Hollering for Dollars for the Wiesenthal Centre

• One of he most committed enemies of free speech in Canada is the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies (FSWC). Going back to the mid 1990s, they made war on any Canadian ISPs brave enough to host controversial “rightwing” websites. They have been  interveners for Internet  censorship in a number of key cases, including Sabina Citron and the Toronto’s Mayor’s Committee on Community and Race Relations vs The Zundelsite and Richard Warman v. Marc Lemire. For almost 20 years they have been warning of 5,000, 7,500, now 15,000 “hate” sites available on the Internet. (Gosh, the outlets for dissent unacceptable to the Wiesenthalers just gets worse and worse. Send money!!!) CAFE has been studying two years worth of fundraising letters fired out by a guy with the handle Avi Benlolo. He’s the president and CEO of the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. His pleas for pennies, well, actually dollars, follow a pattern: The Nazis are coming, the Nazis are coming, people who don’t like Jews are speaking up. Send money and we’ll try to shut them up.
• His fundraising letters ere undated. Here are some recent samples. One from 2012 asserts: “Fight back against anti-Semitic hate worldwide. A respected university poll suggests that more than  150-million Europeans hold intensely anti-Jewish views. … A study presented at the Bundestag reported 20% of Germans still harbor anti-Semitic attiudes. A banner reading ‘Adolf Hitler was right’ and a swastika were displayed at a Madrid building. Italian winemakers are selling bottles of wine with labels portraying Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders.” [To be fair, the same Italian wine bottler also has labels extolling the Italian Carabiniere and  another the Alpine fighters. French bottlers  feature labels with Marilyn Monroe and another with a frog and the name “Fat Bastard”.  So what?] So, “FSWC is exposing the dark undercurrent of anti-Semitism and demanding Europe’s leaders confront the anti-Semites in their midst. Indeed our partners at the Simon Wiesenthal Center … have just achieved what the New York Times called ‘a major victory’ when they presented a hard hitting report exposing the German pulp magazine Der Landser — in print for over 50 years — violated German laws prohibiting the glorification of Nazism [but not the glorification of communism, it might be noted]. The publisher was forced to pull the plug on the magazine.” Avi Benlolo is not long on introspection, but it might occur to a person less fixated on shaking shekels out of his supporters that, if 20% of Germans have a less than rosy view of Jews, it might be as a result of seeing them as meddlers trying to censor and shut up people with whom they don’t agree.
• The Wiesenthalers are very concerned about anti-Israeli Apartheid committees organized on many Canadian campuses. An undated 2012 fundraising letter reports: “FSWC has been active in helping campus communities combat anti-Semitism, identify and confront hate speech and promote dialogue among diverse viewpointsl We are also pleased to commend those universities who recognize that anti-Semitism has become a growing problem for both student and faculty on campus, and for taking steps to address the issue head on,”  Don’t let the talk of “dialogue among diverse opinions” fool you. Shutting up the critics of Israel is the agenda.
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• Avi Benlolo, CEO of the Friends of the Simon  Wiesenthal Centre, and Ontario’s Liberal lesbian Premier Kathleen Wynne.
• Earlier this year, the National Post (April 12, 2013) reported: “University of Manitoba Students Union voted Thursday to strip the group Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) of official club status. … For several years, pressure from Jewish groups including B’nai Brith has been put on the University to ban  … ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ (IAW), but the University has refused demands to cancel or censor this annual event. On Friday, in a statement titled ‘first victory in Canada,’ B’nai Brith applauded the motion as a win for the democratic process.” Victories are seen, not as dialogue or “diversity of opinions” but in silencing opponents. The chatter about “hate speech” is mischievous because it is never defined. Legally speaking, however, no one on a Canadian campus has been charged, let alone convicted, of violating Canada’s “hate laws”, repressive as they might be.
• In another fundraiser, Benlolo proclaims: ” Israel Apartheid Week persists in promoting a racist ideology targeting a minority group with little oversight from the campus authorities, or concern for the ongoing intimidation of Jewish students.” The accusation of “racism” is incomprehensible, as the IAW is accusing the Zionists accusers of racism, Readers will see a familiar “human rights” industry  notion that criticism of a privileged group (in this case Zionists) is a form of “intimidation. Anyway, the Wiesenthalers will rush to the rescue, if you’ll just send money: “You can count on FSWC to be on the front lines working on your behalf to combat anti-Semitism and hate 365 a year, wherever and whenever the rights of the Jewish people and the State of Israel are concerned.”
• In yet another fundraiser, Benlolo  proclaims: “When you see your child .. off to university, … what you do not expect is that new students will be subjected to harassment, intimidation and a storm of anti-Israel hate. …. You know that FSWC will never stand idly by as anti-Israel fanatics poison young hearts and minds against the Jewish State.” There is an irony here that likely escapes Benlolo. Israel is identified as “a Jewish state,” but were one to argue that Canada should remain a Christian and European land, true to its founding/settler people, one would find oneself denounced as a ‘racist’ if not an ‘anti-Semite.’
• In a later 2012, begging letter, Benlolo writes: “Combat anti-Israel, anti-Semitic hate and pro-terror activity on the Internet. As you know, FSWC is one of Canada’s leading experts on Internet hate and terrorism, Our groundbreaking Digital Terrorism and Hate project has found 15,000 problematic social networks forums, blogs and Twitter accounts, and our app has become a key support for Canadian law enforcement officials as they track and analyze extremist activity on the World Wide Web.”  Another fundraiser adds: “Our Digital Terrorism and Hate annual reports, specialized app for police and intelligence forces, and high level leadership training on four continents is combatting the growing use of the social media and Internet technology in the service of bigotry, anti-Semitism and terrorism.” Thus, the Wiesenthalers are helping direct police forces, including Canadian police forces, in their spying on the expression of political opinions on-line by their fellow Canadians. Now, that certainly deserves a big old cheque as support.  
• Note the dog’s breakfast of villains — “anti-Israel,” “hate,” “extremist,” “problematic.” The Wiesenthalers, who, of course, have a strong political agenda seem to have convinced establishment agencies  that they are somehow neutral experts. Freedom suffers. In a 2013 fundraising appeal, Benlolo complained about the co-chairman of the Finish Governments Foreign Affairs Committee who noted of the U.S.: They have a large Jewish population who have a significant control of the money and the media. … This is a sad truth about U.S. politics.’ Many of his peers rushed to defend him from our protests.” Of course, Benlolo and company would see the Finn as “anti-Semitic”. However, was he wrong? Do Jews in the U.S. not have a huge and disproportionate control of the media — heading most of the major news networks and Hollywood studios? Over half the donations to the Republicans and over 70% of the donations to the Democrats come from Jews, who constitute just over 2 peer cent of the U.S. population. Most of the “hate” and “anti-Semitism” denounced by Benlolo are merely truths uncomfortable to the Zionist lobby,
• Still another achievement for the FSWC was “we … reported Toronto’s East End Madrassah for teaching extreme forms of anti-Semitism to thousands of students, launching a full police investigation into the school” (which Benlolo doesn’t tell his donors did not result in any charges.) FSWC called investigators’ attention to a school syllabus that referred  [to] ‘Jewish plots and treacheries’ and lumped Jews together with Nazis.” Canadian law wisely accords wide latitude to religious beliefs as opposed to actions. Mr. Benlolo might be forced to do some nimble legalistic dancing to explain away some of the hateful, anti-Goyim (non-Jewish people) passages of the Talmud, taught widely to Jewish youth,