A little labeling

It’s a good thing I don’t go in much for unhelpful name-calling myself, because otherwise I’d be tempted to label NDP MP Peggy Nash’s comments this week so much asinine twaddle.

While touring Southern Lebanon this week, Nash was prompted to observe that “it is just not helpful to label [Hezbollah] a terrorist organization”. Well, we wouldn’t want to be unhelpful. Perish the thought. I’ll keep in mind Nash’s schoolmarmy injunction the next time Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, calls for the extermination of Jews worldwide, and I am tempted to dismiss him as a genocidal maniac. It would be so unfair to stigmatize the man.

I’m all for a little honest debate. Bring it on, I say. But when my opponents exhibit a keen interest in leaping across the podium and throttling me to death, I consider that I am justified in terminating the exchange.

Nash and fellow travelers Bloc MP Maria Mourani and Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj, who has since retracted his statements and resigned as deputy foreign affairs critic, expressed support for the idea that Canada should remove Hezbollah from its list of banned terrorist organizations. NDP MP Brian Masse echoed this view, equating the terrorist group Hezbollah to the separatist party Bloc Quebecois, which, no doubt, was delighted by the comparison.

The jaunt was sponsored by the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations, which is opposed to listing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. It is also the recipient of $150,000 worth of federal grant money. Alone among the federal parties, the Conservatives did not send an MP on the trip.

Nash and Wrzesnewskyj make the argument that having elected members in the Lebanese Parliament confers a certain legitimacy on the terror group. That’s all very nice, but having elected members in the Lebanese Parliament is not much of a stretch for anybody. Why, until recently, even neighboring countries like Syria could field members in the Lebanese Parliament. Hardly an exclusive club, what?

Wrzesnewskyj compared Hezbollah to the IRA, arguing that “if there wasn't the possibility for London to negotiate with the IRA, you'd still have bombings,” showing as abysmal a grasp of history as he has of ethics. The IRA became amenable to political settlement only when terrorism proved ineffective.

The logic that we should engage terrorist groups in dialogue so they do not have to resort to violence is absurdly circular. We do not engage them in dialogue precisely because they resort to violence. Offering a group like Hezbollah the prospect of unconditional political legitimacy would be to both reward terrorist acts and provide incentive for their continuance. Hezbollah’s message is not one that is best conveyed verbally.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when opposition Liberal, NDP, and separatist Bloc Quebecois parties convened a hearing on the government’s Mideast policy early this month, they excluded Lebanese groups from testifying who were critical of Hezbollah, but not of the Harper government’s evacuation of Canadian citizens from Lebanon.

According to the Globe and Mail,

Mr. Wrzesnewskyj is not the only Liberal to generate controversy over the Middle East. Former cabinet minister Denis Coderre marched recently in a peace rally in Montreal that included Hezbollah supporters hoisting the organization's flag.

And Thomas Hubert, the party's youth leader in British Columbia, recently wrote on an Internet blog that Israel was the "most vile nation in human history," and suggested Hezbollah might be considered freedom fighters.

In a letter written in Wednesday’s National Post, NDP leader Alexa McDonough defended Nash, first by denying that she had ever taken such a position and then by accusing Prime Minister Stephen Harper of – all together now – “damaging Canada’s credibility as an honest broker” and “parroting George Bush” by taking a principled stand against terror. If anybody’s parroting anybody, you would think it would be the Canadian left, which has taken to endlessly trotting out the same threadbare accusations pretty much verbatim. McDonough’s ideas are as tiresome and worn as the words she uses to express them.

The problem with these MPs is not that they are stupidly incapable of recognizing their own self-interest. Well, not entirely, anyway.

It is that they are, for the most part, nice, decent, well-intentioned people. And, like most nice, decent, well-intentioned people, they think that everybody else is just like them, with perhaps the exception of George W. Bush and anyone remotely associated with him. They are the kind of people who see evil in conservatives, but not in terrorists. They see the inherent good in everybody, or at least anybody who is a member of in good standing of an oppressed minority. Having been raised in an environment where even the most intractable problem can be solved through dialogue, they are incapable of imagining the violent reality of Mideast hatred. For them, a single picture of destruction in Lebanon is more effective than a thousand-word treatise explaining its origins.

I, being more of a dour old battle-ax, do not have a propensity to see the world through a beatific haze. I am not disposed to think of my fellow man kindly, nor is he readily endeared to me. But such pessimism has yielded me great benefits; I am rarely disappointed, and often pleasantly surprised.

If you see the world through a Hobbesian prism, as a place that is, in the main, hostile and unfriendly, and our own present age as a splendid respite, a mere aberration, then you know that not every soul is redeemable.

On Tuesday, Conservative spokesman Jason Kenney likened Hezbollah to the Nazi party, and accused opposition politicians of providing “political cover” for them.

“There was another political party in the past which had democratic support, which provided social services, which played an important role in the political life of its country in Germany in the 1930s which was also dedicated to violence against the Jewish people,” Kenney said. “The world was wrong to negotiate with that party then and it would be wrong to negotiate with Hezbollah today.”

The Liberal party of Canada and other opposition parties cannot claim to be prepared to be ready to govern Canada if they cannot even establish a coherent position on such a clear-cut issue as the terrorist nature of Hezbollah, an organization motivated by anti-Semitism and dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

It’s nice to find a little clear-eyed realism in the federal arena.