Ezra’s been seeing what I’ve been seeing. He reports on anti-Israel demonstration in Calgary:
There was precisely one counter-protester, with a tiny Israeli flag:
At one point, the police told that counter-protester that if he didn’t leave, he’d be arrested for “inciting civil disorder”. I’m not making that up — the lone pro-Israeli protester was told that, not the 175 people trespassing on the parking lot of a private mall. Maybe that’s why the cops were too busy to station someone inside.
My point here is that the one counter-protester wasn’t Jewish.
This protest was at Glenmore Landing mall, in the heart of what I like to call “Jewtopia” in Calgary. The Jewish Community Centre is literally across the street, on Jerusalem Road. The city’s Holocaust memorial is there. A block further is a synagogue. You get the picture.
And the Jewish community didn’t muster a single counter-protester.
Yep.
Here’s a sample of the emails I’ve been getting about my report on the Toronto anti-semite rally last Saturday, which I counterprotested along with a grand total of maybe a dozen Jewish people:
was sorry to hear about your experience at that rally. I’m really at a loss….I have 2 Jewish friends who are especially near and dear to my heart. (…) one moved to Colorado and the other lives in NYC , maybe 10 blocks from the Israeli consulate – where there has been at least one rally – sent her links about it. She wrote me back “I would go to that one, but I already promised XXX I would shoot pool.”
If they don’t care, why should I?? Of course I don’t mean that. But it’s very discouraging. You can bet that if there were any rallies [here], I would make every effort to be there, Protestant though I am. (…) I really think the Jewish diaspora here think that Christians are more the enemy than Muslims – do they think that Hitler was a practicing Christian or something?
This is just one message of many like it.
When I was going to Catholic school, believe it or not, I never heard the words “abortion” or “birth control”. The absolute sin, we were told, was… anti-Semitism.
Contrary to popular (Jewish) belief, that is pretty typical. Evangelicals are even “worse”, in the sense that sometimes their pro-Semitism can be downright embarrassing.
However, human beings are not blessed with infinite compassion. If we don’t see Jewish people being willing to defend themselves, pretty soon people will start to say, “Why bother?”
We/you can’t criticize moderate Muslims for failing to protest 9/11 then not show our faces when the new Nazis are taking to the streets of our city.
