a bimonthly magazine that he founded and edits. It is a tactile process, like making a collage, and occasionally Lasn will run a page with his own looped cursive scrawl on it. From this absorbing work, Lasn acquired the habit of avoiding the news after dark. So it was not until the morning of Tuesday, November 15th, that he learned that hundreds of police officers had massed in lower Manhattan at 1 A.M. and cleared the camp at Zuccotti Park. If anyone could claim responsibility for the Zuccotti situation, it was Lasn: Adbusters had come up with the idea of an encampment, the date the initial occupation would start, and the name of the protest—Occupy Wall Street. Now the epicenter of the movement had been raided. Lasn began thinking of reasons that this might be a good thing.

Lasn is sixty-nine years old and lives with his wife on a five-acre farm outside Vancouver. He has thinning white hair and the small eyes of a bulldog. In a lilting voice, he speaks of “a dark age coming for humanity” and of “killing capitalism,” alternating gusts of passion with gentle laughter. He has learned not to let premonitions of apocalypse spoil his good mood.

The magazine, which he founded twenty-two years ago, depicts the developed world as a nightmare of environmental collapse and spiritual hollowness, driven to the brink of destruction by its consumer appetites. Adbusters’ images—a breastfeeding baby tattooed with corporate logos; a smiling Barack Obama with a clown’s ball on his nose—are combined with equally provocative texts and turned into a paginated montage. Adbusters is not the only radical magazine calling for the end of life as we know it, but it is by far the best-looking.

Lasn was interrupted by a phone call about the Zuccotti eviction while in bed, reading Julian Barnes’s “The Sense of an Ending.” He rose and checked his e-mail. There was a message from Micah White, Adbusters’ senior editor and Lasn’s closest collaborator.

“Eerie timing!” White wrote. Earlier that night, Adbusters had sent out its most recent “tactical briefing”—a mass e-mail to ninety thousand friends of the magazine—proposing that the nation’s Occupy protesters throw a party in mid-December, declare victory, and withdraw from their encampments. A few hours later, officers from the New York Police Department began handing out notices stating that the park had become dangerous and unsanitary, and ordering the protesters to leave, so that it could be cleaned. Those who refused to go were arrested, and whatever they left behind was carried off by the Department of Sanitation, to a depot on West Fifty-seventh Street. After a long night of angry marches and meetings, the protesters were allowed back into Zuccotti, with newly enforced prohibitions on tents and on lying down. The protest continued, but the fifty-nine days of rude, anarchic freedom on a patch of granite in lower Manhattan were over.

White reached Lasn by telephone shortly before nine. Lasn was in the bathtub, and White told him details that he had learned online about the eviction. The police had established a strict media cordon, blocking access from nearby streets. “It was a military-style operation,” he said. These words made Lasn think of the bloody uprising in Syria. He quickly decided that the apparent end of Zuccotti was not a tragedy but the latest in a series of crisis-driven opportunities, what he calls “revolutionary moments,” akin to the slapping of a Tunisian fruit vender. “I just can’t believe how stupid Bloomberg can be!” he said to me later that day. “This means escalation. A raising of the stakes. It’s one step closer to, you know, a revolution.” ... more

PLO ambassodor to Lebanon says Palestinian state will not end the conflict

BEIRUT: Palestinian refugees will not become citizens of a new Palestinian state, according to Palestine’s ambassador to Lebanon.

From behind a desk topped by a miniature model of Palestine’s hoped-for blue United Nations chair, Ambassador Abdullah Abdullah spoke to The Daily Star Wednesday about Palestine’s upcoming bid for U.N. statehood.

The ambassador unequivocally says that Palestinian refugees would not become citizens of the sought for U.N.-recognized Palestinian state, an issue that has been much discussed. “They are Palestinians, that’s their identity,” he says. “But … they are not automatically citizens.”

This would not only apply to refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan or the other 132 countries where Abdullah says Palestinians reside. Abdullah said that “even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”

Abdullah said that the new Palestinian state would “absolutely not” be issuing Palestinian passports to refugees.

