Why are socialist moral relativists silent in the wake of the Norwegian terrorist attack?

After the al-Qaida bombings on 9/11, moral relativists like Noam Chomsky rushed to condemn, not the perpetrators of that horrific atrocity, but the United States of America, for ostensibly having done something to anger the terrorists enough to murder 2977 innocent people.

Rather than outright condemnation of the perpetrators of this abominable mass murder, Chomsky, on the very next day, before the bodies of the victims of Jihadi terror were cold, wrote:

"we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators. If we choose the latter course, we can do no better, I think, than to listen to the words of Robert Fisk, whose direct knowledge and insight into affairs of the region is unmatched after many years of distinguished reporting. Describing "The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people," he writes that "this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia - paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally - hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." And much more.

Again, we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead."

Chomsky was not alone is his morally relativistic justification of Jihad, or even worse, those like Robert Fisk, Richard Falk, Michael Keefer and a cast of irrational or malevolent anti-Capitalists and Jihad apologists who, like Holocaust deniers, strove to deny, and this defend the real perpetrators of the crime against humanity that was committed on September 11, 2001. In some cases, the 9-11 terrorists were even celebrated as heroes, as they were by throngs of Palestinians.

Now that an insane terrorist has murdered dozens of innocent people at a government building and a socialist youth indoctrination camp in Norway, no conservative or Christian of note has come forward to attempt to justify or attempt to mitigate or deflect blame from the depravity of Anders Behring Breivik.

Nor will they. Breivik is a terrorist and mass-murderer for whom there is no justification.

But it is interesting to observe that no anti-capitalist or socialist commentator who was so quick to find a moral justification for 9-11 has not leaped to assuage Breivik's crimes. The question is not why they should do so, for no decent human being possibly could. The question is why they are so anxious to defend and enable the murderers of innocents in the West when the murders are committed in the name of Jihad.

UPDATE: It didn't take long for the crazies to come out of the woodwork. Khaled Muammar, who until earlier this month was president of the Canadian Arab Federation, which was defunded by the federal government for expressing support for terrorist groups, is spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. This one by conspiracy whack-job Stephen Lendman, who says the Breivik killings were a Mossad plot. Lendman is at least consistently crazy. He also says that Bobby Kennedy was killed by the CIA.

(Update h/t Blazing Cat Fur)

My Afternoon of Kabuki Democracy

Tuesday afternoon, The City of Toronto's Executive Committee held a hearing about whether to accept the City Manager's report that decided the term "Israeli Apartheid" in Toronto's Pride Festival does not violate the City's anti-discrimination policy. As one councillor pointed out, this is an issue that really has relatively little effect on the City and yet takes up an inordinate amount of Council business.

In the same session, prior to that, the transfer of stewardship of Casa Loma and the sale of 22 public housing properties were discussed and voted upon. Both matters, which will have a lasting effect on the City, took up far less time than the Pride discussion.

Nonetheless, the Pride issue does reflect on the City and people have a right to be interested in whatever they choose. I was one of the deputants arguing that the Executive Committee should reject the Manager's report. To be fair, I think the City manager got it right and the term itself is not, by definition, "hate speech."

But as Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti observed, the intent of what is said is sometimes much more discriminatory and nefarious than the words themselves. My position was that whether or not the City's anti-discrimination policy was violated, Council as democratically elected representatives had the right to reject the finding. They are not Supreme Court judges ruling on the validity of legislation or the wording of law, they are the people's representatives whose job is to represent constituents and not a policy. Pride has the right to include any messaging they choose, but the city is not obliged to validate them with tax subsidies, and in the case of groups like Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, the City has a right to distance itself from them by witholding funds for any event that includes such bigotry.

There is a difference between free speech and subsidized speech which a number of people fail to recognize.

The term Israeli Apartheid is used for the sole purpose about lying about the nature of Israel and to attempt to deligitimize the country, along with attempting to boycott and sanction it.

Apartheid is a system of racial segregation and disenfranchisement that does not exist in Israel. Let's put it simply: a Palestinian Arab could convert to becoming an Israeli Jew. In the Apartheid era, could a black South African convert to being a white Afrikaner and get all the commensurate rights? There's your answer about whether Israel is an "apartheid" state.

The sole purpose of calling Israel an apartheid country is to fight a battle that was lost by the Arabs over and over again militarily. This is illustrated by the likes of Khaled Muammar, the head of the terrorist-supporting Canadian Arab Federation, who complained that he was a refugee from a country he never lived in. The Arabs failed to wipe out Israel with force of arms, and now they want to do it with propaganda, and have enlisted Marxist dupes like Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, whose antiquated, vacuous, cult-like belief in the politics of oppression and victimology is rife for exploitation by the smarter, more manipulative forces of Islamism and anti-Semitism.

