Something's rotten in the state of Canada

Something's rotten in the state of Canada

Canada is a country that is world-renowned for Anglo-French biculturalism, legally enshrined multiculturalism, increasing Native autonomy gains, and the championing of peace through the multilateralism of the United Nations. In 1957, future Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson was awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize for his role in the creation of UN peacekeeping missions. Canada’s international reputation has always positively differentiated it from both continental European nations and its superpower neighbour the United States. Given this record, one might expect for Canadians to be honest brokers in respect of the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.

Yet, Canada increasingly tolerates intolerance, the silencing of political foes, and annihilationist ideologies on its university campuses. Unfortunately, government and civil society alike have participated in the denigration of Canada’s once healthy liberal democracy and the lack of even-handedness. Canada has the most pro-Israel government ever under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, yet the undercurrent of Canadian society is increasingly a left-wing progressivism that views the struggle against Israel as the most potent human rights struggle of our age.

Let me offer some examples to illustrate this dichotomy between official Canadian government policy on Israel, one the one hand, and the anti-Israel chorus in civil society, on the other hand. Canada has declared Hamas an illegal terrorist organization, refused to participate at the recent UN conference on racism because it considers it an anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic “hate-festival,” and unambiguously spoken out against violence against Jewish students on Canadian campuses. The Canadian government recently banned British MP George Galloway from entering the country on the pretext of material support for Hamas. They gave a marginal figure untold numbers of new supporters in Canada and around the world.

The picture in Canadian civil society is radically different. Despite his support for child “martyrs” (suicide bombers), claim that the Holocaust was a “fairytale exploited by Israel,” and his admission of “rage towards the Jews,” on April 5 2009 Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, addressed Canadian Arabs near Toronto. The head of the Canadian Arab Federation since 2006, Khaled Mouammar, has radicalized a once tolerant organization by openly opening his heart to genocidal Islamists such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Between 2006 and 2009, resolutions calling for boycotts of Israeli academics at Ontario universities found a welcome ear with student organizations at Toronto’s Ryerson University and the president of the powerful Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) in Canada’s largest province. Ryan manipulatively compared an Israeli bomb that hit the Islamic University in Gaza to Nazi burnings. In a McCarthyite moment, Ryan outlandishly argued that unless Israeli academics condemned Israel for the 2008-9 war against Hamas in Gaza they should be banned from Canadian campuses.

In 2006 and 2008 respectively, conservative pundits Marc Steyn and Ezra Levant were threatened with censorship by Muslim organizations as a result of complaints to human rights commissions. In 2006, Steyn penned “The Future Belongs to Islam,” in Canada’s leading political magazine Maclean’s. He argued that Muslims in North America and Europe represent a potential Islamist political constituency due to demographic assertiveness and clashing values.

Levant, the editor of conservative publication the Western Standard, reprinted the infamous Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad on his website in 2008. Syed Soharwardy of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada launched a complaint against Levant for spreading hatred. Levant was farcically dragged to the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission to respond to the complaint. Levant taped the proceedings. The video catapulted to You-Tube cult status as Canadians were made aware of how the government gurus of anti-racism chillingly participated in the silencing of political speech. The complaint was eventually dropped.

In 2003, student rioters at Montreal’s Concordia University violently intimidated the administrators to the point that they shamefully cancelled the speaking engagement of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Even Ehud Barak, the current Israeli Labour leader, could not set foot on the Montreal campus due to the hooligan tactics of the anti-Zionist protestors.

I am a product of the Canadian university system. I completed my BA and MA at Toronto’s leftist hotbed York University. Crude anti-Marxist, anti-Zionist, anti-imperialism prevailed in the late 1980s, but open displays of anti-Semitism and calls for the liquidation of Israel were practically taboo. When I completed my Ph.D. at Montreal’s McGill University in 2000, I was involved in amicable Jewish-Arab dialogue groups attempting to solve conflicts in the Middle East.

Today I am a professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University, an anglophone university in Waterloo (Ontario) graciously named after Canada’s first French-Canadian prime minister. I have witnessed our campuses degenerate into institutions of greater intolerance. New lines of political toxicity have been crossed. Authentic political discussions are stifled. Righteous, moral sloganeering wins the day. Racism and anti-Semitism are more openly expressed today. Intimidation and harassment have multiplied against Jewish students. Hate against Israel is expressed like the latest Che Guevara fashion accessory.