Neither this definitional status nor U.N. statehood, Abdullah says, would affect the eventual return of refugees to Palestine. “How the issue of the right of return will be solved I don’t know, it’s too early [to say], but it is a sacred right that has to be dealt with and solved [with] the acceptance of all.” He says statehood “will never affect the right of return for Palestinian refugees.”

The right of return that Abdullah says is to be negotiated would not only apply to those Palestinians whose origins are within the 1967 borders of the state, he adds. “The state is the 1967 borders, but the refugees are not only from the 1967 borders. The refugees are from all over Palestine. When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict. This is not a solution to the conflict. This is only a new framework that will change the rules of the game.”

The Palestinian Liberation Organization would remain responsible for refugees, and Abdullah says that UNRWA would continue its work as usual.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration recently pledged to veto statehood in the Security Council, which would leave the Palestinians the option of seeking a General Assembly resolution. If this happens, Abdullah says, 129 countries have committed to positive votes.

The United States has of late been taking steps to dissuade the Palestinians from taking their bid to the U.N., sending negotiators to meet with Palestinian officials. The ambassador says these talks have not been fruitful.

“They won’t offer us anything … that saves the peace process,” he says. “They would offer us nothing except to say that they will cut financial aid, and other such threats. Dignity is much more important than a loaf of bread.”

The last minute threats Abdullah refers to include a bill proposed by the chair of the U.S. House Foreign Relations Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, which would cut U.S. funding to any U.N. body that recognizes the Palestinian statehood.

Abdullah says now is the time to seek statehood because the peace process has been stalled for around a year, and rattles off the dates of locations of failed meetings with the Israelis last September.

“These meetings did not bring us one iota closer to achieving the goal the negotiations were resumed to achieve.” He says that there are now new obstacles, including settlement building “with some haste” and Israel’s insistence that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state or a national home for the Jewish people.

Abdullah says the Palestinians effectively have no choice but to go to the U.N. With talks at an impasse, he says, “nothing was left for us to protect the international consensus of the two-state solution.”

A U.S. veto in the Security Council, Abdullah says, would only harm the great power. “The United States is propagating that it is the champion of freedom and democracy around the world, and if it denies the Palestinians the right to be free, to be democratic, and to live in dignity, it is not a good sign for the U.S. It leaves a dark stain … It’s not good for America,” he says. “America deserves better.”

He says the U.S. should be mindful of “signals in the region … that are ringing a bell.” He mentions the tension between Turkey and Israel and the recent eruption of protests at the Israeli embassy in Cairo.

“If wrong policies are adopted in the U.S., it will only give a freer hand to extremism. It only empowers negative forces. And this will make it more difficult and complicated for rational forces to prevail.”

Despite clear signs of opposition from the U.S., Abdullah says anything could happen next week, when the U.N.’s General Assembly session opens and the issue of Palestinian statehood will be debated.

“When we go [to the United Nations],” he says, “we [will not] bet on anything.”


A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on September 15, 2011, on page 2.

Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Politics/2011/Sep-15/148791-interview-refugees-will-not-be-citizens-of-new-state.ashx#ixzz1YVaEgLvw
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)

Black and Jewish

Check out this music video: "Black and Jewish," a parody of "Black and Yellow," a hip-hop tribute to the colors of Pittsburgh’s professional sports teams.

Photo Lisa Bonet, Jewish actress.

United Church minister's bias

Here's a film review from the United Church Observer. The reviewer's profound ignorance and casual bias illustrate what's wrong with even the well-intentioned "critics of Israel" (as they like to be called) ...

The Hilltops
Directed by Igal Hecht
Chutzpa Productions
Reviewed by the reverend Jim Carey

The Hilltops appears to make the case for Israeli settlers to occupy every hilltop possible in the West Bank, presenting the settlers as misunderstood, persecuted and maligned by those who view these settlements as one of the key obstacles on the road to peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Scenes of various hilltop outposts and the well-meaning people who occupy them are placed in contrast with statements made by U.S. President Barack Obama in June 2010. It is “undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland,” he said. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. . . . It is time for these settlements to stop.”

