Too many journalists have fallen for claims that the B.C. cabinet minister said something 'racist.' She didn't
Neither her two grovelling apologies for having said nothing wrong in the first place nor her masochistic submission to “anti-Islamophobia training” were humiliations sufficient to save Selina Robinson, the British Columbia minister for advanced education ousted by B.C. Premier David Eby last week.
The real reason behind the sadism involved in Robinson’s political lynching will elude you if you rely too casually on the saturation news coverage of the grisly affair. You will be left with the impression that owing to her glibly unscripted but otherwise reasonable remarks during a Zoom conference panel discussion on Jan. 30, Robinson had induced so much “hurt” among British Columbians, as Premier Eby put it, that she had to go.
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The main problem with this rendering of the story is that it isn’t true.
To understand Robinson’s political lynching the first thing you need to notice was the noose that first appeared around her neck months earlier. Being a “progressive” Jew of “woke” sensibility and only the mildest Zionist inclination served only to tighten the rope as the howling from antisemitic and “anti-Zionist” voices in Canada grew louder and louder following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7.
The backstory to Robinson’s defenestration goes back years, and just one part of it involves the “activism” of a creepy groupuscule that purports to speak for Canada’s Jews that calls itself Independent Jewish Voices. They’ve been lurking at the uglier margins of Robinson’s own New Democratic Party for more than a decade, and besides, IJV has always had it in for B’nai Brith, the long-standing Jewish human rights organization that hosted the Jan. 30 panel discussion where Robinson committed her heresy.
According to Shimon Koffler Fogel of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, anyone who affords IJV any credibility “must be understood as doing so to justify their own anti-Israel political agendas.” This would seem to reflect quite poorly on quite a few journalists who have gone out of their way to burnish IJV’s credentials lately, notably by platforming IJV’s denunciations of........