By Beryl Wajsman
Sunday, July 23, 2006
"…the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis…"
The current Middle East crisis has brought Canada to a fateful hour. a new rendezvous with destiny. Not because of the threat of uncontained conflict; for containment there will be. Not because of any pressure from rising oil prices; for rise they always will without any pressure. Not because of some perceived humanitarian tragedy; for the true tragedy of human perception lies in ourselves. No, this is a fateful hour because it will test our courage, conscience and character as a people. and our response to this challenge will determine much of what we will be able to achieve at home and abroad in the years to come.
George Bernard Shaw wrote that "Liberty demands responsibility. That's why so many dread it." During this crisis we will see whether we have the courage to shoulder responsibility. Whether we possess the conscience to embrace liberty. and most importantly, whether we have the character not to dread.
a brave new Prime Minister is trying to restore the vision of Canadian pride and purpose. He is putting the world on notice that we have the steely resolve to marshal our vigilance and re-engage in mankind's transcendent struggles for redemptive change. If we flag or falter in that vision we will retreat to the sad spectacle of cowering in undeserved smug self-satisfaction that has been Canada's hallmark these past dozen years. a hallmark that has masked nothing less than our own self-doubt driven by our jealousy of others self-belief.
and that jealousy and self-doubt have begun to rear their ugly heads once again in recent days. Though still broadly supported throughout the land, Stephen Harper's vision has come under some gratuitous attacks in the past week among those in the knee-jerk anti-american "progressive" chattering-classes in both of Canada's official solitudes. His bold foreign and military policies have been unjustly attacked as "slavishly following the lead of the United States". Nothing could be further from the truth.
Stephen Harper is not following the U.S. He is leading Canada. He was the first western leader to demand that Hamas renounce violence upon its election and demonstrate its legitimate participation at the table of civilized nations. The first to cut off non-humanitarian aid to the Palestinian authority government Hamas led. The first to demand the arrest of Saeed Mortazavi, the Iranian prosecutor who beat Montreal photojournalist Zara Khazemi over the head with his shoe during torture sessions that led to her death, when Iran sent him as its observer to the UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva. and when he declared in Kandahar that Canadians "…don't cut and run…" he tried to make us all realize that the fight for justice cannot stop at our borders for that kind of insularity will inevitably corrode our progress as a people.
But progress doesn't really matter to the "progressive" media types and politicos when they've got to pump out 800 words by deadline or have a chance at a sound bite. Fresh attacks were launched that the "inexperienced" Harper administration was "bungling" the execution of our evacuation effort in Lebanon. The truth of the matter is that it took Canada no longer than america to organize the effort but it was harder because Canada has no military assets in the Mediterranean. and frankly, not enough anywhere else. No ships. No planes. as Gen. Lewis Mackenzie has pointed out, this was the result "of fifteen years of opposition by the "progressives" in this country" — the very people who now criticize the evacuation effort — "to the purchase of any military hardware including heavy-lift aircraft and naval vessels". Canada has had to lease them from private enterprises. and the critics of the evacuation efforts know this full well.
But this whole evacuation question is really a red herring issue to attack the government. as Terry Corcoran wrote in the "National Post" this past week, since when did we have to meet a "Dunkirk standard" for evacuation? Dunkirk took nine days with the largest flotilla ever launched from English shores until D-Day. and that was just crossing a few miles of the English Channel. Not the entire bloody atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Foreign affairs Canada always cautions travellers to any of the world's hot spots that it can only "assist" in transportation arrangements in case of war. This is not a "right". Yet Harper's critics ignore this and more. None of them have bothered to examine the numbers. They usually state that Canada is attempting to evacuate "a few thousand" and failing badly. The reality is that there are some 40,000 Lebanese who hold Canadian passports. They don't all live in Canada. Only some 10,000 do. But over 25,000 have applied to be taken out. america, with ten times our population has only 20,000 passport holders to worry about of whom only some 8,000 want to leave. and they've got an aircraft carrier in the area. But facts don't seem to matter to our "progressives". Facts are mere fodder to be molded into their pre-conceived notions.
Then there was the shameful spectacle, particularly in Quebec, when media and academic types went totally berserk when Quebec Tory MP Jean-Pierre Blackburn had the "temerity" to call Israel an ally of Canada. Some French talk-show hosts even refused to use the word "Israelis" preferring "les Juifs" — the Jews — instead. But they didn't call the Hezbollah murderers "les Musselmans" — the Moslems. Oh no. They were "militants" — militants. Something the Liberal Party used to call its workers.
But then can you imagine the sin of it? Calling a sister democracy an ally. No, the "progressives" would much prefer that we stay enslaved to the bankruptcy of moral relativism and loyal to our true Canadian doctrine of the right of failed states to be wrong. Funny thing though. The "intelligentsia", again particularly in Quebec, had no problem when French President Chirac boarded the French nuclear submarine "Vigilante" some months ago and declared his readiness to use nuclear weapons if radical Islam threatened the glorious French Republic. Not a peep of criticism on that. anyone else wondering why?
In 1970 Pierre Trudeau enforced martial law; abolished basic civil liberties and put 10,000 soldiers into the streets of Montreal when the FLQ kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte eventually killing the latter. When Trudeau was asked by a CBC reporter how far he would go to protect Canada from internal terror, he glared angrily into the camera and declared, "Just watch me!" It is the basest form of hypocrisy that the left upholds a double standard in condemning Stephen Harper's support for Israeli democracy's self-defense against external terror.
But the problem is even deeper than that. Not to put too much emphasis on polls, there are two that bring into stark relief the disconnect of Canadians from the reality of "World War IV" as former CIa Director James Woolsey calls the struggle against Islamic theocratic tyranny. Europeans, who have felt the brunt and burn of Jihadist bombs from London to Beslan, voted 82% support for Israel in a Sky News Poll on July 17th. In Canada, a recently released Léger poll, showed some 57% in favour of the Prime Minister's unequivocal support for Israel.
Robert Kennedy said many times in many places that "…courage was the cardinal human virtue…" We can only hope that Canadians shed the hypocrisy they cling to as children grasping their favourite blanket, and find the courage to rise to the call of virtue in this most dangerous of times against this most dangerous of enemies. If we fail, we will be condemned to Dante's admonition that, "…the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis…" For as andrew McCarthy of the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies has written, "Israel's war is our war for it is the frontline state in the family of free nations." We are fortunate to have a Prime Minister who knows these lessons well. It is to be hoped that this land will be deserving of him.
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