We probably all start out prejudiced; having been brought up by people who look and act like us and believe the things that we learn to believe, we start by assuming that our way is the right way to do things, and if people do things differently they must be wrong. The need to grow beyond that childhood perspective is what led Mark Twain to optimistically claim that, “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” But though we now live in a global village, in which the floods in Pakistan or fires of Russia are no further than a click away, an irrational fear of Islam or Muslims, Islamophobia, has been rising as fast as the floods, and spreading as fast as the fires.

The most obvious examples are the inchoate rage some have felt at plans to build a Muslim community centre two blocks from ground zero, and the proposal to burn Qur’ans sponsored by a fringe Florida pastor. But it goes a lot further: last week Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, wrote: “Muslim life is cheap, particularly to Muslims… This is a statement of fact, not value,” and “I wonder whether I need to honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” Two immediate points: imagine the reaction if such a statement had been made about Jews or Blacks, or any other minority group! But Peretz has not resigned, has not been pilloried in the main-stream media. Philip Weiss does a fine job of disproving the “Muslim life is cheap” canard, meticulously going through the world’s Islamic states and documenting the evidence, but that such desperate medicine is needed is pretty telling evidence of the extent to which the contagion has spread.

True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero – really look – and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you.

Ursula K. LeGuin “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction”

Ashkenaz Festival started in Toronto fifteen years ago, as a celebration of the worldwide revival of Klezmer and Yiddish culture. It became a biennial event, held on Labour Day weekend at Harbourfront Centre, and my own smouldering appreciation for Klezmer music was brought to full vivid flame by performances I saw there, by bands such as the Klezmatics, Brave Old World, and Andy Statman. There were free shows along with paid shows, theatre, a parade, art, and of course lots of good food.

It was exciting, back then, because it was both old and new, and of course for many of us who had grown up in North America, a lot of the old stuff was new. I’d never been exposed to Eastern European Jewish music, the roots of Klezmer, before. When I played it to my parents, who had grown up in Western Europe, it was new to them as well: they had been raised on Mozart and Beethoven. Yet somehow this music called to me, and sounded like coming home in a way that much other world music didn’t. And it had a good beat and you could dance to it, too.

Saturday June 26th, the anti-G20 demonstration in Toronto was planned to start at 1 pm. I had been uncertain as to whether to go; originally a group of Tikkun Toronto veterans had planned an alternative demonstration, focussed around the slogan, “Open your heart to what matters more.” But the unexpected death of the brother of one core member, and difficulties around getting permission, and the predictions of violence and anarchy that the media had been purveying had reduced our enthusiasm below the critical mass we needed to make it happen. Perhaps, I thought, I don’t need to go. But the MSM descriptions of protesters against the G20 as “thugs and anarchists”, the spending of $1.2 billion on the summit, the revelation of new powers to arrest and detain that the police had been secretly given all made me feel that my right to peacefully gather with my peers was worth coming out to defend. As governments try to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor, lowering taxes on corporations and offering billions to financial institutions that have become too big to fail, surely someone should speak up. And if not me, then who? I created a “My Canada WAS a free country” t-shirt, and went down to the rally, humming the Rolling Stones’ “I went down to the demonstration, to get my fair share of abuse”.

The Black Bloc at the G20 demo in Toronto

In front of Queen’s Park, the Ontario provincial legislature, there were about 25,000 people gathered. While waiting for the speeches, they chanted,”The people united, will never be defeated.” After years of hearing this, I couldn’t help but think that I wasn’t sure I still believed this. But as I wandered around, looking for all the friends and fellow travellers I knew were also there, I realized that it wasn’t really relevant, because while these people may have been many things, they weren’t united. Among the groups were the Ontario Federation of Labour (the organizers), CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees), assorted teachers’ unions, the Black Bloc, the Iranian and Iraqi communist parties (marching together!) , independent Kashmir, independent Khalistan, independent Palestine, independent Quebec, the Animal Liberation Front, the American Tea Party, “9/11 Was An Inside Job”, a lot of Trotskyist-Socialist-Marxist groups all selling newspapers, Greenpeace, an anti child-abuse group (are the G20 pro child-abuse?), a person with a sign protesting the mind-rays she claimed the government was using to control what people think, and the Judean People’s Front. (OK, I’m lying about them). But whatever this crowd might have been called, it wasn’t united.