At times, the hate is open. Most often it arrives in coded language such as “Zionist imperialism” or “international Jewish lobby.” The campuses are not alone. On April 7 2009 left-wing Toronto Star columnist Linda McQuaig wrote lines that shockingly smacked of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The 19th century anti-Semitic forgery insisted a tiny Jewish cabal insidiously destroys national governments and rules the world. Reacting to the infantile banning of Galloway by the Canadian Conservative government, McQuaig writes “it seems likely Israel had a hand in the decision to ban Galloway from Canada.” McQuaig forgets that Israel itself did not prevent the British MP from entering its country. Galloway’s ban was allegedly “influenced by a foreign government,” insists McQuaig. Presumably Israel, not superpower United States. As a G-8 country, why would Canada need Israel to make a decision about a British MP? McQuaig calls a 2008 security pact between Canada and Israel a “secretive management committee,” which might have a detrimental impact on Canada’s Arabs and Muslims. McQuaig provides no proofs for her allegations. If Canada is doing the bidding of a “foreign government,” would it not make more sense to back Arab governments with their massive oil reserves?

McQuaig is not considered a crank in Canada. Along with another fierce critic of Israel, Naomi Klein, McQuaig is one of the stars of Canada’s anti-globalization left. She is the author of It’s the Crude Dude: War, Big Oil and the Fight for the Planet (2004), which simplistically argued that the US invasion of Iraq was principally about securing a steady stream of petroleum.

Klein, the author of international anti-corporate best-sellers such as No Logo (2000) and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), recently signed an anti-Israel petition, “Jewish Canadians Concerned About Suppression of Criticism of Israel” in leading Toronto left-wing weekly Now (March 19-25, 2009). She was joined by 160 Canadian Jews, who tragically insist that “false charges of anti-Semitism” are utilized to block dissent against Israel. The anti-Zionist signatories claim that Israel does not act in self-defense and “causes immeasurable suffering and injustice to the Palestinians.” Despite the manifesto’s claim that it combats all forms of racism and anti-Semitism, there is not a word about the genocidal anti-Semitism of Hamas, Iran’s role in killing 85 Jews at a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, growing anti-Semitism on Canadian campuses or European cities, or the disproportionate demonisation of Israel among the community of nations. Not a word about real genocide in the Sudan today. Yet, there is a tasteless insinuation that “Never Again!” from the post-Holocaust era “means never again for all peoples.” The ringing conclusion: Palestinians suffer a new genocide akin to the Holocaust, which must be unambiguously blamed on Israel.

When did Canadian civil society become so virulently anti-Zionist? For me, the tip of the iceberg was the birth of “Israeli Apartheid Week” (IAW) through the efforts of Toronto-based academics in 2005. The fact that IAW is increasingly tolerated by universities across Canada reflects profound and frightening changes in Canada’s political climate. According to IAW organizers, by 2009 IAW comprised 42 participating cities, with a staggering 13 in Canada. I was immensely troubled by IAW at my own university and campuses throughout Canada. IAW presents one-sided anti-Zionist, anti-Israel events where moderate voices for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are silenced. At IAW in Canada, there was not a single pro-Zionist speaker. Is this what passes for debate on Canadian campuses today?

Writing in the National Post on March 10 2009, Judy Rebick and Alan Sears insisted IAW is a free speech issue in respect of Palestinian rights. All states, including Israel, should be legitimately criticized in the international arena. In reality, the aim of IAW is not merely criticism, but to compare Israel to formerly apartheid South Africa. The dubious label ends debate. It leads to the conclusion that, like one of the most heinous regimes of the 20th century, Israel ought to be eliminated. Irwin Cotler aptly points out that the aim of IAW is to deny the collective Jew (Israel) the right to statehood among the community of nations. Yet, the deeper question I ask is why have Canadian universities been at the forefront of dubbing Israel an “apartheid state”?

The clues to the answer are provided by “All’s well in the kingdom of Canada” (March 8, 2009), penned by Toronto Star columnist Haroon Siddiqui. Siddiqui offers a sanitized and inaccurate picture of IAW. He insists that IAW is “anti-racist” and disingenuously compares its supporters to the multicultural peaceniks of the 1960s anti-Vietnam war movement. Unfortunately, the legitimization and proliferation of IAW on Canadian campuses means that something’s rotten in the state of Canada. University administrators, professors, and students have failed to sufficiently speak out against IAW because the cause is branded as “progressive” and “anti-racist.”

