Terry Glavin: The new blood libel, state sponsorship and freedom of speech.
The thing is, I just can’t seem to put my finger on a proper remedy between the extremes of having the state administer sanctions for what Canada has devolved into treating as the mere misdemeanour of propogating unreconstructed, drooling antisemitism, and the swift retributive justice of a baseball bat to the side of the head. Where does one start? Where would it end? Should we just laugh out loud at it? I don’t know. This is my problem. But I mean, really:
An international Israeli conspiracy to kidnap children and harvest their organs is gathering momentum as another shocking story divulges Tel Aviv’s plot to import Ukrainian children and harvest their organs.
Yes, I get it. It’s all the rage these days. It’s just some unpacking of the discourse in a site of competing post-colonial narratives and yada yada bla bla bla. But two things about this particular eruption of an ancient incitement caught my eye. The first is that the story appeared not two weeks ago in Al-Ameen, the house journal of the British Columbia Muslim Association (the periodical’s editorial board is in fact the executive committee of the BCMA, which also runs the Surrey Muslim School). The second thing is that the story itself is reprinted faithfully and accurately from that holocaust-denying international scab operation known as Press TV, which is the house journal of the Khomeinist tyranny in Iran.
I notice this because the ‘Ukrainian Kids New Victims Of Israeli Organ Theft’ story is not merely the dribblings of some pimply and deluded heavy-metal freak bashing away on his mummy’s old computer in a basement somewhere, trying to out-drool some other freak in some hillbilly internet message-board debate. It is vile antisemitic gibberish presented as a serious news story in what presents itself as a serious newspaper, run by a major, wealthy cultural organization in Canada, and the report comes straight from the propaganda arm of an extremely dangerous, unstable and violently anti-democratic regime that enjoys full status at the United Nations. This is reported, as fact: Israel has brought some 25,000 Ukrainian children into the occupied entity over the past two years in order to harvest their organs.
The thing is, I just don’t know what’s worse: the chance of Canada slipping a few notches on the global Index on Censorship rankings, or just sitting back and allowing the Canadian state to facilitate and support the circulation and dissemination of such filthy, toxic and dangerous libels. Honestly. I don’t know what’s worse, the fascist Jew-hater who would happily disseminate such a lie, or the moral illiterate who would claim in his defence that he is only the lie’s manservant, he’s just the lie’s masseur.
The Ukrainian hysteria arises directly from the recent recrudescence of the classic blood libel that appeared last summer in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. At the time, Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress warned that the concocted story of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians to harvest their organs was only “the latest shameful addition to an infamous trail of lies, innuendo and fabrications that have historically set the stage for the violent and deadly persecution of the Jewish people.”In the wake of the Aftonbladet’s fabrications, the presidential campaign in the Ukraine has gone rather nasty, with the spectre of murdering, blood-stealing Jews becoming a frightening and incendiary election issue. It is now unremarkable to come upon candidates for political office in the Ukraine who will blame the “Zionists” for Stalin’s crime of starving hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to death in the 1930s.
Oh, but that’s altogether different, one now hears. You can’t call equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. That would deliberately stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.
It’s all quite funny, but the thing about racist canards is that they don’t die unless you kill them and keep on killing them. There’s always a cunning misreading of the facts that will allow a just-so newspaper headline to present any old thug or his manicurist with the opportunity to say ‘I told you so, it’s those blood-sucking Jews.’ It doesn’t matter that the old opportunity arises in the form of a new Israeli documentary reporting a low-grade scandal involving the unauthorized removal of organs from dead Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers in a kind of sophomoric malpractice that Israel shut down more than a decade ago. It doesn’t matter that the malpractice persists still, all over the world, perhaps especially in China, or that only a few weeks ago, 11 Jordanians were extradited from Egypt to face trial in Amman on charges of trafficking in kidneys and selling them for up to $30,000 each, or that there is a global demand-supply gap in human organs that health authorities are struggling with everywhere, or that even in Canada, patients are dying while they wait for transplants.
So, who knows what’s best. Just laugh, maybe. Construct a proper canard of our own, along the lines of, you see, the truth about all this matzoh carry-on is it’s really just a feint so that us Irish will have everyone yapping about the Jews as Saint Patrick’s Day approaches. The Jews have been in on it with us from the beginning. We pay them with whiskey, and they rig it so that no one notices that the traditional recipe for the soda bread we’ll all be eating calls for great heaping dollops of the blood of a Protestant. Everybody wins.
Oh, look, here comes that Anglican fella. Says he’s upset about what’s in the bread and he wants to complain to the Human Rights Commission.
Oblige him.
Then again, I don’t know if I’d be laughing about this stuff right now if I were a Ukrainian Jew. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’d be laughing about this right now if I were a Canadian Jew living in the vicinity of the Surrey Muslim School, either.
No to racism. Zero tolerance. No excuses. No exceptions.
And I want my scalps.
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