Who are these guys? Whatever are “business class refugees”? And, most of all, why should I care?

You should care because this album, Business Class Refugees, is a new and extraordinary music, created internationally, in ways that simply haven’t been possible till now. It comes out thirty years after “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” the pioneering Byrne / Eno collaboration which used electronic ambience, and world music behind sampled vocal tracks, but assembled painfully in the studio through analog trial and error. Kartick and Gotam, known as K&G, also weave a beating net of electronic ambience, but overlay it with a stunning selection of Indian and south Asian musicians as foreground. And they do it live with visuals as well, though that comes later.

In my exploration of the BDS movement a week ago here, I talked about Margaret Atwood, who had chosen to not boycott the Dan David prize of which she was co-winner. She’s written a piece for Haaretz about her experience of Israel, that is a profound and eloquent exegesis of her Israeli experience. She admits that going into the issue she had “strayed into the Middle-eastern neighbourhood with a mind as open as it could be without being totally vacant”, and says, not unfairly, “The whole experience was like learning about cooking by being thrown into the soup pot.”

So what does she conclude about Israel?

The Israelis I met could not have been more welcoming. I saw many impressive accomplishments and creative projects, and talked with many different people. The sun was shining, the waves waving, the flowers were in bloom. Tourists jogged along the beach at Tel Aviv as if everything was normal. But… there was the Shadow. Why was everything trembling a little, like a mirage? Was it like that moment before a tsunami when the birds fly to the treetops and the animals head for the hills because they can feel it coming?

I’d been told ahead of time that Israelis would try to cover up the Shadow, but instead they talked about it non-stop. Two minutes into any conversation, the Shadow would appear. It’s not called the Shadow, it’s called “the situation.” It haunts everything.

The Shadow is not the Palestinians. The Shadow is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, linked with Israeli’s own fears. The worse the Palestinians are treated in the name of those fears, the bigger the Shadow grows, and then the fears grow with them; and the justifications for the treatment multiply.

BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is the increasing popular weapon of choice amongst many of us who oppose the actions and positions of the current Israeli government. It is also the Israeli weapon of choice against Gaza, though if pushed they resort to more direct weapons. At the heart of the debate over BDS lies the question of whether it is right to call for a boycott of Israel of when so many other countries do so many worse things. Some BDS opponents claim that call is the demon of anti-Semitism rearing its subtly disguised head. But as Hamlet noted, “Use every man after his dessert, and who should ‘scape whipping?” If I were to boycott every country that committed human rights abuses, I fear I’d have to walk naked for lack of a source of moral clothing. So do I then boycott none? How do I decide?

This is a story I have always known, a story I grew up with. It is the story of how in Germany on Kristallnacht, Nov 9th, 1938 the mob which was destroying the houses of all the Jews in Mainz came to the house in which my Jewish grandparents lived. There they were met by Maria, my family’s Catholic cook, who faced the mob and said, “Why are you here? You know these people and you know they have done nothing to harm you.” And the people left the house untouched.

Nor was this the only story my grandmother told me of such kindnesses. I heard of their gardener, who had to be let go because Jews were not allowed to keep Christian servants, and who became Hitler’s gardener, and managed to get vegetables to my grandparents during the first two years of the war before they were able to escape. And when they did leave, the butcher gave them a smoked beef tongue, which they ate while riding the trans-Siberian railroad till they got to Vladivostok, where they took a ship which got through Japan before Pearl Harbor, and eventually landed in Seattle, where they were able to tell me these stories as I grew up. My grandmother told me the stories to teach me that not all Germans were bad. I remember that she said the Holocaust could happen anywhere; it could happen in Canada, or in the United States. And with that absolute sense of certainty about the world that teenagers have, I claimed that it could never happen here. Now, forty plus years later, I believe she was right and I was wrong. But sadly, I cannot tell her that in person. I can only show her that through what I do in the world.

