The pseudo-left marches away from reason

To get just a glimpse of the dementia that has crippled the cognitive functioning of what was once the western world's brave and lively tradition of intellectual dissent, feminist solidarity and progressive internationalism, all you need to do is look in on any one of the dozens of vanity projects being staged across Canada at the moment under the Israeli Apartheid Week marquee.

In Halifax, "radical educator" Evan Coole facilitates a Deconstructing Pink Imperialism workshop to look at television commercials in ways that pro-vide instruction in the avoidance of imagining straight male Muslims as "a collective enemy of queers," with an emphasis on Israel, which shows up in the brochure as Occupied Palestine. In Toronto, Trish Salah, a professor with something called the Simone de Beauvoir Institute in Montreal, draws the connections between Palestinians, health care for transgendered people and anti-capitalist activism in a reading of poems from her work in progress, titled Lyric Sexology.

At the University of British Columbia, up from Seattle's Antioch University, Global and Gender Studies professor Nada Elia, formerly of the Anti-Militarism and Anti-Occupation Task Force of the Women of Color Against Violence Steering Collective, but now with the Steering Collective of The Critical Ethnic Studies Association, delivers the Israeli Apartheid Week keynote lecture and elaborates upon what she calls "the currently non-existent academic freedom in the U.S., Israel, and Palestine."

At the University of Guelph, Professor Michael Keefer, the former chair of the literature grant adjudication committee of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, who says al-Qaida's mass atrocity of Sept. 11, 2001 was "organized (and subsequently covered up) by civilian and military officials at the highest levels of the Bush regime," delivers a lecture on the humane, rational and peaceful necessity of Judenstaatrein. In polite academic circles nowadays, it is known as boycotting, divesting from and imposing sanctions upon Israel.

Because Thursday was International Women's Day, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions groupuscule within the Women of Diverse Origins affiliates of the women's day marchers in Montreal gathered at the corner of Guy and de Maissoneuve with Palestinian flags and a banner of their own. Rally-goers were encouraged to bring their own signs and noisemakers.

That's just a random sampling of what's playing these days at The Zombie Octoplex.

The script repeats in cities across Canada, and in Albuquerque, Boca Raton, Brussels, Cape Town, Coven-try, Edinburgh, Geneva, London, Ljubljana, New York, Omaha, Phoenix, Stockholm, Zurich, and dozens of such cities. If you can resist the hegemonist and patriarchal urges of homonation-alism, you will correctly avoid taking any pride to notice that Israeli Apartheid Week is a distinctly Canadian contribution to these giddy eruptions of the global avant-garde. It all began in Toronto in 2005. It continues to spread its toxic mumbo jumbo, every year sucking greater volumes of oxygen out of all the spaces where a robust Israeli-Palestinian solidarity movement might otherwise be.

You'd think the Arab Spring never happened. You'd think the Khomein-ists in Tehran were not still jailing and torturing Iranian democracy activists and feminists and journalists, and that Bashar al Assad's Baathists were not continuing their slaughter of thou-sands of Syrians even as I write this. It is as though the very rights and liberties that millions of young Arabs have been fighting and dying for from Algeria to Amman were not already guar-anteed, uniquely in the Middle East, by Israel.

Ah, but what about the fundamental rights of free speech on campus? For one thing: "To argue with a man who has renounced his reason," as the 18th-century abolitionist and radical philosopher Thomas Paine put it, "is like giving medicine to the dead." For another: The thing to watch for is what this elaborately organized and carefully orchestrated renunciation of reason is bringing to the Zombie Octoplex on March 30.

In a grotesquely accelerated propaganda exercise of the "Gaza Flotilla" type that Canada's pseudo-left has lately spent so much money and effort falsely advertising as actual concern for Palestinian suffering, March 30 is shaping up to be a catastrophe far more bloody and perilous to Middle East peace than the disgraceful MV Mavi Marmara "humanitarian aid" hoax of 2010 that left nine so-called peace activists dead.

This time around it's called the Global March to Jerusalem. The plan is to mobilize a million people to storm Israel's borders from Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

The 2010 escapade was mainly a propaganda exercise orchestrated by the reactionary Islamist death cult Hamas in collaboration with a variety of moneybag luminaries, not least the drooling anti-Semite and former Malaysian strongman Mahathir Mohamad. The 2011 MV Tahrir rerun that soaked more than $300,000 out of Canada's self-professed antiwar activists didn't even pretend to be bringing any aid to Gaza, but was rather transparently a ridiculous and irritating ego-trip for the ship's dizzy crew.

The March 30 mobilization is brought to you mainly by the Muslim Brotherhood - the sworn enemy of Arab democrats, feminists and secularists - and by Hezbollah, whose gruesome commandante Has-san Nasrallah shows up in official Global March communiques as His Eminence. Just this week Nasrallah declared Jerusalem "Al Quds, the capital of Palestine, the Arabs and Muslims."

You can just see the curl of a smile on the face of Bashar Assad in Damascus, whose secret police last June staged a kind of Global March trial run by rushing a mob toward Israeli border guards on the Golan Heights. At least 24 people were dead before the day was over.

The Global March is endorsed in Ottawa by the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid and the Canada Boat to Gaza.

In Kabul it's endorsed by the Taliban-sympathizing Islamic Movement of Afghanistan. The Global March International Central Committee reads like a roster of the most savage misogynists on Earth. Desmond Tutu says he's for it, too.