If you hear a discussion about the spoof magazine
Adbusters, the thing people would find most surprising is that it's still around.
The magazine, founded in 1989, garnered attention for itself with irreverent
ad spoofs in its early days. Their alleged point is something that they call "
culture jamming," a term that has failed to enter the popular lexicon and would leave anyone who hasn't committed the collected works of Naomi Klein to memory scratching their heads. The term is a description of altering something (i.e. an advertisement) and spoofing it in a near identical form to reverse its meaning. It may have eluded the geniuses at Adbusters that the word "irony" already covers most of what they intend to do, but it's so much cooler when you can take credit for originating a catch-phrase. In this case, as in so much else, they failed. Cowabunga, ad dudes!
If there's anything media hates more than being despised, it's being ignored. Right now, Adbusters is trying to promote a worldwide boycott of Starbucks. I wasn't even aware of that until I checked their website today, which is an indication of what global reach Adbusters has.
So in that vein, one sure-fire and acceptable way to get admiration for yourself from the radical leftist community, while incurring contempt from the mainstream, is to engage in soft anti-Semitism. Then, when reasonable people express outrage, you can say how your free speech is being denied, even though it isn't. If the Adbusters geniuses wanted to find out about real attempts at the denial of free speech in Canada, they could ask Ezra Levant or Mark Steyn, who were hauled before our kangaroo-court "Human Rights" commissions at great expense because of respectively publishing cartoons depicting a dead middle eastern warlord and for critiquing the influence of Islam on Western culture. Both cases were dismissed after considerable cost and inconvenience to the defendants.
But back to Adbusters. In 2006, they decided to identify supporters of the Iraq war and put down 50 names with
special indicators of the Jewish ones. I didn't see the issue, so I can't say whether they used little yellow stars of David for that or not.
But in keeping with the Nazi theme, this time, the sad, irrelevant characters at Adbusters have now decided to use a motif that radical, discredited Islamists and anti-Semites have attempted for quite some time by comparing the Gaza strip to the Warsaw ghetto. Only the most puerile minds who are either moral imbeciles or have a less-than-superficial understanding of the history and circumstances of the Warsaw Ghetto would suggest any similarity to Israel's reaction to attacks from Gaza. The contradictions are too innumerable to list, but the most basic and obvious is that unlike Hamas re: Israel, the Jews of Europe had not pledged to eliminate Germany. They were not launching rockets at German civilians, there weren't luxury malls and hotels and vacation beaches in the Warsaw Ghetto. The people of Gaza were not relocated there from conquered areas, but are the indicginous population, and the Warsaw Ghetto saw its population annihilated, whereas the population of Gaza has at least tripled due to births since 1967.
But the people at Adbusters either aren't interested in facts or are too stupid to process them correctly.
Which accounts for their current spurious complaint about "
censorship" regarding the Canadian Jewish Congress's call to have people alert outlets that are selling Adbusters that their content is anti-Semitic.
What the
CJC has asked is for "community members to take a moment to see if their local bookstore or newsstand sells the magazine, to show the clerk or the owner the offensive material and to tell them that “this is anti-Semitic and shameful.”
Based on this, Shoppers Drug Mart has decided to pull its distribution of Adbusters. That's not censorship, it's using economic influence to express oneself. No one is denying Adbusters the right to publish. The CJC hasn't pulled Adbusters in front of an HRC, although they have as much grounds to do so as those who were offended by Mohammed cartoons.
What is very funny about this situation is that the dimwits at Adbusters who are advocating the "
worldwide boycott of Starbucks" are decrying a boycott directed at them. I guess they missed the irony of that, or should I say, "
culture jamming?"
No, "culture jamming" sounds like a term only an idiot would use. Let's stick to "irony".
