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1. Marky Mark said,
   December 31st, 2008 at 6:14 pm

   If he had waved that sign in Canada he could have been prosecuted for hate speech under the Criminal Code.

2. Bryan said,
   December 31st, 2008 at 8:45 pm

   If he had waved that sign in Canada he could have been prosecuted for hate speech under the Criminal Code.

   Better yet, take his ass to the CHRC on section 13… Ain’t that right all you free-speech hating left-wing fanatics?

3. Robert McClelland said,
   December 31st, 2008 at 10:08 pm

   If he had waved that sign in Canada he could have been prosecuted for hate speech under the Criminal Code.

   I doubt it. The juice lobby in Canada isn’t that powerful.

4. Marky Mark said,
   December 31st, 2008 at 10:18 pm

   Ridicule of the guy is a good approach but clearly the typo in his sign would not be enough to save him if you read the sections (318 and 319).

   http://www.efc.ca/pages/law/cc/cc.part-viii.html

5. Robert McClelland said,
   December 31st, 2008 at 10:29 pm

   Maybe, but then given how obvious the sign was I’d wager that the guy was a rightwing plant. Next week the same guy will be claiming he was mugged and the assailant carved a B in his face.

6. arthurdecco said,
   January 1st, 2009 at 1:56 pm

   Maybe, but then given how obvious the sign was I’d wager that the guy was a rightwing plant.

   Your suspicions makes the most sense to me, Robert, judging by how perfectly placed he was for his photo op. That stuff doesn’t happen by accident.

7. arthurdecco said,
   January 1st, 2009 at 9:40 pm

   I see you’re doing your part for the Reich, Marky Mark. Tell me, is it paid work, or do you do it for the love of your (other) country?

   Israel backed by army of cybersoldiers

   From Yonit Farago in Jerusalem

   WHILE Israel fights Hezbollah with tanks and aircraft, its supporters are campaigning on the internet.
   Israel’s Government has thrown its weight behind efforts by supporters to counter what it believes to be negative bias and a tide of pro-Arab propaganda. The Foreign Ministry has ordered trainee diplomats to track websites and chatrooms so that networks of US and European groups with hundreds of thousands of Jewish activists can place supportive messages.

   article continues at:

   http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article693911.ece

8. Marky Mark said,
   January 2nd, 2009 at 9:36 am

   That’s an interesting comment arthurdecco, as one of the bloggers whose blog you used to stain with attacks on Jews told me that you in fact most likely were a Likud plant. Makes sense. Your MO is to find a blog where the blogger takes a principled stand against Israel and become a regular commenter there. The blogger is typically someone under attack for being anti-Israel and is thereby unfairly accused of being anti-Semitic.

   Then you start to test the waters to see what you can get away with and your comments move away from Israel to vast conspiracies involving “the Jews” so as to become clear expressions of classical anti-Semitism. The blogger, having been smeared before, understandably initially is tempted to defend you as a possible fellow target of a smear.

   In the result the blogger’s principled criticism of Israel becomes overshadowed by a debate about anti-Semitism stemming not from the initial blog post but from your comments.

   But in the end almost everyone realizes that any commenter who seriously could write what you’ve written here (see below) and who could link to unambiguously Judeophobic websites like JwishTribalRview [sic] is not remotely steeped in the traditions and values of the Left in Canada.

   For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look at this comment and the firestorm that ensued.

   This too.

   Oh–and I don’t work for anyone–and nice try with the classic “dual loyalty” smear. Once again you make a point putting you in the company of David Duke.

9. Bryan said,
   January 2nd, 2009 at 5:41 pm

   artherdecco just got pwned!

10. arthurdecco said,
    January 2nd, 2009 at 11:10 pm

    artherdecco just got pwned!

    Only in the minds of gnats and imbeciles, Bryan.

    MM, It’s nice to know how easy it is to elicit the reaction I expected from you even if I don’t feel particularly proud of myself for doing so.

