The original report, from Nick Bergamini, the VP-Student Issues at Carleton University, and an outspoken supporter of Israel, apppears here: The cost of supporting Israel « Take Back Your School:
Tonight I went out to the bars downtown. It was a great night with my roommate Mark Klibanov. Around 1:45am, as we were leaving the bar, and we heard the shout of “Zionist” in Arabic. As it stands now, we weren’t sure if the shouts were directed at myself, a known a supporer of Israel, or Mark, an actual Israeli.
Quickly, we both responded that yes we were Zionists. All of a sudden we were surrounded by 10-15 men who began to shout at us in Arabic. We tried to back out and run away. All of a sudden, I was struck in the back of the head. I’m not sure if it was a fist, a rock or a pipe but it left me dazed and bleeding.
We quickly ran back to the bar and stood beside the bouncers. The crowd of anti-Israel thugs dispersed.
About 10 minutes later, assuming that it was safe, we began to walk home. We were walking through a parking lot when a car pulled up next to us. The driver shouted “I fucking hit you, you Jew.”
We stood our ground. Quickly we had three guys around us. We were able to push them away. As the cowards that they were, they retreated. Then I heard, shouts of “Open the trunk!” One of them opened the trunk and I saw glistening in the street light the reflection of a 12-inch machete. “Fucking Jew,” he shouted. I began to run for my life as he was only 5 or 6 feet away.
I ran, and as I looked back, I saw the long shiny blade slicing through the air about 12 inches from my neck. I ran as fast I could and, thanks to my grade 9 track and field training, got away.
People who were around the scene said the blade came within inches of my neck.
Now, the debate on campuses has reached the next level. In this country, people are no longer safe if they support Israel. But you know what? I will never take back my beliefs. I support Israel 100 per cent.
But I will say this. Some of the guys who tried to kill us are Carleton students and I recognize who they are. What is this country coming to?
The report is yet unconfirmed, but it sounds like what we can expect now that Ontario universities are going out of their way to recruit Arab students. Either the universities are ignorant of the pervasive and hysterical antisemitism in the Arab world, taught in schools, mosques, and the state media, not to mention ignorant of the entire history of Islamic imperialism, or they actively want to make their schools uninhabitable for Jewish students, and soon for all who won't take up the dhimmi's bow. Frankly, even schools without Scimitar Studies programs can't be that ignorant, that blinded by their worship of the Other, can they? (Alternatively, the universities are recruiting Arab students so that the latter can be taught a lesson about antisemitism, but somehow I doubt that's the schools' motivation, though it must now become ours.)
Meanwhile, it's time for ordinary Canadians to decide if they want a country in which Jews and other infidels can live without fear. For starters, they might tell Dalton McGuinty to give up his desire to recruit rich Arab students as a funding source for Ontario universities; and we can demand of federal politicians changes on immigration policy, like restrictions/screening when it comes to admitting people from pervasively racist and totalitarian cultures. Write a letter, hold a meeting, today.
Meanwhile, Blazing Cat Fur suggests the Ottawa Citizen is working on this story. UPDATE: here is the Citizen story.
17 comments:
Hopefully this story is not true. If it IS true, I have long been telling anyone who will listen that Dalton McGuinty is 1001% wrong for wanting to welcome foreign students. Hopefully this violence as I said is not true, however, I am afraid the more Arabic speaking students they let into Canada, the more of a problem it will be. Just refer back to what happened at Palestine House yesterday during a JDL protest to take away funding for this group of people who acted like pigs and barbarians yesterday.
I hope the story is not true, too, however I have been told that a police report has been filed on this incident. So I expect we will soon learn more.
I'm pretty well convinced that if it weren't Palestinians as cause du jour it would be someone or something else that excites our Left dhimmi fascists to hate our nations and people, to hate Jews, to hate Israel, to hate Modernity, to just hate. Muslims are, I think, a mere proxy for the Left dhimmi fascists. If they didn't have active encouragement to riot and violence we could probably have a multitude of them living in peace here and elsewhere. Not so with the Death Hippies urging Muslims to mayhem.
