Michael Neumann (at Counterpunch) is to be commended for his bravery in stating what’s obvious to the non-Western world but seems to elude many Western commentators (yes, and that’s “collectivist” –  it’s a generalization, but it happens to be accurate):

:”What is remarkable about the story of Canada and wartime Jewry is not the callousness, but the pangs of conscience, which highlight the morally privileged position of Jews vis-à-vis other victims of oppression. Despite the antisemitism of at least some immigration officials, there is no reason to suppose that Canada’s policy on Jewish refugees was itself antisemitic, or that it victimized Jews.

Let’s review some facts which are not even on most people’s historical horizons.   In 1965 – after Canada had liberalized and de-racialized its immigration policies – civil war in Nigeria brought starvation to Biafra.  Images of dying children were sent all over the globe.  Also in 1965, between 500,000 and one million Indonesians were killed on the pretext  of a coup attempt.   The very idea that we should have opened our borders to these victims apparently never registered in anyone’s brain.   Nor did it occur to anyone to welcome without restriction those hundreds of thousands fleeing the most horrible murder and mutilation in Liberia or Sierra Leone.   There was no great effort made to bring those fleeing a bona fide, well-confirmed genocide in Rwanda to North American shores.   It never occurs to anyone today to slash  immigration quotas to rescue hundreds of thousands of Congolese,  three to five million of whom have already died amid atrocities not only legitimately comparable to the worst of Nazism, but much better known than the fate of the Jews during the war years.   So the story of Jewish immigration in the Hitler era, appalling as it may be, is also testimony to how much more the (almost white!) Jews could claim from the West than their darker-skinned counterparts in later years. Democratic societies, whatever pet exceptions they may make from time to time, have always watched others die without compunction:  many more cases could be cited.  Callousness is the norm.   Jews, at least, made it onto the moral radar; most others never did and never do. “