B’nai Brith Canada is up in arms—so to speak.
Some Quebec student strikers, reacting to police barbarity that has apparently been sanctioned at the highest levels, are flashing Nazi salutes at their tormentors.
Enter the indefatigable Frank Dimant:
“We condemn, in the strongest of terms, this inexcusable display of hate by Quebec student protesters that has outraged the Jewish community and demonstrated just how low the level of public debate has fallen on the streets of Montreal.”
The elephant and the Jewish question, redux.
We have witnessed extraordinary ongoing police violence and abuse of authority in Quebec during the past few weeks: a wholesale use of illegal “preventative arrest,” repeated unnecessary deployment of pepper-spray, free-swinging truncheons and “kettling.” Students and bystanders alike have been brutalized by uniformed thugs acting with complete impunity. And the Charest government has passed “emergency legislation” stripping Quebeckers of their basic Charter rights.
Not a peep out of Dimant on any of that, which is a little surprising, given his evident sensitivity. Why isn’t he speaking out against this gratuitous emulation of historical European fascism?
Instead—and the mind that produces such nonsense would make a fascinating clinical study—the students are, with a non-violent gesture of defiance, allegedly mocking the Holocaust. If the gesture is possibly a little exaggerated, Dimant is here to show us that they aren’t the only ones who can venture over the top on occasion.
Two years ago there was an outcry about female ski-jumpers being prevented from competing in the Olympics. Such exclusion is shameful, certainly, but are the women involved equivalent to Jews in Hitler’s Germany?
I leave it to others to judge whether or not this is trivializing the Shoah. But no doubt the fed-up gesticulations of Quebec student demonstrators will find their way into Dimant’s annual catalogue of anti-Semitic incidents.
