Co-Opting Canada for Islam

"[The] Islamophobia industry [is enabled by] self-proclaimed Muslim dissidents, reformers and ex-Muslims [who] act as instigators and propagators of anti-Islamic narratives as well as validating and authorizing the circulation of these tropes."

"[I have] comprehensively outlined the machinations of Canada's Islamophobia industry."

"[Moderate Muslims and mainstream Jewish organizations] share political and ideological mandates that involve the demonization and vilification of Islam and Muslims and often work in concert to foment controversies and spread Islamophobic narratives and conspiracy theories."

Jasmine Zine, Professor, Sociology and Muslim Studies Option, Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario

BDS protesters at McGill University FILE PHOTO

 

Religious studies professors, sociology professors,  history professors, they dominate increasingly in Western institutes of higher learning, and bring to academia and to the public, their perspective and narratives focusing on the legitimacy of Islam as a religion of peace, while painting with a broad brush of Islamic condemnation any individual or group that dares point out that Islam today represents offshoots of extreme religious devotion wreaking havoc worldwide as Muslim terrorist groups.

Fundamentalist ideologically-driven fanatics on a mission to force the greater Muslim population to a more 'pure' and authentic vision of Islam excising all the relaxed, Western- and democracy-ringed versions of the original that may blur the stark distinction of Islamic values, precepts and mores from those of any other religion, laws, cultures or value systems. In the process, to demonstrate just how serious they are, these groups known more familiarly as Islamist terrorists rampage through non-Muslim and Muslim societies alike, intent on vengeance against those failing to place Islam on the pedestal demanded for it.

In a country like Canada which, like any other has its home-grown bigots and racists, but which is not even marginally culturally and socially racist, the current government has been pleased to demonstrate its progressive credentials by describing Canada as a 'racist country', and with this attitude from the executive branch of the federal government, it is hardly surprising that Muslim academics feel free to slander the country and to accuse Canadians of anti-Islam bias described as "Islamophobia", a term coined by the Muslim Brotherhood after the public impact and reaction stemming from the 9/11 attacks in the U.S.

Even more shocking is the presence of a growing number of mosques throughout Canada, reflecting the growing number of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East bringing their social culture, religious devotion and Islam-inspired system of justice with them, and where in the mosques incendiary messages of hatred against others are frequently spewed. It has been those messages that have been responsible for recruiting Muslims to the concept of jihad, persuading some to go abroad to fight alongside terror groups like Islamic State.

Yet with all this activity of fanatical Muslim terrorists cutting a swath through the Middle East and Africa with their agenda of slaughtering non-Muslims and Muslims alike in the performance of their martyrdom missions in jihad, people like sociology professor Zine feel free to preach against "Islamophobia", condemning the general population, both non-Muslim and moderate Muslim who abhor the violence engendered by some of the Islamic texts and hadiths along with interpretations of the Koran inimical to peace between people, as "Islamophobia".

Professor Zine recently released a report she titled The Canadian Islamophobia Industry: Mapping Islamophobia's Ecosystem in the Great White North, where she gives insights into "how Islamophobia manifests and is purveyed: in Canada"; a totally skewed perspective of anti-Msulim bigotry in Canada, besmirching wide groups of people as racist, inclusive of Canadian Muslims who practise a moderate Islam. 

Raheel Raza, president of the Council of Muslims Facing Tomorrow, a rational, intelligent and moderate movement within Canada representing the interests of integrated Muslim-Canadians, has been singled out by Professor Zine for special condemnation. Raheel Raza points out that the term "Islamophobia" has no clear definition, unlike the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's antisemitism definition; clear and concise. She points out that Islamophobia is meant to connote heresy.

Ms. Raza also speaks of the mosques that were found to be spreading radical messages, with links to known terrorist groups, for spreading 9/11 conspiracy theories, for refusing to denounce terrorist attacks; indeed promoting them as reflective of the faithful committing to martyrdom on behalf of upholding Islam's sacred injunction to its faithful to spread the word of Islam, committing to proselytizing. What also takes place is hateful attacks against others in the community. 'Solitarity with Palestinians' sees radical groups in Canada mounting slanderous attacks against Israel and Canadian Jews.

 

Children hold anti-Israel signs at the al-Quds Day at the Alberta Legislative grounds in Edmonton (Credit: Facebook: Radical Citizen Media)

The BDS movement, Israel Apartheid Week and Al-Quds Day creates divisions between Canadians of various origins and cultural heritage. Islamists in Canada have infiltrated Canadian universities, as student groups mount verbal and violent conflicts against their Jewish counterparts. Muslims are prone to complaining about Islamophobia and attacks against Islam and Muslims in Canada, yet as Statistics Canada and police reports point out, Jews are the single most-persecuted religious/ethnic group in Canada through antisemitic attacks, followed by Blacks, and then Muslims. And it is Muslims who lead the way to antisemitic attacks.

Al-Quds Day Rally in Toronto, 2022. (Credit: B'nai Brith Canada)

Innocent? Proven Guilty!

"I felt that what we were giving him [Ben Cohen], in the end, didn't matter much to Unilever."

"We were getting the brand. We were getting the business. They would have their own board of directors, but we would control what I regard as the key factor in success or failure, which is the selection of the chief executive."

Richard Goldstein Unilever's former U.S. chief

Ben & Jerry's ice creams on sale at a shop in Jerusalem on July 19, 2021.

(photo credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH 90)

These are the lines and the felt sentiments that then-Unilever chief executive Richard Goldstein wrote in his history of the Vermont-based company titled Ice Cream Social. Straight from the horse's mouth, as it were. So Unilever on the one hand honoured its contract with Ben & Jerry's owners with its 2010 takeover of the brand by agreeing to its terms of sale that its social policy issues would remain in control of a Ben & Jerry's board. 

Sometimes the 'principled' socially progressive stances the ice cream maker made reflected well on the company that owned the product and sometimes they failed to. Unilever could take credit for those issues like Ben & Jerry's support of Black Lives Matter, and its becoming a boycott member of Facebook advertisers when it suited their purpose, and at other times, could stand back and metaphorically wash their hands of any responsibility for choices that failed to resonate.

None had ever experienced the backlash that the current imbroglio brought to bear as a result of Jews feeling utterly betrayed by a brand they had celebrated as one of their own success stories. Ben & Jerry's ice cream was Jewish ice cream. A tradition, a culture of applauding Jewish success stories in entrepreneurial business acumen.

A celebrated Jewish ice cream maker that suddenly turned on its most enthusiastic client base when its social messaging-with-a-conscience contingent embraced the social justice flavour of the times known as the "Palestinian cause", to join the Jew-hating rabble that loves to describe Israel as an 'Apartheid' state, a killer of Palestinian babies, an occupying force of Palestinian-designated land reflecting not Judaic but 'Arab historical heritage'.

