The Enemy Within the “Safe Spaces” of Jews on campusFriday May 27th, 2016
Academia is awash in social justice warriors (SJW). There are SJW consumed with racism, gender and Islamophobia, but the issue that looms largest and most relentlessly on all campuses with a sizable Jewish population is anti-Zionism. A demonstration of one’s unnuanced hostility to Israel coupled with unconditional sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians has become something of ...
Montreal moratorium is bad news for horses and driversThursday May 26th, 2016
Montreal is a great tourist town, but our tourism season is relatively short as compared to other North American cities of similar size. So entrepreneurs invested in those five profitable months don’t want to miss a single day of work once the trees are in bud.
Nobody is a greater stakeholder in the fine weather than the calèche drivers of Old Montreal. Tourists like r...
The Dorchester Review — the little magazine that canTuesday May 24th, 2016
My heroes in the writing game are the contrarians who beat against cultural currents by publishing small magazines. These magazines boast rich content, but appeal to circumscribed markets. The monetary reward is zilch. Satisfaction is almost entirely bound up (both for the editor and the usually unpaid writers) with pride in the product.
Which brings me to my subject for today, the...
Barbara Kay on preserving aboriginal languages: Cultural will cannot be outsourcedTuesday May 17th, 2016
Over the weekend, the Globe and Mail published a cri du coeur by Adrienne Clarkson about the importance of language, titled All Canadians Must Tell Their Stories. The piece is stylistically elegant, as we would expect from our former governor general, but not polemically coherent.
Clarkson’s central thesis is that language is vital because “it is the basis from which we...
The case for subsidizing trainsWednesday May 11th, 2016
Next year is Canada’s 150th anniversary. We need a project to mark the occasion that will do us proud in the future, but that speaks to our collective memory.
Most nations are born in violence. We owe our identity to the Big Choo Choo. I therefore propose as our defining anniversary project a commitment to renewed and improved passenger rail service throughout Canada. (Please...
At $317 million, Via Rail is cheap to maintain Canada’s rail heritageThursday May 5th, 2016
Uh-oh. The federal auditor general’s office has just released a study casting a cloud, yet again, on the future of rail travel in Canada.
The report indicates an increase in late-arrival times over the past two years, from one in five trains to one in four. This deterioration in service – on-time performance being “the main factor in customer satisfaction” &...
Unborn babies will stay persons in fact, but not in lawTuesday May 3rd, 2016
In December 2014 Cassandra Kaake of Windsor, Ont., was murdered in her seventh month of pregnancy, and so her already-named unborn baby Molly died as well. To Casandra’s husband and mother, Molly didn’t just “die.” She was a murder victim, in moral terms exactly as if she had been killed while nursing at her mother’s breast.
But the Criminal Code conta...
When kidnapping is a risk, there are ways to prepareWednesday April 27th, 2016
What is a government’s proper response to extortion when a human life hangs in the balance? The answer seems obvious to everyone who has no personal stake in the outcome: Don’t pay; to pay is to encourage the practice, and escalate the demands of ruthless outlaws. That is the policy of the Canadian government, and rightly so.
On Monday, making good on their threat when ...
On cleanliness, dignity and our obligation to the homelessTuesday April 26th, 2016
My mother-in-law, Maryka, was healthy and independent well into her 80s, but eventually short-term memory loss and general frailty set in. Maryka studiously ignored our gentle suggestion to consider assisted living, and it seemed unkind to pressure her, but on the other hand, we didn’t want the decision made for her by a broken hip or a kitchen fire. Where, we wondered, was the lin...
Barbara Kay on her experience with Weight Watchers: Vanity has no cutoff dateTuesday April 19th, 2016
The queue was longer than usual last Thursday, but we women — I have never seen a man in this particular lineup — waited patiently. Patiently, but an alert observer would note a common tension in our body language: a mix of resignation, hope and dread, with the odd expression of righteous assurance.
