The synchronization of 9-11 conspiracy lunacy and antisemitism has reached the highest levels of the New Democratic Party of Canada.
NDP Deputy Leader Megan Leslie recently promoted a 9-11 conspiracy event on her website.
Tory MP James Bezan called the posting on Leslie's website "shameful."
"Parliamentarians, especially senior members of the Official Opposition, should not be promoting these ideas," Bezan said in a statement. "Canadians should be able to expect reasoned positions on major issues, not statements that trivialize the deaths of Canadians and others or that make unfounded attacks on our allies.
This complements the other NDP Deputy Leader, Libby Davies, who actually introduced a petition in Parliament that also promoted insane 9-11 conspiracy theories about US government involvement in the terror attacks on New York and Washington.
There is a heavy strain of antisemitism in the 9-11 "truth" movement, which consists in large measure of bizarre and psychologically damaged individuals.
NDP leader Tom Mulcair is known to be supportive of Israel and democracy in the middle east. However, by appointing fanatics with bizarre, extremist views as his most senior deputies, it is an indication of the incompetence with which the federal NDP government would govern Canada if ever given the opportunity.
If you pay attention, you'll notice a pattern to the way that concepts are frequently expressed by Marxist ideologues such as Abigail Bakan, the new "Social Justice" Department Chair at University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
A supposed maxim will be forwarded based not on verifiable facts, but on opinions rooted in antiquated, Marxist axioms. Then, to "prove" it, few if any actual supporting facts will be offered. Instead you will hear quotations of the unsubstantiated opinions of people who share the same views as her.
For example, to prove that Israel is an "apartheid state" she may offer that Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter consider Israel is an "apartheid" state.
According to Ms Bakan's dysfunctional logical processes, one has to accept that that something means whatever Desmond Tutu says it means. But then, naturally, only on those occasions when Tutu's opinions align with those of Abigail Bakan and whatever the current Marxist zeitgeist allows.
If this resembles a description of the way conspiracy theorists look at everything, there's good reason for it. Abigail Bakan is a conspiracy theorist; one who makes a living promoting a fallacious, ridiculous,and malign version of global events.
In a speech she made at Lakehead University that was loaded with uniformed, paranoid assertions predicated on her own extremist ideological prejudices, she discussed, among other matters, the primary campaign of Jesse Jackson in the 1980's.
Anyone who was an adult while Jesse Jackson ran for the Democratic Party nomination will be aware of a very different reality than the one claimed by OISE's Social Justice Chair Bakan.
Jesse Jackson did well in early primaries and caucuses. But he was eventually defeated not by an elite who forced him out because of a racist conspiracy, but the rather straightforward fact that Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis eventually trounced Jackson in open, democratic primary voting and gained enough delegates to win his party's presidential nomination. Among the other candidates Dukakis defeated for the 1988 nomination were Al Gore and Joe Biden.
The fact that the Democrats hadn't named a presidential nominee who never held elected office, such as Jackson, since 1904 when Alton Parker was defeated by Teddy Roosevelt, may have escaped her attention. Or perhaps it's a result of an inability to process information that doesn't coincide with her conspiratorial obsessions.
Whatever the reason, university students, the bulk of whom were not even born when the father of George W. Bush defeated Dukakis for the presidency and whose knowledge of American history is minimal, could easily unquestioningly accept the twisted interpretation put forward by an authority figure like Bakan.
Imagine a generation of students being guided by Abigail Bakan, who is on the editorial board of a website called The Canadian Charger that routinely publishes demented 9-11conspiracy theories.
In Ms Bakan's deranged, conspiracy riddled outlook, the election of Barack Obama was the means by which the ruling capitalist elites planed to replace racism against African Americans with "Islamophobia." In Ms Bakan's mind, the magazine The Economist exists to provide a discourse by elites "maintaining and sustaining American and global imperialism."
Her lunatic assertions are too long to list, but you get the idea.
The world may be terrifying if one believes the idiocies fostered by Ms Bakan. But what should be even more terrifying is that the University of Toronto has given her a substantial platform to proselytize those idiocies as dogma to impressionable students.
Evidently the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) has given up the pretense of being anything but a center of radical, anti-Western indoctrination.