The government of Israel and diaspora Jews, particularly in consumer-conscious and powerful U.S. markets reacted rather negatively to the announcement that Ben & Jerry's principles forbade them from selling their product in the 'occupied Palestinian territories' as "inconsistent with our values". Suddenly Jews found Ben & Jerry's ice cream inconsistent with their gustatory values. 

 

No manufacturer rejoices at the sudden erosion of their consumer base.

"Liz Gordon, executive director of corporate governance for the $254.8 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund, Albany, said in a July 23 letter to Unilever CEO Alan Jope that the fund's trustee, State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli "is troubled and concerned" about reports that Ben & Jerry's is involved in Israel boycott activities, and that if they are true, the pension fund will include Unilever on a list of companies with investment restrictions."

Pensions & Investments

Unilever was swift to assure Israel that it had no intention of removing itself from its Israeli market. Leading the Ben & Jerry's chair of its board Anuradha Mittal, an unreconstructed anti-Semite, to charge Unilever with "trying to destroy the soul of the company". The merger agreement between Unilever and Ben & Jerry's suited both, until the present time. The independent board was entrusted with "preserving and enhancing the objectives of the historical social mission of the company".

But suddenly Unilever chief executive Alan Jope didn't feel quite so happy with the event threatening a central client base with the explanation that the withdrawal was a decision "by Ben & Jerry's and its independent board, in line with the acquisition agreement that we signed 20 years ago". But not quite so, since Ben & Jerry's proposals for CEO nominations had been ignored and Unilever  has appointed CEOs who have vetoed social activism proposals by the staff at Ben & Jerry's in the past.

They were somewhat different in that sense than the current chief executive Matthew McCarthy of Ben & Jerry's who said in May: "One of the questions I get most often is, aren't you afraid of alienating consumers by the stands that you take at Ben & Jerry's? It's the exact opposite." 

 

Hello, Unilever: over to you, now!

Emmanuel Dunand / AFP/Getty Images

Their Tempestuous Teapot

"There is a perception, right or wrong, true or untrue, that the Netanyahu administration and the Trump administration are working hand in glove."
"In our hyperpartisan world, the friend of my enemy is my enemy, and to the extent that Democrats look at Trump as the enemy, if they see Israel and the Netanyahu administration as operating hand in glove, that gives them real pause."
Mark Mellman, president, Democratic Majority for Israel

"What is the one mantra of the pro-Israel organizations for 30, 40 years?"
"It's congressional support. Presidents have their own views, but Congress is the core."
"So, to pick a fight with members of Congress, which is going to force half of Congress to rally to their defence is really foolish."
William Kristol, conservative Trump critic

"We respect all members of Congress. Our directive is to facilitate, on a regular and automatic basis, the entry of all members of Congress, Democratic and Republican. Just one week ago, I met with dozens of Democratic members of Congress."
"Ambassador Dermer enunciated this precise policy. There is only one exception and it is the BDS law that obligates us to evaluate the entry of people who support BDS."
"When Ambassador Dermer spoke, there was no specific request regarding these visits; neither was there an itinerary or a specific travel plan. As soon as these arrived, we checked it and reached the decision that we did. This was a principled, not a partisan, decision."
"We respect all political parties in the US equally; however, we also respect ourselves. Whoever comes to impose boycotts on us and to deny the legitimacy of the State of Israel, we will not allow them entry." 
"Several days ago, we received [Omar and Tlaib’s] trip itinerary which clarified that they planned a visit whose sole purpose was to support boycotts and deny Israel’s legitimacy. For example, they called their destination ‘Palestine’ and not ‘Israel,’ and unlike all Democratic and Republican members of Congress before them, they did not seek any meeting with any Israeli official, whether government or opposition."
"The itinerary of the two congresswomen reveals that their sole purpose is to harm Israel and increase incitement against it. In addition, the organization that is funding their trip is Miftah, which is an avid supporter of BDS, and among whose members are those who have expressed support for terrorism against Israel."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Reps. Rashida Tlaib, left, and Ilhan Omar, right. (AP/Andrew Harnik, File, Susan Walsh)

Many countries other than Israel make decisions not to permit entry to those whom they consider unwelcome. Most frequently guest speakers invited to address university audiences are refused entry to a country because of their right-wing or perceived racist views. Any country reserves the right to welcome or deny entry to those whose political agenda is questionable on its merits posing as proponents of ideologies contrary to a nation's values and laws. The two U.S. Congresswomen whose statements and positions with respect to Israel's legitimacy they frequently slander a case in point.

Which brings us to the question, why is it that Israel alone seems to attract condemnation for its decision-making to a degree never otherwise seen addressed to other nations? A country that the two Congresswomen describe as Apartheid despite having a 20 percent Arab citizenry, as opposed to all its neighbouring Arab countries where historically Jews lived and laboured but were expelled at the creation of the State of Israel. And certainly in stark contrast to the Palestinian Territories where a deadly prohibition against any Jewish presence is formalized.

Reps.Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota had one agenda only with their intention of travelling to the Middle East, and that was to bolster their credentials as virulent anti-Semites. Now, as matters tumbled from one exchange to another with the sanctimonious accusations of Apartheid and insults to the United States Congress because two notorious partisan helpmeets of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and associates of groups linked to terrorism claim themselves to have been victimized, it has become instantly fashionable to criticize Israel.

It was, in fact, Tlaib who, spurred on by her Palestinian family in Bei Ur Al-Fauqa, West Bank where they have been resident since 1974, declined the 'humanitarian' based exception to the 2017 Israeli law excluding entry to Israel by BDS supporters, although she had appealed for just such an exception, writing to the Israeli Interior Minister directly: "This would be my last opportunity to see her [grandmother]. I will respect any restrictions and will not promote boycotts against Israel during my visit", only to slam the very invitation she had requested as "insulting" to her values.

Back to the victimhood drawing board, and why not, since it works so spectacularly well; the first, middle and last resort of the sanctimonious hypocrites that love to rewrite history in their favour irrespective of how absurd their historical claims tend to be, revealing the pathological state of their intransigent hatred for the presence of a Jewish state in the Middle East; a humiliating wrench for Islamist sensibilities when land 'consecrated' by divine right of conquest to Islam is returned to its rightful inheritance.

Slander? Incite to Deadly Hatred? C'Mon, Y'all!