All around the musical village
The alarm-clock chased the vulture.
The sands ran through the hourglass -
Pop! goes your culture.
…………..(old children’s song)

“Good evening,” said Neil Innes, as he stepped out onto the Hughes’ Room stage last Thursday. “It’s wonderful to be.”

He opened with “I’m the Urban Spaceman“, ended it after 30 seconds, smiled at the audience and said, “Thank you. That was a medley of my hit.” I laughed, though I remembered that he had started his show at Edinburgh Festival 20 years ago with the same song and line. But then he’d performed the whole song, and now it was just a thumbnail from his (and my) past.

I first saw Neil Innes in 1969 in Boston, when he was a member of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a UK band of art-school graduates who were heavily into surrealism and dada art. They performed a 30 second Neil Sedaka parody called “Kama-Sutra“, a painfully extended blues song (“Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?”) in which Neil played a guitar with a four foot long neck, explaining sotto voce that, “this next song will feature a long guitar solo.” Other songs included an electric trouser press, and a female mannequin leg with built-in theremin, which made screeching sounds if you moved your hand close to it. There were about a dozen members in the band, and they were quite wonderfully manic.

For years, Israel has said that it cannot negotiate with Palestinians because there is no leader who can represent Palestine and who doesn’t support violence. But finally, things are changing. It appears to be increasingly accepted by Palestinians on the West Bank that the path that offers them the most hope is a non-violent path of demonstrations against the occupation at home and the world wide push for BDS against Israel. Front and centre in this is the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad.

As always in dealing with the Middle East, perception is as important as reality. So the significance of this recent article in the New York Times is two-fold: both what it says, and that the Times (not traditionally a paper that has said much positive about Palestinians) is saying it.

Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance New York Times

One of the rationales for the war in Afghanistan is that under the Taliban it was a state that oppressed women and denied them their freedoms. Unquestionably, the Taliban government did deny many of the freedoms that women have won in the west and that are now taken for granted: the freedom to vote, to be educated, to dress as they choose. But freedom is a tricky concept: in some countries, such as Australia one isn’t free not to vote – it is compulsory and there are fines if one doesn’t. In all countries children (or their parents) aren’t free to choose to not be educated – up to a certain age they have to be in school. And increasingly, women are free to not wear a niqab (a veil that obscures their faces) – but they aren’t free to choose to wear one. Freedom is peculiar when it only allows you to make whatever choice the state wants.

There’s climate change happening all over the world, and everywhere melting glaciers calve icebergs at an unprecedented rate. (“Iceberg”? Isn’t that a Jewish name?) One particular glacier that’s disappearing fast is the unified and monolithic support that Jews outside of Israel have always given to whatever the Israeli government of the day wanted to do. It has been a truism for years that there was far harsher criticism of Israeli governments from Jews within Israel than from Jews outside of it. But now, for the first time significant numbers of diaspora Jews (and fellow travellers) are opposing the Israeli government, and doing so because they see the current expansionist policy as hugely harmful to any chance of Israeli survival.

As I prepare to go to friends to celebrate Passover sedar, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be Jewish. I have increasingly been feeling comfortable with the people with whom I celebrate, part of which is that they too are more concerned with exploring questions than with repeating simple answers. One of the questions is what is being celebrated: is it exclusively that God saves the Jews, (Hey Pharoah! We own the podium!) or is it a more universal celebration of the unforeseen liberation from slavery to freedom, an archetypal celebration for all who are oppressed?

