WEAK END AT BERNIE'S
Peter Chattaway <petert-LOVM4QxV+tDq6eQxt3vRmLDks+cytr/[email protected]>
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http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3870/26/ Steyn on Canada and the Commonwealth Friday, 25 March 2011 Bernie Farber's Canadian Jewish Congress is almost too perfect a metaphor - a dying organization obsessed with memorials to the dead, to the extent of being "thrilled" and "delighted" by mere Royal Assent to a mere bill for yet another monument. As Scaramouche points out, by now the CJC should be getting a bulk discount on memorials. I had clean forgotten I've been doing jokes about Bernie Farber's Lifetime Achievement Award for Lifetime Achievement in Lifetime Achievement Awards for over two years now. But it's not really funny so much as pathetic and decadent. Bernie seems to have internalized the contemporary western sensibility: The more Europe despises living Jews, the more it venerates dead ones. As I wrote in Commentary: You can see why they’ll keep Holocaust Day on the calendar: In an age when politicians are indifferent or downright hostile to Israel’s “right to exist,” it’s useful to be able to say, “But some of my best photo-ops are Jewish.” But a Jewish advocacy group ought to have the strategic clarity to see beyond that. All over the world you can see Jewish memorials, Jewish monuments - they're called cemeteries, in places where once were Jews and now are none. And that's how anti-Semites like it. Jews don't need memorials, they need a living presence. I ran into a very prominent British Jew the other day, full of rage not just at the barbarism of the Fogel murders, but at the silence of so many Official Jews. My Commentary piece begins with a "Holocaust Memorial Day" visit by a group of Jews to the old Jewish East End of London. Lots of Bernie Farber-type plaques memorializing this and that, but no living Jews - just a successor population happy to stone them and jeer, "If you go any further, you'll die." That's where Bernie's priorities get you - for dead Jews, plaques; for living Jews, attacks. -- dadl-ot mailing list http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot