Brain Freeze

Winters are one of two things in Canada. In 99 per cent of the country, they are long, cold and very, very bitter. Where I live, they are long and damp with stretches of a month or more where we record some precipitation every day.

Anyway, by March, Canadians are suffering from cabin fever. They're a little off. Too much shoveling or too much sloshing does strange things to the brain.

Hence, the reason early March is when Canadian university students, aided by all sorts of looney tune supporting groups with fantastical names that usually invoke peace, justice, truth or freedom host Israel Apartheid Week. (It is, by the way, one of my long-held truisms that if any of those four words appear in a group's title, an individual's internet name, etc. that you can be damned sure they stand for exactly the opposite.) This five or six day testament to hate is particularly prevalent in Ontario and Quebec. Like I say, the cold does get to you after a while...

2011's IAW was particularly noteworthy for Nick Day, the elected prefect of Queen's University. Day wrote an article on a useful-idiot lefty Web site complaining of the ongoing genocide of palestinians and signing it in his official capacity as the representative of thousands of students. This particular candidate for an eventual Darwin Award (Rachel Corrie Division) may not escape unscathed, however; enough students at Queen's were outraged and he now faces a recall vote.

Equally, both Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Conservative) and Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff (Liberal) rightly stepped forward this year to condemn IAW, as did the entire Ontario Legislature. Of censure from the New Democrat Party, the Bloc Quebecois or the fringe Green Party, all left-leaning, nary a word. They wouldn't want to alienate their supporters, I suppose.

Now, it's no surprise that people hate Israel and that IAW and its proponents hide what is actually virulent anti-Semitism behind idiotic labels like "Israeli apartheid". But, what is shocking is that we are, apparently, raising generations of young people with absolutely no understanding of historical fact. Not conjecture but clear fact. Equally, they don't know the definitions of common words like "apartheid" and "genocide", throwing them around as if the rest of us will be convinced merely by seeing them in print. And, let's not forget, modern history - while Day and his moronic cohorts were busy railing all week against Israel, the Arab world remained in severe flux with people actively gunned down in the streets, prevented from assembling or arrested and jailed with little or no cause.

Keep in mind, the IAW is specific to universities. These are the places we send our children to obtain higher learning. Yet, somehow many of the people who attend these universities have bought easily dispelled propaganda which goes largely unchallenged and, even sadder, is often supported by the ivory tower set.

My teenage son was quizzing me the other day about his post-secondary options and stated he had no intention (at this point, anyway) of going to university. Seeing as what's going on on numerous campuses, there are a bunch I wouldn't want him near, anyway.