“WE ARE LOSING MOST EVERY BATTLE WE FIGHT”
by Howard Rotberg, ©2020, originally published at FrontPageMag
(Jul. 18, 2020) — For over 15 years, I have been operating a small publishing house, which is Canada’s sole conservative and pro-Israel publishing house. We publish some of the greatest Canadian, American and international authors who support fundamental freedoms, liberty, justice and individual rights as opposed to group rights. Our authors generally oppose cultural and moral relativism, and for that reason they are generally shunned by leftist publishing houses who naively believe that all cultures are equal.
I am the son of a Holocaust survivor who lost his parents and then eight-year-old sister in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. When someone tells me that all cultures are equal, I ask if the person believes that the culture of Nazi Germany or of ISIS is equal to the culture of Canada or the United States. The person usually walks away at that point.
Recently, as part of my publishing duties and the need to see if there are any upcoming opportunities for our authors to speak, I came across an event near Toronto called the Festival of Literary Diversity. Looking at the photographs of the 20 or so authors speaking or appearing, I could see that almost all were brown or black and they were mostly women.
Mantua Books also publishes brown women (Farzana Hassan, The Case Against Jihad), brown men (Professor Salim Mansur, Delectable Lie: a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism and Islamism and the Qur’an Problem), as well as white Jewish women, aged Christian men, gay Jewish men, all what we might term “conservative” thinkers, but who are actually “classically liberal” as much as conservative.
So, I decided to write to the Festival organizers to see if their definition of “marginalized diverse authors” could include our authors, most with Ph.Ds, who are shunned by mainstream leftist publishing houses despite their qualifications to write in their chosen fields on politics and culture.
It occurred to me that readers might like to peer into the trench, where I, a 67-year-old, former practicing lawyer, a developer of affordable rental housing for low income working people (which I insist gives me “progressive” credibility) am fighting in this war every week.
Of course, we are losing most every battle we fight. It is hard when academia, the mainstream media, and NGOs and government bureaucrats are all lined up against you. But I fight on; if my father could survive Auschwitz, I figure I can survive this.
So what follows is my correspondence with a Festival organizer, to give you some insight into one small, polite skirmish in a much larger War.
Read the rest here.