We are staring into the abyss

I never imaged I would see a massive crowd chanting “Gas the Jews” on the streets of Sydney.

Or the leader of an academic union representing sessional faculty at McMaster University — CUPE Local 3906 — celebrating the largest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust, and then doubling down on it in the face of criticism. 

If you’re a member of that union, the very least you can do is stop paying your dues until the despicable Fred Hahn is forced out in disgrace.

I never imagined intelligent people could respond to videos of terrorists dragging young women by the hair as bloodstains soaked the crotch of their pants with “Yes, but…”

If you’re going to send me messages with “Yes, but…” then please be so good as to tell me, in detail, when you think it’s justifiable to do the following:

• gang rape young girls
• shoot and / or behead babies
• burn entire families to death in their homes
• decapitate an agricultural worker with a garden hoe

Full answers for each, please.

University students have come out in force to cheer on the cold blooded murder of Jews. The same students that show such concern for micro aggressions and causes like BLM and the plight of the non-binary are busy ‘problematizing’ the victims of actual genocidal racism and attending rallies that spin it as some sort of anti-colonial victory in an armed conflict.

I saw one image from a rally in Canada where a student holds a sign reading “Decolonization is not just a theory”. It’s what, then? Justification for genocide?

The student holding that sign was wearing a Carleton University jacket. My old school.

Students have been indoctrinated for years by morally bankrupt professors who preach a simplistic ideology where everyone is either Victim or Oppressor. If you’re somehow ‘privileged’ — meaning you have something that group thinks should be theirs by right, including wealth, social status, or a good job — then you are by default the Oppressor. Whatever is done to you by the designated Victim is therefore justified.

I hope those students are just badly misled and that they’ll grow out of it. But from what I’m seeing, it doesn’t seem to be happening.

The world doesn’t break down into trite one-dimensional explanations.

Is it really so difficult to lament the deaths of poor Palestinians living under the yoke of — and being cynically used as human shields by — Hamas AND to condemn unequivocally the massacre of entire Jewish families without making caveats and spewing whataboutism?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to that question, you might want to take a long, hard look in the mirror. If you can stomach it.

It didn’t surprise me to see Hamas patiently assemble weapons to murder families and rape young girls. They published their genocidal goals decades ago. Anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who expects mercy from the likes of Hamas, ISIS or Hezbollah is fatally deluded. Those walls around Gaza were built to keep them out. Waving flags and hashtags for them won’t do shit when your turn comes.

Hamas is entirely responsible for the hell they’ve called down upon the people they’re supposed to govern — not Israel, not colonialism, and not the convoluted mess of human history.

Khaled Mashal, the head of Hamas’s diaspora affairs office, posted a video from his luxury apartment in Qatar this week calling for “global jihad” Friday, not just in the Arab world but in cities across the West.

Jews in Berlin are being warned by police not to wear articles of clothing that might reveal their religion. And Jewish residents in Toronto have received messages from police warning them “to exercise a heightened degree of healthy vigilance and situational awareness”.

As for the rest of us, we wait for the random knife attacks to resume in European cities, and news of cars being deliberately driven into crowds of pedestrians. 

Israel warned residents of Gaza to leave areas they are about to bomb. Hamas told those same residents to stay put. Civilian deaths make great headlines for their cause. 

What do you think Hamas would do if they had power over the territory currently held by Israel? Here’s a hint: they’d do exactly what they did last Saturday, but on a much larger scale. Here’s a link to a podcast by a former jihadi summarizing the history of Hamas in light of recent events, in case you’d like to understand what people in the West are cheering for.

The moral bankruptcy of the usual virtue signallers didn’t surprise me.

But it did surprise me to learn that my myopic country, Canada, has long been a haven for terrorist fundraising, among them Samidoun, a Vancouver-based Canadian-registered not-for-profit organization linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is a banned terrorist entity.

Germany banned Samidoun this week. And Canada? Not a peep. 

Not a peep from so many back home, either. And that did surprise me. My Twitter feed is filled with evidence of barely believable cruelty. And yet, when I look on social media, it’s like nothing happened at all.

I understand the backlash that comes from wading into the quagmire of Middle Eastern politics, or showing support for the Israeli people. It usually comes from the same quarter that shows such compassion for every other “marginalized group”. But I don’t understand the ability to look away. 

Did you ever imagine you’d see a day where it’s not safe to be a Jew on the streets of the countries that fought and won the Second World War? 

What would our grandfathers who fought and died in that war think?

Speaking of the Second World War, when reading about that world-shaping event, most seem to think they would have been in the resistance. Based on statistics alone, each of us is more likely to have been a collaborator or a victim. The majority collaborated in all the countries occupied by the Nazis, with very few exceptions. 

When I was working on a small blog post earlier this week, after tearing myself away from nonstop news of this attack and the disgusting response in cities across the West, I sat here thinking about what I would have done in World War Two with the benefit of historical hindsight. 

Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn my travel blog into something political, despite having strong views on where my society has gone in recent years. 

But I thought to myself, would I have been one of those people who hid Jewish people in their homes and helped them escape? Or would I have stayed silent, or turned them in? 

I never want to be one of the latter.

We have entered very dark times.