- Jonathan Kay: How did the École Polytechnique anniversary get transformed into a festival of cynical, hyperfeminist propaganda?
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On July 12, 1995, Serbian forces near Srebrenica began cleansing the local population of Muslims. Like the Nazis who greeted Jews at the concentration camps, the Serb commanders sent their prey off in different directions. Women and children were put on buses, and expelled to the Muslim-majority Bosniak territory up north. But the men, including boys as young as 14, were directed instead to a building described as the "White House."
They never came out. Most were killed with a single bullet to the head, but others were left to die through more gruesome methods. More than 8,000 Bosniaks perished in the Srebrenica massacre, all but a few dozen of them male.
In other words, this genocide wasn't just aimed at Muslims, but more at male Muslims. If you were a woman, you lived. If you were a man, some Serbian Josef Mengele would wave his hand and dispatch you to the charnel house.
And yet, do any of us mourn the dead of Srebrenica as anything except human beings — as opposed to martyrs for manhood? When the 15th anniversary of this episode is observed in July, will male bloggers wail about their lot — about how they live shorter, more violent lives than women? Will the event become a pretext for complaints about, say, child-custody bias in family courts?
Somehow, I doubt it. So why is our observance of the the École Polytechnique Massacre — whose 20th anniversary passed over the weekend — always shot through with exactly this sort of crass activism?
- Barbara Kay: Twenty years after the Montreal Massacre, it's time to end the moral pogrom against Canadian men
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December 6, marking the 20th anniversary of the Polytechnique massacre of 14 Montreal women engineering students, is a date that normally sparks a print column from me. I decided to pass this year on print and post in the blog, as I have made my case against the sanctification of this event so many times before, and have nothing new to add to this column in December, 2007, where I laid out my complaints in full. But I am particularly glad I didn't do a column on the massacre this year, because it would have looked like a crib of the December 7 column by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail, in which Wente pretty well reprises everything I have been saying about the misandry-driven, Polytechnique-fuelled White Ribbon campaign for years.
I am not accusing Wente of cribbing me, by the way. On the contrary, I am glad to know that Wente has independently come to the same conclusions as mine, and am very glad to have such a prestigious ally in debunking this unwholesome enterprise. As Wente notes, women are no more at risk from male violence today than they were before, as violent crime in general is going down, and men are far more at risk for violence from other men than women.
But they're only men, so who cares. Not feminists. One of the great curiosities of the feminist movement is their indifference to male victimization by both male and female perpetrators. In cases of male-on-male violence, they pretty take the attitude that it doesn't count as worthy of public sympathy (even though they ignore or make excuses for lesbian-on-lesbian violence, statistically higher than male-on-female violence in intimate partnerships). In cases where women really hurt men badly - and guns, knives or, say, golf clubs, for a random example, are a great leveller - they may find it "amusing" (this is how one Montreal radio station female guest characterized the image of Tiger Woods being chased around by an angry wife); or if they aren't quite so heartless, they'll still refuse to admit that women can administer violence to men unless provoked, even though all credible research, as well as the unforced admissions of many many female perpetrators of violence, tell a different story.
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