"Only a few days ago, we received their itinerary for their visit in Israel, which revealed that they planned a visit whose sole objective is to strengthen the boycott against us and deny Israel's legitimacy."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

"I would like to request admittance to Israel in order to visit my relatives, and specifically my grandmother, who is in her 90s and lives in Beit Ur al-Fouqa. This could be my last opportunity to see her."
"I will respect any restrictions and will not promote boycotts against Israel during my visit."

"Silencing me & treating me like a criminal is not what she [her grandmother] wants for me. It would kill a piece of me."
"I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in–fighting against racism, oppression & injustice."
U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib

US Congresswoman Rashia Tlaib of Michigan. Photo: Reuters/Rebecca Cook

"Last night, she sent me a letter asking to allow her to visit her 90-year-old grandmother 'because this could be my last chance to meet her'."
"I approved it on humanitarian grounds, but it turns out that it was a provocation to embarrass Israel. Her hatred for Israel overcomes her love for her grandmother."
Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri  

Israeli Interior Minister spokesman Barak Seri provided a copy of the letter submitted by Tlaib

"We reject the decision of the Israeli occupation to ban the entry of Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib. This highlights how Israel antagonizes every individual or organization that support the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and rejects every attempt at explaining the reality of the Palestinian life under occupation."
Grandmother,Muftiya Tliab, uncle Ghassan Tlaib

Muftiya Tlaib, the maternal grandmother of US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, outside her home in Beit Ur al-Fouqa on Thursday

Where is it written that it is the inalienable right of slanderers and those who consort with terrorists -- supporting the genocidal agendas of Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad to destroy the State of Israel, the very state that is the hapless recipient of unwanted attention from two American Congresswomen whose anti-Semitism is well known -- to be entitled to visit the very place they work so assiduously to destroy? The expense of the projected trip to Israel by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and her equally heinous colleague Rep. Ilhan Omar was underwritten by a terrorist group.

Rashida Tlaib, left, and Ilhan Omar, right

For sheer blatant effrontery in the face of attempted conciliatory placation, by a nation that tries heroically to accommodate its detractors, leading Israel to reverse its decision to deny entry to the two women, the malicious turn-around by Congresswoman Tlaib to declare after all, despite her assurance that she would restrain her base vituperative tirades against Israel while visiting, that she had no intention of honouring that pledge once it had succeeded in persuading Israel to allow her entry.

Part of the two women's itinerary was to visit the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, the third holiest site in Islam, and the first most sacred site in Judaism. There, at the mosque, Muslims are permitted to pray on what Islam terms the Noble Sanctuary. Jews may 'visit' the site but are not permitted to pray there. Their very presence infuriates Muslims who react with violence. Should Jews be seen to be praying on such a visit an instant mob action materializes with stone-throwing and assaults.

So much for the claims of the two that Israel is an Apartheid State.

A Jewish state in fact where a considerable proportion of the population with citizenship is Muslim (21%), with Muslim legislators duly elected, and high office achieved. Other minorities within the greater population, from Druze to Christians and Baha'i, have all the rights of citizenship. Should, on the other hand, any Jew somehow find their way into a West Bank Palestinian town through an error of judgement they will be attacked, their very lives in danger.

There is an exclusionary law enacted in 2017 in Israel that supporters of BDS are not permitted entry to Israel. The BDS movement, after all, is meant to mount worldwide sanctions against trade with Israel, against academic exchanges, through boycott, divestment and sanctions. Some unions, some among the LGBTQ2 community, the international entertainment field, academic community and university student bodies actively support BDS. Its purpose is to delegitimize the State of Israel.

What country would absorb this kind of abuse in the name of human rights, when those for whom the destruction of Israel is meant to benefit, are in very fact, corrupt, tyrannical, undemocratic, misogynistic, violence-prone, refusing to accommodate themselves to the presence of Jews in a majority-Muslim landscape?

Hate Crimes in Canada

"It's obviously disturbing and alarming [increase in racist attacks]. But we have to remember the vast majority of Canadians are exceptionally tolerant and welcoming and accepting to minorities of all kinds."
"It's tricky [establishing a national strategy on hate crimes, particularly online]." But when people are engaged in really vociferous rhetoric online, that can also fuel and foreshadow violence off line, so we have to curb it."
Andrea Freedman, president of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa

"We were obviously surprised by the data, and not really surprised."
"It [the Muslim society's own tracking mechanism for racist attacks] doesn't track crimes based on their perceived identities."
"Islamophobia doesn't just target Muslims. It targets people perceived to be Muslim, like Sikhs, Christian Arabs and those from Southeast Asian communities."
Ihsaan Gardee, executive director, National Council of Canadian Muslims 

People hold up a signs during a demonstration to oppose motion M103 in Montreal, Saturday, March 4, 2017.
THE CANADIAN PRESS IMAGES/Graham Hughes

The latest report out by Statistics Canada on hate crimes taking place throughout the country in 2017 contained few surprises. That there would be a jump, although it is even so well known that up to 2/3 of total hate crimes that occur are not even reported, was expected. Casual narratives of ongoing incidents attest to the constant presence of prejudice, hostility and hatred directed against certain groups in society. Blacks in Canada have experienced incidents of prejudice since forever and continue to, accounting for 16 percent of all hate crimes reported in 2017. They characterize the most common race-, or ethnicity-related hate crime.

A doubling of incidents directed at Muslims was seen between 2016 and 2017. There were 139 incidents of hate crimes in 2015 and that number had soared to 349 the following year after an initial decline for that population group. The overall percentage of such crimes directed against Muslims in Canada represent 17 percent of the total, as opposed to 16 percent for Blacks. And then there is the perennial, most-favoured-by-racists target, the Jewish population accounting for 18 percent of all nationwide hate crimes; the second consecutive year of increases identifying Jews as the most targeted victims of hate crimes.

Jews, and undoubtedly Muslims and Blacks as well, must take steps to ensure security in high-profile gathering places such as synagogues and community centres where attacks are most common by employing electronic security measures along with hiring security guards. In a country like Canada, one which was built on immigration and where a general consensus exists that people of various backgrounds have traditionally integrated and accepted one another it is all the more shocking that the pernicious persistence of such incidents occur, grow in numbers and continue to threaten.

Police forces across the country dealt with a record number of hate crimes in 2017, Statistics Canada data found. Here, anti-Semitic graffiti that was spray painted on the door of The Glebe Minyan in Ottawa in 2016 is cleaned up. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

Yet a more comprehensive Statistics Canada victimization survey dating from 2014 found respondents to be victims of over 330,00 incidents believed by those suffering them to have been motivated by hate; and two-thirds of such incidents failed to be reported to police. Even so Statistics Canada feels that their records showing substantial increases year over year may be the result of a growing tendency to report, and perhaps not indicate an increase in incidents.