Most recently, this appalling cesspool of neo-Marxist fanaticism made the news when one of its senior academics was arrested for producing child pornography. While that disgraceful distinction is revolting enough on its own, making matters worse is the fact that that same OISE academic, Professor Ben Levin, was responsible for attempting to introduce a hyper-sexualized curriculum for small children in public schools.
That curriculum came with the blessing of OISE, a faculty of the University of Toronto, whose graduates and academics helped design that reprehensible effort to rob children of their innocence.
If you think OISE, which is the most prominent teachers' education facility in Canada, couldn't get any worse, then think again.
Abigail Bakan speaking at a Khomeinist
CASMO al Quds Day event
This month, the institute named the new Chair for its "Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education" Department. That person is Abigail Bakan.
Ms Bakan is a Communist extremist who was a speaker at an al Quds Day event organized by the racist Khomeinist group CASMO. The Canadian Association of Shia Muslim Organizations (CASMO) is comprised of Khmomeinist fanatics who had a public relations fiasco when it became public knowledge that they were posting anti-Semitic videos made by the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. In the spirit of hatefulness that characterized the event, Bakan made the fatuous and despicably slanderous declaration that Israel "is exactly like the apartheid state of pre-1994 South Africa."
Bakan is also one of the five Editorial Board members of a 9-11 conspiracy promoting website called The Canadian Charger, whose founder and her co-Board member is Mohammed Elmasry, who infamously declared that all Jews in Israel over the age of eighteen are 'legitimate' targets for murder.
You might imagine that someone who makes common cause with anti-Semites and people who advocate the murder of homosexuals might not seem the ideal choice as a leader for "Social Justice Education."
But then at OISE, "social justice" isn't about justice at all.
At OISE, Social Justice is a euphemism for hateful detestation of Israel with its implied anti-Semitism of choosing the Jewish people as the one group on earth to whom they would deny national self-determination. Social Justice at OISE means advocacy for communism and totalitarian communist dictatorships, which deprive people of individual liberty.
The department that Bakan will Chair had its only notable distinction in its former incarnation as OISE's Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Department, which has since folded into the new division.
Are you distraught from having to face callous throngs of ignorant masses who not only dismiss your superior understanding of the world, but mock you for it?
Are the frustrations overwhelming from knowing that the 9-11 attacks on New York and Washington were really a plot contrived by Neo-Cons and Zionists, and yet George W. Bush and Dick Cheney remain unpunished?
Have you become clinically depressed when your attempts at economically crippling the Zionist state of Israel go bust because pesky Jews come and buy out all the products you want to boycott?
Then Diana Ralph could be the right therapist for you!
Diana Ralph, denouncing Israel
at the United Church of Canada
You always have been and always will be good, wise, intelligent, beautiful, generous, loving, honest, flexible, zestful, happy, innocent, and unique. Like the Sun, these aspects of yourself are always there. The messages you internalized when you got hurt act like clouds blocking your ability to see the Sun.
I help you to clear away the clouded (incorrect) messages about yourself, to notice again your inherent amazing self, and to free your ability to act in terms of those realities.
We all have been hurt by societal oppressions (sexism, racism, homophobia, able-ism, as well as oppressions from social class, language, religious upbringing, and societal oppression of men). I can help you heal from these hurts and regain your full pride and joy in life. I have devoted my life to ending oppression and injustice. In addition to being a therapist, I am a community organizer and activist on a broad range of issues.I validate the specific damaging impacts of societal oppressions..
But it doesn't stop there! There are other services Ms Ralph offers, like addiction counselling, and let`s face it - all of us are addicted to something. And don`t be discouraged just because for one of her "addictions counselling" resources, Ms Ralph links to Gabor Mate, whom UBC Sociology Professor Emeritus Werner Cohn recently described as a charlatan. Because if you`re at the stage where you need Diana Ralph`s help, you probably have much greater concerns.
Could that disgusting piece of shit Wenner have picked a prettier cover shot of his dreamboat homoerotic fantasy? What an asshole...
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) July 18, 2013
Does that puke Jann Wenner harbor erotic fantasies for that other puke, the Boston Bomber? Fuck them both...
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) July 18, 2013
""I remember telling him I thought certain aspects of religion were harmful, and I brought up the 9/11 attacks."
At which point Jahar, Will says, told him he didn't want to talk about it anymore. Will asked why. "He said, 'Well, you're not going to like my view.' So I pressed him on it, and he said he felt some of those acts were justified because of what the U.S. does in other countries, and that they do it so frequently, dropping bombs all the time."