    I should apologize for poking you with a stick when you really didn’t deserve it this time, based on your present comments. But I won’t be. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to apologize to you: the Freak-that-is-you who has chased me around the internet for literally years screeching about what an anti-Semite I am to anyone within screeching distance. (Thank gawd some of them finally told you to, “Shut the fuck up!”)

    Weird behaviour like yours tends to colour one person’s opinion of the other…and the lengths they’re prepared to go to be civil in the aftermath.

    …

    But now that the psychopaths in charge of Israel are back to murdering innocent people with the full weight of their aerial divisions – murdering women, children, policemen, religious leaders, university students, Palestinian government workers and even some militants - back to bombing public apartment buildings, private homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, government offices and the Palestinian Parliament building in order to influence the results of their Israeli election (!) – an election where both sides are trying to woo the majority of the Israeli voters, (who actually approve of this latest round of war crimes dished out to the Palestinians!) – where the battle is conjoined by two equally sociopathic political groups trying to outdo each other on how savage their assaults will be on these pathetically helpless Palestinians, well, I kind of got my back up when I read your name at the top of one more post filled to the brim with the slimy sophistry you pollute our political and social intercourse with.

    I lost it, kind of…

    My rage got away from me while I was thinking of all those times I gave you the opportunity to condemn the very real war crimes Israel had committed against the Palestinians and the Lebanese – those times when you slithered away from committing yourself with anything more than your usual platitudes that meant nothing to anyone.

    I got to thinking about what a disgraceful liar you have proved yourself to be, time after time, in our exchanges - about what an earnest defender of Israel you’ve been - what a “good German” you can be depended on to be, so to speak.

    I got to thinking about what a shitty year it’s been for regular people everywhere and about how much of that shittiness can be attributed to those you have passionately defended over our acrimonious time together.

    I finally remembered how much I despised you for your cowardice, your dishonesty, your ignorance and your cruelty.

    I got angry when I thought of your refusal to ever engage honestly the arguments I provided in any substantive way. You, and the group of hyenas who supported you always found a way to make the conversation about me so that you didn’t have to engage the points I raised in my posts. Always.

    I. will. never. forget.

    I want you to continue to link to posts I will never re-read. I’d like your efforts to lead those who do link to them to explore further. I’d like nothing more for everyone to examine our written relationship in depth.

    Of course that’s not going to happen.

    You and me mean nothin’ to no one. We exist only in what we write right now. Our pasts are buried in the bowels of the internet where they will never be read again, (except perhaps by third-rate scholars, freaks and those with too much time on their hands or an unhealthy agenda.)

    So what’s my point? This is my point:

    What have you got to say about Israel’s illegal assault on Gaza?

    That’s my point.

    I’m not remotely interested in whatever delusion you’ve constructed out of your self-serving “greatest hits” taken from our chequered past. I want to know what you think about Israel’s right-now illegal assault on Gaza and the million and a half people who live there.

    That’s why I yanked your gold chain, bud.

    Spill.

11. Marky Mark said,
    January 3rd, 2009 at 8:49 am

    I wear a gold chain?

12. arthurdecco said,
    January 3rd, 2009 at 10:50 am

    Marky Mark. I see you haven’t changed a whit. You’re still a venal coward.

    And with your silence you have shown your complicity in Israel’s war crimes.

    Someday we’ll be able to throw you terrorist supporters in prison where you belong.

    It’s only a matter of time.

13. Marky Mark said,
    January 3rd, 2009 at 11:02 am

    OK, arthurdecco, I’m going to give a reasoned reply to your comment, as there’s a lot in it. In doing so I will note right off the bat that you didn’t at all deal with the point of my earlier comment which pointed out that there are some familiar with your commenting who think you’re a rightwing plant with an agenda to discredit criticism of Israel.

    You say that I have chased me around the internet for literally years screeching about what an anti-Semite I am to anyone within screeching distance. This is silly. There is some notion of accountability for our comments even when made under a pseudonym. I’ve taken you on in a handful of blogs where we’ve both commented. There are many more blogs where a simple Google search shows you’ve left many comments and I haven’t commented on any of those blogs. Here is such a thread where people took you on for your past comments and I was unaware of it until now.