Dag,
And so how do you explain the radicalization of the Muslim world by the Muslim Brotherhood types, by the Iranian Mullahs - is this all to be blamed on the left too? The centre of gravity of what is going on in the Western cities full of migrants is not so much in the West as somewhere in the demographic mass of the larger Muslim world, it seems to me. Modern communications put the imams and sheikhs and less learned rabble rousers of the Middle East in any "youth's" mind, anywhere.
As Ibn Khaldun saw, Islam is a history of periodic renewals of militant fervour. From time to time, orthodox tribesmen, with a beef against cosmopolitan overlords too well attuned to getting along in this world, would ride in from the hills to re-establish proper Islamic government in the decadent cities until they, in victory, in turn turned decadent and someone else came in to renew the fight. Islam, when taken to its textual heart, is a warrior religion. There are thousands of sects and diverse practices, yes, and the majority of people just want to go along to get along; but when fundamentalists return to the text, and to the model of the Prophet, then standing up to the infidel and the apostate becomes a test of one's manhood.
What I meant to say is that the most important conflict in the Muslim world is not Israel/Palestine, but rather pan-Muslim Islamism vs Arab or other nationalist/local big man regimes. The fight, as it has been for centuries is between "reformers", i.e. fundamentalists, and the corrupt powers that be. What we see in the West is in good part the outgrowth of Islamism - a particular movement within today's Islamic world. Now standing up to Jews is not the be all and end all for students enflamed by Islamism - because Jew hating is a ritual that everyone performs, from two-year olds right up to granny, from regime insiders to outsiders, and so it is no great thing to hate the Jews. But in the West the righteous students don't have the Saudis or the Mubaraks to stand up to and bond against, at least in any immediate sense. So... we may be seeing a lot of confused agendas in play.
Too many Zionists, not enough machetes...
That anonymous hate mail comes to us from here in Vancouver, from a Telus customer. She found the blog by Googling "Lorna Pardy".
Dalton McGuinty, like most Liberals, suffers from a very bad case of flatulence. Anyone who has had the misfortune of riding in an elevator with him can attest to this fact. Dalton's sour blossoms are actually a common Liberal condition being symptomatic of "shit-for-brains syndrome" inherent in the Liberal Party, provincial and federal.
How do I explain the radicalization of the Muslim world by the Muslim Brotherhood types, by the Iranian Mullahs; and is this all to be blamed on the Left too?
I don't see any radicalization of the Muslim masses at all. I see a normative Muslim expression, as practised consistently throughout most if not all of Islamic history, the very being of Islam as Islam.
Western cities are full of Muslim immigrants due to a demographic explosion in the larger Muslim world, I agree. I thank Modernist medicine, a very recent trend in the world, for the rise of Muslim population growth.
Now that Modernist communications put imams and sheikhs and less learned rabble rousers of the Middle East in any "youth's" mind, anywhere all I see is that Muslims have succeeded in peacetime where they failed in war. But I see this as an extension of jihad--by other means. Again, nothing other than the Muslim norm, if we look even casually at Muslim history.
Is an of this or all of this to be blamed on the Left? I argue that even Modern medicine is to be blamed on the Left. I blame the Left for dispensing Modernist medicine without also dispensing Modernist culture: it becomes a cargo-cult exercise for Muslims: they build a "victim" and they receive, so they hope and often get, "cargo" from nowhere. Who can blame them for doing what works? That they can come to the West and other places of Modernity and rape, as they do with near impunity in Sweden, that they can burn, as they do in France, that they can pillage, as they do in Spain, and still come in waves thereafter, is mostly due to the Leftist sentimentalism of "we are the world, we are the children" idiocy and a lack of awareness of what real poverty is, they never having had to work through it from pre-industrialism.
Ibn Khaldun, one good thinker among many with a good possible if not perfect idea, sees Islam as a history of periodic renewals of militant fervour.
"From time to time, orthodox tribesmen, with a beef against cosmopolitan overlords too well attuned to getting along in this world, would ride in from the hills to re-establish proper Islamic government in the decadent cities until they, in victory, in turn turned decadent and someone else came in to renew the fight."