To be fair, Will and others note, Jahar's perspective on U.S. foreign policy wasn't all that dissimilar from a lot of other people they knew. "In terms of politics, I'd say he's just as anti-American as the next guy in Cambridge"
...Even before 9/11, the notion that neo-Nazism and KKK-style racism was still a real and lingering threat to Canada’s social fabric was beginning to wear very thin. But Section 13 and its provincial equivalents remained on the books anyway. Canadian society, then as now, felt vaguely guilty about the (very real) mistreatment historically doled out to Jews, blacks, aboriginals and immigrants. And though many Canadians rolled their eyes at the manner by which human-rights commissions were expanding the definition of “discrimination,” most bien-pensant types still saw eliminating racism as a more important project than protecting free speech. All of this changed on October 20, 2006, the publication date of Mark Steyn’s famousMaclean’s magazine essay “The future belongs to Islam” (adapted from his book,America Alone. Its theme was that an enfeebled West was under demographic siege from Muslim immigrant populations bristling with militant attitudes and unassimilated young men. Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress launched complaints with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and its provincial equivalents in B.C. and Ontario. Around the same time, the (now defunct) Western Standard magazine, published by current Sun News talking head Ezra Levant, printed the infamousJyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons, which elicited a separate set of human rights complaints from Syed Soharwardy of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada. The backlash against these two (unsuccessful) human-rights prosecutions ultimately is what led to the elimination of Section 13 of the Human Rights Act.
It may be inconceivable for Iranians, in whose country homosexuality is considered a grave sin and is punishable by death, that Canada affords equal rights to Gays and respects sexual orientation as a personal matter. It may surprise them further that legally and in the opinion of virtually every credible person in leadership positions in Canada, an individual's sexual orientation is immaterial to their ability to perform their job.
So it's understandable that homophobic Canadian acolytes of Iran's monstrous dictatorship would try to tie a politician's alleged sexual orientation his exercising his role in government.
That is what, Joshua Blakeney, the Canadian correspondent for Iran's propaganda service, PRESS TV has done to try to rationalize Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird's strong support for Israel.
Previously, in a typically irrational diatribe about a small, unimpressive protest against Toronto Mayor Rob Ford that Blakeney tried to magnify beyond reality, he digressed into a weird, homophobic theory. Evidently forgetting that Gays have equal rights in Canada, as opposed to the persecution they face by his Iranian paymasters, Blakeney suggested Canada's government is "replete with homosexuals" who could be targets for blackmail, thus accounting for particular national policies.
Taking it a step further, Blakeney is now naming names, Clearly quite clueless about how government works in Canada, he has attempted to explain that Canada's stalwart support for Israel is due to, Blakeney alleges, Foreign Affairs Minister Baird being Gay.
John Baird is the most principled, honorable and effective individual to hold the office of Foreign Affairs Minister in generations. He has condemned specific human rights abuses and has been outspoken against dictatorships and nations that trample on freedom, like Iran, more forcefully than any of his predecessors since Confederation.
But what irrational, uninformed people like Blakeney don't realize is that the Canadian Foreign Minister, despite the title, does not make foreign policy. The Prime Minister, with advice from Cabinet has final say on foreign policy decisions, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs would never act without that approval.
Blakeney is someone who is obsessed with conspiracy theories. An apostle of the University of Lethbridge's very weird 9-11 conspiracy theorist professor Anthony J. Hall, the pair seem virtually enraptured in their delusional, bizarre paranoia. Almost every one of Blackeney's PRESS TV reports includes an interview with Hall offering another lunatic conspiracy, like the one where he claimed the Canadian government was killing off wild salmon to subjugate aboriginals in British Columbia.
Whatever John Baird's sexual orientation is may be of import to Blakeney and his Islamist, Gay-murdering bosses in Iran, but to Canadians, the only thing that matters is that he is doing a good job of running his Ministry. And in that, Baird has excelled.
Blakeney commences his deranged report with the statement "whenever a prominent statesman prioritizes the national interest of of a foreign country over the national interest of his own country, it behooves journalists to ask uncomfortable questions."