These days I have my most stimulating arguments about being Jewish, and about Jews with Philip Weiss, even if my part of the debate is in my head. Here’s an except from a recent piece, in which Philip and the non-Jewish wife of a Jewish friend of his are having this argument:

I said, “It is a great liberation story and that’s what I like about the seder. It belongs to all people.”
The friend’s wife is sophisticated religiously, she has read widely. She said firmly, No it is confined to the Jewish people. There is the sense throughout the festival that this is What God did for us. There is a sense of chosenness throughout the seder.
I got upset. I said flatly, she was “wrong.” But she persisted, and I was quiet. I just listened. She quoted some of the liturgical stuff in the seder, also the violence directed at Egypt, the ten plagues down to the slaying of the first born. I bet she knows the seder better than I do.

It all seemed to start when Vice-President Biden, in Israel to promote the “peace process”, was greeted with the announcement of further Israeli expansion into the historically Palestinian Ramat Shlomo, in East Jerusalem. The US fired back on all cylinders, with Biden, Clinton, and General Petraeus questioning Israel in an unprecedented way. In return, the Jerusalem Post accused Obama of “repeatedly humiliating our prime minister.” And since he’s critical of Israel, Obama must be (according to Hagai Ben-Artzi, Netanyahu’s brother-in-law, anyway) an anti-Semite. The dust was still thick in the air, as American leaders made it clear that they loved Israel, it’s just the actions of the Israeli government with which they have difficulty.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Karl Marx

Growing with two parents who escaped the Holocaust, from Germany and from Austria, there was no ambiguity in my mind about Adolph Hitler or the Holocaust. He was evil, to an extent beyond any other person, and the Holocaust was an event, sui generis, beyond any other event. For years my dreams were inhabited by desperate attempts to escape jackbooted storm troopers who were searching for me, or trying to survive after having been captured by them. I was horrified at other evils, but this lay beyond them, as the far marker of human cruelty

In political debate that made me very wary of cheap comparisons to the Nazis or Hitler. I’m not alone in that of course: Godwin’s Law, created by Mike Godwin, famously states that, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” and goes on to note that whoever raises the comparison is considered to have lost the debate. (The technical term for this logical fallacy is “Reductio ad Hitlerum” Really.)

But the problem with that moral stance, viewing Hitler as an evil beyond all other human possibility, is that it diminishes the chance of our recognizing or preventing such evil from occurring again.

I have always thought my best writing happened when I didn’t think about the audience, but instead got taken over by the words I was shaping. When I became so involved with the passion of what needed to be said, so entranced by how best to birth it into the world that I lost my sense of self and there was only the process of trying to shape the words on the page so that they embody the idea that lay just the other side of perception. The audience didn’t enter into it at all. Perhaps on a later draft, I’d look at the piece and recognize a reference that was so obscure that no reader would get it, and so it had to go. But for the most part, the dance was between the words and my ideas, and the audience were wallflowers, watching perhaps but obscured by shadows.

I think of this because of a recent encounter that brought home just how out of touch this attitude of mine is with the way things are done these days.

One of the most read pieces on this blog in the last week is Eli Zaretsky’s “Proto-Fascist Elements in America Today.” It’s a powerful piece, and I disagree with it only in two regards: I don’t think the problem is particularly American, and I don’t think it’s about fascism. Zaretsky’s concerns certainly apply as much to Canada and the UK as they do to the US. And the core of what is wrong with what is happening in these countries isn’t a potential slide into proto-fascism, it’s that what is making that possible is the destruction of the legal protections that were once taken for granted.

Paul Craig Roberts, in CounterPunch, cuts to the heart of the issue:

The greatest human achievement is the subordination of government to law. This was an English achievement that required eight centuries of struggle, beginning in the ninth century when King Alfred the Great codified the common law, moving forward with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century and culminating with the Glorious Revolution in the late seventeenth century.
The success of this long struggle made law a shield of the people. As an English colony, America inherited this unique achievement that made English speaking peoples the most free in the world. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this achievement was lost in the United States and, perhaps, in England as well.