We might see this in European history as well, seeing Jan Huss or Luther in something of a similar role. Maybe Savanarola, maybe Calvin. But what we don't see is the continual and cyclical violence of the Christian world in constant decay and puritan renewal without end. One might say that anything as corrupt at base as to require endless violent renewal due to its innate corruption is a failure. This is especially true when we look at Islam as parasitical, as needing endless expansion to maintain itself as dynamic. Once the boundaries of Islam are set, the rot sets in and decy takes over, as seen in Ummayad, Abbasid, in all the Turkish dynasties and holdings, in fact, universally in Islam. If Islam has nowhere to conquer and suck dry, Islam decays materially and socially, descending into slavery, moral depravity, and murder. Look, for example, at the Ottoman Empire for example non-stop of all cases above.
"Islam, when taken to its textual heart, is a warrior religion. There are thousands of sects and diverse practices, yes, and the majority of people just want to go along to get along...."
E.O. Wilson describes Islam nicely, that it is a 7th century tribal code enflamed by ethnicity. As a warrior code, Islam is anti-intellectual, c.f. closing the Gates of Ijtihad, i.e. refusing to examine Islam critically any further c. 800-1000 A.D., but I disagree that most Muslims want to live and get along in life like others. Islam is a warrior creed in part but it is a slave-ownership culture, based not on getting along but on exploitation of Humans as energy sources and as pleasure objects, as manual workers and sex-dolls. It's both, and simultaneously hedonistic and guilt-ridden. It's a pedarast culture, and it's a rapist culture, an honor and theft culture, hence it bags women to keep them from rape by even family members, c.f. Siwa Culture, and turns men into homosexuals of convenience.
"When fundamentalists return to the text, and to the model of the Prophet, then standing up to the infidel and the apostate becomes a test of one's manhood."
Life isn't all roses. When a wolf isn't strong enough to take on the alpha wolf in charge of the pack, he might become a lone wolf, finding others to join him, turning on his own kind in hopes of finding mates through group strength. Islam is much the same, the lower orders turning on the higher in order to overthrow the lack of goods and women. Muslim jihad is usually limited to opportunity, not to infidels per se.
Islam is "successful," insofar as it still exists, only in that it still exists. It's not dynamic in a true sense, it is allowed and encouraged to exist by mercy. Islam is a hold-over of primitive hunter-raider cultures, this one organised as a triumphalist warrior religion. It's a dead dog walking. It ahs no organic place in the world today, and the longer it is allowed to survive as other than a folk tradition among Modernity, the worse will be the continued suffering of its adherents, to our shame.
Islam exists in the Modern world in large part because there is no moral outrage left in Modernity such as stopped for large part slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. rather, today we have an anti-morality that I see as moralistic posing among a gnostic and nihilistic utopian Left who use Islam as a proxy to fight Modernity in the hope of destroying Modernity and replacing it with a sentimentalist, anti-Human Rousseauianism that can only appeal to the most wealthy of fools and misanthropic Westerners who simply do not know poverty, pain, or death. It is a delusion of fools. I call the latter Death hippies. Their cheerleaders, the fools who clap and wear Palestinian scarves are Conformity Hippies. In short, they are childish and stupid spoiled fools. They allow Islam to linger and do its harm for the sake of a theatrical longing of the bored.
Anonymous tells us much about "Human Rights."
I don't see any radicalization of the Muslim masses at all. I see a normative Muslim expression, as practised consistently throughout most if not all of Islamic history, the very being of Islam as Islam.
-well, if you believe this, why you would hold to your original statement about large numbers of Muslims living among infidels not having to be a problem, if the left weren't so appeasing, is not too clear. It would suggest some kind of great confidence in some aspect of Western culture (almost like the leftist who thinks the West is always the strong oppressor and they can never really hurt us), or perhaps just arrogance that we need never have problems with Muslims because they can't do much to us in the way of Islamic imperialism, and asymmetric warfare, if we are strong and free. Anyway, it might be worth spelling out a bit.
