New flags of convenience

Latest trick of the anti-Semites running the Israel is apartheid campaign is to target the later grades of high school children so that they can hit the ground running with the hatred crowd when they get to university. No need to lose a term indoctrinating them at university with the revisionist and false histories. Out of this is a new attack on Israel. The logic is that because some non-Jewish people live in the sliver of land that represents the sole Jewish country and claim in the globe, the Jewish country should not be allowed to have a flag with a Jewish symbol, or a national anthem that refers to the 2,000 years of yearning to return to Zion as a free people. So, let's leave on one side the hypocrisy of the haters supporting and funding theocratic, homophobic, misogynistic, terrorist tyrannies against a fully functioning democracy, and examine their latest act which came to fruition with a Grade 11 (17 year old) kid in Canada getting her hatred published in the national newspaper. Perhaps the Grade 11 kid's only defence is ignorance, but I doubt that she wrote the letter to inspire or learn, merely to attack.

There are 82 nominally Christian countries and we have not seen any complaints about Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Finland, Dominican Republic, Scandinavian countries…etc. having a cross on their flags, or on the sports shirts of Portugal and Brazil. When Mohammed became the most popular boys’ name in London, England and Wales, why was this kid not complaining that the Cross of St. George and the Union Jack should be scrapped? Where are the complaints about the 56 Islamic countries flying a crescent or including green on their flags. I wonder how the Bahai and Zoroastrians feel about the Iranian Islamic flag?

Surely the provision of equal rights to all citizens of Israel, Jewish or not, gives the lie to the truly offensive apartheid claim. It is not surprising that not all the inhabitants are Jewish and yet the percentage of Jews is high, especially if one factors in events of recent centuries which included the slaughter of Jews, the Ottoman Empire oppression of the Jews struggling to survive in the Holy Land and Perfidious Albion preventing Jews fleeing the Nazi horror to the remaining 22% of the League of Nations area that was mandated for the Jewish homeland before Britain gave more than 78% to the Hashemite clan as a pay-off, then one can presume that the Jewish population of Israel should have been much higher than it is today. It is amazing that in only 60 years, nearly 50% of a people of just under 13 million have returned from 107 countries to their ancestral homeland after being dispersed for nearly 2,000 years.

Israel is hugely accommodating of all religions and one can visit Christian, Muslim, Bahai and Jewish sites unhindered. The Druze and Samaritans worship as they like without oppression. In comparison, the Church of the Nativity and Joseph’s tomb have been desecrated under Palestinian Authority rule. Transjordan barred Jews from the Wailing Wall and Hebron after they made captured areas Judenrein in 1948 and destroyed the 68 synagogues in the Jewish Quarter. I may just be a person who knows a little more than what is taught in the 11th grade, but I feel very strongly that one should not impose a separate standard, based on ignorance, upon the single Jewish country. The grade 11 kid, Darci Bloom Bertrand ,should get a failing grade.