Mantua Books is releasing my new book later this week.

It is already available through Amazon.com or by email from the publisher at:

mantua2003@hotmail.com.

I will post more information on the book in the next few days.

Mantua is also releasing at the same time the impressive collection of essays by distinguished Canadian author David Solway, entitled Hear, O Israel!

In part one of this essay, I came up with the term "Tolerism" to describe the ideology of excessive Tolerance that is distorting the thought processes of too many in the West.

I pointed out that:

Merriam-Webster defines "tolerance" as:

sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own 

I mentioned that I think that "sympathy" for the human condition is always a good quality.  But what about "indulgence". Merriam-Webster describes the verb "indulging" as:

to give free rein to : to take unrestrained pleasure in : to yield to the desire of : to treat with excessive leniency, generosity, or consideration

Accordingly, I pointed out the problem when a person abandons the religious concepts of Good and Evil, and fails to view beliefs and practices as Evil even when they are inimical to what we should view as fundamental human rights, but instead "indulges" them - i.e. to "treat with excessive leniency, generosity and consideration" and in fact sometimes to "take unrestrained pleasure in".

Treating very bad behaviour with excessive leniency, and even taking unrestrained pleasure in that behaviour, hardly seems to me an admirable ideology.   Yet, over and over again, we are told that "Tolerance" is our most important value. I disagree.

Now, when talking to Tolerists, I avoid the Israel-Arab problem entirely and I just ask them what they would have done with Hitler and the Nazis.   Would it have been an admirable and tolerant position to be lenient with the Nazis?

If you think that the Tolerist mind gives in at that point, I have news for you.  I have now heard the argument, made in all seriousness by a highly educated (but morally infantile) Vancouverite, that the Nazis were, in his opinion, the result of the Allies after World War 1, imposing draconian terms on the losing Germans.   To this Tolerist, then, in an astounding leap of tolerist logic, the Americans were responsible for World War Two and even the Holocaust!

The Tolerists have infected so much of our Cultural Elites.  Here is the example of PenCanada which gave its inagaural 2005 Paul Kidd Award for Journalistic Courage to an anti-American ranter named Paul William Roberts, as if it takes courage nowadays to join the chorus of anti-Americans.   Roberts succeeded in getting a three page excerpt from his nonsensical book carried by the Globe & Mail, which shows the current reach of Tolerism.

Here is my response (in a letter to the editor that the Globe declined to publish) after the Globe published a second article containing the bizarre political analyses of British travel writer Paul William Roberts.

>
"Last September, in three full pages, Roberts expressed his view that the
inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina proves that the U.S. is an
imperial superpower undergoing the death throes of republicanism and
heading steadily toward oligarchic totalitarianism.    Inadequate disaster
planning, yes, but totalitarianism?
>
>
>
Then he wrote of a sense that the American Empire is in decline, that
the only successful wars it has ever waged are the ones against the
environment and its own people.

Its own people?
>
How could he fail to grasp the American achievements in halting Hitler
and Japanese aggression in World War II, and in freeing Eastern Europe and the
Russian people from Communist totalitarianism by winning the Cold War? ... because it is clear that while the U.S. has made many mistakes,
and will continue to make them, (especially in foreign policy), the
reality is that its vigorous democracy, free media and judicial system,
and educated population will continue to keep it a positive force in
world history.  (Especially when one looks at the alternatives.)
>
>
But now we see on your pages a new article by Roberts that claims moral
equivalency between George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  While Roberts
writes about the dangers of Ahmadinejads quest for nuclear arms, and
his pledge to use them to wipe Israel off the map, he astoundingly
comes up with the judgment that To see Irans leader objectively requires seeing Mr.
Bush and his judgments in a similar manner & (the) two men (are) so
mirrored in each other ideologically, emotionally, intellectually and
even spiritually.

