The Black Rod

Fundraising for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has collapsed. The museum's fundraising arm, The Friends of the CMHR, has managed to gather barely two million dollars in pledges this year so far. Over the past 14 months, only 200 private donations have been received . Given that donations are usually spread out over 5-10 years, that means they could have raised as little as $400,000 cash in 2013.   In that case the CMHR has officially slid into the abyss, with costs, including millions in unpaid back taxes, escalating faster than they can raise money to pay for them. The only thing that's propped up this White Elephant appears to be a wink-wink nudge-nudge $10 million slipped to the CMHR under the table by the federal government. In 2011, after running out of money and while waiting for a government bailout, the CMHR stopped hiring and paying for the design of exhibits. In that way they underspent their $21 million annual operating funds by $10 million. They, a...

Woof.  The watchdog is still on the job. Is it June already?  You know what that means? It means our annual shaming of the scofflaw, or, as it's also known, how much is the Canadian Museum for Human Rights refusing to pay for its property taxes? The CMHR has failed to pay its city tax bill for three years running, despite CEO Stu Murray's panicked---and false--- claim when we first exposed their scofflaw status in 2010 that the museum fully intended to pay what was owed.  Since then they've made partial payments but still owe more than $300,000 in back taxes, and that's without the penalties that would accrue to anyone else who stiffed the City. Add to that this year's tax bill---$4.1 million.   Yes, you read that right. Four point one million dollars.   We're betting that since they refused to pay a tenth of that, they're going to claim poverty again. But the only poverty is in the souls of the elitists who can build a $365 million...

If you thought this summer's $60 million government bailout of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights was the last of your money going into this white elephant, then you haven't read their latest corporate plan. They want more. Lots more. Details in a minute... The museum's board of trustees realizes it has a great big horking credibility problem. Among the seven things the Museum "needs" to do is: * Restore and retain public confidence , developing and sustaining momentum and support until opening and beyond. Ya think? Just because the museum proponents... * lied to the Senate by promising that taxpayers would never be asked for more than the initial $100 million federal start-up money * deliberately lowballed the cost of the project at $265 million to get government approval---and financing * lied that the $310 million new cost was the bottom line guaranteed final figure * lied that the museum would pay its property taxes *...

Earlier this year, the New York designer of the museum's exhibits, Ralph Appelbaum, came to Winnipeg to give 200 donors to the CMHR a super-sneak preview of  the "interior wonders" they can expect to see when they visit. The museum's fundraising arm, the Friends of the CMHR, took detailed notes and reported Appelbaum's "thrilling" lecture in the group's Summer, 2012, newsletter.   Given the importance of knowing exactly what we're spending $351 million (and counting) on, we decided to scalp the Friends' account (with the really boring bits scissored out). Barf bags at the ready, here we go... http://www.friendsofcmhr.com/resource/file/newsletter_summer12_en.pdf "Appelbaum began his thrilling virtual tour of the Museum’s interior at the building entrance between two of the structure’s massive “roots”. The roots represent the earth as the common home of all people and the beginning of our journey ...

A special envoy for U.S. President Barack Obama was in Winnipeg on Monday to reignite the hate campaign against Canada's Ukrainian community on behalf of the Asper-led Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Hannah Rosenthal, described as Obama's envoy to "monitor and combat anti-semitism" was here as a speaker at the "first annual Shindleman Family lecture at the Canadian Institute for the Study of Ai-semitism". CISA, you'll remember, is the front group created and financed by supporters of the museum with the task of smearing as anti-semitic anyone who challenges the Asper Family's plan for the CMHR. Rosenthal, reiterating she was here "as a representative of the United States government", praised CISA for being "one of only six institutions in the entire world dedicated to the scholarly study of anti-Semitism." She failed to mention that CISA is a one-woman show--- director and energizer bunny Catherine Chat...

For a brief moment, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights dropped its public mask and revealed its true agenda. The national moneypit's biggest shill, CEO Stuart Murray, travels the country to put a happy face on the private Holocaust museum that was foisted on the public as the first "national museum" built in 40 years. Its backers, the Asper Family, realized they couldn't afford it without a pipeline into the public purse, so they tweaked the idea by folding the concrete Holocaust museum into a vague, undefined promotion of "human rights" in order to win a "national" patina for the project. Murray still can't exactly define what the $310 million CMHR will be, other than it will have two permanent exhibits---one for the Holocaust and the other for Canada's alleged mistreatment of its natives. Here's how a professor described the museum's mandate in a lecture at the Fort Garry Hotel in October: "Murray emphasize...

What's round, respected and rolling away from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights? Another wheel fallen off the Asper bus. "Leave it to the experts" has been the desperate last-ditch cry of proponents of the CMHR as the public facade of the museum has slowly chipped away. But the experts have begun to desert the CMHR. Over the past few months, the truth has been forced out, bit by bit -- that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights was always intended to be a Holocaust museum, is still, and, if Gail Asper has any say, always will be. Asper and her hand-picked trustees refuse to contemplate that the mass murder of anyone else has the same significance to the world as the Holocaust. That, to them, justifies having a separate Holocaust gallery, with all the other genocides in history lumped together in a "mass atrocity" exhibit. They specifically reject the argument by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association that the crimes of the Communist...

There's a panic spreading through the Jewish community over the threat facing the primacy of the Holocaust exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. One unexpected side effect is the emergence of truths long hidden from the general public. Rhonda Spivak, editor of the Winnipeg Jewish Review, has published a clarion call to the Jewish community to fight back, and fight now, to cement the status of the Holocaust gallery as one of only two permanent galleries in the museum. She's rattled by the success the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association is having in turning the dabate over the Holocaust-only gallery that's planned for the CMHR into a national issue. Spivak wrote an 'open letter' to Lubomyr Luciuk, director of research for the UCCLA, to lambaste him and spur the Jewish community to action. www.winnipegjewishreview.com/index.cfm (She called him Lobomyr Luciak. That mistake has since been corrected online. Funny, the Winnipeg Fr...

Right on schedule. Barely four days after The Black Rod laid out the plan, chapter and verse, there it was in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, down to a T. The proponents of the Gail Asper-version of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights have played their last card--- anyone who challenges them is anti-semitic. "The war against the Holocaust" blared the headline over the op-ed by, guess who , Catherine Chatterley the "the founding director of the Winnipeg-based Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism." It's unfolding exactly as we predicted: http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2011/03/nuke-ukes-fp-preps-nuclear-option-to.html * It's not hard to put two and two together, we wrote. * Gail Asper doesn't want to accuse the Ukrainians of being anti-Semites, although she hasn't met them face-to-face, she added. * Only "the uniformed" ask why the Asper human rights museum plans to highlight the Holocaust ove...