Hate Camp

I've returned home from an out-of-town excursion, catching up on my mail pile, and getting ready for what may be shaping up to be another out-of-town excursion.

Summer camp is a big industry in America and elsewhere. There are many camps which are specialized. Music camps. Athletic camps (one of which I attended during my high school jock days). Art camps. Math camps. Science camps. Computer camps. Weight loss camps. Travel camps. Theater & Drama camps. And so on.

These camps are good for the entrepreneurs who run them, and usually good for the children and youth who attend them. Not to mention the privacy the kids' parents get for a few weeks (which my wife and I certainly enjoyed).

The previous posting was about the carnage in Oslo. Following that posting, additional details emerged about the whole affair in Norway. For one thing, the unpreparedness of the Norwegian law enforcement authorities is nothing short of amazing. More notably, the camp operated by the Norwegian Labor Party on Utøya Island was a specialized summer camp. It was a Hate Camp, as further detailed by Nidra Poller and Debbie Schlussel, where hatred for Jews and Israel was part of the agenda, and where the facilities were shared by Islamic terror groups.

Note that Jewish camps do not have such hatred programs against our enemies (of which we have so, so many).

I would be less than candid if I denied that this new info caused me to revisit my empathies with the victims of the massacre at Utøya Island. After all, the "victims" had, just the day before, engaged in an unabashed anti-Semitic exercise sponsored by the camp and blessed by a Norwegian cabinet minister. So yes, I have done some considerable deliberation regarding the previous posting.

But the first line of that posting, "There is no question that Anders Behring Breivik is truly an evil person," is still a highly valid statement. It is not good that he is being glorified in some quarters, and the fact that he has a good chance of walking freely in 21 years is not reassuring. That's a relatively easy one.

More consterning is the statement "My empathies are with the victims, regardless of whatever connections they may have had to the Labor Party in general, and its policies of dhimmitude in particular." There is, after all, a certain justice in the killing of the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people, and I do see G-d's hand in that. Nevertheless, those indoctrinated youth could have been my children, or, for that matter, me. They were victims of the Norwegian Labor Party's hatred and anti-Semitism.

So, even as I appreciate the justice of the Divine Retribution, I regret the loss of lives. Were I to go celebrate and exult, then I would be no better than the Labor Party, and I myself might just as well go to Hate Camp for a summer.