...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Guys and gulls: Yes, it’s true. Hershell Ezrin, who, in his capacity as CEO of  CIJA, is capo di tutti capi of Canada’s Israel and Jewish advocacy groups (the CJC, Wiesenthal, B’nai Brith, et al), has his very own blog. Yesterday, Hershell took time out from his busy day to opine on the Bambi ‘toon tumult. As Hershell sees it (and he sees it through the eyes of a former strategist for the Ontario Liberals), the hoopla erupted because certain people who harbour “quaint” ideas have been unable to come to terms with the fast pace of "change" and the wonderfulness of Fauxbama, who's his kind of guy (my bolds):

…methinks the outrage over Blitt’s cartoon is less an issue of genuine offense and more a case of “the lady doth protest too much.” It touches on a fear of the world changing much too fast for many Americans to keep up. The New Yorker cover ridicules an America that is being left behind, grappling with quaint notions of Muslims in regulation turban and white robe and militantly angry black women. And whether other countries have bread or fruit.

We, the children of a post-colonial world, don’t fear an Obama Planet. It has been our world for a long time. We’re happy to finally see the growing success of one of our own.

No, I didn’t mean a Muslim. Stop hyperventilating.

Will do, Hershell. Got my brown paper bag at hand. Breathing in and out. In and out.

There. Serenity returns. Now, could you please explain how a half-black Kansan/Hawaiian who spent his adulthood imbibing Black Liberation Theology from Louie Farakhan’s amigo at the Church of Abominate Ameri-KKKa and the Jooos is “one of our own”?

Yesterday, Hershell’s guy Bambi, whose foreign policy chops don't exactly rival Dean Acheson's, explained that radical Islam rose in response to American foreign policy and poverty (i.e. a paucity of "bread and fruit") in the Arab/Muslim world—in its own clueless way, rather a quaint notion. Robert Spencer, who’s likely not Hershell’s kind of guy, demolishes this fatally naïve idea in one fell swoop (my bolds):

On Sunday CNN aired an interview Barack Obama recently gave to Fareed Zakaria, in which the candidate expressed the opinion that Islamic jihad is a result of U.S. foreign policy failure. This is, of course, an assumption that he shares with virtually everyone of any influence in both parties. It is conventional wisdom that the United States, or the West in general, can make the global jihad problem go away by doing something that is not being done now, or by stopping doing something else. The possibility that the jihad might have arisen not as a reaction to actions of America and the West -- and cannot be ended by our actions, either, with the possible exception of overwhelming military and cultural force -- never seems to occur to anyone.

Zakaria asked Obama: “Do you believe, when looking at the world today, that Islamic extremism is the transcendent challenge of the 21st century?” In reply Obama spoke of “terrorism and groups that are resisting modernity,” as if Islamic jihadists were Amish with AK-47s, and avowed that “the fact that they can be driven into extremist ideologies, is one of the severe threats that we face.”

How can such people be driven into extremist ideologies? Obama explained that when he was a child Indonesia, “Indonesia was never the same culture as the Arab Middle East. The brand of Islam was always different.” And “around the world,” he said, “there was not the sense that Islam was inherently opposed to the West, or inherently opposed to modern life, or inherently opposed to universal traditions like rule of law.”

Of course, the problem in the world today is not an opposition of “Islam” to the “rule of law.” It is the resurgence of the Islamic supremacist ideology that has led to a global attempt to replace non-Muslim legal systems with Islamic sharia law -- an attempt that is making great headway in Europe and is also going on in the United States, both by violence and by stealth…

Oh, Robert, you’re such an alarmist. Try being more like Hershell Ezrin and Tammy Farber, chaps who embrace an “Obama planet” and who are building bridges with Muslims (our co-pebbles in Canada’s gloriously colourful multi-shmulti mosaic), and I can assure you, you’ll feel muuuch better.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:19 | link | comments

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