Prime Minister Harper, like Baird, has plainly articulated the reasons for supporting Israel and they are based on common sense and common interest. Israel is a liberal democracy, like Canada, defending itself from anti-democratic, repressive, terror-supporting, totalitarian states like Iran and Syria.
But it doesn't take a conspiracy theory to explain where Blakeney's interests lie. A person is most likely to represent the interests of those who pay them. As Watergate journalists Woodward and Bernstein understood, to get the answer, follow the money.
John Baird is paid by the Canadian government. Joshua Blakeney is in the employ of Canada's enemy, the government of Iran.
The UN's anti-Semitic, 9-11 conspiracy theorist Richard Falk continued to disgrace the world body by appearing on "Truth Jihad" a radio show hosted by a delusional, lunatic hatemonger named Kevin Barrett.
Barrett, who writes for the innocuously-named but virulently anti-Semitic,Holocaust-denying websiteVeterans Today, maintains the 9-11 al Qaida terror attacks are a "false flag operation" perpetrated as an excuse to wage a world war on all Muslims, among whom he numbers himself.
Once again, the NDP travel to the US to promote left wing extremism. Over the weekend, Deputy NDP Leader Libby Davies participated in Left Forum 2013 in New York – a conference committed to addressing the “destructive nature of capitalism’s inherent drive to growth”.
The conference featured anti-capitalist, anti-Israel, anti-responsible resource development seminars, including among many others,
“The Renewal of Radical Thought and the Question of Communism”,
“The Intertwining of Red and Green: Ecocide Can Only be Stopped with the Defeat of Capitalism”,
“Thinking Across Crises: Anti-Capitalist Strategies and Imaginaries”,
“The Necessity of Direct Action to Prevent Expansion of Gas and Oil Infrastructure”, and
“Deadly Economies: Israel’s Role in Worldwide Repression”.
Canadians should not be surprised by this latest demonstration of left wing extremism from the NDP. After all, Deputy Leader Libby Davies believes that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are “irrefutably false”, and NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair doubts that Osama Bin Laden is dead.
Richard Falk, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, is upset. Falk is demanding a full investigation of UN Watch. He wants the group stripped of its U.N. accreditation. Without that accreditation, which allows the organization to more freely attend and speak at U.N. meetings, UN Watch would find it much more difficult to fulfill its purpose.
Capitalists groom politicians with vulnerable secrets so they can control them, the Harper government is "replete with homosexuals" (and who cares if it is anyway, other than the leaders of Iran he admires who murder Gays?)...
Just another day in the crazy, conspiracy-filled world of 9-11 conspiracy nut Joshua Blakeney:
Blakeney also, as usual, tries to disparage Canada by saying our country isn't really democratic while it "lectures other countries about democracy."
Sure, so what would happen to protesters like the ones he showed in the video if they were to protest in Tehran against Blakeney's fascist friends who rule Iran?
9-11 conspiracy theorist Phillip Marshall killed his two teenage children, his dog and himself when he apparently learned there was no hope for reconciliation with his estranged wife.
Marshall was previously arrested for battery against is wife in 2008. But of course the Holocaust-denying Iranian regime is asserting a CIA conspiracy is responsible for Marshall's death in order to cover up some "revelation" about 9-11.
Representing the Iranian side is anti-Semitic 9-11 conspiracy nutcase Kevin Barrett.
Barrett is a lunatic who has suggested that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Israeli agents.
"Critical Thinking" as a term suggests the ability to objectively analyze and critique data. But as a methodology taught at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) it takes on an entirely different, sinister meaning worthy of a creation of the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell's 1984.
Turning logic on its head, the Marxist-influenced faculty teaches that Critical Thinking means to assume that American foreign policy is always in the wrong, that Western mainstream media is deceptive for the purpose of serving the government, that history is taught to further the aims of an oppressive patriarchy, and that the public, with the exception of those who are taught OISE's brand of Critical Thinking, are a mass of brainwashed dupes.
OISE's message - media is part of the conspiracy
In other words, at the University of Toronto's cultish ideological incubator for pedagogy throughout Canada, a "Critical Thinker" is someone who uncritically thinks exactly what they are told to at OISE.
That practice takes on an appalling twist at OISE's Centre for Media and Culture in Education. With the pretext of teaching "Critical Media Literacy" OISE is attempting to cast doubt that the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington were perpetrated by Muslim terrorists and that the Taliban was actually sheltering the al Qaida terror organization.
