The Last Exile

The Globe and Mail Konrad Yakabuski writes an op-ed piece on the Occupy movement and reinforces the very point I attempted to make last week.

North Americans appear less concerned with overturning the current political and economic systems and more interested in making them more responsive to the plight of the middle class.

That could change. The outrage toward financial and political elites remains a palpable and broadly based sentiment in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. As long as the political elite on both continents fails to address this anger in meaningful enough ways, it is giving the middle class a reason to back one or the other of these protest movements.

For the middle class, the real irritant is the sense that average folk can no longer reasonably aspire to get ahead.

The dream of upward mobility – in essence, the social contract at the heart of democratic capitalism – has been shattered. The evidence turns up in two-tier wage structures in the auto sector and other industries; in rollbacks in pension and health benefits; and, among the jobless, in a proportion of long-term unemployed in the United States that surpasses Depression-era heights. This is an explosive recipe for unrest.

Bingo…and if the Occupy Wall Street movement can push the cranks and fringe to their natural home on outer political edges of just about everything; it has the ability to be a truly transformative movement ‘of and for’ the people – rather than of the crackpots. Of course, calling for this type of thing….will is never useful or even helpful.

I have been ignoring the Occupy Movement. I was interested, but then came the ‘blame the Jews’ meme – and I wrote it off. I have no desire to pay attention to another protest movement which uses Jews to scapegoat my country’s or even the world’s economy. It has been done before with horrific consequences. If there is one constant in over two thousand years of Jewish history it is this; first comes ‘blame the Jews’, and then comes the pogroms. And I have no desire to end up as anyone’s lamp shade. If the Occupy Movement wants to be a force for positive change; it needs to write-off the ‘fringe’ rather than attempt to take the ‘fringe’ element into the mainstream.

But there is something rotten, and the middle class and working poor of this country know it. I know it, my senior mother knows it, my daughter knows it, my neighbours know it, the people I ride the subway and the bus with know it. The people I work beside every day know it. But it is just not us, it has spread throughout the Western world and we all know it. We are not the fringe or the protest pimps who come and protest for whatever cause is the flavour of times.

The last provincial election, not a single party represented a coherent platform which I could cast my vote for without cringing. The political class has betrayed the very people who they are sworn to represent.

Instead, the political class lobbies and seeks multi-national corporate interests rather than national ones. The political class tells us we need to nurture and care for corporate interests; otherwise, the people’s needs will not be met. This is why China can buy Canadian granite, ship it all the way to China to grind, cut and polish it, pay again to ship it all the way back to Canada and be as competitive as local Ontario producers. This is way Canadian multi-national corporations can seek government bail-outs but have no qualms in laying off Canadian workers to outsource those same jobs to third world workers. I do not have an issue with the third world countries attempting to build an a stable and healthy economy – but I just want them to build and develop their own economies without dismantling mine. Self-sufficiency should be the goal rather than inter-dependence.

Globalization was suppose to make us all free and rich. Although, it has not worked out that way for most of us. I am not any richer and my wages face a constant erosion from the rising rates of taxes and the general cost of just about everything while the corporate tax rate continues to slide ever downward. I know for a fact; I am less free today than I was 30 years ago.

Canadians generally do not have any babies anymore; mostly because they cannot afford to when it takes a 2 person income just to raise a small family with ordinary expectations. We never really discuss that in this country, and if the topic does manage to come up in public dialogue, somehow the dominate ethos manages to give the impression that a woman who works outside the home rather than rising her children at home does so for selfish avaricious reasons rather than the fact that taxation, housing and transportation costs now claim a much larger percentage of family income than they did 30 years ago.

Let me put it to you another way. My best friend in high school was number 7 out of 13 children. Jim’s parents emigrated from Scotland. His father starting off working in a factory and eventually worked his way up as a supervisor but not until most of the children had grown. His parents bought a modest 2-storey 3 bedroom home and renovated it to accommodate the ‘ever’-growing family. Jim’s mother did not work outside the home. Restaurant meals, movies or even cable television were not in the cards but there always enough kids for pick-up games of baseball and hockey. Jim’s father had a car, a station wagon, and the boys all got jobs at a young age.

The thing is, I cannot imagine any man today, with only a grade 8 education, being able to buy his own home, a car and support 15 on his salary without government assistance. The times have changes and not for the better, but the sad part is, no one is asking why this is.

Arutz Sheva has You Tubed a video collage of Israeli Knesset members who spoke out in favour of the ‘disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip chastising all those who said that the violence against Israeli civilians would increase after the disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

Normally, I would say flippantly that it never gets old being right…except I wish I was wrong in this case. However, (this is where I go old Biblical Prophet-style and say) any withdrawal – with or without a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians – will not stop the Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians. The land for peace formula is utterly and completely bankrupt.

Jerusalem Post:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met Thursday with a US Democratic Congressional delegation currently visiting the region, telling them that he is seeking a Palestinian state without settlements, Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

The sound you will not hear is any progressive wavering in the cause of Palestinian statehood. When Leiberman talks transfer of Israel’s Arab minority to a potential future Palestinian state the progressive left works itself into a frenzy of denunciations of Lieberman’s racism, but have chairman Abbas call for a ‘Jew-free’ Palestinian state, and not even a dawg barks in protest. I have to hand it to the progressives who are unstinting in their calls of condemnation of the Israeli state for racism and so-called ‘apartheid’ policies but who do not have the slightest qualms in helping the Palestinians establish their own little corner of apartheid.

