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

“Hatred” warriors: I was dipping into my binder from the COMBATING HATRED IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Conference last night—the first time I’ve done so since the event was held last November. (The theme of the conference, an all day fête put on for the anti-hate community by the legal industry that has nurtured and sustained it for so long, said it all: “BALANCING RIGHTS, FREEDOMS AND RESPONSIBILITIES”.) The binder is a treasure trove of “human rights” mishegas which, like the conference, casts a very wide net for “hatred” and, not surprisingly, catches a lot of fish. What do the anti-“hate”warriors consider to be “hatred”?  Apparently, it’s what’s experienced by a Muslim at a homeless shelter when pork shows up on the lunch menu. It’s society’s exclusion of the “Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgendered/(Two-Spirited)/Intersexed community.” (My knowledge of alternate sexuality only goes so far. Up to “Transgendered” I get. But“Two-Spirited” and “Intersexed”?  Is that the fancy p.c. locution for, er, hermaphrodites?) It’s what a “differently-abled” person faces when a location is insufficiently accessible.

In other words, “hatred” is everywhere and can be experienced by everyone—unless, of course, you happen to be white and Christian. If you are, and people hate you because of it, well, sir, you’re just plum out of luck.

One of the items in the binder was written by that former confabulator for a skeevy supermarket tab who now writes for the Calgary Herald. Yesterday the women weighed in on l’affaire Levant, pretty much accusing Ezra of being the architect of his own misfortune. Par for the course. Back in 2007—the binder inclusion—she insisted http://www.montrealmuslims.ca/module-pagesetter-viewpub-tid-7-pid-1982.html  “It’s us who created the xenophobia”:

If an us versus them mentality is growing in Canada towards minorities, it's us who created it, not them. The xenophobia marinating in that slimy little euphemism of "reasonable accommodation" which originated in Quebec, is a symptom of what's wrong with our mindset, not theirs.

Fifteen or 20 years ago, the idea arose that minorities were offended by Christmas and other overt displays of majority Canadian culture. This did not come from minority Canadians, but from self-proclaimed progressive middle-class whites. These people thought it was the height of liberalism to declare their own cultural and religious traditions offensive to others and to fight to have those traditions hidden away, much as the Victorians covered the legs on their pianos in the cause of prudery. Schools rushed to rip down Remembrance Day displays of white crosses.

Christmas was relabelled a "winter festival," venomous battles were fought over public displays of creches featuring -- ironically -- the infant who grew up to be the ultimate preacher of brotherly love, and spruce trees festooned with glass balls, tinsel and angels were renamed holiday season trees.

In all that time, no member of a minority was quoted as claiming to be offended by any majority Canadian ritual. In fact, people who said they were Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims wrote letters to the editor stating that not only were they bewildered that all this was being done on their behalf, but that they didn't mind being wished a Merry Christmas and always returned the greeting. (A few years back, when I received a Christmas card from Calgary MP Deepak Obhrai, I could joke with colleagues that when a Hindu MP sends a Jewish person Christmas greetings, we have reached the acme of multiculturalism).

The same crusaders who misread Pierre Trudeau's vision of multiculturalism, and who thought it meant that minority traditions had to be elevated at the expense of their own squelched one, enthusiastically organized festivals for other cultures and prattled ceaselessly about "tolerance." Until one day, in this post-9/11 era, the sight of a peasant skirt whirling in a folk dance at a festival began to take on sinister connotations. Just how much were we going to put up with from these people?

So we began zeroing in on the very traditions we had once avidly promoted. A woman wearing a head scarf was suddenly no longer a proud Muslim enjoying the freedom of religion this country offered her, but an oppressed soul to be liberated. She must be stripped of this symbol of oppression by others who, treating her in the same white-man-knows-what's-best-for-you manner, once scorned as the domain of right-wing bigots, took it upon themselves to decide what was best for her.

What has surfaced here in Canada since 9/11, and what has led to the ominous talk about "reasonable accommodation," is a variation on the same xenophobic theme that saw Japanese- and Ukrainian-Canadians carted off to internment camps during the two world wars.

It's fear, pure and simple. Fear of The Other is spawned when someone of a certain religion, skin colour or culture commits some heinous and hostile act.

Then, heretofore "tolerant" folks in Canada begin looking askance at their fellow citizens of that religion, colour or culture. Ignorance -- the kind of ignorance that sees a Muslim who fled persecution and mass murder in Srebrenica as no different from a Muslim with links to al-Qaeda -- feeds that fear of The Other…

“Fear of The Other is spawned by a minorities’ heinuous and hostile act”? Nuh-uh. Millennia of Jew-hatred have had absolutely nothing to do with anything the Jews have done but, rather, with who the Jews are—i.e. the folks who got in on the ground floor of monotheism, and who thus had to be discredited and often liquidated by successive (and often insecure) monotheists seeking to validate their own doctrines. “The Jews” did not, as did Mo Atta and his crew of virginizers, hurl large airliners full of passengers into American landmarks, thereby spawning quite legitimate “fears” that other Muslims, gripped by a similar passion for Allah and death, might be inclined to act out in a similar way.

The tabloid-trainee—clearly clueless and profoundly ignorant about history—mistakes irrational hatred of “The Other” with valid concerns about people who pose an actual threat to us and our way of life, i.e. those who are doing their level best, both through violence and non-violently, to make inroads for sharia. That, madam, is the reality of life in the Twenty-First Century, but it requires a paradigm shift (an expression I loathe)—away from the model that sees every minority as being a “victim” of prejudice and stereotyping to a new awareness that some (though by no means all) Muslims are working day and night to ensure sharia’s primacy—to grasp it. And since the anti-hate biz is in love with its current paradigm which, after all, is its bread and butter, don't expect a shift to come any time soon, or, indeed, ever.

Given this woman’s breathtaking ignorance there’s only one thing left to do: give her a seat on the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

Better yet, with her qualifications she deserves to be the chief!

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:12 | link | comments

Comments: