There's something seriously wrong with the Canadian Jewish Congress

There's something seriously wrong with the Canadian Jewish Congress.

I put to you two recent facts that tell the story.

The first is their threatened lawsuit against Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn. Mark describes it here; I'm less interested right now in the disagreement than with the means the CJC sought to resolve the disagreement: they threatened to sue Steyn and Maclean's over what was clearly a fair comment.

While not Jewish himself, I cannot think of a more dedicated advocate of the cause of Israel or Canadian Jewry than Mark Steyn. He sees clearly the threat of radical Islam, and knows that is the threat of our generation -- not the fetishization of the Nazi Holocaust 75 years ago, as the CJC does; but warning against the looming Holocaust that is the aim of radical Islam.

That takes courage -- courage that the CJC lacks.

Steyn doesn't just talk the talk. He fights the fight -- even submitting to a five-day show trial at the hands of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal for precisely his campaign to expose the threat of radical Islam.

You'd think the CJC would regard him as a hero, or at least as an ally -- most Jews I know sure do. But while secular groups like the Civil Liberties Association intervened in support of Steyn, the CJC stayed silent. Well, that's not quite true, is it: they were amongst the only defenders of the censorship provisions of Canada's HRCs.

So that's how they treat our truest allies: abandon them in their time of need; threaten to sue them over hurt feelings.

Gotcha.

But how does the CJC treat a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite like Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj?

Oh, I don't throw that appellation around lightly. Besides calling for the legalization of the terrorist organization Hezbollah, and calling for negotiations with them even while they're banned, and flying to Lebanon himself proposing to meet with them, Wrzesnewskyj actually -- this is just too hard to believe -- called up the Globe and Mail, unsolicited, and demanded that Jason Kenney should come home from his "jaunt" to Auschwitz, when Kenney was there for a commemoration.

It's an odious man who thinks that; but it is a bizarrely brazen man who picks up the phone and calls up the paper to announce that.

That's Borys Wrzesnewskyj.

So how do you think the CJC treats him?

How do you think they treat him, compared to Mark Steyn?

The high priests at the CJC give Wrzesnewskyj their blessing.

They ask him to say a benediction for the father of the president of the CJC, Mark Freiman. And when Wrzesnewskyj reads out their scripted words, the CJC goes into full propaganda mode for him, publishing his remarks and e-mail blasting them out to every Jew in the country for whom they have an e-mail address.

So let's recap.

A Jew-lover like Mark Steyn: the CJC threatens to sue.

A Jew-hater like Borys Wrzesnewskyj who condemns the remembrance of the last Holocaust, and condemns the warnings of the next Holocaust: the CJC whitewashes and deodorizes. That kind of cleansing must have that old anti-Semite just laughing and laughing at them.

Good God, there's something deeply sick about the Canadian Jewish Congress when they no longer can tell our community's best friends from our worst enemies.