Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Jew sues Israel haters: are the Canadian courts capable of enforcing just reciprocity?

The Israel-Palestinian "peace process" is perhaps the world's longest-standing act of cynicism.  Countless have professed themselves to the cause, but too often in ways that actually avoid the possibility of any resolution.  As Blazing Cat Fur notes in his post on the lawsuit of one Cherna Rosenberg, the Gazans today enjoy the trappings of modern consumer culture: Blazing Cat Fur: Sea Hitler Lawsuit - Canada's Gaza Boat Sued For A Cool Million.  However, there is no economic basis in Gaza for this consumption other than the inflows of foreign "aid" in various forms. Essentially, the Gazans are paid to hate and fight the Jews, and as David Goldman has shown their warfare economy has earned them a standard of living considerably higher than that of their neighbors in Egypt.  The world pays the Palestinians because the world doesn't really want a resolution to the conflict, because such a resolution would require the world to admit it either wants another Holocaust or wants the Jews to be a sovereign nation like all the rest (and not a pathetic figure in whose apparent failures one can take religious comfort), a self-interested nation with the ability to guarantee its security by controlling, if only militarily, the lands from which the local Arabs have professed, since at least the 1920s, their will to launch endless attacks until the Zionist presence is wiped off the map.  The world doesn't want either of those outcomes as much as it wants a ready scapegoat on which all the resentments churned up by the modern global economy, and the failure of large swaths of humanity to adapt to this economy,  can be directed. Countless organizations around the world gain their credibility among the resentful by participating in what is, effectively, a death cult that positively requires blood and suffering that people may find identification with a victim of supposedly "aggressive", world-destabilizing, Jews. Money is paid for blood, as the latest parade of self-sacrificing Arab youth to tresspass the Syria-Israel border has once again shown.

So one wonders, now that much of  the Canadian and world left has returned to its antisemitic roots - i.e. to the Marxist identification of "the Jew" with the evil invisible hand of bourgeois capitalism - will a Canadian court with, likely, a centre-left judge, allow a Jewish plaintiff to sue successfully the Canadian organizers of the Canadian "Sea Hitler" boat to Gaza? In other words, will the Ontario courts allow for some reciprocity that a Jew, who has suffered under the rocket attacks from Gaza, get a share of the money the world directs towards the Palestinian cause of blaming and hating Israel for all the woes of the Middle East and beyond? Via Scaramouche:
A lawsuit filed in Toronto is seeking to block Canadian participation in the second international "Freedom Flotilla" to Gaza.

Cherna Rosenberg, a 68-year-old citizen of both Canada and Israel, filed her case June 2 in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice inToronto against the Canadian Boat to Gaza and Alternatives International. The complaint charges these groups with raising funds for and providing material support to Hamas, which governs Gaza and which was declared a terrorist group by Canada in 2002.

Under Canadian law, it is illegal to help or support "a designated terror group," said Rosenberg's lawyers, Neil Sher of New York and Ed Morgan of Toronto, in a statement.

Rosenberg, who divides her time between Israel and Canada, is seeking an interim and permanent injunction prohibiting the defendants "from continuing to raise funds, purchasing equipment or supplies, and purchasing or renting a vessel for the purpose of delivering goods or funds to the Gaza Strip."

According to a statement of claim, which outlines a plaintiff's cause for action, the suit also seeks to block the defendants "from sending goods, funds or any other material support, directly or indirectly, to Hamas or any of its representatives, and/or from aiding and abetting Hamas by assisting in bringing imports and exports to and from the Gaza Strip."...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is no radio commentator in Canada or maybe in all North America that hates Israel as much as Michael Harris of 580cfra of Ottawa. He is obsessed with supporting the palestinians and just giving daily sermons to the unemployable losers who idolize him.

His arguments are specious, his cherrypicking of facts is obvious and he is a mental dwarf when it comes to things zionism, islamism, etcc.

To him the only conflict is Israeli/Arab which even presenting like that, as he does, ignores religion and history.

It is clear that he is being paid by muslim groups to blabla on and on and to be rude to those callers who know history and facts.

