April 2002
by Barry Stagg
The Globe preaches against Israeli revenge, as if a sovereign state must absorb terrorist murders without retaliatory action. It seems that mewlings of this sort, that are directed at the United States only at great peril, are now instead unleashed against a more distant and ethnically vulnerable target. Early on after September 11, liberal commentary in Canada was tending toward the odious ' they had it coming' . This soon changed when President Bush made it clear that choosing sides was the only option and that sneering neutrality was not going to be tolerated.
The same fear that keeps a foolish Canadian media from lionizing the Islamists does not carry over to the Arab-Israeli conflict. There the press shows a cloying sense of supposed balance by equating Arafat's corrupt terrorist haven in the Palestinian territories with democratic, pluralistic, besieged Israel.This may have been what the French press was like in the dark days of 1940 when the Vichy French were negotiating an accord with Hitler and scorning the folly of England standing alone. What did Churchill say about the French prediction of England' s demise:
"When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone, whatever they did, their Generals told their Prime Minister and his divided cabinet that in three weeks, England would have her neck wrung like a chicken - Some chicken! Some neck!"
In the same Good Friday paper, the Globe has little difficulty lauding the hagiographic Trudeau drama put on by the CBC and admits to not a pinch of irony in celebrating one of Canada's most notorious war bystanders, one who sat out World War Two on his motorcycle and opposed conscription in the divisive wartime plebiscite. When Churchill spoke these stirring words to the Canadian House of Commons, Trudeau was exhibiting much more commonality with Petain's Vichy France than with the valiant anti-Nazi fighters defending the British Isles. Condemning Israeli Prime Minister Sharon for defending his people sits side by side with this fluff.
Why should Canada's intelligentsia be given an unchallenged hand to demonize a valiant Israel by equating it with the amorphous, anti-Semitic Palestinian Liberation Organization? It is as if Che Guevara has been reincarnated in the form of Yasser Arafat, to carry the torch for clever variations on Stalinism for the balding flower children/geriatrics who populate the snob temples of Canada' s thoroughly provincial elite. Viva Che, Viva Yasser, Viva Osama....
What contemptible behaviour we are seeing from Canadian critics of Israel who would have Tel Aviv make a Munich-style peace with a bunch of Arab dictatorships dedicated to an anti-Semitic purging of Jews from the region and the destruction of their country. The safety that these craven critics find is in the plain reality that Israel will never surrender and will not be defeated as long as the United States exists.
How much of the critical Canadian enmity toward Israel is re-directed loathing of the Americans and their militant determination? The answer is plenty though the Canadian critics are in the same rut as their hand-wringing American counterparts. Commentators are filling U.S. television with dire predictions of Arab uprisings if Arafat is killed by the Israeli army. These use the same template that sent forth the liberal wisdom that Afghanistan would swallow the American military like the Russian winter burying the Nazi army. The Arab 'street' is a myth that grows dimmer with each ridiculous prediction that mobs in Gaza will come calling on Washington. For such as the Hamas martyrs, incineration is the only certainty after any attempt to confront the Americans.
The Canadian 'street' will have nothing to do with the Globe's championing of a plan for world peace that distills down to this: Embrace your local barbarians as they murder you.