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Liberals anti-Israel bias

The party of "None is too many"

By Beryl Wajsman

Saturday, October 14, 2006

"Israel was not created in order to disappear. Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by resistance. It brings honour to the shield of democracy and it carries high the sword of freedom."

~President John F. Kennedy

The only words this week more hypocritical and egregiously offensive to the civility of political discourse in Canada than Michael Ignatieff's declaration that "war crimes" were committed by Israel at Qana were the puffed-up false pieties of Bob Rae defending the Liberals and demanding an apology from Prime Minister Harper for accusing the former Natural Governing Party of an anti-Israel bias.

Rae, and the chattering-class talking heads around him, even had the temerity to state that because Rae had a Jewish grandfather and his wife is Jewish Rae could not possibly have an anti-Israel bias. Yet it has been Rae, and the salon liberals of media and academe who remain his most ardent defenders, who have for years argued that being critical of Israel does not imply that one is necessarily anti-Jewish. Therefore one would think that a former Rhodes scholar like Mr. Rae would easily understand the corollary. That being Jewish does not necessarily imply that one is free of anti-Israel bias. Noam Chomsky and Prof. Norman Finkelstein are just two examples that prove the latter point. Blood doesn't get you a get-out-of-jail free card on this one.

For Rae to descend to using blood as an intellectual argument is an insult to Canadians' intelligence. But today's re-iteration by Ignatieff of his original charge against Israel followed by continued calls by Rae and Ignatieff that the Prime Minister's statement was "crass" politics and that he should apologize, adds injury to the original insults of both these candidates who have demonstrated that they remain firmly wedded to the politics of divide-and-conquer by means of the lowest common denominator. But then the Liberals have perfected this art in the past several years. and Rae and Ignatieff, being the former roommates they are, are set to take this duplicity to yet a higher level.

Support for Israel, and equitable consideration of its actions, should have nothing to do with blood. It should be driven by a moral courage to stand with a friend of freedom abroad and not distort doctrine and truth in order to pander to political expediencies at home. It should be driven by an equal standard of judgment, and not the double standards of moral relativism and political equivalency that Liberal leaders have applied to the Middle East far too often and for far too long.

This moral courage is the stuff of a leader. The stuff of national conscience and character. Something that neither Mr. Rae nor Mr. Ignatieff have demonstrated. The Prime Minister has. Time and time again. Mr. Harper is right, Rae and Ignatieff are wrong, and here's why.

This nation nominally pledges allegiance to the survival and success of liberty. That would imply a fidelity to equitable consideration of sister democracies under attack in this global war on terror. This should particularly apply in the case of Israel which is the frontline state in the family of free nations. Yet the hard truth is that you wouldn't know it looking at Liberals over the past few years and particularly through this leadership race.

Within ten days of Israel's counter-attack against Hezbollah's state-sponsored rain of fire on Israeli cities and towns, Bob Rae began his calls for Israel to be more "proportionate" in her response. He called for Israeli "restraint". He called for a "ceasefire" when frontline arab nations like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi arabia voiced their understanding of the intensity of Israel's response and secretly hoped for an overwhelming Israeli victory. Rae even supported interim Liberal leader Bill Graham's call for a more "nuanced" Canadian position than Mr. Harper's clear and unequivocal support for a democratic ally that had been aggressed. Is this the un-biased record on Israel of which Mr. Rae is so proud?

Borys Wrzybenski, the Liberals' then deputy foreign affairs critic and a major supporter of Liberal leadership candidate Gerard Kennedy, went on a fact-finding tour of the war-torn region and promptly announced that Israel was practicing "state terror". Not a word about Hezbollah's actions which even the UN and arab states condemned as having been responsible for the outbreak of hostilities.

Liberal MP Denis Coderre, Ignatieff's Quebec lieutenant, led a "Rally for Peace for Lebanon and Palestine" that specifically excluded peace for Israel in its communiqus and specifically excluded any Israeli or Jewish groups from participating. He even affixed the name of the Liberal Party of Canada to the rally organizers' press release. The rally quickly turned into a pro-Hezbollah demonstration yet Coderre stood by his participation and repeated on RDI his condemnation of the "savage massacre of the Lebanese caused by Israeli bombing". Not a word of reproach from Ignatieff.

