The Culture of Hate. A Canadian Viewpoint.

Has our civil society today lost the will to react firmly against hate and intolerance?

The great ninth-century Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon commented that the thirst for revenge affords the pleasure of seeing discomfiture of its enemy, assuages the vehemence of its wrath and puts an end to excessive brooding. Saadia said that the man who is consumed by the desire for revenge gets into a frame of mind of refusing to accept intercession or entertaining any feeling of compassion or pity or listening to any plea of clemency.

Today, is my world also your world?

Over one thousand years later Saadia’s comments still reflect the attitude that we have learnt nothing. As we observe the hatred and intolerance between political elites, Sunni and Shia, between the Muslim and the Jew, we find very little is based upon the two way acceptance that my world is also your world.

Hamas, as a political entity and their armed wing known as the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade, are the deluded, splenetic terrorist psychopaths of the Gaza Strip, lovers of hate, initiators of democide, they gloat over people’s misfortune, and falsify historical evidence. It is their wish to instill hatred from birth in its populace against the Jew that has no hope in hell or will in stopping. It is in their DNA. It is a hatred that has its own direction, its own time and space, egged on by the perverse nature of extreme fanatics utilizing the services of the ten-second clip, satellite dishes, mobile phones, and as identified, photos of the children of Gaza training to kill Jews.

It is hatred and intolerance also spurred on by educated societies and social networks to the masses of the uneducated and their educated children.

Lighting the match of hate and intolerance

It’s been said that because today our media have very little moral fibre left, they have enhanced the egregious display of open prejudice against the Jew pervading our society. The days where media were supposed to spread enlightenment has vanished. We have crossed the red line. It’s an utter travesty.

Today, as many of us of a certain age, dream for the return of independent news commentators of our world, we attempt to compare the difference between fake news and the flag-waving, drum-rolling entertainment thrust upon us by many anti-Israel social and media networks.

In Canada, where I live, nowhere is this clearer than within the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC), Canada’s national public broadcaster, the darling of anti-Israel propagandists, whose prejudice has continued for many years and currently with unprecedented ferocity and malice is well defined here by Honest Reporting Canada. CBC through its programming has painted Israel as an evil state, even though anyone with even a passing knowledge of that country can see at a glance this is a baseless lie and despicable libel.

Where has our civil society disappeared to?

I ask you, has civil society today lost the will to react firmly against hate and intolerance in this topsy-turvy world we live in? Yes, probably it has. Is civil society prepared for the future? Probably not!