In the documentary, one woman seemingly replies to Obama, saying, “We will never stop!” This appears to typify the zealous nature of the settlers.

The settlers are portrayed as hippies and back-to-the-earth types who deeply love the land and who seek to live out an interpretation of the Bible that holds that the Holy Land belongs exclusively to Jewish people. This portrayal is contrary to the witness of United Church of Canada partners in Palestine, who report the settlers are militant, law-breaking and often armed.

In the latter half of the documentary, there is an attempt at conversation with neighbouring Arabs about the settlements. But the conversation goes nowhere, as each party believes it has the rightful claim to the land.

The value in this documentary is that it offers a clear window into the mindset and the militancy of the settlers. While appearing to defend the settlers, it offers some explanation as to why the settlements endanger the peace process, render the division of the West Bank highly problematic, and lead some United Church partners to compare the settlements to apartheid.

Rev. Jim Cairney is a minister in Mississauga, Ont. He recently travelled to Israel and the Occupied Territories

A review of the review:

I confess I still find it shocking to see a minister using the word "apartheid" against Israel. I’m more used to hearing such name-calling from bigots on the far left and the far right.

But putting aside this slur, Cairney's review illustrates the sort of generalizations that obscure the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Cairney speaks of settlements and settlers as if they're all the same. Many (most?) settlers aren't ideological at all; they're suburbanites who have moved into the new neighbourhoods built around Jerusalem.

Nor is it true to suggest that the ideologically motivated settlers are all of a kind. Doubtless, some are violent bastards; others are peaceable and often have good relations with local Palestinians.

In March, following the terrorist massacre of the Fogel family (the mother, father and 3 children aged 11, 3 and 3 months), there was a news story about local Palestinians seeking medical help at a settlement for a mother going through a perilous childbirth. See here.

What struck me about the story was not only joy of a tragedy averted as the Israeli medics saved the Palestinian mother and her new born baby, but also that when faced with a medical emergency, the Palestinian taxi driver took his passenger straight to an Israeli settlement.

Cairney also seems to be misrepresenting Obama. Of course, Obama called for a cessation of further building within existing Israeli settlements. (Israelis haven't built new settlements for more than 10 years.) But Obama has also recognized that the large settlements will never be dismantled; it's simply unthinkable that any country would (or could) move hundreds of thousands of citizens.

This is why no one who's really interested in peace calls for the removal of all Israeli settlements.

On the other hand, all mainstream Israeli political parties treat the small, isolated settlements as bargaining chips to be given up in negotiations with the Palestinians. Unfortunately, this strategy hasn't worked, as the Palestinian side hasn't been willing to accept peace.

Way back when, Arafat turned down a peace proposal (two in a row, in fact) and launched the terrorist war known as the Intifada instead. Arafat's successor has been no more willing to sign a peace deal. Three years ago, the Israelis offered the Palestinians Gaza, east Jerusalem and the West Bank, with land swaps to fully compensate for the settlements to be kept by Israel, giving the Palestinians the equivalent of 100% of the territory.

President Abbas turned the offer down. Because the settlements and the occupation of the West Bank aren't the issues.

The underlying problem is that the Palestinians claim that Israel is an illegitimate state; that the Palestinians alone have rights to all of "historic Palestine" (including Israel), and they will not allow legitimacy to the Jewish state.

This isn't like the wild Israeli settlers sitting on a few hilltops in the West Bank claiming exclusive sovereignty over the land; within Israeli society, such views are marginal. No, the belief that Israel is illegitimate is the view of the Palestinian leadership and of the majority of the Palestinian people.

I’m an optimist, though: I expect we’ll have peace between the Palestinians and Israelis within 20 or 30 years. It will begin when the Palestinians recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, just as Israelis have long recognized the Palestinian right to a state of their own.