If you want to know the voice the jew hating left, listen to Michael Harris. He must have the support of management. Good thing that he is on at a time that everyone is working and broadcasts from an insignificant station in an insignificant city that lives in a bubble of its own importance.

truepeers said...

Living in Vancouver, I don't know anything about Michael Harris, and from your description that may be fine with me. I'm not sure there is anything new for me to learn about Israel hating. At least we can be thankful that we now have a Prime Minister who defends the moral ground on which Israel stands.

Anonymous said...

I doubt the ‘scapegoat’ theory you use to explain attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Attitudes and postures vary through time. Israel received considerable support when it was initially founded. Even from the Soviets. Several of the major European states continued to ally itself with the Israelis for decades after the state’s founding. Sometimes the Jewish state is considered good, other bad. Sometimes plucky hero, other times Judeo-nazis.

Contemporary international support for Palestinians and pressure on Israel has a simple origin: the economic clout of the oil producing Middle-Eastern states. Israel’s alliance with the US during the cold-war (and after) lost it some friends on the left. The Israelis made it easier to dislike them in some ways. The settlement policy has been a domestic and international disaster. But lots of countries pull this type of crap. For the Europeans, and all those other countries that wouldn’t typically give two shits about some regional conflict, the logic of a pro-Palestinian tilt comes down to currying favour among oil exporters. And the region’s oil producers never really got their act together until the late 60s/early 70s, which explains the shift in attitudes.

When the developed world gradually moves to a non-oil based economy (which will happen in my lifetime), international support for the Palestinian cause will fade. Oil is all the region has: they’ll squander the current wealth, they’ll continue to produce nothing, and their markets will remain generally unattractive. With no leverage over the world they can expect far fewer foreign dignitaries promising money and kind words for their favourite charity case nation.

This is not to say everyone will stop paying attention. Muslims, active Christians (and those dependent on their votes) and Jews will always be interested. But focus will shift away from the current obsessive levels. Embassies and news bureaus will be downsized. Student radicals will find a new cause. Former world leaders will try to make peace between different warring peoples. The clock is ticking. The Palestinians just don’t realize it.

na

truepeers said...

a simple origin?

I think it's a mistake to look for simple or decisive factors, because history is not some mechanism. It is rather a series of events or scenes whose coming together is anything but simple or reducible to a single cause.

I certainly wouldnt deny that the Arabs are appeased because of the oil interest. But when people abase themselves for economic reasons, they are also making an ethical decision. And since the ethical is just as central to the human as the economic, if it is a decision that leaves a bad (or good) conscience, one may well look (both before and after the decision) for a scapegoat to mediate that. And heh, most Americans don't hate Israel, and they too are rather dependent on middle-east oil. It is a choice, not an inevitable necessity.

And there are many people who are not too concerned with oil, or who think we can somehow get off it in short order, who still hate Israel.

Israel did have a lot of supporters in its early years. The turning point really was 1967, and not just because of the war, and not just because that's when the Soviets turned and started pumping Western antisemitic propaganda to the Arabs (something the Russians still do to some extent, notwithstanding their healthy oil supplies), but because the late 1960s were a key ethical turning point in Western and global history, with the maturing recognition of the cultural centrality of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, and the birth of the postmodern intellectual movements focussed on redeeming the victims of various putative "Nazi-Jew" and "Modern, successful nation-bomb victim" relationships. It is in the growth of the postmodern victimary mindset that it becomes possible for many Europeans to feel superior about their economic relationships with the Arabs by turning the Jews into the new Nazis.

Now I could go into this more clearly another time if you like; right now I am just too depressed by the evident failure of our society to educate the scum who rioted and looted in downtown Vancouver.

truepeers said...

I should point out that they are resentful "scum" because they have no decent cultural models other than various resentful pop culture poseurs who share in the (antisemitic) white guilt promoted in the schools. And they are all this before they have even an inkling of a coherent economic self-understanding. They can trash and loot because that doesn't hurt them but just the bad guys with the stash who screw the rest of us.