TORONTO, January 4, 2010 – The League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada, has called on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (VANOC) to reconsider the continued exclusion of Women’s Ski Jumping from the upcoming Olympic Games. According to the League’s National Chair Allan Adel, and its National Director, Ruth Klein, although the recent Supreme Court decision technically places the IOC outside the ambit of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the position taken on women’s ski jumping violates the spirit of the Charter, which prohibits discrimination based on gender.B'nai Brith can't be taken seriously as a voice for real human rights if it indulges in the ultimate tyranny of making it imperative to label every institutionalized recognition of human differences as Nazi-like.
In a letter to John Furlong, CEO of VANOC, the League recalled the 1936 Berlin Olympics when the OIC turned a blind eye to Hitler’s fascist regime, which was even then implementing discriminatory policies against Jews that impacted Games that year. The League asks the OIC and the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (VANOC) to focus on its policies and practices relating to discrimination, “and that includes eliminating discrimination against women now, just as it should have included resistance to discrimination against Jews then”.
Monday, January 04, 2010
B'nai Brith beclowns itself
Whatever you think of the International Olympic Committee's decision not to allow women to compete in ski jumping at the upcoming Vancouver games - the IOC claims the women's sport is not yet sufficiently established - it is surely not a decision that merits comparison to the Nazis. B'nai Brith Canada does all Jews a disservice in demonstrating an inability to move their political discourse beyond the Nazi-Jew model of victimhood (a now much abused revelation, as evidenced by the fact that antisemites currently invoke it to "Nazify" Israel and other Western enemies of Islamofascism). Here's what B'nai Brith says in its latest press release
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6 comments:
Sigh...
There's not much one can say to that press release, is there? It seems to cement B'Nai Brith's near-eternal imprisonment in a time decades-past.
How sad.
how can an organization which purports to represent the Jewish citizens of Canada minimize the holocaust by making such a ridiculous comparison. there are far to many illegitimate agendas (homosexuals greens peta etc) for the B'nai Brith to be wasting its time championing any of them. The B'nai Brith needs to spend its time and resources defending the right of Israel and Israelis to exist in peace and freedom.
Yes, they are trapped, on one level. On another they are very "current". Their "Nazi-Jew" trap is shared by most of the West, if not the world, where people seem incapable of recognizing any significant difference as anything other than evidence of unjustifiable victimization in some zero-sum game. Those of us who value a free society and free markets have to work on our ideologies to make it common sense that in a free society, certain differences just emerge as a consequence of that freedom and should not be taken, ritualistically, to justify endless litigation to redistribute the fruits of someone's difference.
Hear, hear.
Or, to put it another way, those who are ready to be scandalized by the "privilege" of male ski jumpers, or the victimization of the female jumper, are surely being made more, not less, prone to being scandalized by any other signs of asymmetrical "firstness", signs which Jews have often figured and for which they have often been made into targets of resentment. Ritualistic worship of "Nazi-Jew" symbolism is incipiently antisemitic because the Jewish presence at the forefront of Western history once again becomes a "scandal" in an age when it has become a source of power to be able to play the victim.
I recall reading an article a few years back from the Canadian Jewish Congress where he lamented this exact matter...making comparisions to Nazi germany it said diminishes and belittles the evil of Nazism. Alas if only B'nai Brith would have heeded these wise words.
If anyone could find this article I think it would be a great idea to post it.
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