IAW is a step backwards akin in its annihilationist goal to the infamous Zionism equals racism resolution passed by the UN in 1975 and revoked in 1991. IAW calls for equal individual rights under one national state for Israel’s Jews and Arabs (over one million legal citizens of allegedly “apartheid Israel”), as well as Palestinians in the territories of Gaza (Hamas-controlled), the partially occupied West Bank (Palestinian Authority and Israel), and foreign refugee camps. For Canadians, this sounds appealing. But do Jews who were expelled from Arab lands not also have the right of compensation or return to Libya or Egypt? Moreover, IAW seeks to extinguish the right of Jews to exist as a national community. Would a more appropriate solution not be to recognize the right to self-determination of Palestinians and Jews living in peace with their respective viable states?

Speaking to Jewish students from Wilfrid Laurier University to University of Toronto, I know they no longer feel safe on campuses supporting Israel, even if they also support the creation of a Palestinian state. IAW has made them more afraid. Through IAW Canadians are fed the false mythology that destroying “apartheid Israel” is the most “progressive” human rights struggle of our age. In jumping on the IAW bandwagon and speaking the language of “Israeli apartheid” and “genocidal Israel,” Canadian campuses participate in perpetuating what English philosopher Jeremy Bentham might have called “nonsense upon stilts.” They also cheapen the memory of the victims of South African apartheid and genocide victims from Armenians and Jews to Tutsis and Darfuris.

Canadians are being deluded by IAW as a straightforward anti-racist, human rights struggle with evil Israel on one side and eternally good Palestinians on the other side. Canadians are proud of their human rights tradition, but Canada’s political culture is increasingly de-politicized and deep historical knowledge of unique conflicts weakened by a sloganeering moral righteousness. This is perhaps why too many Canadians uncritically support IAW.

Would Canadians rally to the IAW cause if they understood that in destroying “apartheid Israel” they would destroy the most vibrant civil society and democratic state in the Middle East? Or, that Israel with all its warts can be a model to end centuries of authoritarianism in the Arab and Muslim worlds?

Canadians and others around the world should reconceptualise what it means to be “progressive” and “anti-racist.” IAW created strange bedfellows: left-wing “progressives,” radical Islamists, and rabid anti-Semites of the far right and left. Prominent anti-Zionist Jews support IAW’s one-state solution. They are in dubious company sandwiched between Hamas and Libyan autocrat Muammar Qaddafi.

Sadly, Canadian “progressives” fail to see the raging storm that has begun with Israel’s absolute demonisation will not end with it. Canadians should be under no illusion that the aim of IAW supporters, sometimes unwittingly, is annihilationist vis-à-vis Jewish and democratic Israel. Should they succeed one day, the impact will be felt beyond Jews. Liberal democratic ideals and their supporters will also be threatened with elimination.

An Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who died in a government-controlled Fascist prison after years of incarceration, clearly understood that liberal democracies engender mass consensus based on common ways of seeing in civil society. Consensus is moulded by common sense, as well as shared attitudes and worldviews. The repressive apparatus of the state, Gramsci argued, is less important in liberal societies than the creation of mass consensus, which legitimizes capitalism and the parliamentary system. Governments come and go, but the underbelly of long-term power rests in cultural power shaped by civil society in the media, universities, voluntary associations, and think-tanks.

If we pay attention to Gramsci, we can predict that Canada’s most pro-Israel government in history does not hold the key to durable power. Civil society holds the key. In respect of Israel, Canadian civil society is increasingly alienated from the mantra of Canada’s current Conservative government. The danger of the rising anti-Zionist tide is that it will become “self-evident” to ordinary Canadians that Israel is an “illegitimate Zionist entity” fit for the dustbin of history. And then will not Canadian governments have to follow suit? It might not be long before Canada’s civil society’s hatred for Israel rivals that of France, Greece, or Venezuela. It would still not rival the Jew and Israel hatreds of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, and other Arab bastions of freedom. Already Hamas and Hezbollah banners are openly displayed at anti-Israel marches in multicultural havens such as Toronto and Montreal. Israel’s foes in Canada wait to regularly and legitimately scream “Death to the Jews!” at “anti-racist,” anti-Zionist marches. Their “progressive” anti-Zionist friends on the faux left do not dare open their mouths. Perhaps they hope to be naively spared from the coming storm.

Tamir Bar-On