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Three years ago, former NDP candidate Stefan Jonasson, writing about religious misogyny, said: “much like the Taliban and other extremists, the Haredim [an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect] offer a toxic caricature of faith at odds with the spirit of the religious tradition they profess to represent.”

Here, for the record, is how the Haredim carry on at the moment. They spit on girls. They stone women, throw bricks at them, pour bleach over them. They gang-beat women for not moving to the back of the bus. They demand men-only streets, and tear-gas women who fail to comply.

Sounds like a “toxic caricature of faith” to me. Certainly comparable to the attitudes of ultra-Islamists towards the “place” of women in society.

But today’s NDP considers such an observation “inappropriate.” That’s quite enough out of you, spake the NDP High Command, and Jonasson was kicked to the curb, joining an ever-growing heap of other “inappropriate” candidates and would-be candidates. 

I do, however, have happier news to report. Alex Johnstone, another NDP hopeful — the one who, incredibly, had never heard of the Auschwitz death camp — seems to have been successfully rehabilitated after agreeing to be re-educated by B’nai Brith. Her abject public prostration has saved her candidacy.

Read the cringeworthy joint statement, with its Red Guard-era Maoist overtones.

It’s come to this.

Now we anxiously await the fate of Andrew Cash. Not, I’m afraid, with much optimism.

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