OISE Lesson
The word "allegedly" is something media must use when reporting on a crime before the courts that has not been proven. Its use in other contexts is generally for the purpose of casting doubt on the veracity of a report. That word makes a number of appearances in OISE's Critical Media Literacy in Times of Warlesson.
According to OISE, the al Qaida terrorist network "allegedly" carried out the 9-11 attacks, "it was in Afghanistan that bin Laden..allegedly organized al Qiada and established training camps," and it was in Afghanistan where the Bush Administration "claimed" al Qaida was based.
From OISE lesson
All these terms, in the lesson, are not-so-subtle suggestions that the allegations of lunatic 9-11 conspiracy theorists are correct. Those being that the 9-11 attacks were planned by people inside the US government, and Zionists as a pretext for war.
Rather than being an educational institute, OISE is a centre of indoctrination. How else to describe a school that promotes and encourages Marxism, an ideology that inevitably results in totalitarianism and has led to decades of repression and tens of millions of political murders?
This sort of sympathy for the Taliban is common at U of T's OISE. One of the Marxist professors at the Institution that produces people who devise school curricula throughout Canada recently produced a paper that attributed the cause of women's oppression in Afghanistan not to the Taliban or the harsh form of Islam it represents, but to a conspiracy among western governments, corporations and NGO's.
OISE's professors are academics of the most anti-intellectual kind. They are a type, to use a description provided by Emma Teitel in Macleans, who speak "another language, a jargon you might misconstrue as scientific–only the words they (use aren't) shortcuts meant to simplify or summarize complex concepts, they (are) used to make simple concepts sound complex: Hegemonic, racialized, problematic, intersectionality... "
Toronto blogger Blazing Cat Fur received a visit from the police last week because he sarcastically mused OISE needs to be purged or burnt to the ground, whichever is more effective.
I have another idea. The spoiled, overpaid, dense OISE staff who are so sympathetic to the Taliban should be sent to live with those fanatics for a year. That dose of living outside their self-indulgent academic bubble might not do them so much good, but it would certainly benefit the students they would otherwise poison for that year.
Yeah, you read that headline right. They want Ben Affleck, that Ben Affleck, hanged for 'war crimes."
The reason Iran's shills want the Hollywood star punished is for making the Academy Award-winning Argo, which they say could lead America to a war with Iran.
The article was done by the lunatic 9-11 conspiracy theorist Kevin Barrett, who writes for an innocuously named anti-Semitic, online clearinghouse for mentally unbalanced bigots called Veterans Today.
The idiots at Press TV also think Affleck could be convicted of war crimes for his role in making Pearl Harbour.
Evidently, film criticism in Iran has reached the levels of tolerance they show to Gays in that brutal, authoritarian, Islamofascist country.
While the Iranians and their stooges are way off base on Argo, which was a good movie, they might have a point on the dreadful Pearl Harbor. But hanging seems a bit severe for being in a crappy movie. Although after seeing Gigli, 10 lashes for Affleck at the time did seem like a reasonable retribution sacrificing almost two hours for that drek. But clearly Ben has rehabilitated himself since then.
On Friday March 8, Michelle Obama will join John Kerry at a special ceremony at the State Department to present ten women the Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award. The award, says the press release, is given to “women around the globe who have shown exceptional courage and leadership in advocating for women’s rights and empowerment, often at great personal risk.” Five of these awards are being given to women from Muslim-majority countries, underscoring the unique plight of women in those countries. The only problem is that one of the women to be recognized is an anti-Semite and supports the 9/11 attacks on the United States. h/t Blazing Cat Fur
As their numbers plummet while the average age of its membership is in the Senior Citizen category, the United Church of Canada is finding some very strange bedfellows in its desperate struggle for relevance.
Unable to find it in a revitalization of religious belief, it has somewhat foolishly turned to finding common cause with radical political movements. In what could be mistaken for an ecclesiastic pantomime of a G20 protest, environmental extremists, anti-Israel fanatics, Omar Khadr aficionados, and immigration reform opponents have all been courted by the current United Church leadership. The result was not new adherents so much as alienating a large number of the rank-and file and continuing the exodus away from the Church's thinning pews.
