Jenin Redux

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

A short time after Israeli withdrawal from a territory, it becomes overrun by a terrorist entity that uses it to launch deadly attacks against Israeli civilians.

During the course of a defensive war in which Israel seeks to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure while taking great care to minimize civilian losses, the other side wages a sophisticated propaganda campaign to paint Israel as the perpetrator of a heinous massacre. World opinion, needing little prodding to begin with, quickly turns against Israel and rushes to castigate it for excessive use of force.

Some time later, independent investigations reveal casualties to have been wildly overestimated, but by then it is too late. Massacres that never were pass into popular mythology and prove impossible to dislodge.

Picture it: Jenin, 2002.

After the West Bank camp of Jenin passed to Palestinian control as part of the 1995 Oslo accords, it promptly became a terrorist base from where dozens of suicide bombers were dispatched to Israel.

The IDF, fearful that aerial bombing would cause needless civilian casualties, instead launched a ground operation where soldiers engaged in much riskier door-to-door combat. It was a decision that prompted Islamic Jihad terrorist Tabaat Mardawi to enthuse, “It was like hunting... like being given a prize. I couldn't believe it when I saw the soldiers. The Israelis knew that any soldier who went into the camp like that was going to get killed. I've been waiting for a moment like that for years.”

Soon, reports began to surface of an unspeakable bloodbath. Breathless eyewitnesses spoke of hundreds, even thousands, of mass graves. Credulous reporters repeated wildly inflated claims of casualties. The IDF itself, never one to shy away from self-accusation, reported that it had inflicted 250 casualties while itself sustaining 23.

When it was all over and the international outcry had forced Israel to withdraw, the final tally, as reported by independent investigators, was 52 dead – of whom 22 could be classified as civilians. The price Israel had paid for the sacrifice of 23 of its sons was universal and unqualified censure.

Zip forward to South Lebanon, 2006.

While Jenin was a propaganda war that witnessed the sudden miraculous resurrection of dead Palestinians climbing gamely back into their funeral biers, prompting the coining of the term “Palliwood”, South Lebanon was a war that saw the term “fauxtography” enter the lexicon.

The story broke when an alert blogger noticed that a Reuters photograph taken by a local stringer was so obviously doctored to blacken the smoke over Lebanon that you’d have to have been smoking something pretty heavy yourself not to notice. Another photo by the same stringer, one Adnan Hajj, had Israeli aircraft emitting three defensive flares instead of the original one, with a caption misidentifying them as bombs.

You’d be tempted to ascribe this to a single rogue photographer who happens to have a heavy hand with the clone tool in Photoshop. But there are multiple accounts of Hezbollah staging media-friendly events for the benefit of reporters, who are all too eager to lap it up.

The strange world of Hezbollah media relations is peopled by characters known as “Green Helmet Guy”, “White T-Shirt Guy”, and “Flat Fatima”.

A video taken by German TV shows the ubiquitous “rescue worker” known to posterity as “Green Helmet” posing dead bodies and barking orders to cameramen like he was directing a swanky photo shoot in Paris, where the supermodels all happened to be dead. We can think of “Green Helmet” as a kind of Grim Reaper, with a rather morbid habit of popping up wherever there are deaths attributable to the Israelis. His pal, “White T-Shirt Guy”, pitches in by aimlessly carrying dead children to and fro in an exaggeratedly theatrical manner.

The female counterpart of Green Helmet is “Flat Fatima”, a woman variously pictured at the scene of one building destroyed by Israeli missiles on July 22 and another on August 5 with identical expressions of horror, leading some to dub her the unluckiest property owner in the world.

Flattened buildings also have a habit of popping up unexpectedly. One building was variously described as having been destroyed on July 18, July 24, and August 5.

Neither was Hezbollah media operations to be deterred when massacres were in short supply.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper describes empty ambulances driving around in circles, sirens blaring, in order to create an atmosphere of dire emergency for the benefit of photographers eagerly snapping pictures.