Nowhere in the report is there the merest hint of a suggestion that while Muslims speak constantly of "Islamophobia", inclusive of any kind of criticism of Islam, or reference to terrorism and Islam in one breath, many among them have indulged in slanderous campaigns against the state of Israel, bringing Middle East politics to Canada, and by extension impacting deleteriously on the lives of Jews in Canada through their all-inclusive campaigns. And if those campaigns don't qualify as hate campaigns, what would?

From establishing "Palestinian" friendship clubs on university campuses, to staging anti-Israel protests and campaigning against Jewish students who are Zionists as enabling a purported "Apartheid" regime, the vicious slanders fomenting hatred sweep Jewish students and their families into the wide-ranging anti-Semitism launched by Muslim-Canadian groups influencing non-Muslim leftists to swell the numbers of "anti-Zionist" anti-Semites clamouring against Zionism and isolating Canadian Jews.

One of the most active chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, organizing anti-Israel campaigns and events throughout the year (SJP at UOIT/DC Facebook page)

The incidents of Islamofascist terrorist attacks whenever and wherever opportunities arise more than adequately demonstrates a seriously dysfunctional Islam that threatens security and stability wherever Muslims have migrated, fail to integrate and agitate for Sharia law, threatening to Islamicize whichever European, North American or Asian country they infiltrate in astonishing numbers fulfilling their obligation to Islam's injunction to its faithful to jihad.

It's hardly surprising under those conditions that fear and resentment at the presence of Muslims who ghettoize themselves in Islamic communities, inspire in the surrounding population. A search of any daily newspaper where Muslims have congregated rewards by the appearance of Arab or Muslims names attached to crime reports of gangs and violence, disproportionate to their numbers in society. Little wonder that distrust and fear is the result, among the general population.

As for Jews, law-abiding, proud of their Canadian citizenship, leaders of industry, valuing  higher education, reaching out to the wider population base to build bridges, nothing seems enough to convince some bigots that their suspicion, fear and hatred has no rational basis. The result of which is that despite making an effort to be model citizens, reflecting a cultural, social proclivity to just that, there seems to be no successful way to convince detractors that in detesting the presence of Jews they expose their innate racist malice.

Israeli/Palestinian Peace Beyond Elusive

"Everyone sees the difficulty of relations between Jews and Arabs but not everyone sees that there is no solution to that question. There is no solution."
"There is an abyss and nothing can fill that abyss . . . We want Palestine to be ours as a nation. The Arabs want it to be theirs, as a nation."
David Ben-Gurion, 1919

Famously, the woman who twenty years later followed David Ben-Gurion, the first and founding prime minister of Israel 29 years after he made that lugubrious statement of fact, Golda Meier gave her own opinion of the logjam of interaction for acceptance and peace between Jews and Arabs, when she gave her famous appraisal of the chances that accommodation could be reached between the two antagonists: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us."

That achieving of a state of peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is as  remote at the present time as it was back in 1948 is due in large part to the Palestinian Arabs and their authority tenaciously grooming Palestinian children to hate Israeli Jews. Arab children are fed a steady diet of propaganda characterizing the Jewish presence on 'Arab land' as theft, and that their heritage will only be restored when they and their peers succeed in routing Jews from 'Palestine'.

So it is unlikely that peace will come anytime soon.

UNRWA, the UN agency that has nurtured the Palestinian sense of grievance and victimization has given limitless support to the psychological violence imposed on Palestinian children. It has also encouraged the Palestinians to believe that they are entitled to 'return' to land now 'occupied' by Israel. Of the estimated 700,000 Palestinians who fled the land when Israel declared itself a nation returned to its Biblical-era heritage, UNRWA has given refugee recognition to an estimated six million descendants of the original 700,000.

"Refugee camps" are in fact well-established cities in the West Bank and Gaza, where Fatah (PLO) and Hamas respectively, urge and incite their citizens to acts of violence against Israel and its population, drawing in those Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to join the common cause of 'resistance' against the 'occupiers'. From the physical violence extended toward Jews in Israel and abroad, to the public relations programs embarked upon globally for sympathy with the 'underdog' in efforts to delegitimize and slander Israel, the appetite for peace appears remote indeed.

The global propaganda identified with boycotting Israel through unions, academia, business, investment hides behind a more recognizable and ancient pathology of anti-Semitism where sanctimonious perpetrators state that BDS doesn't equate with hatred or discrimination but with justice for Palestinians, citing Israel as the aggressor and Arabs as victims. As though the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon attacking Israel repeatedly hadn't really occurred.

Now that Israel has declared groups engaging in boycotts against Israel persona non grata to enter the country, those groups are aghast and disbelieving that they would be outlawed entry to the Jewish state. "The boycott organizations must know that the state of Israel will act against them", Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan stated, as though any explanation was in the least way required to explain Israel's fed-up position, refusing to accommodate BDS interests.

Peace talks were never seriously undertaken by the Palestinians, goaded by the Arab states, irate at the very idea that a Jewish state would have the audacity to appear among them in the Middle East whose territory was completely consecrated to Islam by conquest; a Jewish presence that in fact presented as an intolerable insult to Islam. Having learned their historical lesson that joint military attacks against Israel would gain them nothing, the Arab League is turning to a refurbishment of an alternative tack.

Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and the Palestinians have formed a committee following an Arab League emergency meeting in Cairo in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump's support of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. "We will confront the decision by seeking a (U.N.) resolution, an international one, to recognize a Palestinian state on 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital", confirmed Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi.

Palestinians react during a protest against Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip     Reuters

The Discomfort of Being a Jewish Student at McGill

"Instead of dealing with this important and distasteful issue, supporters from the gallery for [Igor Sadikov] turned the meeting to attack me and request that I be removed as a representative of SSMU [Students' Society of McGill University] due to my faith."
"I was left isolated and alone to respond. My fellow representatives sat in silence and permitted this malicious, prejudicial, and unjustified attack to continue."
Jasmine Segal, social work students representative on SSMU council

"Since SSMU has a social justice mandate, why does it allow Zionist councillors on council when Zionist ideology is inherently [linked to] ethnically cleansing Palestinians?'
Pro-Palestinian activist tweet to The McGill Daily student newspaper

"This tweet and the discourse that followed on Thursday have unleashed a wave of condemnation of Zionists and Jews at McGill and have normalized inciting violence against students who identify as such."
"If anything, I feel more unsafe and more singled out now than I did last week because of the campus groups who have used Sadikov's tweet as an opportunity to express their anti-Zionist, and often anti-Semitic views."
Molly Harris, third-year Arts student