One of the most controversial and potentially self-destructive moves the United Church has made has been to engage in yet another foray into the quagmire of the Israeli-Arab dispute, with a decidedly anti-Israel bias. Ironically while striving to demonstrate how "progressive" it is, the United Church's embrace of radical leftist ideology has returned it to the ancient, anti-Semitic roots of early Christian theology. The United Church's Working Group on Israel Palestine, whose report recommends a boycott of Israeli settlement goods, heavily draws upon the so-called Palestine Kairos document. That treatise denies a special relationship between Israel and the Jewish people, places all the blame on Israel for its ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, and refers to "the Israeli occupation" as "an evil and a sin that must be resisted and removed." The document, which says of Israelis, "they must liberate themselves from the evil that is in them and the injustice they have imposed on others," is considered by many to be inherently anti-Semitic.
Among the most insidious aspects of the new leftist Jew-hate is its tactic of trotting out ridiculous Jewish anti-Zionist fanatics and displaying them like comical banners at the front of an April Fool's parade. In that vein, the United Church's of Canada's Comox-Nanaimo Presbytery's declaration that they "work with Jewish organizations such as Independent Jewish Voices, which are committed to seeing Justice for the people of Palestine" is less offensive than if Shutzstaffel leader Heinrich Himmler had said "we are working with our Jewish labor camp kapos, who are committed to seeing justice for the Aryan people," but we are only talking about degrees.
Independent Jewish Voices is headed by a 9-11 conspiracy theorist named Diana Ralph. After 12 years hard work of being on Disability Leave from her position of Associate Professor of Social Work at Carleton University, Ms Ralph, who seemed to get around a lot for someone on disability leave, retired from that institution in 2011. With all that additional extra free time, she can now devote herself exclusively to eradicating Jewish national self-determination.
As one might expect, Ms Ralph is not the only 9-11 conspiracy theorist in the organization she co-founded. Her co-Chair and fellow Independent Jewish Voices founder Sid Shiniad shares her views and the organization of fringe radicals is liberally peppered with adherents to a movement that proposes the attack by Muslim terrorists on the World Trade Center and Pentagon was actually the work of "neo-cons and Zionists."
Independent Jewish Voices are, as the National Post's Jonathan Kay observed:
an extremist group whose leaders support a total economic boycott of Israel, defend the UN's original anti-Semitic Durban conference, support the destruction of the Jewish character of Israel through the influx of millions of Palestinians, spread conspiracy theories about the "Israeli lobby," promote the blood libel that Israel deliberately targeted "children playing on roofs" during the Gaza conflict, and cheered on the illegal occupation of the Israeli consulate in Toronto..
If the United Church's leaders think they can shield themselves from being perceived as anti-Semitic by playing footsie with a small group of fringe Jews whose actions and statements could easily be interpreted to suggest serious, unresolved psychiatric issues, they will find themselves sorely mistaken.
Yet in the ranks of the United Church there are still voices of sanity and reason. Reverend Andrew Love of Grace St. Andrew's United Church in Arnprior has launched a campaign to counter the noxious agenda of the denomination's leadership. He says that "there remains an undercurrent of anti-Semitism" in the church. Love has warned that if the recommendations of the Working Group on Israel/Palestine's report are adopted, the United Church, rather than advancing the cause of peace, will destroy its relationship with the Jewish community and render itself irrelevant to playing any role in helping resolve the Israel/Palestine question.
That's an insightful assessment that towers above anything the United Church's leaders have offered on the issue to date. Whether it is one that the Church's leaders heed at its General Council next week will decide less about the future of the mideast than it will about a United Church that is in danger of loosing its bearings.
Frumpy and hysterical, prone to "eat the rich" and "politics of oppression" style rhetoric, Vancouver East MP Libby Davies is a walking caricature of 1970's style radical politics that has rendered the New Democratic Party unelectable and non-credible among an overwhelming majority of Canadian voters.
But the antiquated, white, middle class, neo-Marxist faction of the NDP Davies personifies is the core of the activist base that has been at the centre of the party for the last four decades. With the Quebec breakthrough the party had in the 2011 election, there may be a coming marginalization of the radicals who continually look to re-fight old victories like abortion and health care, and to push divisive, unappealing policies like cozying up to Islamist radicals and 9-11 conspiracy theories rather than looking ahead to forming responsible economic policies.