Annia Ciezadlo recounts staged Hezbollah-guided tours, complete with a cast of defiant characters who enact their anger for the cameras. Nic Robertson took one of these, but failed to mention its circumstances to his CNN audience.

And it’s hard to know what to make of the many photos showing improbably pristine stuffed animals and well-thumbed Korans lying too poignantly amid the rubble.

Consider this excellent summary of media allegations that Red Cross ambulances were purportedly targeted by Israel, injuring the driver and severing the leg of a patient.

The Israeli missile had, if we’re to believe media reports, left a hole in the ambulance’s roof the exact same shape, diameter, and location of its siren. The same media who faulted Israel for the random and indiscriminate bombing of civilians would have us simultaneously believe that Israeli missiles are so precision-guided that they can accurately target the exact spot where a siren would have been, smack in the center of the cross painted on the ambulance roof.

The ambulance showed none of the hallmarks of a vehicle targeted by missiles, nor did it bear signs of having undergone the fire and resulting explosion recounted by witnesses. Gouges supposedly cause by shrapnel were rusted and clearly preceded the date of the supposed attack. And photographs taken one week after the event showed that the driver had made a full and miraculously quick recovery. Either he is possessed of enviable elasticity of skin, or this Red Cross ambulance driver is a Hezbollah collaborator.

This was a war in which initial reports of massacres were frequently followed by a downwards revision of the number of casualties. Thus the Qana casualties were halved to 28, and a massacre denounced by Lebanese PM Saniora in which 50 people were supposedly killed became shortly afterwards a massacre of one.

Life is too short and this article too long to detail all the depraved and cynical ploys used by its enemies to smear Israel, but honorable mentions must surely go to two incidents.

Mohammed al-Dura, a boy caught in the crossfire between Israeli and Palestinian forces, is killed, pictures of his dead body plastered on posters, and Israel predictably blamed for his death, with worldwide condemnation shortly following. Independent investigations later find the boy to have been killed by Palestinian fire, and there is some debate whether in fact he was killed at all.

In the Gaza Beach episode, a family is killed on the beach and the deaths attributed to an Israeli air strike, with the familiar worldwide condemnation shortly following. Subsequent investigations suggest that a Palestinian artillery shell, planted on the beach to discourage Israeli commando units from landing, is to blame, and not an Israeli missile.

Just this month, a Palestinian father paraded the body of his daughter for the cameras, accusing an Israeli air strike of responsibility for her death. The injuries were later found to have been caused when the child fell from a swing and landed on her head. In the depths of his agony, the grieving father did not forget to mistake Israeli aircraft for a child’s swing.

Israel’s enemies are so pickled in hatred, so twisted by a murderous, violent, and fanatical ideology, that they think nothing of politicizing the corpses of their loved ones. They have no scruples about weaponizing their own people, including pregnant women and young children, by strapping bombs to their bodies and sending them off to detonate in crowded places. They think nothing of using ambulances, schools, mosques, and private homes for the transport and refuge of terrorists and weapons, and then complain loudly when they are targeted.

Even were all the atrocities of which Israel was accused true in every particular, it is not Israel who puts civilians in harm’s way, but its enemies. Civilian deaths are always regrettable and often unavoidable, especially when one side does its utmost to blur the distinction. But regardless of outcome, we can always count on the mainstream media to put a unique, anti-Israel spin on the story.

Their reasons are manifold.

A reliance on local stringers with dubious political affiliations means that the authenticity and objectivity of reports cannot be independently verified.

Reporters’ access to the site, whether Southern Lebanon or Palestinian Territories – and even their lives – are threatened if they do not report in a manner favorable to the local side.

In many cases, it’s not even that reporters are actively collaborating to vilify Israel. It’s that they are, for various reasons, troublingly receptive to the notion that Israel is the embodiment of evil.