"If the abilities of any councillor were questioned on the basis of their personal identity [SSMU executive condemns that violence]."
"The SSMU recognizes that this is an emotional and contentious issue revolving around differing interpretations of historical and cultural contexts."
Students' Society of McGill University board of directors

McGill BDS students demonstrate on campus MCGILL DAILY PHOTO

There was a time, decades ago, when McGill University committed to a policy where the number of Jews admitted to study was strictly limited. That time long past, and Jewish students responded to the lifting of restrictions by flooding to the university to pursue their academic studies and plan careers, feeling comfortable in the university environment of equality. An immigration influx of Muslims and Arabs to Canada has brought a new threat to the comfort of Jewish students in academic institutions, where activist Muslim groups have incited 'progressive' leftists to rally to the 'cause' of Palestinians.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement gained momentum and in February of last year the SSMU managed to pass the BDS motion for the university through the student body, though a minuscule number of the actual student body voted for BDS. The activists on the student council, after a year and a half of previous agitation to pass BDS, succeeded. In the very same month, almost to a day, the Parliament of Canada passed a motion condemning the BDS movement taking place in Canada, equating it with anti-Semitism.

More recently, a student politician at McGill, Igor Sadikov used his Twitter account to invite followers to "punch a Zionist". That invitation led to no little amount of consternation and condemnation, but as well, support. Targeting McGill's Jewish students for violence, both verbal and physical is not reflective of a civil society, but Canadian academic society has become anything but civil in the last several years with political agitation aimed at condemning the State of Israel, and by default, Jewish students at Canadian universities.

The board of directors of the Students' Society of McGill University where Sadikov sits to represent political students rejected a motion calling for his removal from the board, by a vote of five to four. Elected representatives chose to refuse to denounce this student, standing by, as instead of removing and denouncing someone who clearly incited to violence, a Jewish student was heckled and defamed as a Zionist as though that designation merited censure and did not in fact represent a clear instance of anti-Semitism.

The McGill Daily has a policy that it will not publish Zionist points of view. As a student newspaper it is meant to reflect the interests of all students at the university. When all of this latest eruption over Zionism and the place of Jewish students on campus was being discussed, the newspaper reported a complaint from a pro-Palestinian activist regarding the presence of Zionists on the student council. A quite unspeakable situation where a Jewish student who supports the State of Israel is considered persona non grata on a university student council, rejected because she is a Jew and a Zionist.

McGill now has a fairly unenviable reputation -- for a pluralist, liberal-democratic society -- as an anti-Semitic institution where bigotry against Jews and discriminatory tactics along with fairly compelling threats are the order of the day. A malicious and degrading pursuit by supporters of the slander that Israel is a threat to the living existence of Palestinians, as an apartheid state visiting violence on helpless Palestinians has gained acceptance, thanks to the presence of Muslim recruiters successfully swaying the loyalty of 'progressives' on campus.

The atrocious distortion that Jews are the aggressors and Palestinian Arabs the victims despite decades of violently murderous attacks by Arabs against Jews has gained traction building on latent anti-Semitism in Quebec and elsewhere, disabling the ability of Jewish students to feel safe and comfortable as Canadians in a Canadian academic institution. In a Canada where the Muslim population vastly outdistancing by well over a million to 385,000 the number of Jews, complains that it is suffering from "Islamophobia" when in fact incidents of anti-Semitism far outnumber those of anti-Muslim acts.

The irony being, of course, that much of the anti-Semitism that has taken hold has been given an immense boost by the enmity of the growing Muslim population against the Canadian Jewish population. A fairly accurate reflection of what is occurring when the Palestinians are identified as victims of Jewish persecution. No recognition that Palestinians inflict violence on Israeli Jews as a point of honour. Little wonder that McGill University is ranked number four in the worst of North American academic institutions to be a Jewish student, exposed to anti-Semitic discrimination.

This, at a university where a large proportion of the professors are in fact of Jewish origin. Perhaps there is hope in the fact that 150 McGill professors last year in an open letter, wrote their opinion of the BDS movement reflecting the focus of the student society; this paragraph from their letter to the university executive is telling:
"Unfortunately, in its disproportionate focus on Israel, in its founding declaration, and in many statements by key members of the movement, the BDS movement tries to squelch speech and intimidate those who support Israel’s right to exist. The BDS movement repeatedly jumps from criticizing particular Israeli policies to delegitimizing the State of Israel. The July 2005 Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS quickly shifts from fighting “the occupation” to demonizing Israel to rejecting Israel’s existence. The leading BDS activist Omar Barghouti – whose calls for boycott overlook his own studies at Tel Aviv University – states a “Jewish state in Palestine in any shape or form cannot but contravene the basic rights of the indigenous Palestinians."

Israel, Moving To The Head Of The Class

"Israel is a country where hundreds of new corporations start up their business every year in information and communications technology, medical services, and agriculture, and also produce innovative technologies. And for Japan, innovation is the engine of our economy."
"Taking both into account, there is every reason for Japan to co-operate with this great nation."
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Israel Innovation Forum, 2015

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greets his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe at the Japan-Israel Business Forum, held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Jerusalem, January 18, 2015. Photo: Miriam Alster / Flash90

Not that this is the first time that Japanese have admired and wanted to acquire for themselves some of the spark that Jewish enterprise is capable of generating to advance economies and industries. But at that previous time, Israel did not exist. What did exist was the reputation that Jews were extraordinarily gifted with entrepreneurial qualities, as well as a genetic predisposition to the arts and sciences to a degree not matched by other ethnic groups.

And that is what spurred Japan to invest in a rescue effort of Jews, to bring them under Japanese aegis, away from the European killing machine that Nazi Germany introduced to Europe. Although Japan was recognized by the Third Reich, as part of the Axis powers and granted "Aryan" status, official Japan never did accept the calamitous propaganda about Jewish perfidy and threats to the world. They recognized in the Jewish mind something similar to the Japanese mind, aspiring to succeed.

Now, the two countries have some things in common. Both are small "islands" in the sea of larger countries surrounding them. While Japan historically became a threat and a violent overseer to its neighbours, Israel suffered the reverse; seen as a threat to its larger neighbours, they turned the hostility of violence against Israel. Among its neighbours, Japan is the technologically advanced one, though South Korea has caught up nicely. While among its neighbours, Israel is the success.

Israel has had to, and continues to struggle with that neighbourly hostility, the Muslim collective surrounding it representing an ongoing existential threat to a tiny country of non-Muslims  (excepting its 1.5-million Israeli Palestinians). Added to that, the most influential institution the world has whose purpose has been ostensibly to promote world peace and understanding between nations, has itself become a tool with which to bludgeon Israel and isolate it on the world stage.

