Again with the Canaries

Cassandra, of Villainous Company, writes about a phenomenom that is becoming more obvious every day.

In his Sun Times column, Mark Steyn used a phrase which caught my eye. He called the Jews of France "canaries in history's coal mine". It caught my eye because in November, during the French riots, I wrote a piece called Canaries in the Mineshaft, about the migration of French Jews to Israel, Montreal, and the United States.

Canaries in the mine shaft. It is an ugly image. A terrifying image, almost an archetypal one: instantly recognizable to all of us. We know what it means. We know what is being asked of us, whether we want to recognize it or not. Because it is not birds, but people who we are using in this manner. And this is a historical pattern which would truly be unimaginably horrifying if it were to come to pass.

What kind of civilization shrugs its shoulders and turns away from something like this?

A society that has lost its guts. Or, to put it another way, Europe.

I've been yammering about this for some time. I can't believe that, after all the incidents of synagogue descration, on-the-street harassment of identifiable Jews, and several murders, it took over a week to speak the name - antisemitism.

Tags = antisemitism