And maybe there’s even a mercenary motive added to the calculus. Wire services know that a little anti-Israel bias goes a long way among their wealthy Gulf clients.

Without getting too hysterical about it, these are serious allegations against established media outlets. By exhibiting a consistent bias towards one side alone, they have undermined their reputation for objectivity. By swallowing these tales credulously and without scrupulous fact-checking, as is their professional duty, they have compromised the credibility of all.

Tellingly, recent media scandals have been broken mainly by bloggers, and not by the established media they implicate. Since I began writing this article, bloggers have cast doubt on reports of an Israeli air strike on a Reuters van, citing the fact that witness reports seem inconsistent with actual damage. Regardless of the actual truth of the report, doubt will be cast on its veracity. Reporters will be suspected of complicity with those who would suppress the truth. The irresponsibility of mainstream media risks turning the fourth estate into a fifth column.

Since the Lebanese-Israeli conflict began dominating the airwaves, 17 aid workers have been shot dead in Sri Lanka. Eight hundred people have been killed. And an estimated 162,000 people remain displaced since April’s flare-up in tensions between government troops and rebel groups.

In Sudan, two African Union peacekeepers were killed and 2.5 million people remain displaced amid ongoing violence caused by a government campaign of genocide against the non-Arab population of Darfur.

And Ethiopian troops have crossed into Somalia, large parts of which are now controlled by an Islamist army that has threatened to execute anyone who does not attend regular prayers.

And now, I offer you the following definition of a “disproportionate response”. A “disproportionate response” is the media reaction to any conflict that involves Israel.

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.

Status of Women

Note: This post is part of a blogburst. For more info, click here.

It has always struck me as ironic that the colloquial term for the female reproductive organ is used pejoratively to denote great fecklessness, while the male reproductive organs are considered a symbol of bravery and courage.

Examining this proposition further, the vagina is designed to expulse an object roughly ten times wider than what a cursory inspection would tell you is strictly comfortable. The testes, on the other hand, are notoriously sensitive to pain, and generally the first place you want to be aiming if your goal is to incapacitate their owner. And, as the famed Seinfeld episode taught us, they are also the first to retract in an unfriendly environment such as cold water, in a phenomenon known as shrinkage.

I do not claim that this is one of the weighty issues grappled with over at the Status of Women, a Canadian governmental organization not generally referred to by the acronym SOW.

Founded in the heyday of Trudeau-era socialism, there have been many objections to its existence. Some resent its perceived radical feminist agenda. In part due to Status of Women Canada, Canadians today enjoy the most lenient abortion laws of any country in the world. Canadian women have access to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand during all stages of pregnancy, subject to virtually no restrictions, while polls have repeatedly shown that a majority of Canadians favor some restrictions on abortion.

But my objection to the organization is far more fundamental. The very concept of a governmental organization dedicated to the advocacy of women not only presupposes a non-existent homogeneity among Canadian women, but the marginalization of reproductive and family matters and their relegation to mere “women’s issues”. And I resent my gender being infantilized and consigned to perpetual victimhood.

Feminists would have us believe that what unites an inner-city crack-addict prostitute and a suburban female professional from an affluent neighborhood is a common suffering under the bonds of patriarchy. But in truth, bring these women together over a café latte and there’d be plenty of awkward silences, and, I’d wager, no bra-burning.

At a time when birth rates are plunging and Canadians are witnessing the erosion of the nuclear family, wouldn’t Canadians benefit more from a Status of the Family? Or better yet, a Status of the Child? Children, after all, are the only social entities in Canada with no political voice.

Its mission statement proclaims that Status of Women is dedicated to promoting “gender equality”. But what is this nebulous concept? Do we quantify gender equality by the number of women in Parliament, or by the number of female doctors or engineers? What of those women who choose instead to be stay-at-home moms? Are they indicative of pervasive “gender inequality”?