Under huge duress from countless sources, not the least of which is the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions universal threat to harm Israel diplomatically and economically through a concerted leftist-led "progressive" campaign to besmirch the country, Israel's energy minister has announced that his nation's gas sales from its enormous offshore gas deposits will soon make the nation financially secure as it sells its resources to an energy-hungry world.

Not only to Egypt, Jordan and Turkey will Israel sell its natural gas resources, but to countries distant from the Middle East; China, Japan and Eastern Europe. "Their attitudes are based on a major reevaluation of what Israel as a nation represents, and what its existence and survival signify for the future prospects of other nations and regions", stated Yuval Steinitz, the Israeli energy minister.

The nation's high-tech industry has been building to the present time where, for a country of fewer than nine million citizens, it has achieved an amazing position in the world of high tech. Israel ranked five in position in the world on the Bloomberg Innovation Index, according to research and development budgets, patents, and the percentage of the labour force with advanced degrees, the number of research professionals per million population.

Ahead of France, Singapore and the U.K., and where the United States ranked sixth.

Major Chinese corporations are anxious to discover which Israeli startups they can invest in to aid them in competing with American counterparts such as Google and Apple. Israeli and Chinese universities work together, partnering on joint projects.

So much for divisive slander, efforts at isolation and manipulating the UN's Human Rights Council to condemn Israel for manufactured human rights abuses, singling it out over all other nations of the world whose record on human rights truly is deplorable, but who nonetheless manage to readily find place for themselves on UN committees judging Israel.

Carlos Slim speaking at the opening of the Aldea Digital Mexico City, Mexico. Photo by ITU Pictures Flickr .. Israel poses a challenge to the United States in the leadership of the global high technology industry, according to Carlos Slim, a Mexican telecommunications magnate. .

Volatile, Vicious Palestinian Hate-Mongering

Police keep Arab-Canadians celebrating Al Quds day and Jewish-Canadians protesters along with Gay activists apart at Queen's Park on Saturday July 2, 2016. Veronica Henri/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network

In one of the most violent parts of the world, where Arab and Muslim tribal, sectarian antipathy to their varied counterparts has bred an atmosphere of brutal repression, oppression and vicious attacks, the one nation whose religion is exempt from the direction that motivates those that follow Islamist principles and values is portrayed as the catalyst for all the ills that befall the Middle East. When Israel was declared a universally accepted nation for and of Jews of the diaspora, the assembled armies of its surrounding neighbours marched to destroy the fledgling state.

The Arabs from Jordan and Egypt who settled in the ancient homeland of the Jews, co-opted for themselves the identification long denoting Jews as Palestinians, just as they co-opted the history of the ancient Hebrews declaring that the notable Biblical figures of Judaic history were in reality not Jews, but Arab 'Palestinians'. They certainly had an earlier, influential precedent to mount their claims; that of the introduction by the Prophet Mohammad of Islam to the Arab Bedouins of the 7th Century after having looted from Judaism its precepts, laws and sacred symbols; even its prophets.

The looting continues to the present day, with any historical artefacts attesting to the presence of Jews in ancient Jerusalem discovered by the Muslim authority (Islamic Waqf) -- invested with the care of the Temple Mount, the most sacred place in Judaism, but diplomatically handed over to Islamic rule as the Noble Sanctuary for its vaunted connection to Mohammad's rise to Paradise -- reacts on their discovery by hiding or destroying the artefacts validating the historical connection of Jews to Jerusalem.

Arab Palestinians, through the Palestinian Authority, have long launched  two sets of conflict against Israel in an effort to destroy the Jewish state. One is their violent attacks in succeeding modes dating from the earliest hijacking of planes and ships to bring attention to their claims of ownership of the land apportioned through the medium of Partition by the United Nations to both Jews and Arabs, which Jews accepted and Arabs did not.

That violence gradually changed to become grisly episodes of suicide bombings capable of destroying many lives at a time, when explosives-laden vests were detonated in crowded malls, buses, restaurants; anywhere that people gathered in the civic and civil arenas. Martyrdom in the name of 'resistance' against the presence of Jews among Arabs became a motivating social movement to destroy Israel.

The second half of the equation arose through a hugely successful public relations appeal to the international community, portraying Israel as a brutal occupier of Arab land, intent on committing genocide. Claims that were specifically addressed to the European and North American left, and adopted by unions, church groups and academics. Able to penetrate those groups and find support there, not least because anti-Semitism runs so deep in many societies but whose presence is denied.

Throughout Europe and North America, academic institutions have been co-opted to the 'cause' of the Palestinians; that cause obviously being a plaintive distress against the heartless, destructive agenda of the State of Israel against the helpless Palestinians. Jewish students on campuses were treated to jeers and accusations by those supporting the 'Palestinian cause'. Al-Quds Day (The concept that Jerusalem belongs to Islam), and BDS support is high on campuses. Visiting Israeli academics are boycotted.

Claims run rampant that the Israeli Defence Forces are in league with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, with placards reading "ISIS and IDF are the same: Only difference is their name", as well as "humanity devastated Zionist collaborated, ISIS and IDF activated", along with "Boycott IsraHell". Graphic images of Palestinian children drowning in blood, abused by the IDF make the point for genocide. Speakers claim the IDF executed a 17-year-old Arab, a Palestinian who had knifed to death a 13-year-old Israeli girl in her bed; her killer shot to death as he attempted to murder the rest of her family.

Little wonder Jewish students feel endangered, intimidated, and fearful as they attend university classes, with their university administrations loathe to 'interfere' in these exhibitions of free speech, and choosing to capitulate to free speech imperatives requiring restraints when speakers the defenders of Palestinian 'rights' declare to be off limits at the university become an issue, because they defend Israel against this hateful slander.

During Al-Quds Day events "die ins" are popular, and charades of fake IDF soldiers attacking students who pose as Palestinian are performed. The Palestinians love to portray themselves as violently oppressed. And Muslims in general claim that they are the victims of slander and of hate attacks. When the truth is that Jews are the most common targets of hate crimes. The contortion of reality and the destruction of truth is a usefully convenient and highly successful tool of those who feel they have been oppressed and who throw in their lot with hate-mongering Jew-haters.

Arab-Canadians celebrate Al Quds day and Jewish-Canadians protest at Queen's Park on Saturday July 2, 2016. Veronica Henri/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network

Veronica Henri/Toronto Sun

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York University's Anti-Israel Infamy

"The BDS movement is not only a boycott of of Israeli made products, but a boycott of the Jewish people and the Jewish culture. It is a means to isolate and alienate Jewish students and Jewish Professors on university campuses. Although the very idea of boycotting Israeli made medical technology, along with scores of Israeli made drugs and research innovations, is absolutely ludicrous, this has not prevented the BDS movement from proclaiming just that."
 

