The Prime Minister’s Purim Joke

Tuesday, 14  March 2017

This year on March 10, on the occasion of the celebration of the Jewish holiday Purim, the Prime Minister issued a statement.

Past the usual platitudes, the statement reads:

“We honour this celebration of triumph over persecution and oppression as both a testament to the resilience, bravery, and joy of the Jewish people, and as a reaffirmation of our responsibility to stand against anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and prejudice. The government denounces recent acts of anti-Semitism, and other acts of religious intolerance, in the strongest terms. We cannot-and will not-tolerate any expressions of hatred and discrimination in our communities.”

The first thing about this statement is that it does not stick to anti-Semitism, lest he hurt  the feelings  of some of his associates .

The second thing is that while the Prime Minister talks the tough talk about anti-Semitism, he has yet to walk the tough walk.

While, he has been frigging around defending and promoting the wording of yet another anti-Islamophobia motion, what has he done to deal with the long festering anti-Semitism on university campuses? Nothing. Rien. Zilch.

Has he bothered to abide by the letter and the spirit of the Ottawa Protocol and implement it in Canada? No.

Talk is cheap especially when everybody knows that the chap likes to talk.

Yet, the solution to the problem is quite simple. Universities depend on Federal largesse by way of grants, subsidies and research grants of various sorts. All he has to do is to hit them in the pocket.

Towards this end, he can a) establish an investigative office with a strict mandate to suppress anti-Semitism on campus, b)  tell  the universities to clean up their act, if they wish to continue to receive Federal monies; c) investigate all complaints of anti-Semitic occurrences, and d) in those cases where the university is shown to have failed in its duty to deal effectively with such an occurrence and  prevent  future recurrences through tough disciplinary and  other deterrents,  give a warning on the first substantiated occurrence and then cut 10% of the federal contribution  for each  subsequent occurrence.

So until he gets on with fixing this problem, to begin with , he can and should keep his best wishes to the Jewish community to himself while he is busy engaged ,as he is, in fighting Islamophobia in thick along with the folks that have their own plans for the future of Canada.

Decidedly, he is simply unable to fix his  political bow.