Canada: The Liberal Party speaks with forked-tongue on BDS and does nothing

By Dogan Akman

During the 2015 general federal election that brought Justin Trudeau to power, he ran an ad in the Canadian Jewish News which in part reads:

The Liberal Party of Canada believes that…..we must oppose Boycott, Divest and Sanction campaigns in our communities and continue to speak out forcefully against them.

He also declared on the hustings; I am opposed to the BDS movement. I think it’s an example of the new form of anti-Semitism in the world…an example of the three “D’s”: demonisation of Israel, deligitimisation of Israel, and a double standard applied toward Israel…The BDS movement has no place on Canadian campuses. And he repeatedly said enough is enough.

On February 18, 2016, two members of the Conservative Party in Parliament decided that it was time to do something about the BDS movement in Canada and tabled their anti-BDS motion fully expecting that the leaders of both major parties would put their money where their mouths are and vote swiftly for the motion. They were in for a big surprise. The motion read:

That, given Canada and Israel share a long history of friendship as well as economic and diplomatic relations, the House [1] reject the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which promotes the demonization and delegitimization of the State of Israel, and [2] call upon the government to condemn any and all attempts by Canadian organizations, groups or individuals to promote the BDS movement here at home and abroad.

During the ensuing debate on the motion a leading member of the Conservative Party told the House of Commons:

….The boycott, divest, sanction campaigners claim it to be a human rights movement. In fact it is nothing more than a thinly disguised, multi-dimensional hate campaign. On the one hand …it seeks to delegitimize and demonize Israel with hateful, hypocritical anti-Semitic attacks .On the other hand, on Canadian university and college campuses, the BDS movement focuses the new anti-Semitism on pro-Israel and Jewish students, disrupting with hate what should be a happy, uplifting student experience.

Trudeau failed to show up on the day when the motion was to be debated in the House of Commons. Instead, Mr. Dion, then Minister of External Affairs led the debate from the government benches.

In light of the strong statements of the Prime Minister during the election campaign, one would have thought that Mr. Dion would follow suit. This did not turn out to be the case.

After informing the House that the government will support the motion and vote for it, for all intents and purposes, he spoke against the motion by giving a perfect demonstration of the art of speaking on both sides of the mouth or, as my Indigenous brethren would say, he spoke with a forked tongue.

He first paid homage to the Canadian Jewish community beginning with an appropriate mea culpa about the ill- treatment of Jews in Canada before, during and for a time, after World War II and the government’s refusal to give sanctuary to Jewish refugees. He then praised the contributions of the community to Canada.

Mr. Dion then proceeded to describe Canada as a close ally and a strong friend of Israel since 1948 and the relationship between the two countries as broad and deep.(Since then, in the course of the recent armed conflicts in Gaza, the Prime Minister reduced the nature, scope and depth of the relationship to that of a “friend”)

Mr Dion also specifically referred to the mutually beneficial exchanges of scientific research and related joint endeavours and put some emphasis on the importance of trade between the two countries and mentioned the free- trade agreement and described it in highly favourable terms in terms of the importance and the benefits of the agreement for Canada.

Likewise, Mr. Dion paid his diplomatic dues to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and claimed that Canada is an important partner of the P.A. He said: Our development and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza address the immediate needs of the Palestinian people. Contrary to all reliable evidence, he claimed that this helps to lay the groundwork for the viable, democratic and secure Palestinian state…

However, when Mr. Dion turned to the intent, substance, effect and merits of the motion, his tongue spliced. He (a)  falsely accused the Conservatives of bad faith and divisive tactics;(b) again, falsely asserted that  the motion was divisive; (c) expressed  some disagreement with the way the  motion was framed; (d) ) save for a  single reference to “some hate-filled extremists, racists and anti-Semites … [about whom he said] “We must strongly condemn those individuals”; and utterly ignored the well- documented evidence of the serious harm caused by the BDS movement not only in Canada  but also  to the economy  of the Palestinians; (f) paid  lip service to the adverse impact of the BDS movement on the Jewish college and university students with a one liner despite the fact that  during the debate members of  his party and of the two other major parties  kept speaking about  the serious  problems  experienced  by Jewish and pro-Israeli students on Canadian campuses from coast to coast  caused by the BDS movement and its supporters; (g) reduced  the BDS movement  to a mere aggregate of individual supporters, and (h) in effect, rejected the second part of the motion  by re-framing it by reference to the individual supporters of the movement with sparse reference to organisations.