We've argued this before but I don't think any religious phenomenon can be reduced to a singular form of normative expression, howevermuch it is of course true, and important for us to to recognize, that some norms are more popular than others in any time or place. Islam is at root a paradox because, like any religion, it does not provide an unproblematic code for living in this world: it cannot do away with the realities of human conflict. Thus to the extent any Muslim thinks Islam is a unifying vision for the world, this vision of Islam wars against certain realities, like the self interest of established powers, and has to find ways to accomodate all kinds of worldly realities the prophet did not foresee. So I think it is arbitrary to suggest that all the more pragmatically conservative sects and semi-religious/secular regimes are not "normative", and the Muslim Brotherhood is not "radical". That's the kind of thinking that gets you in trouble with the Caliph, the real one, and his imams.-:) Pan-Islamic Umma-as-political-entity worship is an inherently radical phenomenon it seems to me, whatever its basis in Koranic interpretation, simply because in a world of a billion+ Muslims, of various languages, spread out in a vast geography, any such political fantasy is just that however real and dangerous the attempts to realize fantasy are. All the Muslims who are more intent on controlling or hurting their Muslim or "apostate" or "radical" neighbors, and hence who support established regimes, are really more normative it seems to me: normative because bound by actually-realized forms of reciprocity (daily life) as opposed to grand dreamy visions.
I don't say that as an interpreter of the Koran, but as someone who would argue that no book has a necessary interpretation, that reading, even reciting, is always already interpretation. Of course I recognize that Muslim Brotherhood type Islam is becoming a huge problem because far too many (including Western elites) now embrace it as normative. I admit that Islam, on the model of the Prophet, readily lends itself to a violent imperialism, but no imperialism is sustainable for long times in history and as such it is a kind of violent radicalism to realistic eyes. So I cannot simply laugh off Muslims who speak of the prophet less as an imperialist than as a defender of the faith and of his own people, and who interpret the texts and the MB thusly, though I do recognize the fairly arbitrary nature of such arguments. Politics and conflict is inevitable.
Is an of this or all of this to be blamed on the Left? I argue that even Modern medicine is to be blamed on the Left. I blame the Left for dispensing Modernist medicine without also dispensing Modernist culture...
-Well, here again, I have to ask what you think modernist culture is if not something deeply tied to the left or to liberalism more generally. In other words, isn't modernity the dog that continually bites at its own tail? You can say the leftist wants a return to some pre-industrial "idyll" but isn't he really more likely to believe in the impossibly modern, technological, idyll? Seriously now, what separates your calls for a revolutionary modernity from many forms of leftism?
I wonder how can we see the present impasse as anything but revelation of the self-defeating limits of a modern liberalism now cut off from previous moderating elements inherited from a more traditional past. Personally, I think there is a kind of liberalism that we can see as traditional to Western Judeo-Christian culture - our tradition is not the deadly conservatism the left imagines - so I encourage you to keep struggling to express some such vision. But I think it is a weakness to be too indebted to protestant narratives of overcoming all that is pre-industrial. That, I think, is what has led many among us to our present nihilism. After so many failed "revolutions" you give up any real belief other than "will" and "power" which you now intend to wield in the name of "victims" you must now often desperately create, because you now have nothing else to offer.
the continual and cyclical violence of the Christian world in constant decay and puritan renewal
- i honestly don't see how puritanism is a basis for renewal. Yes I see it as a reaction to decadence and as such at times necessary but puritanism is not itself the basis of the covenant that is going to be possible (in the city that is not one family alone on a hill) and that needs to be renewed. That covenant, it seems to me, requires we take a step back from our most puritanical monotheism, or from metaphysical idealism, and dwell on the pragmatic needs to set up forms of free exchange that can include all who need to share in the new order. The renewal is thus, in the generic sense, catholic. If there is no moral outrage left in modernity, why is this? I'd say it's because modernity has to discover that moral outrage - such as the leftists continually pretend to find - is not enough: freedom requires a religion of works (not that I see works as too distinct from acts of faith) and all kinds of pragmatic men. Thus I can't completley discount Muslim desires to go along to get along. Not to be obscene, but it is not completely logical or honest to argue that pederast and slave-owning cultures are all about domination and not also about pragmatic negotiations of "sacred" principles. If Muslims today are so loathe to recognize the homosexual aspects of their cultures, it's in part because they don't have a textual justification for it, because pederasty is a pragmatic compromise, however evil, with the sacred vision that allows things like polygamy and honor killing.