>
Ideologically?
>
While his article does provide a summary of Ahmadinejads recent
war-like statements (under a column headed Tough Talker) and while he
does acknowledge that monstrosities are likely to come out of the
Iranian regime, Roberts says we need to understandAhmadinejad because
from understanding comes respectand further (w)e'll have to stop
pretending that weve done nothing to offend denizens of the area.
>
What we do know about Ahmadinejad (and which information Roberts omits)
is the following:
>
During the crackdown on universities in 1980, as part of Khomeinis
Islamic Cultural Revolution, Ahmadinejad played a critical role in
purging dissidentlecturers and students, many of whom were arrested and later
executed.   The universities were closed down for three years, and
Ahmadinejad joined the Revolutionary Guards.   In the early 1980s he was a
member of the Guards Internal Securitydepartment, and earned notoriety
as a ruthless interrogator and torturer.
>
It is believed that he worked as an executioner in the notorious Evin
Prison, where thousands of political prisoners were executed in bloody
purges of the 1980s.   Then he became involved in external
terroristoperations, masterminding a series of assassinations in the
Middle East and Europe.  I fail to see how Bush's involvement in
business organizations and then service as Governor of Texas would compare.

>
Ahmadinajed is actively funding terrorist organizations, and has called
for militant Islam to rule the world.   Roberts' rationale for restraint in
dealing with the man, according to this article, is to refer to a
bizarre, obscenity-laced quote from one of a colourful cast of former
drinking buddies at a London beerhall, who said (and I paraphrase),
that its not a good idea to fight with someone who does not care if he lives or dies.
>
Well, I think we all know that the suicide-bombing crowd is hard to
defeat, but I'd prefer not to give up on the basis of the advice that
Roberts puts forth.
>

Roberts article is so offensive, so juvenile in its anti-Americanism,
and so morally confused that it has no business appearing in any
serious newspaper to whom Canadians are looking to shed light on the issue of
Islamist terrorism and its state sponsors.   I know George Bush is far
from perfect, but spare me comparisons to Ahmadinejad"

And so, Roberts is not only a Tolerist par excellence, but he comes from Britain, the leading purveyour of Tolerist nonsense.  Britain is the home of banned "intolerant" expressions, like "Islamic terrorism" which has been deemed "offensive" to all Muslims.

The "indulging" of the enemy in this war on our freedoms, and the viewing of their abhorrent conduct with "generosity" and "leniency" is a foundation of Tolerism.

Tolerists like Roberts actually seem to take "unrestrained pleasure" in the difficulties of the Americans to fulfill their goals to protect individual freedoms.    PenCanada, in giving an award for "Courage" to infantile Tolerism, shows the dimensions of the problem here in Canada.

I shall return to this topic periodically.

Merriam-Webster defines "tolerance" as:

sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own 

I think that "sympathy" for the human condition is always a good quality.  But what about "indulgence". Merriam-Webster describes the verb "indulging" as:

to give free rein to : to take unrestrained pleasure in : gratify: to yield to the desire of : humor <please indulge me for a moment> b: to treat with excessive leniency, generosity, or consideration

Those who have been reading my blog from the beginning (just one month ago!) know the serious problem I have with the elevation of "tolerance" to the highest value of western civilization, and the extent to which (a) it leaves us open to tolerating what should surely be intolerable; and (b) it creates for some reason in its proponents an intolerance to discussing or even hearing any other points of view.  The concepts of political correctness, moral equivalency, and moral and cultural relativism become the ideological blinders for the denizens of the post-religious utopia that narcissistically looks only inward, and not outward to the obvious world war being waged on liberal values by proponents of Radical Islam or as it is often called, Islamism.

In my blog essay,

A Re-evaluation of Holocaust Commemorations: The Ten Lessons We Should Have Learned

at:  http://secondgenerationradical.blogmatrix.com/holocaust%20museums/

I point out how the over-reliance on "tolerance" has even polluted the religious values of Jews who have self-assumed the role of keepers of the moral of the Holocaust.   Even the Orthodox Jews who run the Wiesenthal Centre's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles have cast aside traditional Jewish values of Justice in favour of the secular confusion of Tolerance.

This can only have assumed the status of an Ideology, a set of beliefs and values which are filtering out every other fact and argument that does not accord with their ideology, which I have chosen to call Tolerism.

For when a person abandons the religious concepts of Good and Evil, and fails to view beliefs and practices so inimical to what we should view as fundamental human rights as Evil, but instead "indulges" them - i.e. to "treat with excessive leniency, generosity and consideration" and in fact sometimes to "take unrestrained pleasure in", then we have a big problem.

