I haven't seen any mention of this at the blogs I usually read (not even Instapundit), but an El Al jet was diverted from Ontario twice in the last two days. On Thursday, westbound, routing Tel Aviv - Toronto - LAX, the jet was diverted to Montreal and then to Hamilton before continuing to LA; on the eastbound flight the next day, the plane stopped in Hamilton instead of Toronto before returning to Tel Aviv.
The reason in both cases was a security threat to El Al aircraft at Ontario's Pearson airport. More information in Google News. The best article at this time was this one from the London (Ontario, Canada) Free Press.
The worst one has got to be this one from an outfit called Airwise News: Canada Assessing Future of El Al Toronto Flights
Canada said on Friday it was assessing the future of El Al flights to Toronto after one of the Israeli airline's planes was diverted twice because of an unspecified security threat.Assessing? What, Canada is going to disallow El Al to fly to Toronto because of a threat against the airline? Are we blaming the victim yet?
"This was a specific threat against El Al at Pearson Airport. I want to assure travelers that there is not a problem with traveling to Pearson, to Toronto."Unless the travelers are Jews. That's the subtext of Transport Minister David Collenette's remarks here -- no specific threat, unless you're a Jew or flying from Israel.
A spokesman at the Israeli embassy in Ottawa said Israel was fully co-operating with the investigation.And this is news because... why? For some reason did Airwise News expect Israel to not cooperate? Maybe I'm missing the part where Israel has a long history of failing to take terrorist threats seriously.
Things like this drive me nuts.
In other news, no baby yet.
UPDATE: 2003/10/25
lgf has picked it up.
No baby yet.
But apparently I inhabit the same parallel universe as Colby, for I too have personally witnessed no anti-semitism in my adult life. Of course that may be a function of where I've lived: Palo Alto, CA; Santa Monica, CA; Edmonton, Alberta. Or maybe the circles I move in, though I did attend grad school at UC Berkeley (briefly!).
Perhaps there is an explanation, though. In a flip-side version of the "passing" stories Meryl Yourish mentions (where someone who is Jewish but doesn't "look Jewish" might hear casual anti-semitic comments), it might be that I look Jewish and this discourages anti-semites from spouting off around me. I confess that I don't really know what "jewish" looks like, but I do look Eastern European or Slavic, and it's certainly possible that someone could mistake that for a semitic look.
Of course, these notional anti-semites would have to be exceedingly delicate and polite. I assume that belligerent, mouth-foaming anti-semites, if they suspected I was a Jew, would shout ethnic slurs at me or threaten me. Haven't run into a lot of that, either.
I know that anti-semitism exists; it's easy to find on the Internet, for one. I don't know many Arabs or Muslims, and the few I do I don't know well enough to talk politics with. Certainly I expect if the subject came up, it would lead to an argument.
But casual anti-semitism from North Americans of European ancestry, I don't see. Phrases like "jew him down" or "shylock" -- never heard them. The casual anti-Semitism of civil society described here is something I just don't encounter.