Segacs’s World I Know

Toronto… Montreal… now Kitchener:

Officials with a Jewish cemetery in Kitchener, Ont., are trying to determine whether 12 headstones were knocked over this weekend as an act of vandalism, or a hate crime.

A dozen headstones were toppled sometime Saturday night or early Sunday morning at the Beth Jacob Cemetery, as Jews prepared to mark the high holidays of Passover.

Trying to determine if it’s a hate crime??? Is that like trying to determine if rain is wet? A friggin’ cemetery was attacked – what do you call that, a hockey game?

The pattern is disturbing. The Ottawa Citizen had an editorial last week that was right on-point:

Still, the firebombing in Montreal represents a new level of depravity. The attack, though, is in one sense instructive: It demonstrates the nexus of anti-Zionism (hatred of Israel, the Jewish state) and anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews). Only a mind clouded with hate could think that burning a children’s school in Canada is a legitimate way to protest Israeli government policies.

Antisemitism is on the rise because of so-called “anti-Zionism”. The two are one and the same. Legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies is one thing, but there’s no excuse for the firebombing of schools, vandalizing of property, or the threatening of Jewish MPs. And it’s exactly why the de-legitimatizing of the Jewish state is a direct attack on the notion of Jewish nationalism, or the Jewish people in general. Call it anti-Zionism or call it antisemitism, it’s just plain disgusting.

When in doubt, blame Israel:

A case of mistaken identity might be delaying the release of Fadi Fadel, a Canadian aid worker held hostage in Iraq, his brother said Monday.

Ghayas Fadel said Arab television is reporting the aid worker is an Israeli agent, which would make him a valuable target for insurgents. “(The tape) shows him giving a different name and saying he’s Israeli and this is what we’ve been trying to correct,” Fadel said in an interview from the family home near Montreal.

“He has never been to Israel and has never had any contact with any Israeli organization.”

It has not been established why Fadi Fadel would have said such a thing.

Ghayas Fadel said the Canadian ambassador in Jordan will help to confirm his brother’s real identity at a news conference in Amman on Tuesday.

Fadi Fadel, a Syrian-born Canadian, was kidnapped by local militia in southern Iraq last Wednesday while working for the New York City-based International Rescue Committee.

The real story isn’t why the Iraqis would force Fadel to claim to be an Israeli agent. That one’s obvious, and a pretty standard tactic in the Middle East, where a simple suggestion that someone is Jewish or in some way connected to Israel is enough to make them out to be the devil incarnate. It’s a convenient way of erasing any sympathy that the public in the Mideast might have had for Fadel.

No, the real story is the Canadian reaction… and how eager Canadian authorities are to state over and over again that Fadel has nothing to do with Israel, that this is false. It’s almost as though they’re validating the Iraqi rebel group’s demonization of Israel.

As Canada negotiates for Fadal’s release, I of course hope he makes it safely and unharmed. No humanitarian worker deserves this fate.

But at the same time, I almost wish that Canada was reacting more like the USA or Japan for their policies: “We will not negotiate with terrorists”.

Kidnapping of aid workers is a form of terrorism. Allowing it to succeed means ensuring it will repeat.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard such moral clarity from Canada.

All Eddie as the Leafs shut out the Sens 2-0 tonight. And you just gotta feel bad for Ottawa, cause they absolutely dominated the play, getting all the good scoring chances… gotta be frustrating after a while when you realize you’re trying to score on a brick wall.

In any case, their win tonight puts Toronto in the lead of their series 2-1. Actually, all the Eastern Conference matchups are now in a 2-1 situation. Tampa Bay beat the Islanders tonight to break the tie there. New Jersey beat Philadelphia finally. And Montreal’s win last night put us on the board, but we’re still trailing Boston.