And so that, in a nutshell, sums up the current angst faced by the old-school NDPers like Ed Broadbent and Judy Rebick, who are seeing their treasured, ineffective values threatened by the modernity represented by current leadership frontrunner Thomas Mulcair.
One aspect of the race and the potential loss of Mulcair's leadership bid is the possibility that the NDP's support in Quebec could totally collapse along with it. As Chantal Hebert wrote in an article in the Toronto Star earlier this week, no one is hoping for a Mulcair loss more than Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois, who sees Mulcair as being a force for federalism in Quebec and someone who could grow federal support in the province.
Conversely, a Mulcair loss would be seen as a slap in the face to Quebec and would almost certainly create an anti-NDP backlash there.
Interestingly, that fact was acknowledged by the ancient lefttist radical Judy Rebick in an interview on CBC Radio`s The Current a few days ago. But Rebick`s main area of concern is not for the future of the NDP as much as it is for maintaining the influence of Libby Davies` extremist brand of politics within the party.
Rebick who has been actively pushing an `anyone but Mulcair` ticket said her greatest fear is that Thomas Mulcair will shut Libby Davies out of the NDP.
Coincidentally, that is probably Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Leader Bob Rae`s greatest fear too. Because by so doing Mulcair would make the NDP a viable, credible party in the eyes of the broader Canadian electorate.
UPDATE: Mulcair is consolidating his victory, but is it a matter of time before Davies is relegated to obscurity within the NDP to limit the damage she can do to the party?
A group founded by a 9-11 conspiracy theorist and comprised largely of emotionally unbalanced Jews is aggressively lobbying the NDP to reject the front-running candidate, Thomas Mulcair, at its upcoming leadership convention because unlike his rivals, he is a supporter of the Jewish state.
Independent Jewish Voices was founded by Diana Ralph, who has argued that the September 11, 2001 attacks perpetrated by Muslims belonging to the al Qaida terror organization was actually a US government 'inside job.' The group itself is mainly made up of white, middle aged, bitter, childless Jews desperate for attention.
The way they have chosen to feed their narcissism is to try to "stand out from the herd" by being Jews who publicly declare their hate for the Jewish state and anyone who supports it. Independent Jewish Voices lets anti-Semites in the Marxist and Islamists movement use them as cover to deny their desire to see the destruction of Israel is a manifestation of Jew-hatred. In exchange, the useful idiots of Independent Jewish Voices welcome feigned adulation from people who are secretly contemptuous of them. But any sort of attention is welcomed by such people whose unimpressive talents would otherwise not afford them notice of any kind
Not coincidentally, this group of Jewish socialists has chosen to make their announcement at rabble.ca, published by the spouse of Israel-hating NDP MP Libby Davies, herself a supporter of Brian Topp, one of Mulcair's rivals for the NDP's top spot.
UPDATE : The "progressive" Jew-haters that Independent Jewish Voices serve at rabble.ca are upset that the murder of 3 Jewish children in France is being "privileged" above other deaths this week. Employing an insidious moral relativism, the Libby Davies Fan Club ignores that three very young, innocent children were specifically targeted and executed by an Islamic radical expressly for their religion. As is not uncommon for them, these radicals tied to the far left of the NDP have descended into outright anti-Semitism.
Seven decades later, how does the UN live up to the vision and resolve of its founders?
An event this evening at Stanford University is a sobering reminder that some of what is said and done today in the name of the UN would cause Roosevelt and Churchill to roll in their graves.
The human rights clinic of the law faculty, headed by Professor James Cavallaro, a former Human Rights Watch activist, has decided to give its platform, in the form of a public lecture and reception, to Richard Falk, a UN expert and former Princeton academic.
While he appears highly qualified and is well versed in the language of human rights, the reality is that Falk’s twisted moral vision negates the UN founders’ dream, recasting tyrants, terrorists and teachers of hatred as heroic victims resisting colonialist oppression.
As the world focuses on the Iranian government’s mad race for a nuclear bomb, and its brutal repression of peaceful student activists, Stanford’s human rights scholars ought to recall that Falk was a key promoter of this regime’s establishment.
Days after Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in 1979, Falk reassured the world, in a New York Times op-ed titled “Trusting Khomeini,” that “the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.”
Khomeini’s entourage, wrote Falk, had “a notable record of concern for human rights.” Indeed, the ayatollah’s “new model of popular revolution” offered the world “a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.”
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