Consider these statistics. In Canada, male high school dropouts outnumber their female counterparts by a ratio of 3 to 1. 58% of university students are female. Males of all ages are three and a half times more prone to terminating their own lives than women. Mothers are more likely to be awarded sole custody of children than fathers in 4 out of 5 divorce cases.

In less fortunate parts of the globe, on the other hand, women are subject to gender apartheid, genital mutilation, and honor killings. They are the victims of systemic discrimination, and their basic human and reproductive rights receive little protection under the law.

We’ve heard a lot recently about “broad strata” of society, but nowhere does the term apply better than to women as a group. Canadian women as an entirety represent a diverse range of concerns and needs, and yet Canadian taxpayers fund an organization with an ideological bias towards a narrow segment of them to the tune of $23 million. Grassroots women’s organizations already exist for the purpose of just such advocacy, and the organization’s other activities should fall under the purview of existing government departments. Status of Women Canada does not speak for me.

The unraveling ceasefire

It should come as no surprise that the UN-brokered ceasefire in Southern Lebanon seems to be unraveling.

European countries, who have been among the most vocal in calling for the ceasefire, have expressed reluctance to commit troops to the UN peacekeeping mission. Meanwhile, Israel launched a commando raid on a Hezbollah hideout for reasons that remain murky but were almost certainly either ill-advised or ill-conceived.

France, expected to comprise the backbone of the peacekeeping force, sent a laughably small contingent of 50 troops, in numbers more suitable for forming a soccer team than maintaining a ceasefire. In fact, France’s soccer team has historically proven itself degrees more intrepid than its army, and if I thought Hezbollah could be neutralized by the simple expedient of head-butting I would be willing to effect the substitution. France, unwilling to commit further troops until their safety can be guaranteed, has agreed to top them up with only another 150, far short of the 4000 hardy Gallic warriors it was expected to contribute. France to the fore!

Among the other UN member states composing the peacekeeping contingent, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh are predominantly Muslim countries with no formal diplomatic recognition of Israel.

Nor can the job be reliably outsourced to the Lebanese army, comprised of roughly 60% Shi’a Muslims who are more sympathetically disposed towards Hezbollah. Early in the conflict, in a display of rare regional cooperation, radar supplied by the Lebanese army guided an Iranian-made missile supplied through Syria to its target, an Israeli navy ship.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Saniora seems to envision the army’s task as establishing a sort of protectorate in South where Hezbollah can operate without constraint. Lebanese Defense Minister Elian Murr sees its goal as twofold: to “ensure the security of the [Islamic] Resistance and citizens, to protect the victory of the Resistance.” The United Nations is not much more ambitious; this week, Kofi Annan ruled out the use of force to disarm the terrorist militia.

Thus far, it must be said, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon has not been what you might call a resounding success. In 2000, UNIFIL troops were complicit in the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, and the entire distasteful episode was the subject of a cover-up that saw the UN withhold videotaped evidence of the crime from Israel. In the ensuing years after Israeli withdrawal, UNIFIL presided over the re-arming of Hezbollah in Lebanon. During the course of the recent conflict, its troops were reduced to cowering in bunkers and sending stern letters of protest to the authorities as firefights broke out around them. Hardly the stuff of legend.

The United Nations does not have a glorious record when it comes to military intervention. Missions are hampered by the lack of a clear mandate to use force in the protection of civilians. Third-world troops are ill trained, poorly equipped, and prone to graft and corruption.

In Rwanda, UN troops sat on the sidelines, powerless to prevent the slaughter of 900,000 Rwandans over a three-month period. (France, it will be remembered, was accused of facilitating the genocide by arming the Hutu aggressors, allowing the slaughter of Tutsis in French areas of deployment, and stymieing foreign intervention in what it considered its sphere of influence.) In the Congo, UN peacekeepers, unauthorized to act, cowered behind razor-wire as thousands were slaughtered. Their enforced inaction has come has come at great cost to both civilians and peacekeepers themselves; in the Congo in 2003, three UN peacekeepers, after having called repeatedly and futilely for reinforcements, were murdered and their bodies later found mutilated. In Bosnia, troops were held hostage by warring parties while the killing continued unabated.