Mr. Dion stated, time and again, that his opposition to the BDS movement is based on the fact that it is not the right solution to the problem; that it will not lead to a peace agreement, and that its supporters are simply misguided in thinking that the BDS will bring about the realisation of the two-state solution even though the movement’s directing minds and the supporters who think along the same lines are clearly not interested at all in that solution.

In a disingenuous  display of wilful ignorance of the well-established facts about the nature of the  BDS movement and the despicable, at times criminal behaviour of its supporters on campuses and elsewhere and its ultimate goal to destroy Israel, the Minister  insisted  again and again that save for some individuals,  most of the people  in  the movement  including many organizations are acting in good faith, believe that the BDS is the way to go in order to get Israel to reach a peace agreement with the PA based on the two-state formula.(Italics mine).

In an attempt to convince the House of the wisdom of his argument, Mr. Dion could not resist the temptation of pointing out that even some Jewish people were among those who in good faith shared this belief. (Italics mine) Obviously, Mr. Dion did not know much about  the Jewish Diaspora’s so-called  “progressives”, “lefties” or “liberals”, who in the  Canadian Jewish community, are known and referred to as meshuggeneh (English word of Yiddish origin: Crazy; senseless. One who is crazy).

So, what then did the government propose in response to the motion? How did the Minister of Foreign Affairs plan to actively combat the pernicious new forms of anti-Semitism [BDS] that are attacking the very existence and legitimacy of the State of Israel? How will he prevent people from being misled by entities that have bad intentions?

The response was: The direction we must take is to launch a number of programs that are effective in combatting racism and developing tolerance, openness and acceptance in Canada”. However, it is important to avoid painting everyone with the same brush, to avoid driving wedges all over the place with indiscriminate condemnations. One thing we can do is identify anti-Semitism and separate this anti-Semitism from legitimate discourse in which we are looking to find solutions and we can have good-natured disagreements…We will be there to fight any attempt to divide Canadians and to put Canadians in good faith in the same bag with people who are animated by hatred and racism….The first way to fight racism is to avoid amalgamation [of these two groups of people].

Hence, at the end of the day, Mr. Dion on behalf of his government reinvented the BDS movement as comprising some hate filled- extremists among most of its supporters who in good faith advocate ultimately the mass capital punishment of Israel, i.e. its demonisation, delegitimisation and ultimately its destruction. (Italics mine)

This is certainly not how the Prime Minister characterised the BDS movement and linked it to anti-Semitism on the nation’s campuses.

To date, the government has done absolutely nothing about the BDS movement in Canada and on university campuses where the overall situation is now worse than it was in 2015. If anything, the former Foreign Minister’s utterances during the debate contributed to the legitimisation of the BDS movement by the government.

In the process, the Trudeau government provided a further impetus, if one was needed, to the spread of anti-Semitism in Canada under the guise of BDS advocacy and otherwise, reflected in the significant increases in the rates of the anti-Semitic incidents and hate crimes year over year since 1986, well ahead of any other religious group.

In the meantime, Trudeau talks the talk by issuing pro-forma condemnations of anti-Semitism from time to time when unavoidable but has yet to take a baby step to do something, anything, about it, on and off the nation’s campuses.

Do?an Akman was born and schooled in Istanbul, Turkey. Upon his graduation, he immigrated to Canada with his family. In Canada, he taught university in sociology-criminology and social welfare policy. After a stint as a Judge of the Provincial Court (criminal and family divisions) of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, he joined the Federal Department of Justice working first as a Crown prosecutor, and then switching to civil litigation and specialising in aboriginal law.