    Now, as for the Arab Israeli dispute, if you want to know some of what I think you can take a look at some of the comments I left here. What you’re doing, however, is what true progressives decry when rightwingers do it to Muslims-namely, you are demanding that Jewish Canadians distance themselves from Israel as if it is assumed that the starting point is that every Jewish Canadian is a settler.

    But of course you’re about as progressive as Pat Buchanan.

    You then say I got to thinking about what a shitty year it’s been for regular people everywhere and about how much of that shittiness can be attributed to those you have passionately defended over our acrimonious time together. Cunning you may be but the meaning of that statement is very clear to me. Glad to see that you’ve now modified your behaviour such that you’re now too timid to be as direct as you’d like to be.

    You say I got angry when I thought of your refusal to ever engage honestly the arguments I provided in any substantive way. You, and the group of hyenas who supported you always found a way to make the conversation about me so that you didn’t have to engage the points I raised in my posts. Always. You’re right-I don’t think it is possible to engage directly on real issues with someone who links to hate sites. That’s why I think you may be a plant-you mix up legitimate points with discreditable points and sources with the result that even the legitimate points lose their power.

    Your punch line is to demand an answer to your question: What have you got to say about Israel’s illegal assault on Gaza?

    I don’t support it.

    Your reference to my supposed gold chain is of course another single entendre that constitutes a clue into your agenda.

    I’ll add this comment. It seems to me that when you look at your comments as a whole, a reasonable take on them is that you in effect make the case for Zionism. If it is true that, as you’ve argued, Jews are different and “must dwell alone,” that leads to the conclusion that they require a separate country does it not?

    Remember this point as well: there is an Israel only because of millenia of continuous religious and ultimately nationalist persecution of Jews. In North American and in much of Europe Zionism was deeply unpopular among Jews who wanted to believe that they could be full and equal citizens of the countries where they lived.

    Even in Ukraine.

    Sadly the systematic mass murder of European Jewry in WWII forced the issue and Israel was created as a result.

    I don’t question that the indigenous Arab population of the Holy Land has paid the price for the decision of the United Nations to partition that land as a result of the horrors inflicted by Europe on its Jewish inhabitants over a very long period of time.

    But I don’t think you care about them at all. Your agenda is quite different.

    I see that as I was composing this comment you submitted another comment suggesting my silence makes me complicit in Israel’s alleged war crimes. Again, that’s like saying that Muslim Canadians must denounce things like the attacks in Mumbai when they had no part in them and are perfectly entitled to live their lives as normal Canadians. Or that Ukrainian Canadians must denounce every anti-Semitic act that take places in Ukraine. One could go on and on.

14. arthurdecco said,
    January 3rd, 2009 at 3:01 pm

    Marky Mark, Reading your latest, I was reminded of a few quotations I collected over the years. While searching for a credit for one of them I discovered two more that seemed written with you in mind. So first, the new two:

    “Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.” Henry Ford

    ” I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” Mark Twain

    “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein

    “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” African saying

    Excerpts from two pertinent articles published on The Nation’s website that will never appear in the Canadian press.

    Israeli War Crimes
    By Richard Falk
    December 29, 2008

    Editor’s Note: This statement was issued December 27 in response to Israel’s attack in Gaza by Professor Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories and a longtime member of The Nation’s editorial board.

    The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war.

    Those violations include:

    • Collective punishment: The entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.

    • Targeting civilians: The airstrikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.

    • Disproportionate military response: The airstrikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza’s elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.

    article continues at:

    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090112/falk?rel=hp_currently

    Israel in Gaza: Irrationality

    By Wallace Shawn
    December 29, 2008

    Jews, historically, have been irrationally feared, hated and killed. Given that background, it’s not surprising that the irrationality which surrounded them for so long, the fire of irrationality in which they were almost extinguished, has jumped across and taken hold of the soul of many Jews and indeed dominates the thinking of today’s Israeli leaders and their American supporters.

