Fighting To Publish in ‘Multicultural’ Canada

I’ll Do It Myself

By Howard Rotberg, PAJAMAS MEDIA

I founded my own book publishing company to promote the ideas of those who must be heard.

Canada is not Europe. Europeans are saddled with a terrible history of fascism and anti-Semitic genocide, which left a legacy of cultural insecurity and a type of self-hatred. Europe no longer knows what it stands for.

In my book TOLERism: The Ideology Revealed, the elites of much of Europe and elsewhere in the West fix on “tolerance” as a supposed cultural value. Had they followed the Biblical value of “justice” and not appeased the Nazi ideology, there would likely have been a much smaller Second World War and perhaps no Holocaust.

Canada, however, has traditionally been composed of emigrants from the evils of Europe. From the British Isles through Eastern Europe, those fed up with persecution made a new life in the New World.

My father — having survived the war as a slave laborer in Auschwitz, where his parents and little sister were murdered in the gas chambers — could make a new life in a wonderful country. Years earlier, my mother’s parents — on their honeymoon — left a small village in the Ukraine for Canada, escaping generations of Russian and Ukrainian pogroms.

The Europeans — who are now tolerating “no-go” areas in their cities, where radical Islamist separatist justice systems and social and human rights injustices are also therefore tolerated — are now having to reap what they have sown.

I’ve dealt with it myself. In 2003, I wrote a novel about a Canadian professor whose daughter, studying in Israel, is injured in a terrorist attack. He writes a book about how anti-Israel sentiment has begun to reflect a vicious anti-Semitism. I soon ran into Islamist attempts to censor me and my novel.

I was shocked at how easily book stores, human rights organizations, and academia had adopted an ideology of cultural relativism. I, and my book, was shunned by a European-style moral relativism and political correctness. I, the child and grandchild of Jews escaping anti-Semitism in Europe, was told that I must “tolerate” young Islamists shouting me down at a lecture, calling me a “f***ing Jew.”

I was told that I was the racist if I reflected any type of attitude that our Canadian political culture was better than Islamist political culture.

Establishment Jewish organizations, having swallowed the idea that “official multiculturalism” might have perks for Jews, denied the reality of the problem. They continued to focus on the small and peripheral neo-Nazi skinhead movements, while Muslim immigrants and their children were educated to be anti-Semitic.

There was no one at the gate asking them if they were immigrating to Canada to be free of the illiberal regimes left behind, or if they wished to spread them with Islamist centers of sharia law, prayers in public schools, revisionist history textbooks, and university clubs funded by Wahhabist Saudis.

Worst of all, no one was asking these immigrants if they were anti-Semitic.

Ironically, I had predicted my own troubles — in the novel the professor runs afoul of political correctness when he makes some poorly worded comments in a lecture. My novel also predicted subsequent history, as the professor obsesses that a second Holocaust would be led by Iran (which he predicted would go nuclear).

Terrorists now seek the sympathy of “liberals” while they attack Jewish children and fire rockets at Israeli cities, an orgy of death and destruction not seen since the days of Hitler. And like Hitler, whose killing encompassed an ever wider classification of “undesirables,” the Islamists target Christians, African animists, even their own women and children.

The very facts that concern me are deemed too offensive by our elites in media, the universities, and the NGOs to be discussed by “our” side in polite company. And it was deemed “illiberal” to ask collections of Islamists and their radical Leftist supporters to refrain from their supposed freedom to create hatefests against Jews and the Jewish homeland.

I decided to become a publisher.

If other publishers were too politically correct to publish writers who advocated human rights and liberal freedom’s critique of Islamism and its growing acceptance in supposedly liberal countries, then I would just have to do it myself. With degrees in law and in history from the University of Toronto (both of which I returned last year in disgust, as the University of Toronto gave a platform to the hatefest known as Israel Apartheid Week), I felt qualified to enter the honorable profession of assisting authors.

I soon found that other writers, better and more experienced than me, were also shunned by supposedly liberal and tolerant publishing houses — the tolerance was not extended to those whom the most intolerant were finding offensive. And neither they, nor I, were “allowed” to say anything about it.

But today, without reliance on mainstream organizations or the uninterested traditional civil rights organizations like the CCLA or PEN Canada, our publishing company is poised for success. We have a group of eminent writers, and support from a new breed of civil rights organizations and the various online newspapers and magazines that have filled the void created by the mainstream media’s decline into irrelevance. Thanks to the bloggers and those who fight for our freedoms without high-profile organizational titles and financial support, without the incestuous awards given to each other within the mainstream, we today have a groundswell of support for freedom.

Our books are getting out. Each title tends to outsell the previous one. Amazon and our own website allow us to bypass the book chains that put cultural relativism before the exercise of their sacred trust to support freedom. We use ebook format, so that anyone with ten bucks can download the book, whether or not the politically correct deem it safe for their big box stores.

We publish the distinguished Quebec essayist and poet, David Solway, author of some 20 books when he was a leftist. When, after 9/11, he changed his mind on the central issues of our times, the other publishers were afraid to publish him. We publish Israeli novelists like the great Pamela Peled, who writes from the perspective of a female losing family members and friends to terrorism. (If you are not a self-hating leftist Israeli writer, the mainstream publishers are not interested.) We are proud to have published Jamie Glazov’s outstanding collection of interviews about how to deal with tyranny today, titled Showdown With Evil: Our Struggle Against Tyranny and Terror. Jamie, the son of Russian dissidents, has a doctorate from York University. We publish a great freedom-loving Muslim, Salim Mansur, whose recent book, Delectable Lie: A Liberal Repudiation of Multiculturalism (read a PJMedia review of Mansur’s book here) is a straightforward expose of how “official multiculturalism,” premised as it is on the equality of all cultures, is sacrificing the best of Western liberal values and freedoms to a favoritism of equality over liberal rights — including government Human Rights Commissions and their chilling effect on freedom of expression.

Soon we are releasing a volume by Carleton University Emeritus Professor Paul C. Merkley titled Those That Bless You, I Shall Bless: Christian Zionism in Historical Perspective. Merkley sheds light on the theological and historical gulf in Christianity between those who support the Jews and their homeland and those whose “replacement theology” has exacerbated anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism.

I have the right in Canada to promote the ideas of those who must be heard, if we want to protect this free country handed down to us by our parents and grandparents. Through my small but growing publishing house, I join many other fine individuals, bloggers, internet publishers, and authors, all with “thick skins” who are pro-freedom in this blessed country.

The Canadian writer, Howard Rotberg, is the author of TOLERism: The Ideology Revealed and the novel about Israel during the Second Intifada, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author. He is also (acting) president of Mantua Books, and a developer of affordable housing in Ontario. See www.mantuabooks.com and www.howardrotberg.ca.