Speaking of Montreal, the media heat’s all over Mike Ribeiro with accusations of crying wolf, after Boston accused him of faking an injury last night. Don Cherry ripped into him relentlessly tonight for being a crybaby. But he was clearly in pain… the close-up showed the trainer doing something that looked like he was snapping his arm back into place. Even I winced. He didn’t practice today, so something’s up. And Ribeiro’s “smirk” at the Boston bench after being helped off the ice – which is what seems to be getting him into trouble – looked a lot more like he was just getting his game face back on to me. Ribeiro has been super all season and he really deserves better than to have the media and fans turn on him now.

And of course, in the ever-continuing shame saga, the US national anthem was booed yet again last night by the Habs crowd. Sure, it was only a minority of people, but it’s really disgusting and unbecoming of a Montreal crowd. If they were booing for political reasons, shame on them; it’s a hockey game. If they were booing for rivalry reasons, shame on them; the visiting team deserves respect. Either way, we ought to show more class than that.

LGF posted a letter written by Fred Friendly, a US master sergeant in 1945, who later went on to become president of CBS news, about what he saw when he liberated Mauthausen Concentration Camp:

Mauthausen was built with a half-million rocks which 150,000 prisoners – 18,000 was the capacity – carried up on their backs from a quarry 800 feet below. They carried it up steps so steep that a Captain and I walked it once and were winded, without a load. They carried granite and made 8 trips a day… and if they stumbled, the S.S. men pushed them into the quarry. There are 285 steps, covered with blood. They called it the steps of death. I saw the shower room (twice or three times the size of our bathroom), a chamber lined with tile and topped with sprinklers where 150 prisoners at a time were disrobed and ordered in for a shower which never gushed forth from the sprinklers because the chemical was gas. When they ran out of gas, they merely sucked all of the air out of the room. I talked to the Jews who worked in the crematory, one room adjacent, where six and seven bodies at a time were burned. They gave these jobs to the Jews because they all died anyhow, and they didn’t want the rest of the prisoners to know their own fate. The Jews knew theirs, you see.

[ . . . ]

This is my Mauthausen letter. I hope you will see fit to let Bill Braude and the folks read it. I would like to think that all the Wachenheimers and all the Friendlys and all our good Providence friends would read it. Then I want you to put it away and every Yom Kippur I want you to take it out and make your grandchildren read it.

For, if there had been no America, we, all of us, might well have carried granite at Mauthausen.

I hate to post only an excerpt. Read the whole thing.

Yom Ha’Shoah is in six days. This letter made me think of something I want to do on this site. For the next six days, starting today (six to symbolize the six million), I want to post some sort of story or account to remember the Shoah. Today, thanks to seeing this letter, the story is Mauthausen.

Almost two years ago, on my tour of Europe, I visited the remains of the camp. They’ve turned it into a museum, you see. A museum of death, for us tourists to stop off at in between the beer hall and the white water rafting. Just another tourist attraction.

I had been learning about the Holocaust for nearly my entire life. I heard firsthand accounts from survivors, read books, saw films, went to Yad Vashem and to the Holocaust Museum in Washington… but nothing prepared me for that experience. I hadn’t been before. Not on the March of the Living or on any of the trips that took groups to Poland or Germany or Hungary or the Czech Republic to bear witness. No, there was just this one experience and it caught me completely off guard.

That day, I wrote pages and pages in my journal. I couldn’t stop writing, even for hours afterwards. Every impression. Every detail.

And I also took photos. I debated long and hard about that one. On the one hand, it seemed almost disrespectful to walk around with a camera taking snapshots. But then I realized it was probably the most appropriate thing I could do. To take photos. To write. To see it for myself and to show the photos to as many people as possible as if to say, here, here is proof that these horrors and atrocities happened and the more people who record witness accounts or take and publish photos or write about it or make films about it, the more the world remembers and the better we can counter the propagandists and antisemites who would claim otherwise.

So here are the photos that I took that day. I have a hard time looking at them myself. And these were of the memorials… taken nearly 60 years after the camp was liberated. But I still have a hard time looking at them. And I don’t know if you will want to either. But it’s important to witness, to remember.