I might add that while I say the covenant has to be "catholic" in scope, we should not thus fall into the Gnostic trap of thinking our representations of our "diverse" reality must be forever "nuanced" and "inclusive", that present "common sense" representations of reality are never good enough but rather fallen and evil. Our representations, on which any reciprocity is dependent, can never be what the Gnostic desires - they can never accomodate all his sophisticated intuitions about the many nuances out there - and it is no good being, as the Gnostic is, forever wat war with our shared representations of reality, with folk wisdom. The Gnositc is a restraint on ordinary people's freedom in the name of some elitist fantasy that only the experts can find the way to redeem us.
What matters to those interested in renewing the covenant is asking how we can encourage events to unfold that will be the basis of the covenant, events whose meaning no one can capture, that we may represent in various ways and that will allow us to renew forms of reciprocity and exchange around events whose meaning is open to such exchange. The "protestant" narrative may well have a part in this as long as it is not so puritanical as to become Gnostic itself, i.e. so contemptuous of the "incomplete" representations on offer that it never accepts the world as it is - a place we can never capture in some perfect play of words. We need stuff to happen, we need works that are revelatory in open-ended ways.
Large numbers of Muslims living among infidels is not a problem even if the Left weren't so appeasing. We might look at Muslims as being just like any other human group, subject to the same foibles as all others, lazy, complacent, apathetic, opportunistic, conformist, timid and even cowardly. If Muslims were left to their own personal devices as they were in Europe post-war to pursue their privacies and to raise their families, them they might well have assimilated in some low way as a servant class among those better able from culture to succeed in the Western world. Islam makes its adherents stupid and resentful of others. But it's not the end of the social world for them. They can grow away from it if they aren't stoked to frenzy. That has to come from outside. Islam is stagnant, being a command to "submission." There can't be any innovation in such a mind-lair culture. Muslims just sit and wait for anything to come by to prey on. Some of the more aggressive ones go pirating. But mostly they stagnate till someone with energy rouses them to violence. It's easy to do with a field sown for the ready seeds of violence as it is Islam. My point is that it's not Muslims who are a problem: the problem is Islam.
It's not simply a matter of great confidence in some aspect of Western culture. Nor is it almost like the leftist who thinks the West is always the strong oppressor and they can never really hurt us. I think the key is that since th ebattle of Lepanto in 1571 the Muslim world has lived in military and technological defeat, incapable of doing more that pesky raiding and occasional terrorism. It's just plain objective reality that Islamic culture doesn't produce the minds that produce Modernity's technology. Muslms cannot compete inthe intellectual sphere; all they can do is react, in frustration. And if they are stoked to frustration, then, the ground there for them in Islam, the violence erupts. The worst Muslims can do is take from the host and turn it against the host, to use a nasty comparison, as you know.
When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, the ruling military class fled in utter defeat before them, the military class one day ultimately powerful in Egypt destroyed in a matter of hours. And to further the humiliation, it took the Bristish to rid Egypt of the French, not the Muslim force. If the French could destroy the Mamluks in an hour 200 years ago, surely we have little to fear from the Egyptians today. throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Ottoman empire existed only due to Western aid. so too do Muslim nations survive by Western charity. Without Western imprtation of food, the Muslim world would, for the most part, starve to death in three weeks. They are not a serious military threat. Nor are they a serius cultural threat, the only Westerners who "like" them being the worst losers in the West.
I see our own need to have a "moral" as the problem, and I'm wiling to concede that for most the remedy is not cultural relativism and cultural nihilism but orthodox Western religion. ithut some alternative moral to "nothing," i.e. multi-clturalism and so on, the need to moralise ones existence might well be simply to ape the morals of others without the moral being present, just the forms of moralising.
Where is the police? This is an assault with intent to kill. There are apparently a number of witnesses. This should be prosecuted.
The university's response to this is just incredible. Those in charge should be fired for failing to take student safety seriously.
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