By Robert Fulford, National Post (Canada)
A word jumped off the page when I was reading Haroon Siddiqui’s column in the Toronto Star the other day: “rabid.” Describing Qatar’s attempt to steal the International Civil Aviation Organization headquarters from Montreal, Siddiqui wrote: “There’s speculation that the bid is also politically motivated, in retaliation for Stephen Harper’s rabid pro-Israeli stance.”
Siddiqui is an important Star personage, routinely billed as the paper’s “editorial page editor emeritus,” a title claimed by no other Canadian journalist. He ran the editorial page in the 1990s, and the Star apparently wants to recall those glory years every time he appears in print. What in the world makes him call the prime minister rabid?
Oxford defines that word as “Furious, raging; wildly aggressive.” Doesn’t sound like Stephen Harper. He’s cool and careful. He speaks quietly of Israel, noting that Canada doesn’t endorse all of Israel’s policies. He finds it unfair that so much criticism is directed by others against “the one country of the global community whose very existence is threatened.” He also draws a lesson from history: Those who choose the Jewish people “as a target of racial and religious bigotry will inevitably be a threat to all of us.” He believes those who target Israel also threaten “all free and democratic societies.”
Perhaps Siddiqui, in using that strange word, “rabid,” unconsciously projects his own feelings of rage and frustration onto his subject. For the left and the leftish, such as Siddiqui, a furious opposition to Israel has become a sacred duty. When the anti-Israel forces assemble, usually in a university, they have wonderfully peaceful meetings. Everyone agrees on all major points. Everything said against Israel is greeted with cheers. (One meeting I recently attended as a journalist was close to a pep rally.) Opposing Israel has become the favourite struggle of the left. Nothing else in world affairs is considered so important. In Canada, it’s the left’s only foreign policy (well, name another one). It is also a major source of their intellectual comfort and self-satisfaction.
Leftists are natural conformists who like to travel in packs and love political abstractions. In the UN, the most persistent gang is the anti-Israel cabal, which pours out millions of words about Israeli imperialists oppressing the Palestinians. Students, listening to Arab politicians tossing around terms such as colonialism and racism, feel a warm sense of recognition: Why, that’s just what our professor is always talking about.
In North America or Europe, holding this position demonstrates an absurd thoughtlessness. It implies that we should punish Israel, the only real democracy in the Middle East, while ignoring Syria, Iran, North Korea, China, and many other despotic states. This a remarkable but widespread form of blindness. I have acquaintances, including feminists, who never utter a word against Saudi Arabia or Pakistan but nevertheless wish everyone to know that they disagree strongly with Israel’s policies.
The boycott movement, a favourite technique of the anti-Israel movement, can create a sensation when Stephen Hawking decides he won’t attend a conference in Israel, out of sympathy for the Palestinians. On the other hand, consistency is not among his qualities: He’s visited Iran and China. It is an ominously meaningful fact that no other country, whatever its sins, is given this pariah treatment. Do the celebrity boycotters understand the company they keep? William Jacobson, a Cornell law professor who blogs on this subject, remarked this week that “The boycott, which singles out only Israel, attracts open and de facto anti-Semites and those in the leftist-Islamist coalition who seek Israel’s destruction.”
But the larger and more ambitious boycott, of Israeli products and services, has struggled along for years, and accomplished approximately nothing. Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) urges its followers to boycott Sears, Home Depot, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Pizza Hut and several other companies; they all sell goods from Israel or have interests in Israel. The CJPME urges the public to stay away from Indigo stores because the principal owners, Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz, started a foundation that offers scholarships for veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces.
CJPME can provide many details about the source of the products it wants to boycott, like Dead Sea beauty products. But their publicity says nothing about the futile effect of their campaign, apparently because the truth would be too painful.
Think how hard this must be for Siddiqui and people like him. Not only do the masses ignore their duty to boycott Israel, but their own country defends the state they want to see defeated and isolated. It would make anybody rabid.
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
Michael Devolin Said:
A favorite WMD in the Muslim world.
Well said, Mr. Ross (your letter to Bernie Farber). Apparently Bernie Farber does not comprehend the scope and intensity of the “jihad” coming his (our) way. As the Supertramp song used to go: “Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer.”
Michael Devolin Said:
perhaps the operative word is “was”. I went to the link and felt compelled to write the following comment in reply to his letter:
Laura Said:
Amen! so should all these frauds. I don’t see why everyone is sympathetic to Hawkings. apparently, being disabled is a passport to fraud, libel, hypocrisy, double standards and anti semitism. He should be shown no quarter because he is disabled. He has used his position of fame to facilitate blood libels on the Jews, he is a despicable human being.
If this statement is true then there is hope. If this statement is true the pigs can be left to choke on their swill.
Sad. I know Bernie Farber. Have known him for years. Meir Weinstein (national director JDL Canada) and him were formerly “together” on a lot of issues. They fought together against Keegstra and to have Zundel removed from this country. They fought against Imra Finta, to have him returned to Hungary. But when the Muslims began stirring about “freedom of speech” all was lost between them, or so it seems to me. We used to meet up with Bernie at important events, but now we never see him. It’s really sad. And Bernie is a really nice man, a mensch, as they say. Whenever I would phone him, even if he was talking to some big-wig politician on the phone, he would put them on hold to talk to me, to hear what I had to say. That’s the kind of person he is. But by now I think he is putting too much faith in the Muslim promise of becoming “assimilated” Canadians. It will never happen. We are travelling down the road to the “clash of civilizations.”
Check out this letter from Bernie Farber, former CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress, putting down and lying about Pamela Geller, supporting intimidation by the police against a rabbi wanting to host her event (last letter on the page).
Please sign this petition asking Siddiqui to retire.
The Toronto Star has been dubbed The Red Star for taking positions consistent with Communism. Siddiqui is their man for Islam – a stalwart defender of terrorism and a rabid Israel hater who has also become a fifth column bully against Canada for taking positions he finds objectionable – like preventing terrorism and standing strong with Israel.
We need frequent “pep rallies” FOR Israel, pro-actively, spontaneously. We need hordes of pro-Israel speakers invited to our universities, protected by the police, or by ourselves, if necessary, “by all means necessary”. We need boycotts of anti-Israeli Arab stores, well-publicized “buycotts” of Israeli goods, large pro-Israel demonstrations each time a hamas or Syrian mortar is fired at Israel, each time Iran calls for the extermination of Israel.
It is time to go on the offensive.
Siddiqui has been telling lies about Israel and the Jews for years now, and getting away with it, thanks to the Toronto Star. I confronted him about one of these lies a few years back in an email and he replied that I had to be more civil before we could begin dialogue. Dialogue with an anti-Jewish bigot, as you know from your experiences here with the Good Doctor, is without reward, so my reply was to tell him to “F*** off.” He is pro-Saudi all the way and virulently anti-American.
He should be confronted about that.