Two peoples, two different standards.

Maybe it is me but there is just something widely appropriate for Ha’aretz’s columnist Gideon Levy to pen an op-ed piece arguing that Israel should give Hamas another chance on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It has been less than a month since a guided missile attack emanating from the Gaza Strip targeted an Israeli school bus and killed a 16 year old boy.

Gilad Shalit is still held captive and a prisoner of Hamas….so yes, of course, why not give Hamas another chance?

I mean, why not roll the dice and play roulette with the other 7 million Israeli lives? It’s a perfect storm of delusion and I can just imagine how Levy would have argued against the Warsaw Uprising if he had been alive and present in the Warsaw ghetto.

For the sanest opinion piece on Holocaust Rememberance Day – read Sarah Honig.

Have you ever read something so startling, that you had to read it over and over again, and then once more; just because you cannot believe anyone would write such a thing? This is how I felt reading Larry Derfner – Jerusalem Post.

Is there anything wrong with Muslims giving charity to the Palestinians during the intifada, even to the “families of martyrs”?

I got nothing. There is simply no way to rationally engage any individual who is so morally perverse.

Helen Thomas reminds me of the old expression – pretty is as pretty does – except in her case – its’ ulgy is as ulgy does. Ynet News reports her latest chip on her shoulder.

Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas acknowledges she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement. But she says the comments were “exactly what I thought,” even though she realized soon afterward that it was the end of her job.

I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive,” Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday.

Which is all well and good…except the only ‘rail’ Helen hit was when she dropped her mask and professed her bigotry loud, clearly and on camera. Helen Thomas was not summarily run out of the press corps for daring to ‘criticize Israelis or an Israeli administration’ but she was shown the door when her over the top statements of pure anti-Semitism were publicly expressed.

Suggesting the ‘third rail’ in US politics is criticism of Israel is a canard lifted straight out of a classic of anti-Semitism literature and applying it to the US electorate rather than Czarist Russia. Blatant bigotry and racism remain the third rail of US politics and not the not criticism of Israelis or their government. Helen Thomas may just be too old and far too ugly of a soul to get that.

About time someone asked about the parents of the Arab child rock throwers and threatened to call in child protective services. Arutz Sheva:

Following several Arab lynch attempts in the Shiloach-City of David areas of Jerusalem, the Knesset’s Child Welfare Committee held a session entitled, “The Involvement of Children in Rock-Throwing in Shiloach.” MKs Ben-Ari and Ahmed Tibi argued furiously.
MK Ben-Ari (National Union) said that anyone, including children, who throws rocks and endangers Jewish lives should know that he can be shot. Arab MK Tibi said Ben-Ari and the “entire committee” should see a psychiatrist. The session was called by Committee Chairman MK Danny Danon of the Likud.

MK Taleb a-Sana (Raam-Taal) confronted MK Ben-Ari and called him a fascist. Ben Ari replied: “you are a terrorist who came here to provoke and you use children as killers.” Danon had a-Sana removed when he refused to behave properly. Three days ago, David Be’eri, founder of the Jewish community in Ir David-Shiloach, entered into a rock-throwing ambush; in his haste to escape, he hit two rock-throwing children with his car. It also appears from video of the event that he had swerved to avoid hitting a third, smaller child. The event was filmed by cameramen who “happened” to be on the scene.

“You’re all crazy,” Tibi railed. “This session is because of a boy who was hurled into the air by a car, not because he threw rocks!”

But its MK Danon who injects the only sane reponse to this sorry state of affairs within the Palestinian position:

“This is not the first time that the Arab population in Silwan (Shiloach) uses children dangerously and cynically by sending them to clash with Jewish passersby,” MK Danon said. “Their parents must be summoned for immediate investigation. We must do whatever is necessary to stop this phenomenon of children throwing rocks.”

Absolutely, and the sooner the better.

Sometimes it takes a cartoon to make a point which should be elementary.

Okay, I can’t resist – one last post to point to the best fracking take down of Gideon Levy – ever. Benjamin Kerstein, The New Ledger – and I will only quote this little bit near the end.

These revelations prove that, put simply, the Israeli left, and Gideon Levy foremost among them, rushed to defend a rapist in a case about which they knew nothing and about which they cared to know nothing. It played to their prejudices about Israeli society and reinforced their hatred of their fellow citizens. They felt they knew all they needed to know. As a result, they compounded a young woman’s trauma, exonerated a monstrous criminal in the court of public opinion, and debased themselves as human beings.

Gideon Levy fancies himself a prophet, a teller of uncomfortable truths to an uncaring society. Where this has led him is frankly horrifying. Did he know the details of the case? No, but he made no attempt whatsoever to find out about them. Did he shrink from slandering a rape victim as a racist? Apparently, not for a moment. Did he shrink from condemning his entire society on the basis of almost no evidence at all? Absolutely not. Did he disgrace himself and his profession? Unquestionably. He was the leading voice of a group of leftists who, in ironically sexist fashion, defamed a victim of rape out of demented sympathy for the man who violated her. After all, these things happen.

Happy New Year!

NB: For background – start here,