I am afraid of Barbara Kay

Yes, I have reconsidered my decision to not pursue a debate with Barbara Kay. She called me a wimp and, in the words of the great teacher KRS-One, « if you call my name I come get that. »

A double standard, Ms. Kay, is when you make a living out of denouncing what you perceive to be the racism at the core of the Separatist movement while at the same time write some of the most unilaterally chilling dismissal of an entire ethnic community, nay, culture, namely Arab, that I have ever read. Twice you have condemned Québec sympathies not for regimes, dictators or terrorist organizations, but « Arab countries ».

Moral relativity, Ms. Kay, is when you condemn a so-called preoccupation by some Québec politicians for « ethnicity » while your writing is replete with a constant division of the citizens of Québec between « old-stock Quebecois », « Pure Laine » and the very eloquent: « by « we » I obviously mean anglos and ethnics ». « Most educated Québécois are wonderful people to live amongst« ( my italics), you wrote. Nobody is excluding you from the Québécois but yourself.

And by the way, God knows we’ve heard a lot of questionable ideas on religion, language and citizenship in the last few weeks, but who the hell is talking about ethnicity but you and my buddies at The Suburban?

Selective memory is when you write « it is only in Quebec that you find racist remarks coming from the mouths of so-called political leadership ». Remember federal cabinet minister Doug Young telling Bloc MP Osvaldo Nunez to find himself another country? Or how about the uplifting anti-Québec political ads run by the parliamentary wing of your newspaper in 1997? Betty Granger’s Asian invasion? Remember Reform MP Bob Kingma sending gays and « ethnics » « to the back of the shop »?

Hypocrisy is reaching far back into the past to a « long tradition of anti-Semitism in the discourse of French intellectuals from France »as proof of « the strains of racism that invariably accompany hardline separatists » and conveniently overlooking that the « principled Stephen Harper »‘s (your words, not mine) own Reform/Alliance/Conservative Party struggled late into the 1990’s to purge itself of the Heritage Front and Social Credit Party elements at it’s root.

Yes I am afraid, Ms. Kay. I am afraid of people who holds someone guilty until proven innocent (how french a concept…) because of the accident of their culture and/or birthplace. I fear a culture in witch fast and easy logical leaps from French-speaking to Arab Francophonie to Rampant Anti-Semitism are not considered « in any way unusual or even highly provocative ». I fear a climate where the cultural insecurities of provincial townspeople who wouldn’t know a Jew from a Sikh from a Mormon are portrayed as proof of widespread organized projects of ethnic cleansing. I fear a country where you must subscribe to predetermined values determined by an arbitrary third party (pun intended) before you are allowed to seek public office or take part in a public demonstration.

I fear a time when what used to be passionate debate about political structures degenerate into politically motivated structured campaigns of fear. I fear that by engaging fear-mongers I feed the beast that I most fear.

I’ll be out of the kitchen for a while, not because of the heat, but because I work for a living.