It is this willful and demonstrable loss of the protection of law that is the core of what is wrong with what is happening in the West today.

Two months ago, I discussed on this blog how the sun was setting on the two state solution in Israel. At the time it felt a bit hypothetical; while Palestinian leaders and commentators were saying that a single state was the only solution, I didn’t find many in the mainstream (neither Stephen Walt nor Philip Weiss can yet be characterized as “mainstream”) who were saying anything in favour of the idea. But suddenly, things have changed and there’s all sorts of talk about it.

In The Nation, Harry Siegman (former executive director of American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America) writes a stunning piece that concludes that an “externally imposed solution” is the only route to two states, and that without such intervention only a single state solution is possible. Here’s a taste of the piece:

Once again, a bungled terrorist attack produces bungled security responses. One can’t help but wonder if there is a final solution hidden in the minds of these people: if they can just make flying so difficult and arduous that no one does it, then there won’t be any airborne terrorism, will there? I can’t be alone in wishing that one politician, in some country, would point out that your chances over the past ten years (including 9/11) of being killed by lightning are 20 times greater than being killed by air terrorism. And the number of lives that might be saved if the energy directed at malicious airplane passengers were instead focussed on drunken car drivers boggles the mind.

Though for serious mind-boggling it’s the new horror film: invasion of the body scanners. Just so we know exactly what this entails, here’s a trailer, a movie of a man and a woman going through the scanners. It is, of course, nsfw (not safe for work.) The first of a number of logical inconsistencies in the protection scheme was that in the UK, the scanners show enough to violate the child pornography laws, so no one under 18 will be scanned.

Winter solstice is time of greatest darkness, which of course is why so many cultures have festivals of lights at this time. But in our culture the lights have gotten over the top, with thousands of lights blazing as you walk down the road, and when you get to the mall at the end of the road (all our roads may not lead to Rome, but most lead to a mall) the lights have become so bright there are no longer any shadows. That’s a profound loss. In the shadows lie our deep fears, and this time of the year traditionally allowed us to look at those fears, to name those shadows, and to learn how they connect to us. If we don’t connect to our shadows, we never grow up, and (like my namesake) we can only live in never never land.

This year, when I look in the darkness, I see the shadow of my country, and it is a dark and oil-stained shadow. I used to be proud of Canada. When I travelled around the world, and people asked me where I was from, I would answer Canada, and they would say, “Oh, Canada good” and then make jokes about snow and cold and I would laugh, and then we’d go out and have a drink and become friends. But as George Monbiot so accurately says, “So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. The tar barons of Alberta…are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.” I read that and wish I could find a reason to disagree.

Soma or Big Brother? Destruction or distraction? For years “Brave New World” was balanced against “1984″, as though those two works defined the opposite ends of the dystopian spectrum, a spectrum one might presume to be exclusively in shades of grey. And though such an opposition ignores the many other fine works describing the range of hand-baskets in which we may be hell-bound, the pairing offered a useful metaphor. For many, the final word on the debate was Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” which in 1986 argued brilliantly that it was Huxley, not Orwell, whose map more accurately charted our society’s devolution. If you haven’t read Postman, or have only fuzzy memories of “1984″ or “Brave New World” check out Stuart McMillen’s concise and clear outline of Postman’s contrast between the Orwellian and Huxleyan dystopias. It’s a funny cartoon summary with painfully accurate images of Huxleyan indulgence and Orwellian control. And it’s hard to argue against Huxley in a week when Google (to whom we’ll return later on) tells us that people find the question of whether the world’s leaders in Copenhagen will manage to avert the impending climate catastrophe to be five million hits less interesting than Tiger Woods, whom we are given to understand has been putting his balls into the wrong holes.

Despite that, I think Postman had it wrong.