Boycott This?

"What Israel has been up against is not just a people of death, but a cult of death, a cult which wishes to annihilate an entire race, and which after dealing with that race has made very clear what it wants to do with Christians, everyone in Britain, everyone in America."

Douglas Murray, British commentator

 

"On college campuses, in the streets and in the media, there has been a readiness to demonize Israel for its response to a terrorist attack in which women were raped and children butchered."

"If ignoring the atrocities of Hamas, such as the fate of [the] young Israeli-German woman who was raped and murdered, then paraded through Gaza on the back of a truck, [if that] isn't that a form of antisemitism, what is?"

"Polls have shown a massive majority of Canadians support Israel in its fight against Hamas terrorists. But silent support is now insufficient as the radicals breaking the law in our midst have become increasingly emboldened."

"The fig leaf of arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism has been long extinguished by the conduct of these crowds."

Howard Levitt, employment and labour lawyer, Levitt Sheikh

University of British Columbia is among nine Canadian universities that have seen encampments erected in recent days. (Chuck Chiang/The Canadian Press)

The ongoing mass protests on the streets, before hospitals, the encampments on university campuses, the pro-Hamas mobs appearing at municipal meetings demanding that official statements condemning Israel and supporting Palestinians be issued forthwith, and that all and anything connected with Israel be boycotted continue to turn normal life in Canada on its head. Illegal occupations, threats issued to Jewish students and teaching staff, school boards that cannot see their way through to offering protection to Jewish students all have upturned life for Canadian Jews.

 

The violent rhetoric, the criminal acts of torching Jewish parochial schools, synagogues, the defacing of Jewish owned businesses, the demands that the public ostracize and penalize Canadian Jews for the actions of the Israel Defense Forces invading Gaza to rout and disarm Palestinian terrorists have amply demonstrated that many Arabs, Palestinians and other Muslim immigrants, refugees and migrants who have arrived in Canada are not sociologically and culturally fit to live in the country with its emphasis on respect for the law and acceptance of equality for all.  

The strident chorus of isolating Israel, of boycotting its products, of damning Jews for their existential imperative to defend themselves from the violent malice of its detractors and predators illustrate the mindless hate percolating through society in the mass infiltration of Western traditions and culture set aside with scorn by people hailing from dictatorships and theocracies who discipline lethally those who spurn their calls for obedience to Sharia and obeisance to Islam.

Boycott Israel? The nation whose research and development represents the highest of any advanced country? Whose research and development eclipsed that of South Korea and Taiwan? Israel's R&D was ranked on a percentage of its GDP, number one globally, three times higher than 21st rated Canada. Jewish tradition weighs heavily in favour of ensuring that their children receive good educations. 437,000 Jewish immigrants left Europe for Palestine between 1881 and 1939, among them engineers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, architects and musicians.

In the 1990s a major migration of scientists following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European appendages, heading for Israel along with other professionals committed to continue building prosperity for their future and that of the nation in a concerted, government-supported-and funded re-education focusing on new technology. "I'd never before heard so many unconventional observations -- one after the other. Junior employees had no inhibition about challenging how we had been doing things for years", observed Scott H. Thompson, PayPal president, in 2007.

Israeli scientists are boldly innovative, their enterprise and curiosity lead them to scientific breakthroughs that tend to have a wide audience as their products and inventions engage other countries in the use of new technologies from the 'startup nation'. 

• The flexible medical stent;
• The computer firewall;
• Micro-irrigation;
• sophisticated bee-breeding;
• Clean water produced from air;
• Road safety (Waze);
• Harm-free pest control;
• The Iron Dome;
• A-I systems conducting automated vehicle inspections;
• Gray Maters Health Prism device for post-traumatic-stress disorder.
  

Pro-Israel demonstrators protested last week near a pro-Palestinian encampment on McGill University's campus in Montreal. (Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press)