In short, I do not have much hope from the organization that brought us what Mark Steyn has dubbed the “Oil-For-Fraud” and “Child-Sex-For-Food” programs. Under the aegis of the UN Oil for Food program in Iraq, you will recall, billions of dollars were diverted to the regime in the form of kickbacks and used to enrich the leadership, buy influence at the UN and, it is believed, fund the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. In the Congo, UN peacekeepers who should have been otherwise occupied preventing brutal atrocities, including cannibalism, bedded the locals with wild enthusiasm, allegedly raping women and young children and trading sexual favors for food.

The UN General Assembly is comprised in the main of autocrats who insist on democratic representation in the form of one state, one vote, with a vehemence that must stun their jailed opposition back home, and the new Human Rights Commission is only slightly less of a joke than the old one. As the world’s only forum for global diplomacy, the UN is not entirely useless. But, having overseen more than its share of venality and corruption, its imprimatur is hardly required to lend legitimacy to the military undertakings of the world’s democracies, nor yet effective enough to render them unnecessary.

Israel has emerged as both the perceived aggressor and loser in this conflict. It has accomplished neither the disarming of Hezbollah nor the rescue of its kidnapped soldiers, whose safe return has not been made a condition of the ceasefire. Syria has successfully deflected attention from investigations into its assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and ditto Iran from its nascent nuclear program, while emerging a greater regional power to boot. Hezbollah, having set the bar for victory so low that their very survival is considered a triumph, is consolidating its support with piles of Iranian cash for Lebanese victims of the conflict. The ceasefire effectively ensures the rearming of Hezbollah, the weakening of Israel, and, I fear, the future deaths of a great many more civilians the next time around.

The last taboo

From time to time, people get to wringing their hands and lamenting the erosion of Western cultural sensibilities.

It used to be, for example, that you couldn’t mention the word “pregnancy” on television for fear of causing offense to gently-bred, Victorian-minded persons who weren’t given to discussing reproductive matters in company. When in 1984 it emerged that Vanessa Williams had posed for Playboy, she was stripped of her Miss America title as surely as she’d been stripped of her clothes during the Playboy photo shoot. Nowadays, it’s practically impossible to have your own reality TV show unless there’s sexually explicit footage of yourself available for download on the Internet.

And it certainly does seem that we’re getting blasé about it all. The first time people gathered in the streets to denounce the Great Satan circa 1978, we greeted it with shocked disbelief. Us, we wondered incredulously? Why would anybody hate us?

These days, you’re more apt to provoke a stare of wonderment if you’re not off chanting “Death to America” or, at the very least, its proxy cry “Death to Israel”. Cries for our demise have long since become monotonous. Old-hat, you might say. And whereas once this was an exotic feature of the foreign landscape, like non-potable drinking water, now you don’t even need to leave town to do it.

Time used to be the swastika was the exclusive preserve of the shaved head and white sheet set, something you wouldn’t normally encounter in polite society. Today, no self-respecting protestor would be caught dead without a placard or two comparing Bush to Hitler, to the detriment of the former. The swastika is enjoying a surge in popularity it barely had during the Third Reich, courtesy of the same people who brought you the convenient contraction “Bushitler”. Such is the strength of its renaissance that you’d be hard put to distinguish between an Aryan Nations hate convention and an International ANSWER rally for peace, using only number of swastikas as a metric.

The first time Iranian President Ahmadinejad called for wiping Israel off the map, there were a couple of raised eyebrows among the pinstriped pants at the United Nations. But by now it’s become so routine that he’s lucky if he can draw a half-hearted, pro forma rebuke from Tony Blair calling his comments “unhelpful”.