Now Michael Ignatieff has decided to join the "party". He condemns the discovery of 28 bodies in a bombed out building in the village of Qana as an "Israeli war crime". I am choosing my words carefully here. as carefully as Ignatieff should have. Michael Ignatieff knows full well that the Israeli bombing of Qana stopped 8 hours before that building collapsed. Mr. Ignatieff also knows that the Lebanese government itself reduced the original estimates of 69 dead to 28. He also knows that independent international investigators have discovered something very curious about those 28 bodies found in that building. No blood. No crushed skulls. No severed limbs. Quite a feat if these unfortunate souls had indeed been in the basement of a four story concrete building that collapsed on them. Well-nigh impossible. and if Mr. Ignatieff does not know these facts it is because he doesn't want to know them.

He also knows about war crimes. He knows that without intent to target civilians there can be no war crime. He knows that the Fourth Geneva Convention concerning the protection of civilians in war is grounded on this point. He also knows that Hezbollah, with the complicity of the Lebanese government, was intentionally targeting Israeli civilians. and there were no millions of leaflets dropped and hours of warning as Israel did before its legitimate defensive retaliation. Finally, he knows, as a self-proclaimed "expert", that every international legal authority from Humphrey to Stone to Tucker to Hewitt, make culpable any state ( in this case Lebanon) that shelters an organization (in this case Hezbollah) on its territory that aggresses another state. International legal codes, both customary and treaty, make the host state subject to military reprisals as if it itself had committed the aggression. It's called the doctrine of "self-help". So who committed the war crimes Mr. Ignatieff?

Why did someone as clever as Ignatieff - who has even implied in books like "The Lesser Evil" that torture may come to be considered a legitimate tool in the global fight against Jihadist terror – decide to play fast and loose with the truth? Well, one could be forgiven for asking if he himself hadn't done some homework – in math. Principles be damned when numbers are at stake. Seven hundred thousand Muslims in Canada. Only 350,000 Jews. and a good number of those Muslims who live in Montreal (where the leadership convention will be held) happen to live in and around Mr. Coderre's riding. No, couldn't be. I'm adding 2+2 and getting five. Right? Wrong!

What we are witnessing from Ignatieff, Rae and the Liberals today is more of the same. This party really thinks that by affixing the word Liberal to itself, it really is liberal. I think the party would have a collective apoplectic fit if it ever found out that the root of its name is from the latin "libertas". Liberty. With these guys, pandering trumps principle any day of the week.

I must freely admit that I had higher hopes for Ignatieff. Hopes that he would bring at least as civil a tone to our public discourse as Stephen Harper did in opposition. But, sadly, Liberals' mother's milk is to make of truth a two-edged sword of craft and oppression and not the shield of the innocent and the staff of the just. Ignatieff and Rae seemed to have weaned well on it. and particularly on the issue of Israel.

Can we forget that Paul Martin called Muammar Khaddafi a man "with a philosophical bent of mind" when he visited Libya as Prime Minister wangling for oil leases even though Canada has more oil reserves than Saudi arabia? Can we forget that as Foreign Minister, John Manley equated the Israel Defense Forces with Palestinian homicide bombers on a trip to Damascus before parsing his comments in Beirut to "Terror is terror is terror"? Who can ever forget the sight of Jean Chrtien in Jerusalem hunching his shoulders saying he didn't know "North from south or east from west" when asked his opinion of the continuing territorial demands by the Palestinians? Dare we ever forget the hundreds of resolutions in which Canadian ambassadors to the United Nations voted against Israel and with degenerate tyrannical regimes on instructions of Liberal governments?

It may well be that Prime Minister Harper owes an apology. But it's not for stating the obvious fact that the current Liberal leadership candidates have an anti-Israel bias. It is an apology owed by the Government of Canada to all our freedom-loving citizens who time and again have seen a sister democracy betrayed, denigrated, and humiliated by a party whose longest-serving Prime Minister, the black-souled William Lyon Mackenzie King, set the tone of the politics of nullification and interposition - so perfected by today's Liberals - when he supported the call of "none is too many" as the acceptable Canadian quota for Jews escaping Hitler's Europe. Mackenzie King would be proud of his party today.


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