With only two women ahead of me, I made final preparations for the &hel...
Sex-selection abortion versus a girl’s right to liveTuesday April 19th, 2016
An ingenious social media campaign, #280today, succinctly conveys the estimated number of pregnancies terminated every day in Canada by induced abortion. That comes out to over 100,000 a year.
Canadians who support a woman’s right to an abortion are sympathetic to, or at least non-judgmental, regarding most of the reasons women decide to have an abortion. But there is one tha...
The scourge of anti-Semitic JewsWednesday April 13th, 2016
A poster from the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, made the rounds on U.S. campuses recently. It reads: “White man: are you sick and tired of the Jews destroying your country through mass immigration and degeneracy? Join us in the struggle for global white supremacy at the Daily Stormer.”
If I had seen that poster in my youth, it would have felt like a punch to the gu...
Kay vs. KayFriday April 8th, 2016
Barbara Kay: One of the most popular books in Israel right now is Catch the Jew! by gonzo journalist Tuvia Tenenbom. Tenenbom is a German-Israeli Jew who lives in New York. His advantage as a reporter is that his German – his mother tongue – is so perfect he can pass as ethnically German and often does (at such times he goes by “Tobias”).
‘Catch the Jew&rsqu...
When Mark Steyn struck backTuesday April 5th, 2016
I was one of the lucky attendees last Friday at the Munk Debate in Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall. The motion before the house concerned refugee policy: “Be it resolved: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” On the pro side: Louise Arbour, former UN Human Rights commissioner and historian Simon Schama; on the con side journalist Mark...
Ottawa’s support of Israel deserves more than just wordsMonday April 4th, 2016
There are 192 member states in the United Nations. In the worst of them, girls and women are raped and trafficked as a matter of course. In many others, women have fewer legal, educational and employment rights than men.
Nevertheless the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) concluded its annual meeting in New York with a condemnation of one country, and one country only. That...
‘Believing women’ isn’t the same thing as proving guiltWednesday March 30th, 2016
Reading Justice William Horkins’ preamble to his judgment following the Jian Ghomeshi trial, I marvelled anew at the testimonies of the three women accusers and the cultural revolution they represent. In a pre-feminist era, it is possible a woman would have lied in court. But the odds, in 1965 say, of three women with apparently slam-dunk cases pre-trial all being exposed on the st...
The link between BDS and Jew hatred on campusTuesday March 22nd, 2016
In a Feb. 25 Facebook post, McGill student Molly Harris recounted her experience in a “Rez (residence) Project” workshop, a (mandatory) three-hour discussion on “oppression, privilege, consent and race” designed to create a “safe space” for fellow dorm students. Molly described an incident when, singled out negatively for being Jewish, she f...
Only blind progressives would think naming a scholarship after Mao is a good ideaTuesday March 15th, 2016
It’s no secret that Western campuses are dominated by progressivism. But certain indices of academics’ love affair with the far left still have the power to shock. The University of Victoria is inviting applications from students in its Pacific and Asian Studies program for two awards “in memory of the late Mao Tse Tung” — one to be applied for a study ...
Flattening feminism’s campus mythsWednesday March 9th, 2016
On the occasion of a prestigious award in her field last month, associate professor Elena Bennett in McGill University’s Natural Resources Sciences and School of Environment was interviewed by the Montreal Gazette on the subject of women and science.
Bennett focused on the well-documented post-undergrad career stall for women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math...
Sour grapes on pit bullsMonday March 7th, 2016
Don Cherry has a big mouth, which annoys some people and delights others.
Since I have no particular interest in hockey, the familiar sound of Cherry rants has up to now been background static in my life. But Cherry got my full attention this week when he set himself up as the point man on a pit bull rescue operation.
Last October police and the Ontario SPCA launched an investig...
The Enemy Within the “Safe Spaces” of Jews on campus
Friday May 27th, 2016