The folly of dividing Jerusalem

All Israeli-Palestinian peace plans to date have proposed dividing Jerusalem. Unfortunately this idea is divorced from reality. In Jerusalem, Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods aren't just an arm's width apart, the "border" runs right through shared buildings. This shouldn't surprise anyone; after all, Jerusalem has been a single city for thousands of years. Jerusalem has only ever been divided from 1948 though 1967 when Jordan occupied the old city.

Yaacov Lozowick has a brilliant series of posts on the issue, including a few short video tours of the proposed dividing line. Watch here and here. See his whole collection of posts here.

On the topic, I've previously proposed holding a referundum among Jerusalem's Arab population about whether they'd rather stay part of Israel or be incorporated into a Palestinian state. It's almost certain, they'd rather remain part of Israel. See here.

Crystal Ball #2

I'm changing my bets. Yesterday's polls show the Liberal collapse continuing across the country. I now think the Liberals may get as few as two dozen seats.

The only area of the country where Liberal fortunes have improved is in BC. They're still in third place there, but they're recovering enough to split the vote with the NDP and hand some closely contested seats to the Conservatives.

I now think the Bloc is in worse trouble than I thought yesterday, too. I think they may get as few as 20 seats. Hopefully even less.

On the other hand, the NDP surge continues - entirely at the expense of the Liberals and the Bloc. So I now expect them to take at least 100 seats.

The Conservatives continue to hold steady or may be climbing. With the Liberal collapse, I think they've got a 50-50 chance of hitting 155 seats, which is what they need for a majority.

So here's my new prediction:

Conservatives: 155 seats (more or less)
NDP: 105 seats (more or less)
Liberals: 24 seats (or more)
Bloc 18 seats (or more)

Combined NDP & Liberal seats: about 130, versus about 155 seats for the Conservatives.

If the Conservatives manage to win their majority, the constitutional situation becomes mute. We'll have a Conservative government, full stop.

Otherwise, I fear we're into the same mess as I predicted yesterday: The other 3 parties combining to defeat the Conservatives at the first opportunity. Then the NDP and Liberals forming an informal coalition undersigned on a vote-by-vote basis by the Bloc.

I don't know if most Canadians will view such a government as legitimate. They didn't the last time the opposition parties tried it.

But here's a thought: Previously everyone's assumed the opposition would be led by the Liberals, and of course it's impossible to imagine the NDP siding with the Conservatives - party members simply wouldn't stand for it, regardless of any consideration of real politic.

But ideologically, only the left wing of the Liberal party is close to the NDP. After tonight, that left wing will cease to exist - they've all gone over to the NDP.

It may take the Liberals a while to understand their new position - and probably too long to adjust to it - but as of tonight, a Conservative - Liberal colation will make much more sense than and NDP - Liberal coalition.

My 2011 federal election crystal ball

Okay, time to put my money where my mouth is. Here’s my prediction for tomorrow’s election:

Conservatives: 136 – 154 seats. Best guess: 143 (i.e., same as before)
NDP: 64 – 73 seats. Best guess: 67 (up about 30 seats)
Liberals: 53 – 61 seats. Best guess: 56 (down about 20 seats)
The Bloc: 40 – 46 seats. Best guess: 42 (down about 5 seats)
Greens: 0 – 1 seats. Best guess: 0

Combined NDP & Liberal seats: about 125, versus about 145 seats for the Conservatives.

While, I don’t have any faith in these numbers I’ve pulled out of the air, I do expect they’ll reflect the general picture: a Conservative minority, with the NDP and Liberals not able to form an alternative government without the support of the Bloc.

I think this is bad news. A Conservative majority would be my preference. Economically, most countries are a mess – except for Canada. Our economy remains the envy of the world, and a Conservative majority would ensure continued stability.

My second choice would be a Liberal-NDP coalition with enough seats to govern without having their every move okayed by the Bloc. Obviously, this isn’t going to happen. The Liberals are headed for third or fourth place, so they won’t be leading any coalition. Worse, I don't believe the NDP and Liberals can win enough seats between them to create a majority.

