For once, I don’t mean that in a (totally) bad way.
“Reality” in this case being “the overarching liberal worldview” and “removed from” meaning “still not entirely emersed in.”
You see, Frum was at that top-secret bigshot Jewish meeting about anti-semitism, and he heard “Canada’s First American Prime Minister (in Waiting)” speak.
Ignatieff talked movingly of visiting the firebombed Talmud Torah dayschool in Montreal in 2006. Fine. Good. He then immediately mentioned that he had also visited a mosque that had its windows broken. Also fine, we can all agree it’s wrong to vandalize mosques too. OK.
But why mention the one immediately after the other? What relationship did these two events have to each other?
Would Ignatieff follow a description of an attack on a synagogue with a condemnation of crime by motorcycle gangs? A lament for bullied gay teens? That would be a clanging non-sequitur, another topic for another comment. Yet in the mind of Ignatieff’s team, anti-Semitism apparently cannot be condemned without immediately and equally condemning anti-Muslim prejudice. That’s an interesting reflex, isn’t it?
I may be very wrong about this, but to the ears of a former speechwriter, Ignatieff’s speech sounded very like it had been worked on by at least two authors. One author wished to sound a strong message of support to the Jewish community. The other author wanted to pull back.
***
Sorry, David but — yeah — you’re very wrong about that.
The Jew=Muslim=bullied gay teen=this week’s African basketcase trope is so commonplace in political and non-profit do-gooder circles I can’t believe a worldly guy like Frum hasn’t heard it before.
I hear it everytime I happen to catch a report on “Human Rights Something Or Other Day/Week/Month”, in which they grab a Holocaust survivor and some bullied gay guy and the last surviving Japanese internment camp survivor and present them on stage and on TV as all of a piece.
I’ve never attended an Establishment “debate” about Canada’s hate speech laws and our Human Rights Commissions without having to endure one of the Official Jews(tm) warning us that without such laws and commissions (and, needless to say, the tireless “work” of all the Official Jews(tm), don’t you know?) downtown Toronto would resemble Rwanda.
Mark Steyn cites the tendency here, when he talks about the young Jewish man taking his frail Auschwitz survivor mother to Holocaust Memorial Day circa 2010, and feeling obliged to smugly make the proper pious gestures to “other holocausts” in Darfur or Gaza.
So either David Frum’s Beltway cocktail parties are even smaller and more insular than even I imagined possible.
Or he is pretending to be shocked in order to make an admittedly very important point. I hope it is the former.
Either way, one is left to once again look upon the majesty that is Canadian Journalism’s Genetic Lottery System, and tremble.