Because my sentiment after walking out of the gates of Mauthausen – walking, you understand, free as a bird and getting on a bus and moving along to the next stop of our tour – was the same as Fred Friendly’s: It could have been me.

The headline of this Haaretz story, about a thwarted attack on Netzarim, says a lot more than it lets on:

Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad claim foiled attack on Netzarim

Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed at least two gunmen in the pre-dawn hours Monday as the Palestinians sought to attack the Gaza Strip flashpoint settlement of Netzarim, military sources said.

[ . . . ]

Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, claimed joint responsibility for the operation. The three groups have increasingly cooperated in attacks on Israelis.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad… and Fatah.

The article later says that it’s the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade wing of Fatah that was involved. But this is Haaretz – not the Jerusalem Post – now clarifying that the distinction between Arafat’s Fatah and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is so irrelevant, it doesn’t even need to be specified in a headline.

Finally, we get a little closer to the truth: Arafat directs and supports terrorism, and has no more legitimacy as a leader than any terrorist dictator thug – despite the West’s attempt to legitimatize him as the “moderate” alternative to Hamas.

That’s just BS. Hamas believes itself driven by religious purposes. Fatah is more strategic and pays lip service to secularism. But they’re both after the exact same thing: no more Israel. Hence all this “cooperation”, which the Western media is making out to be such a big deal, but, when you think about it, isn’t really all that much of a stretch.

It’s about time we called a terrorist a terrorist.

Key win for the Habs tonight! Woohoo!

Jab.

• What on earth is that William Hung kid doing performing on Jay Leno? Sheesh, he’s so bad it’s embarrassing! I’d feel bad for the poor kid… but he’s more successful than most real musicians in North America. For the next 15 minutes at least. I don’t watch American Idol or anything, but I’d venture to say he’s enjoying more fame and publicity than any of the finalists! From Beatles to Hung in less than fifty years. What is music coming to?

• Letters like this one are encouraging and nice to see. But they’re also easy. Too easy. It’s simple to act upset and shocked when assholes firebomb an elementary school. It’s harder to face down other forms of antisemitism that aren’t so obvious but are just as harmful. I’d like to see a flooding of support for the Jewish community when there’s a suicide attack in Israel. Instead, we get finger-pointing and Israel-bashing.

• Speaking of the UTT fire, Geoff has photos (via Celestial Blue). Disturbing to see the building that way. I can’t bring myself to drive by. Though the attack happened in the elementary school’s library, the high school is attached and so I spent 5 years of my life inside that building on a near-daily basis. I’m too used to remembering it as the place I dreaded seeing as we drove up every morning… and was happy to be let loose from every afternoon … only because it meant long days trapped inside boring classes. It meant a school that was falling apart, with leaky toilets and an ever-present smell of rotten fish. It meant all the things that are a normal part of high school. It never meant fear of being harmed or attacked. What will the building mean to the current students?

• Lynn has the latest about the Mel Gibson movie, and its convenient messages in the Arab world. Here’s a hint: It’s not a hit in Muslim countries because of Monica Belluci’s breasts.

• Michele has done a lot to restore my faith in the education system. It seems that there are actually teachers out there who encourage kids to think for themselves and debate!

• In the meantime, I’ve concluded that Passover must be sponsored by the gyms and fitness centres. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt in such need of exercise.

Finally, let’s just pause for a moment and appreciate the wonderful thing that is a LONG WEEKEND!!!

The EU, with American backing, has finally presented a resolution about North Korea to the UN Human Rights Commission:

The European Union (EU), backed by countries including the United States, expressed concern on Thursday at reports of grave and systematic abuses in North Korea, including “infanticide in prison and labor camps.”

The EU, in a resolution presented to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights on behalf of 37 countries, also called for appointing a special U.N. investigator for the first time to go to the reclusive, Stalinist country.

I’m wondering if they actually expect the UN to get off their asses and do something?