So what’s going to happen? Most likely the other parties will defeat the new Conservative government at their first opportunity. Then we’ll see a minority coalition government led by the NDP (though doubtless it will be called something else, so as not to embarrass Iggy who has sworn off coalitions).

Who knows what its policies will be. The federal NDP has never had to create a platform that could actually be implemented. Ignatieff correctly called their election promises “science fiction” – at least $20 billion in increased spending supported by $17.5 billion in new taxes they won’t be able to collect.

But regardless of what the NDP would like to spend our money on, the biggest ticket item will be new goodies for Quebec. To support an NDP-Liberal coalition, the Bloc will charge a high price, and they’ll keep asking for more.

I expect that, sooner or later, the NDP-Liberal coalition will realize it can’t afford to pay more blackmail and the government will fall. Or the Bloc will refuse its support simply in order to demonstrate that Canada doesn’t work – that we can’t even create a government that lasts more than a few months. In the worst case scenario, the Bloc will pull the plug during a new referendum campaign on Quebec separating from Canada.

I hope to be proven entirely wrong in my analysis, but in my heart, I expect we’ll all be back at the polls next year.

Heads they win, tails you lose

Well at least we now know what this election it about. Michael Ignatieff wants to become Prime Minister.

He’s willing to do it the traditional way – by winning more seats than the Conservatives – but as that’s not going to happen, plan B is to lose and still become Prime Minister.

He made this clear just this past week in an interview on the CBC, but presumably, this was the plan all along: Hold the Tories to a minority. Defeat them in the first vote in the House of Commons. Cut a deal with the NDP and the Bloc. Then form a Liberal government.

But what deal will they cut?

At this point in the campaign, the Liberals hope to win 90 seats. But with their campaign going from bad to worse, 70 seems more likely. The Liberals hope to hold the Conservatives to about 150 seats – 5 short of a majority. But clearly it’s going to be a nail-biter. And a Liberal government scratched together in these circumstances would be the weakest, least stable government in Canadian history.

We could have another election in no time – and that might be the best we can hope for.

As the price for their support, Iggy’s partners would be able to demand anything they want. On the social policy front, we’d end up with the NDP platform – which would be fine for a while, until the country goes broke.

But what about the Bloc? The PQ is posed to win the upcoming Quebec election, and they intend to introduce another referendum. So what will the Bloc ask of Iggy? Perhaps they’ll demand that the federal government stay out of the referendum – offer no defence of Canada whatsoever.

I believe Iggy would say no – surely he’s that much of a Canadian. But then the Bloc would pull the plug on the Liberal government and we’d be into another federal election and a separation battle with Quebec at the same time. In other words, heads the Bloc wins, tails Canada loses.

On the other hand, would a Conservative majority be so bad? The Conservatives have provided competent government, and as Stephen Harper never tires of pointing out, our economy isn’t perfect, but it is the envy of the world.

And the last Conservative budget – the one voted down by the Liberals – was in fact a Liberal budget, containing no threat to social programs. On the contrary, it was full of small expenditures for every needy group in the country. Paul Martin might have written that budget.

I know this makes no difference to dyed-in-the-wool Liberals. Political affiliation is a tribal thing. For many, being a Liberal, Conservative or NDPer is part of their identity. It’s not primarily about policy at all.

I understand this perfectly, as I used to belong the NDP tribe. Unfortunately, I became a political refugee because of the NDP’s hostility toward Israel and its supporters (including me). On the other hand, now that I’m without a political tribe, I think I can see better.

I often do vote Liberal. In the past, I’ve campaigned for the Liberal candidate in my riding. This time around, though, I’m voting for stable government and for Canada. I’m voting Conservative.

How to bash Israel in your child’s school, a York University graduate seminar

Recently, I learned of a session offered by York University’s Faculty of Education on “The Politics of Israel/Palestine in the Classroom.” The panel consisted of three notorious Israel-bashers set to discuss: “How do we bring political debate into the classroom?”

Clearly, the real subject was How to teach Israel-bashing to kids – a subject York U apparently thought was worthwhile offering as part of its annual conference for Graduate Students in Education.

