I am re-opening this old thread to post an excellent article that was published in The National Post, one of Canada’s national newspapers. As far as I know, the author is not Jewish.
When Arabs kill Arabs, the left falls silent
Aug. 20, 2011 |
As the news from Syria grows darker, the silence from the left in Canada grows louder.
In Syria anti-government protesters have told reporters that President Bashar al-Assad’s police are using torture in an especially perverse way. It’s not for information gathering, since they can learn who opposes them by simply photographing demonstrators in the streets. Now they torture to terrify rebels by promising them a hideous death.
The police pick up men at random, keep them a few days, then return them to their families, the many signs of torture readable on their dead bodies. It’s not enough to kill demonstrators with tanks and snipers or have gunboats bombard the port of Latakia. The people are willing to face death. The police want them to fear torture as well.
Seventy such deaths in detention have recently been documented, 40 of them in the city of Homs, a centre of anti-Assad feeling.
In the five months since the demonstrations began, the government has killed about 2,000 citizens. The official view is that the state is saving Syria from vicious gangs of criminals. State television reports that events are proceeding as they should.
Even Saudi Arabia and the Arab League have criticized Assad’s use of force. Barack Obama wants him to resign. So far, however, he remains committed to the homicidal style that kept his father’s Baath government in office for 29 years.
Last Saturday about 40 people with anti-Assad banners held a peaceful demonstration outside the embassy of Syria in Ottawa. They all appeared to be Syrians, according to the Ottawa Citizen reporter. They were talking about the monstrous government that’s ruling their homeland and the attempts by pro-Assad operatives in Canada to intimidate them.
But on that occasion, where were all the Canadian-born experts on the Middle East, those vociferous and selfrighteous moralists, who come out of the woodwork every time Israel appears to be in violation of some UN resolution or strikes back against an outrage like the killing of the bus passengers on Thursday near Eilat?
Where, during the Syrian protest, were the massed student armies from York University and Concordia and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education? Where were the legions of academics and trade unionists who are always ready to declare what policy should be followed by the wise and the virtuous? Where, for that matter, were Dykes and Trans People for Palestine, who make such a great noise in Toronto and whose website proudly declares they support everyone’s rights?
It happens that the answers to these rhetorical questions are the same in each case: They were all at work on their next Israeli Apartheid campaign. The truth is that leftish Canadians have only one interest in the Middle East, the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis. That appears to be their entire foreign policy. They insist they are not prejudiced; they are devoted to human rights, nothing more.
But when they consider the world beyond Canada, and choose which cause deserves their energy, they usually select the Palestinians. Their chronically narrow focus on a single conflict is selfblinding. It produces a weird aberration of opinion.
When conflict appears elsewhere on the planet, whether it’s in Tibet or Sudan or Syria, our left-wing morality police go limp. They exhibit passion on one issue only. How can they be taken seriously?
In Philip Roth’s novel Deception, a Czech gentile in London asks her American Jewish lover, “Why does everyone around here hate Israel so much. Can you explain that?” Let’s grant, she says, that Israel is a terrible country. Her lover won’t grant that but she continues: “Still, there are many countries far more terrible. Yet the hostility to Israel is almost universal among the people I meet.” Why? How could that be?
He replies that it’s an article of faith among the left. They are wedded to unrealistic hopes for social justice and they resent Israel’s failure to live up to their ideals. People expect moral perfection from Israel and are appalled when Israel doesn’t deliver.
Israelis are expected to live by the highest standards and, in difficulty, “turn the other cheek.” Roth’s male character offers a shrewd point: “You criticize most harshly the people who behave best, or the least badly.”
That novel appeared 21 years ago. Since then, leftists have grown steadily angrier at Israel. Its strange destiny is to be the only open democracy in the Middle East, the only state with free speech and free judges – and to be nevertheless the favourite enemy of the Canadian left.