My forthcoming book, Exploring Vancouverism:  The Political Culture of Canada's Lotus Land views the "Lotus Land" culture of Vancouver, where organized religion has its fewest proponents on a per capita basis in all of Canada, as a culture that has abandoned the yardsticks of Good versus Evil.   The mariners in Alfred Tennyson's great poem, "The Lotos Eaters" land on the idyllic shores of a Lotus Land where life on the beautiful beaches is complemented by the intoxication of eating the "Lotos" leaves brought by the natives.  Soon the mariners decide not to go back to Greece and resume their struggles for good versus evil, because, after all, what pleasure do they derive from that struggle, as compared to life in Lotus Land.

In fact, if one checks out the on-line Urban Dictionary, (www.urbandictionary.com),

one sees that there is a term being used by young people, called Tolerism, but it is defined as:  One's skill in consuming massive quantities of alcohol without displaying obvious signs of drunkenness.

I suggest that in our wider culture, Tolerism is the skill in consuming massive quantities of political correctness, and moral and cultural relativism, without displaying the obvious signs of the drunken leniency toward, and even taking pleasure in, the slow ascendancy of Islamist values of terrorism, breach of human rights, and attempted reversals of the wonderful liberties and advances made in western societies, where church and state have been successfully separated, and an enormous degree of freedom reigns.

The drunken Tolerists, with the abymsal ideology of Tolerism threaten all that we have accomplished.

Those who have read the second post on my blog in early August know my concerns about the hijacking of the meaning of the Holocaust into some kind of left-liberal lesson of the need for tolerance.

In fact, in the absence of religious values, there are many who make a religion out of being tolerant and non-violent.

There are a couple of problems with this.

The first is that the preachers of Tolerance are very loath to listen to any contrary opinions.  They tend to dismiss other opinions.   This happened the other day when we were visiting relatives.   The second is the immoral positions one starts to adopt when you are worshipping tolerance instead of a God of justice and morality.

One cousin of mine, who prides himself on his liberal values, the primary one being tolerance, reacted badly when I made a small comment on Judaism having foundational values of more substance than simple Tolerance.  He stated unequivocably that Tolerance was the most important value, and the major problems in history lie with religions and their non-tolerant approaches.   This moral equivalency concerning all religions, especially of an Orthodox or Fundamentalist nature has been reviewed here in my essay on Christiane Amanpour of CNN.

When I attempted to make a comment, he rebuffed my attempts to speak, saying it was unnecessary for me to talk, because he already knew that we didn't agree, and I shouldn't bother talking.   Not very tolerant.

I am at the point where I am used to being "shunned" by intolerant left-liberals who shun me because I am not tolerant enough.   But I really felt bad for my uncle (his father - age 90) and my father (age 87).

At one point I did manage to get in a comment that his father, a Canadian army veteran of the European campaign of the Second World War, obviously thought there was something more important at stake in 1941 than tolerance when he decided to risk his life to stop Hitler and preserve our freedoms.   His father nodded his head in agreement.   And I couldn't help but point out that had the Nazis been "tolerated" by soft pacifists too pure to participate in the violence of a war, then my father, liberated in Auschwitz, just in time to save his life, and therefore myself also, wouldn't be around.

There was no response offered, until a few minutes later, he launched into a long tirade against me for "lecturing" him, and how could I treat him as if my opinions were more valid than his.   I could not believe what I was hearing (he has 3 university degrees), but it occurred to me that the ultimate end-game of moral relativism is to take away the validity of any of my arguments, and even the necessity for him to as much as listen to them, because, in his post-religious framework, where there is no such thing as absolute right and wrong or good versus evil, every opinion is as good as every other one, and the only villains are people like me who purport to challenge this ideology of love and peace, and the validity of all opinions, however noxious.

And sure enough, when my father attempted to mention to him a favorite quote from Winston Churchill, my cousin rudely cut off my father, saying he didn't want to hear it and turned around and put his back to him.   Not very tolerant.

But if you stop practicing a religion, and start worshipping tolerance and moral relativism, I would suggest that you stay away from my father and myself.   We happen to think that there is a moral imperative to stop evil.   I guess we are not very tolerant either.