    Recent history shows that the Jews, as a people, have found few friends who are honest and true. During World War II, when Hitler’s anti-Semitism was responsible for the murdering of the millions of Jews, the world and the United States expressed their own anti-Semitism by refusing to house and welcome the tortured race, preferring instead to let it be exterminated if need be. After the war, the world felt it owed the Jews something–but then showed its lack of true regard for the tormented group by “giving” them a piece of land populated and surrounded by another people–an act of European imperialism carried out exactly at the moment when non-European peoples all over the world were finally concluding that European imperialism was completely unacceptable and had to be resisted. And now we have the spectacle of American politicians encouraging and financing Israeli policies which will ultimately lead to more disaster and destruction for Jews.

    It is not rational to believe that the Palestinians in the occupied territories will be terrorized by force and violence, by cruelty, by starvation or by slaughter into a docile acceptance of the Israeli occupation. There is no evidence that that could possibly happen and mountains of evidence to the contrary.
    Many right-wing Israelis and American Jews clearly believe that Jews have always had enemies and always will have enemies–and who can be shocked that certain Jews might think that? To these individuals, a Palestinian throwing stones at an Israeli soldier, even if his life has perhaps been destroyed by the Israeli occupation, is simply part of an eternal mob of anti-Semites, a mob made up principally of people to whom the Jews have done no harm at all, as they did no harm to Hitler. The logical consequence of this view of the world is that in the face of such massive and eternal opposition, Jews are morally justified in taking any measures they can think of to protect themselves. They are involved in one long eternal war, and a few hundred Palestinians killed today must be measured against many millions of Jews who were killed in the past. The agony the Israelis might inflict on a Palestinian family today must be seen in the perspective of Jewish families in agony all over the world in the past.

    It is irrational for the Israeli leaders to imagine that the Palestinians will understand this particular point of view–will understand why Jews might find it appropriate, let us say, to retaliate for the death of one Jew by killing a hundred Palestinians. If a Palestinian killed a hundred Jews to retaliate for the killing of one Palestinian–for that matter, if a Thai killed a hundred Cambodians to retaliate for the killing of one Thai–which, from the point of view of the Israeli leaders, would of course be unjust, that would be racist, as if one Palestinian or one Thai were worth a hundred Israelis or a hundred Cambodians. But if a Jew does it, it’s not unjust and it’s not racist, because it’s part of an eternal struggle in which the Jews have lost and lost and lost–they’ve already lost more people than there are Palestinians. Well, it’s not surprising that certain Jews would feel this way, but no Palestinian will ever share that feeling or be willing to accept it. What the Palestinians see is an implacable and heartless enemy, one that considers itself un-bound by any rules or principles, an enemy that can’t be reasoned with but can only be feared, hated and, if possible, killed.

    article continues at:

    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090112/shawn?rel=hp_currently

15. Marky Mark said,
    January 3rd, 2009 at 3:34 pm

    Well for all you know I agree wholeheartedly with both of those quotes about Israel.

    You are distorting our disagreement to portray it as being about Israel. You know very well that, to the contrary, it’s been about your claims of alleged nefarious conspiratorial Jewish control of the World. You have in the past (and to some extent in this thread as well) sought to hijack a legitimate and needed debate regarding Israeli policy and its arguably catastrophic consequences by moving to references that could have been lifted out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The effect is to move the debate to a discussion as to whether or not your comments are across the line (they are) with the debate as to Israeli behaviour totally chilled as that discussion takes place.

    By all means let’s even have a discussion as to whether the idea of Zionism was inherently flawed and doomed as per one of the quotes you just introduced.

    But as that discussion takes place you’d have to leave the age old stereotypes out of that debate. Unless of course, as someone dealing in bad faith for one reason or another, that’s not a debate you want to see occur.

16. mynalee johnstone said,
    January 4th, 2009 at 7:25 pm

    Definitely a plant.

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