Jason Kunin, the high school teacher on the panel, first gained notoriety in 2007 when he introduced an anti-Israel boycott motion at his teacher’s union local. He also proposed putting together an “education package” for teaching anti-Israeli propaganda in schools. Kunin’s motion was overwhelmingly defeated.

The second panelist, Elle Flanders, teaches at York University and makes obscure anti-Israel films. But she is best known as a spokesperson for Queers United Against Israeli Apartheid. This is the group that marches in the annual gay pride parade calling for the eradication of the only state in the Middle East where it’s legal to be gay.

The third panelist, Bh Yael also makes anti-Israel films and teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design. He and Jason Kunin have both been members of “Not In Our Name.”

In 2007, Not in Our Name attended the Cairo Conference, where members of the Israel-hating left met in Egypt to talk strategy with terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Jamaat al-Islamiya. At the time Jamaat al-Islamiya was best known for murdering 71 tourists. It has since become an official branch of al-Qaeda.

Attendees at the Cairo conference decided that terrorists should continue blowing people up while the western far left groups should confine themselves to propaganda and to promoting a boycott of Israel and Israelis.

Did I mention that all the panelists at the How to bash Israel session support a boycott Israel?

Another session at York’s education conference featured a presentation by PhD Candidate Nayrouz Abu-Hatoum on the “Politics of the Visual.” Nayrouz describes the subject of her PhD studies as: the “Israeli-built apartheid wall in Palestinian lands, where I intend to explore creation of new spaces of belonging and resistance to state power.”

Her presentation at the conference was on the same subject, which of course has nothing to do with education. Apparently, her slide show was just meant as a short anti-Israel rant to help break up the day.

But here’s the thing, I’m reporting missed news – this education conference at York happened a year ago. The media covers big hate festivals such as the annual anti-Israel apartheid week, but how many other outrageous anti-Israel events do we never hear about? Plenty. Because at some universities political activism masquerades as academic inquiry every day of the week.

We saw this recently in the Jenny Peto scandal at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (part of the University of Toronto). For her master’s thesis, Peto wrote a dissertation devoid of research or other academic content. Instead, she attacked Jews as racists. (See Werner Cohn’s excellent series of postings on the scandal here.)

When people objected to the University of Toronto granting an MA for this rant, the university responded that it was an issue of free speech. This was pure deflection. No university can really believe that, in order to avoid trampling a student’s free speech, it must grant an MA for any old crap the student feels like writing. Really, the university was saying: Bug off – it’s none of your business.

Similarly, in 2009, York University held a conference on a “one-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a solution which amounts to replacing Israel with an Arab majority state. One of the conference organizers was Ali Abunimah, best known as a founder of Electronic Intifada, a website that glamorizes terrorism. Many of the other presenters at the conference were also anti-Israel activists, not academics at all.

Gary Goodyear, Minister for Science and Technology, suggested that government funding for the conference should be re-considered. The president of the Canadian University Teachers Association responded with outrage. How dare the government consider withdrawing its funding for a university event!

Clearly, our universities regard themselves as independent Duchies, not subject to any oversight. Canadians can’t afford to indulge them in this delusion. Especially, since at some universities, the propagation of hatred seems to be part of their day-to-day business.

During the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union that handed out advanced degrees in exchange for students developing propaganda. Perhaps most famously, Mahmoud Abbas, current president of the Palestinian Authority, got his PhD for a thesis concocting a tale of collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists, with a bit of Holocaust denial tossed in.

Who could have imagined that Western universities would take on this role? That a York student would be concocting a PhD thesis on the “apartheid wall”? That an OISE student would defame Jews as racist – and get a Masters degree for it?

Most universities are still places where learning takes place. But in some departments at some universities, ideologically motivated professors have attained a dominant position. Instead of pursuing knowledge, they’re spreading propaganda – and we’re paying them to do it.

It’s past time for the government to put its foot down and stop this practice.

This piece was originally published at Harry's Place in Britain.