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Anti-Semitism, Tribalism, Irrationalism & the Postal Workers Union

April 30, 2008 by · 4 Comments 

On April 28, 2008, National Post columnist Jonathan Kay reported that:

At its national convention earlier this month, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers passed a resolution that included the following provision: “CUPW will … support the international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions until Israel recognizes the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

Kay now reports that he has received an e-mail from CUPW president Denis Lemelin, in which Lemelin says, in part:

CUPW has no plans to block mail to and from Israel as of yet.

I replied as follows:
At the convention where CUPE president Sid Ryan was seeking re-election, he supported (proposed?) a resolution to boycott Israel. He was re-elected.

Trade unionism’s allies in the Middle East are the anti-Semites; those who, truth be told, want the elimination of Israel. Here at home, anti-Semitism’s natural home is in socialist collectivism. To the socialist, it’s all association, not reason: “capitalism” brings to consciousness “banking” and “profit”; “banking” and “profit” bring to consciousness “usury”; “usury” brings up the most paranoid and toxic conspiracy in human history: the idea that “Jews, with the help of freemasons, are trying to take over the world through banking”.

The mentally lazy – those who wish to live life on mental auto-pilot, and who think that they can do that so long as they are part of a “tribe” that maintains old traditions and rejects innovations (innovation requires one to think and adapt) – hate that Israelis have turned a desert into a productive, relatively rational society. Seeing progress, economic growth, wealth, change etc. all as enemies, they take the side of stagnation and tribalism. Tribalists become outraged at the introduction of civility, trade, property, rights, justice and the like, all of which threaten to undermine tradition and tribalism; threaten to undermine a system of life lived on autopilot; threaten to permit competition among rational individuals, each putting his own life and happiness first. Rationality, capitalism, and the individualism implied by each, are the great enemies of the collectivist and, in the Middle East, Israel is rightly seen as the foothold both of reason and of its counterpart, capitalism.


Paul McKeever and Sid Ryan on The Michael Coren Show, a few weeks after the CUPE resolution to boycott Israel.