In the end, little was accomplished. Council's Executive Committee was, in the vast majority sympathetic to those who opposed public funding for a venue that facilitates the bigotry of the anti-Israel group, but it was clear a deal had been struck between Councillors before the meeting had begun. The report was accepted, but al-QuAIA won't march, because they know Pride will have its funding pulled permanently if they did.

An interesting afternoon nonetheless.

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Here's me racing through my presentation. The reason I'm speaking so fast is that the presentation time was cut for speakers to 4 minutes from 5. So I had to do some fast editing and faster talking.

Thanks to Blazing Cat Fur for the video!!

The annual hypocrisy of Idiot Apartheid Week is upon us ...or Why I've come to appreciate "Israeli Apartheid Week"

In Israel, it's time for the annual American Apartheid Week. 

Campuses across the Middle East's only liberal democracy will be holding seminars and protests this year to denounce the apartheid to which the Indigenous populations of the Americas are subject. The natives of the Americas were and are the victims of one of the most effective genocides in history,  their contemporary numbers are fractional compared to their population  prior to the invasion of the Americas by European settlers. The Europeans and their colonialist successors in the "New World" are responsible for the pre-colonial cultures having been mostly destroyed and forgotten.

Even though Indigenous peoples in the Americas have voting rights, they are treated as second class citizens who face discrimination at every turn. The American settlers continue to occupy their lands, reaping wealth from their conquered resources while the true owners of these riches remain impoverished and relegated to non-contiguous Bantustans called "reservations."

Of course there is no American Apartheid Week in Israel. There isn't a country in the world where some people weren't dispossessed in favor of its current population, and grievances regarding that, to some degree, past and present, exist almost everywhere.

Israel is engaged in a land dispute with Palestinians who, while their treatment is exponentially better than the historical sufferings of our First Nations, are still subject to myriad indignities until that conflict is resolved.

But in one of the great ironies that typifies the profound stupidity of North American radicals, they are using facilities built on land stolen from the indigenous population to hypocritically condemn Israel for acting in self-defense.

The rallying cry for activists who opposed South Africa's racist apartheid system was "One man, one vote!" If the real goal of the bigots behind "Israeli Apartheid Week" were that, then they could have declared victory before they started. Israeli Arabs have always had the vote.

People like the discredited Canadian Arab Federation's Khaled Muammar quote Jimmy Carter for support of their position without understanding him or realizing even Carter said, "There is no semblance of anything relating to apartheid within the nation of Israel." While Muammar has made unsubstantiated accusations of racism being at the root of Israeli policy, Carter has stated that Israeli practice in the West Bank "is not based on racism as it was in South Africa, but is based on the desire by a minority of Israelis to acquire land that belongs to the Palestinians."

Those familiar with the agenda of the anti-Israel fanatics who populate "Israeli Apartheid Week" seminars know that they are mostly divided into two camps, radical leftists and Islamists. Within those two camps are two types: those who understand that Israel does not practice apartheid but are happy to attempt to slander what they see as a "Western, imperialist, colonialist outpost in the Middle East," and those who are either too uniformed or too stupid to comprehend the nature of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

These are motley gang who pretend to be "peace activists" and want to send a boat to break a military blockade of Gaza that is designed to prevent Iranian arms shipments that would spark another war. They claim to want to help the "starving" people of Gaza, while denying the reality that Gaza has well-stocked markets, multi-level malls, luxury hotels, and has one of the highest female obesity rates in the world.

Typical of the hypocrisy of holding Israeli Apartheid Week in a country that has eradicated most of its native population is an attitude reflected by Toronto lawyer, Zahra Dhanani.

Dhanani, up until very recently a member of the disgraced Toronto Community Housing Corporation Board, which was compelled to resign en mass by Mayor Rob Ford, gave an interview last year where she decried Israeli actions as "genocide." She may be unaware that "genocide" means the murder of a race. When genocide occurs, the population of the victims drastically declines, as was the case of the native population in Canada, whose land she enables new settlers to occupy through her work as an immigration lawyer. The Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank has more than tripled since 1967, which would make that the opposite of genocide.

Hazardous products are required to carry warning labels; unfortunately, hazardous people are not.  But for a week in March, these camps of enraged, obtuse participants at "Israeli Apartheid Week" do society a big favor by separating themselves from the rest of us while engaging in a bigot-fest. In so doing, they let us see who they are and what they truly stand for. They have created a self-imposed Idiot Apartheid Week.

Their annual Idiot Apartheid Week (IAW) helps us all. When you meet someone, instead of having to wait for them to make some idiotic pronouncement to establish if you're dealing with a bigot or a fool, knowing that someone is an IAW participant saves you the time and trouble.



info on this available from Blazing Cat Fur

There actually is apartheid in the Middle East. It's practiced by Israel's neighbours in the form of brutal repression of women and religious minorities and in the legalized murder of homosexuals. But we won't see the characters at Idiot Apartheid Week denouncing those crimes against humanity. That would be inconsistent with their idiocy.