• At York a number of people, both students and faculty members, criticize the State of Israel unfairly and incessantly. They have sometimes managed to take over the student government and some of the unions. They have no power to influence university policy but they can spread their calumnies about Israel and make Israel supporters feel uncomfortable.
• The criticism of Israel can have antisemitic overtones. When people who have no particular connection to the Middle East obsessively criticize Israel and ignore human rights abuses in other countries it seems at a minimum plausible to think they may be antisemites. The border between fervent anti-Zionism and antisemitism is often porous.
• Professors teaching a course unrelated to politics or to the Middle East sometimes use their courses as a bully pulpit to criticize Israel. Jewish students in these classes feel that they have no recourse but to listen and suffer in silence. After all, the professor is the one giving them a grade.   Professor Martin Lockshin, historian, Jewish biblical interpretation, York University

Pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian protestors face off at York University's Vari Hall FILE PHOTO

The reality of Israel is that it is and has always been under siege from 1948 forward to the present. Its presence in the Middle East, a tiny sliver of land perched within a huge enclave of hostile Arab forces representing nations governed and oppressed by tyrants, kingdoms, theocracies, oil sheikdoms all of which find the presence of a heritage Judaic democratic nation in their midst an assault against Islam represents a precarious perch. One concerted effort after another to militarily eject Israel from the Middle East has failed.

In its place once the futility of conventional armies converging on a state determined to protect itself proved itself time and again, the tactic turned to oil wealth buying loyalty and public relations ventures hugely dependent on latent anti-Semitism in the global community, along with Islamic influence blocs at the United Nations making common cause against Israel with the non-aligned nations bloc succeeding in slandering Israel, accusing it endlessly of human rights abuses, charges levelled by none other than human-rights-abusing nations.

York University in north Toronto has more Jewish students enrolled than any other university in Canada. The university has long been a stronghold of Jewish university opportunities and has graduated countless Jewish students who have gone on to enrich Canadian culture, business, arts and sciences. For the past decade, however, Jewish students have felt increasingly uncomfortable, unwelcome, targeted and threatened under crude assaults geared toward destroying Israel's legitimacy as a nation among nations.

York's reputation within the Jewish community has declined in lock-step with its failure to counteract such a crudely hostile climate where supporters of Israel feel themselves to be vulnerable to the all-too-obvious menace that anti-Israel and anti-Semitic groups have targeted them with. Canadian Muslim university students, pro-Palestinian leftist university student  unions have manipulated events at the university to continue a slander campaign and to threaten Jewish students.

From verbal assaults and physical intimidation leading to the blockading of Jewish students, to the endorsation of a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel, culminating in a large mural of a Palestinian demonstrator holding a rock behind his back in a purportedly Israeli setting with the scene recognized as a provocative glimpse of an intifada against the "occupying power", it is little wonder that Jewish students feel beleaguered and unprotected by the university administration.

This painting hangs in York University’s student centre, despite repeated complaints from Jewish students

The president of York University, Mamdouth Shoukri, responded to repeated requests by the Jewish community and the university's students for remedial action by announcing the formation of a president's advisory committee to examine "effective methods to ensure inclusive, respectful exchanges of ideas, particularly on sensitive social and political issues". The committee membership however, has been revealed to be of no neutral value whatever in addressing the deliberate alienation of Jewish students on campus.

One committee member is a high profile BDS activist who had attempted to join a flotilla to Gaza, another signed an open letter to pressure President Shoukri to boycott Israel because of its "genocidal" intentions, yet another signed a 2013 petition accusing Israel of "ethnic cleansing" and that Canadian universities should cut ties with the Jewish state. Such tainted appointees simply point out that there is no serious intent to address the problem. Appointing committee members whose vocal anti-Israel biases expose them as part of the problem, stands out as a  hostile action in and of itself.

One that York University's administration and its president urgently need to address.

The Nobility of Purpose in Deceitful Slander

"What BDS wants is to make life in Israel intolerable so the Jewish nation will not be able to have a normal existence. BDS does not only want to change the government's policy, it wants to empty the country of Jews."
"Most of us [Friends of Israel Initiative] are not Jewish, but we share the vision. When defending Israel we are defending the West. We are defending our way of life and values, and also our interests."
"It is unfair and unthinkable for Israel to sign an agreement with a [nascent] state [Palestinian Authority] that refuses to acknowledge the Jewish state's right to exist."
former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar

"The following students and faculty at UC Santa Barbara have allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetrate BDS and Jew Hatred on this campus."
"Jew haters on other campuses are going to wake up some morning soon and see their pictures on posters holding them responsible for their anti-Semitic thoughts and deeds."
David Horowitz, Horowitz Freedom Center

Anti-BDS Movement conference in Jerusalem photo information Photographer Abir Sultan

"Administrators hypocritically invoke free speech in defence of faculty members who provide an ostensibly 'academic' rationale for opposition to Israel. By now, entire disciplines use their academic conferences to attack the Jewish state."
"Where are the campus rallies for women's rights in Islam, relief efforts for Syrian refugees, vigils for Christian victims of Islamic State [or Iraq and the Levant]? Where is the outrage of historians and archaeologists at the destruction by radical Muslims of ancient monuments?"
"[Anti-Israel campaigns flourish] because onlookers who think they have no stake in the conflict choose not to face down the belligerents."
Ruth Wisse, professor, McGill/Harvard Universities

Recalling the Holocaust in her observation of disaffected onlookers recognizing the moral imperatives, but choosing non-involvement because they feel the situation has no impact on them, is a reflection of non-interference by the world at large when Nazi Germany was busy operating its efficient machinery of genocide perpetration, to rid the world of Europe's Jews. There are certainly direct parallels to the launching of the Holocaust, and that of the BDS movement, both working to isolate Jews and portray them as enemies less than human, to make their destruction more universally palatable.

The political left has gone into overdrive to send its message, that it is not of course, suffused with hatred of Jews, simply seeking justice for the Palestinian 'cause', and if Israel is being vilified as an oppressor and a threat to peace in the Middle East and beyond, the nation has earned that status by not submitting to world opinion. World opinion in the 1940s managed to overlook the plight of Jews targeted for annihilation. World opinion in the 21st Century seems satisfied with the destruction slated by defenders of the 'underdog' Palestinians of the State of Israel.

The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign that gave equal rise to its offshoot Israel Apartheid Week, to slander and deprive Israel of legitimacy has certainly had its successes. Forcing a nation that has, since its birth been compelled to defend itself against one violent wave after another of combined Arab military attacks, and of non-state militias intent on destroying it as well, to defend itself against a coordinated onslaught of accusations that its ultimate goal is to demolish the aspirations of worthy Palestinians.

