Conrad Black: A repulsive antisemitism plagues U of T profs

National Post

4 hours ago

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I live in a prosperous suburb of Toronto inhabited by people of many ethnicities, including a significant percentage of Jewish families. It has apparently become a routine event where cars are left in the driveway of nearby residences and there are mezuzahs by the doors of those residences, for the windows of the cars to be smashed. This happened to many neighbours last week. They have discovered from experience that nothing useful is achieved by calling the police. Nothing like this should be happening to anyone or any group anywhere in this country and it must be possible to conduct some sort of a follow-up given the profusion of security cameras. This doesn't directly affect me but it is disturbing and outrageous that this, or any neighbourhood in this country is plagued by such problems.
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I commented in this space two weeks ago about the Canadian government joining with the governments of the United Kingdom and France in condemning Israel for conducting its offensive in Gaza. This all appears to be of a piece with the implicit and profoundly mistaken theory that what is going on in Gaza is a disproportionate response to a border skirmish. On October 7, 2023, Israel was invaded and assaulted and more Jews were killed on that day than at any time since the liberation of the death camps in Europe in 1945. The attack was intended to be, was, and has been replied to as an act of war that created a state of war. In wars there is no discussion of proportionality. The bombing of Dresden, like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and innumerable actions of our enemies were disproportionate, but wars have nothing to do with proportion and are conducted until a comfort level has been achieved that the act that began the war will not be repeated.
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Now, the RCMP, an organization that has appeared to be incapable of anything more challenging than a musical ride for the last 50 years, has been tasked with a 'structural investigation' (which we are told is quite distinguishable from a criminal investigation) into alleged war crimes committed in the Israel-Gaza war. It is difficult to imagine a more unpromising and redundant mission. Does the RCMP imagine that it possesses the ability to assess what goes on in Gaza and by what standard will a Canadian police force purport to judge the conduct of armed forces engaged in mortal combat in the Middle East? This has all the dreary ear-marks of more pandering to the not overly numerous but ever-more noisy and obnoxious Jew-baiters in our society.
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I believe most Canadians remain tolerant and civilized, as they have always been. But leaders at all levels of government throughout the country have failed in all of these related areas. The former prime minister, Justin Trudeau, acquiesced in this country falsely labelling it as genocidal because of historic treatment of the Indigenous, which had many failings, but no aspects of genocide. The government of Quebec has been actively engaged for decades in trying to exterminate the English language in that province, often with the passive cooperation of the federal government. This is an outage that is only made less obvious because of the comparative prosperity and ability of the English-speaking population of Quebec to manage its own affairs, despite blunderbuss official suppression from the so-called National Assembly of Quebec.
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Now we are clambering aboard the tawdry bandwagon of antisemitism, the most ancient, contemptible, and frequently wicked of all forms of collective hate and persecution. Where are our leaders while the national mission of 'peace, order, and good government' is mocked? And where is the solid, sensible, decent majority of Canadians when our leaders have so conspicuously and cravenly failed us, with the complicity of much of our painfully inadequate media? Answer, comes there, none.
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