Segacs’s World I Know

It’s days like today when I’m really glad I no longer live in West Island…

Jeff Jarvis reflects on three years after the twin towers fell:

But our stock-taking as a nation and as a civilized half of the world is troubling this year, for we are fighting with each other, not with our enemy.

And that enemy has only dug down to new depths of atrocity: from jets filled with innocents killing innocents, down to children strapped up as bombs, down to bombs in backpacks on trains, down to beheadings on video, down to schoolchildren captured and killed. They fall deeper and deeper into hell.

And we just yell at each other: left v. right, Kerry v. Bush, Swift v. Kerry, Moore v. Bush, France v. America, America v. France, Iraqi v. Iraqi, damned near everybody v. Israel…. We fight all the wrong fights and wrong enemies and meanwhile let our real enemies invent new evil and drag us down with them.

We’re all falling.

(Via Allison).

September 9th, 2002, when this was the scene at Concordia:

The riot forced cancellation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech, but that was just the short-term effect. It brought a campus war to a head, resulting in endless finger-pointing, international media attention that dragged Concordia’s name through the mud, and all-out political dissention that devolved into a CSU fight against Hillel. Concordia became known as “Gaza U”, as a hostile campus environment for Jewish students, and as a school that had pretty much hit rock bottom.

So what’s changed in two years? In March of 2003, anger at the CSU for the Netanyahu debacle was partly responsible for an upset victory for the moderates in the CSU elections. This was repeated in 2004, and the two years of relative calm have done a lot to help the student atmosphere. Activism is still alive at Concordia, but moderation is trumping extremism, and, on the whole, students are free to go to class without harassment. Speaking to friends who are still students there, I’m told that the difference between the atmosphere of two years ago and today’s campus atmosphere is like night and day.

But has progress really been made? Or is it just another sort of defeat? Could Hillel bring a pro-Israel speaker back to Concordia now, or would the event be shut down – not by violent protest, but by insinuations that they shouldn’t “rock the boat”? Is that really better?

For the past two years, the goal has been to ease tensions, cool everyone down, and neutralize the campus atmosphere. A lot of progress has been made on that front. But come March, if the extremists get elected again, things could go right back to the way they were. Unless the next step is taken: that of standing up for what’s right. Students need to be able to express their opinions freely, and not suppress them for fear of being provocative. They need to be able to do this in an atmosphere where they have the freedom to say what they think, without the risk of violence or being shut down. They need to be able to wear their support of Israel with pride, not hide it away because it’s not politically-correct.

There’s still much work to be done. Luckily, the new crop of student leaders seems to be rising to the challenge. I wish them luck and strength.

Never satisfied to merely be tasteless and shocking, PETA decided to cross the line to completely appalling a long time ago. Today, the group took its absolutely disgusting Holocaust on your plate campaign to the Montreal streets, where it would be as visible as possible to piss off as many people as possible.

The thing that gets me is not that they use shock to advertise. The marketer in me understands that. But what gets me is that they’re so goddamn self-righteous about it. Instead of admitting to being cynical media hounds, the PETA people want us to believe that they’re actually trying to accomplish some sort of noble cause.

I’ll be very happy to raise my fork to PETA the next time I eat meat.

Today is the American Jewish community’s 350th “Arrival Day”, a cultural holiday celebrating the arrival of the first group of Jewish people to North America.

Jonathan’s Blogburst on the subject has a number of thought-provoking posts on the theme of the future of the Jewish community in America. So I figured that today would be a good opportunity to put a few of my own thoughts to paper (or to screen, as it were) on the subject of the Jewish community in Montreal. Most of what I will say in this post is not politically-correct. But if you want political correctness, go read a different blog.

I am a fourth-generation Montrealer, I consider myself thoroughly Canadian… but most definately not thoroughly (or even partially) Quebecoise. Sure, I live in Quebec, but Quebecois is less about location and more about culture… and the Quebecois culture has never been particularly welcoming to Jews – especially anglophone Jews.

From the overt antisemitism of Quebecois figures such as Lionel Groulx, to the WWII conscription crisis and identification of Quebec with fascism, the history of this province is rife with antisemitism. The people here will be extremely offended if you bring it up or call attention to what has become one of Quebec history’s dirty little secrets… as historian Esther Delisle found out the hard way.