Yet the smear campaigns have also resulted in unforeseen consequences that have done great harm to Palestinians. Palestinians, for example, who were employed in well-remunerated construction jobs helping to build West Bank settlements, when the Palestinian Authority failed to produce jobs for its vast army of unemployed. When a campaign targeting SodaStream operating in the West Bank forced it to relocate its production to Israel proper there were consequences. In the process of silencing the BDS accusers hundreds of Palestinians lost their employment.

In the growing relevance to the modern world of science and technology Israel has shown itself to be an innovation powerhouse. Of the 300 projects approved by the European Research Council, fully 11 percent were directed to young Israeli scientists, placing it behind only Germany and the United Kingdom in its productivity and enterprise potential and capabilities. Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar is striving to have Israel accepted into the European Union; their values parallel each other's.

University students have taken up the challenge to demonstrate how engaged they are with social media favourites, and as a favourite target, Israel and Jews have few serious challengers. Universities breed idealism and the ideology of slamming Israel for its very existence and accusing it of oppressing a people who claim prior and everlasting entitlement to a land that was historically and remained through the ages a heritage of Judaism, has huge popular appeal.

Israel's existence as an aberration, a lone Jewish state surrounded by Arab states, a democracy encircled by dictators, monarchs, theocracies and oil sheikdoms, is one of those errors in the perceived natural order of things; a square peg in a landscape designed for round ones, and so that square peg must be hammered incessantly until it no longer resembles its authentic form, squeezing the Jew out of the Jewish state, so it becomes yet another Arab-majority state to the satisfaction of Jew haters.

The anti-Israel movement is supported and celebrated for all the presumed harm it can do to Jews and to Israel. By creating yet another forum by which both can be declared illegal, immoral and indefensible by their very existence.

The World's

In Canada, university student unions, the United Church and trade unions appear to have permanently gravitated to the censure of Israel, happy to join the Palestinian BDS movement, seeing an affinity between the hard-left transition to Israel-bashing in lieu of outright anti-Semitism, and empathy for the plight of the Palestinians who suffer under a leadership determined to outwait Israel's eventual collapse as a state, leaving the geography to be mopped up and reimagined as a Palestinian state.

This would be a Palestinian state where the Christians now sheltered in Israel would be unwelcome to remain. It would be a Palestinian state where the presence of Jews, who have lived in the geography since time immemorial would represent a travesty, an indulgence insulting Islam they would not be prepared to accept. While Palestinians formerly with Israeli citizenship could mourn the evaporation of their past entitlements, under Palestinian rule.

The reality is that Christians have been hounded from their former heritage sites by an Islamist horde that view them as unworthy of living among Muslims. Their numbers had steeply declined when Jordan had jurisdiction of Jerusalem, but with Israeli jurisdiction in place those numbers have increased markedly. A million and a half Palestinians live within Israel, holding Israeli citizenship and are guaranteed equality under the law. The Palestinian Authority gave notice that no Jews would be permitted to live alongside Muslim Arabs in a new Palestinian state.

Yet it is Israel that is condemned as an apartheid state. It is Israel that those who detest the very presence of a Jewish state in their ancient homeland as an alien presence in a land consecrated by Islam to itself. In Britain, the Labour Party which has governed the country for nigh unto three decades following the Second World War and the rise of the Israeli State, is now led by an elected leader who views Hamas whose charter guarantees the annihilation of Israel, as a fine political movement.

During the Second World War, what remained of European Jewry after the mass slaughter of six million of Europe's Jews, found that it was dangerous to return to their countries of origin, leaving them to remain for want of a homeland, in displaced persons camps. Polish Jews who did return to Poland found a dangerously hostile greeting awaiting them in their towns and villages, the Poles who took their properties unwilling to part with them. Pogroms were still in favour.

The solution was, finally, the long-awaited and dreamed-of return to the homeland, the land of Israel. Where the newly-established state's leaders promised that never more would Jews be homeless, stateless, at the mercy of those who wished them dead. In escaping from the confines of the countries that could not, would not see them as equal citizens, they embarked toward a country of their own, surrounded by countries that conspired to destroy them and their new state.

Winston Churchill set the legal wheels in motion to have the United Nations eventually vote on the creation of the State of Israel; it did so knowing that most of the land that should have gone to Israel went instead to the creation of the Kingdom of Jordan, and then it partitioned what was left over to be divided between Jews and Arabs. The Arabs, coopting the name "Palestinians" for themselves, a name which previously referred to the Jews of the geography, refused partition. And they still do.

In Britain the Labour party's national student organization launched an official enquiry into the anti-Semitic flavour of its politics, spurred on no doubt by the former branch chairwoman of the party, Vicki Kirby having written that Jews "slaughter the oppressed". She feels that it is Israel, not Islamic State that should receive the world's condemnation. "I will never forget and I will make sure my kids teach their children how evil Israel is", she has stated.

In a Britain where in the past, there was a Jewish prime minister, where all three major political parties elected Jewish leaders, where cabinets of Jewish ministers were commonly the norm, things have changed. As elsewhere in Europe, Jews feel themselves under siege. Understandable with the practical alliance taking place between socialism and Islamic radicalism, where socialists find it useful to make excuses for the excesses of radical Islam.

Where Britain's Labour Party has a new leader in Jeremy Corbyn who finds it disagreeable to linger on the theocracies in the Middle East where mass murder, torture, racism and ethnic cleansing are the order of the day. The crimes committed by Muslim states date back to the Medieval era, and show no signs of abating. But it is Israel and Israel alone that is held to a standard that finds it wanting, encouraging its detractors to call it out for human rights violations.

A demonstrator at a pro-Palestinian rally throws a rock toward riot police during a protest in Paris, June 19, 2014. Thibault Camus/A.P. Images

Throughout Europe the influx of Palestinian and Arab Muslim immigrants and refugees has resulted in the spread of anti-Israel, anti-Jew reactions. The spillover from Israel's existence in a largely Muslim geographic framework has resulted in a gradual and sinister disintegration of social stability where major numbers of Muslims have taken haven. They have agitated for the imposition of Sharia for themselves in accepting societies and they have campaigned violently against the presence of Jews.

In the view of Muslims, Jews having a state of their own in the Middle East is a provocation too far, which must be removed, since it is purportedly the source of all the violent dysfunction in that geography. And in the view of Muslims who have migrated to the West, the presence of Jews living in countries of the diaspora for thousands of years are misplaced there as well, among the obviously entitled presence of Muslims whose numbers are slowly transforming Europe into something more approximating the Middle East.