Things are changing. Montreal is a truly multicultural city, and many of the barriers faced by Jews until midway through last century have disappeared. But Quebec society – especially outside Montreal – continues to be relatively closed compared to the rest of North America. As Jacques Parizeau’s comments on the evening of the 1995 referendum defeat told us, we will always be considered part of the “money and the ethnic vote” that most Quebecois nationalists feel keep costing them their dream of self-determination. Quebec continues to have the highest rate of antisemitic incidents in Canada. This narrow-minded attitude creeps up now and again, as a reminder that, despite their outward facade, many Quebecois politicians and leaders have not truly overcome this antisemitism. The bottom line is, we will never be “pure laine” enough to truly fit in here. And there’s still a long way to go before that will truly change.

The Montreal Jewish community, too, is changing, though. More anglophone Jews are making the move down the 401 to Toronto, or to the United States, resulting in a shrinking, aging community. Partially compensating for this is the leaps-and-bounds growth of the francophone Sephardic Jewish community, which is young and dynamic and is changing the face of Montreal Jewry.

Antisemitism is coming from new directions now, too. Mirroring the worldwide trend, much of it is originating from the growing Arab and Muslim communities, especially on university campuses where the traditional student Left has adopted the Palestinian cause. Incidents such as last April’s UTT firebombing remind us that we must be ever vigilent.

Despite all of that, I love living here. This is a great community with lots to offer. I’m a proud Canadian and I love my country, and I’m a proud Montrealer and I love my city. We grumble about how small the community is and how everyone knows everyone else, but in a way, that too is kind of nice. With over 90,000 members, the community is certainly still large and vibrant, and is one of the least culturally-assimilated Jewish communities in all of North America (with the exception of the ultra-Orthodox). During community-wide events like the March to Jerusalem or the Yom Ha’atzmaut parades, we can really see the strength of the community, but its backbone are the people who volunteer tirelessly to keep things running and strong.

Happy arrival day to our US neighbours. Today, as all days, I’m very proud of my identity as a Canadian, Montrealer, and Jew.

During this long weekend, I tried to spend as little time in front of a computer as possible (hence the lack of blogging).

But now it’s the most depressing day of the year: Tuesday after Labour Day. This means that summer is really over. The days are getting shorter, not longer. It’s too early to be hopeful for next summer. Everyone goes back to work, back to school, back to the grindstone. No more vacations or sunshine or lazy summer days until next year.

Grumble grumble.

An absolutely compelling article appeared today by Australian Tony Parkinson in The Age entitled Why appeasement is always wrong.

As the link requires registration, I’ll post the beginning. But you owe it to yourselves to read the rest.

More than 100 schoolchildren in southern Russia are seized at gunpoint on the first day back from summer holidays. Teachers and parents die trying to protect them.

Eleven Nepalese workers in Iraq are lined up and shot in cold blood. A 12th is beheaded, purely for show.

Sixteen bus passengers in southern Israel are blasted to death by suicide bombers. Explosions at a Moscow subway station kill 10 workers. Another 90 lives are lost when terrorists force two Russian passenger jets from the skies.

In almost any other time in modern history, a week of atrocities such as this would have stunned the world.

Yet, today, as the third anniversary of September 11 approaches, it is no longer a shock to see Islamist extremists carrying out these depraved assaults. Many thousands of innocent civilians have already died. Sadly, there will probably be many thousands more.

But maybe, just maybe, the excruciating horror of watching seven-year-olds monstered by fanatics with bombs strapped to their bodies will prompt more people in free societies to grapple with the true awfulness of this phenomenon – and to confront the reality that muddling through with the old verities of international diplomacy is no answer to the threat.

A group of Chechen terrorists are holding over 350 adults and children hostage in a school in Russia, in a horrifying saga that is now in its second day.

Imshin calls it every parent’s worst nightmare. She’s right, I suppose.

But it’s more than that. It’s every civilized society’s worst nightmare, because how can a country stand firm on policies of refusing to negotiate with terrorists, when the lives of innocent children hang in the balance? As Damian points out, Israel found that out the hard way in 1975.

Once upon a time, war had rules. People died, sure, but most of them were combatants. And children were always off-limits.

But that’s the thing about terrorism. It’s so scary because terrorists don’t play by the rules. And now, children have become targets… because terrorists don’t recognize any lines of human decency.

However this crisis ends will probably be a tragedy. But the greatest tragedy of all would be if terrorists learn that targeting children works. Then, no child can ever be safe.

I guess it’s true that you really can find everything on ebay.