Truth is, Ahmadinejad is a victim of our jadedness. He’s simply lost the power to outrage. He searches in vain for ways to outdo himself.

He denies the Holocaust ever happened. The world barely bats an eyelash. He launches a nuclear program. The EU stirs itself to send some forms in triplicate. He sends a proxy terrorist army to wage war on a fellow UN member state. France lauds him as a “force for stability in the region”. Try as he might to provoke a reaction, the world is determined to pat him on the head (no great feat, in light of his small stature) and treat it like a quaint prank.

The danger in all this is that when the leader of a totalitarian theocracy is given to making the outrageous demand that a democratic fellow nation be annihilated and, furthermore, that he be the one assigned the task, he starts to seem like a reasonable fellow when he suggests instead that it be merely dismantled and relocated to Upper Silesia.

Every time a bunch of university-educated, upper-middle-class guys attempt to blow up a few planeloads of their fellow citizens, we’re told that such is the strength of their grievances they were positively driven to it. After a few repetitions of this mantra, it starts to seem like a plausible hypothesis. We stop questioning how it is that citizens of a democratic nation, encouraged to express their opinions in every conceivable way except violently, able at a pinch to round up several thousand of their fellow countrymen in front of Her Majesty’s Parliament to denounce their host country in terms bordering on the seditious, can possibly feel “alienated” from society. In fact, one wonders in just what other non-Western nation on earth could these individuals have greater latitude with which to promote their views. Try emigrating to Iran and pulling that stunt in front of the majlis, for instance, and get back to me on the results.

These days, victimhood is so fashionable that you can’t find a group without a long laundry list of compelling grievances. And yet it is only one group among them that resorts, with alarming frequency, to violence. So the argument that terrorist acts are motivated by sundry “grievances” is simply unconvincing.

Then just what is the mysterious ideology that fuels these acts of terror? Don’t expect enlightenment from our law-enforcement officials, who get suddenly tongue-tied whenever it comes to naming it. It seems that every age has its taboos, after all.

The terror that dare not speak its name

Whenever there’s a round-up of terror suspects, whether in England or Canada, we always hear a lot about how they represent a “broad strata” of society. And in a sense, I suppose that’s true, if the society in question is that of Baluchistan. There are British-born Muslims, Canadian-born Muslims, Shi’a Muslims, Sunni Muslims, pregnant Muslims, 34-year old Muslim biochemists, 17-year old Muslim students, black converts to Islam, white converts to Islam, Hindu converts to Islam, Muslims born in Virgo with Venus ascendant, and Muslims born on Venus with Virgo ascendant. In short, a pretty broad strata of Muslim society.

First, it was box cutters. Then it was shoes. Now it’s liquid explosives smuggled in sports drinks, to be detonated with a camera battery. It seems to me the overall strategy here is to get as many items banned from in-flight travel as possible, until eventually we’ll all be boarding in loincloths. The deadly conflagration over the ocean thing may not have worked out so well, but on the bright side, it’s imposed the unthinkable inconvenience of passing a whole trans-Atlantic flight without lipstick or an iPod.

I can’t help but feel that al-Qaeda is in danger of becoming a one trick pony. I mean to say, airplanes. YAWN. That’s so, like, five years ago. We waited this long, and all we got was this lame resuscitation of a failed 11-year old plot conceived, incidentally, in the supposed heyday of Clinton internationalism. Come on. Even the whole sorry shoe-bomber episode was better than this. It’s time to get over this unhealthy obsession with flight travel and move on.

Granted, al-Qaeda has a well-developed flair for the dramatic, but their problem is a marked distaste for mediocrity. They’re like an opera diva who can belt it out no sweat at the Royal Albert Hall, but freezes singing the national anthem at the local high-school football match. All this emphasis on glamorous, high-value targets is costly and self-defeating, especially while the apostate Shi’a are battling the Zionists so successfully. Makes you look a little bumbling, doesn’t it, Osama? You scored a big hit with the 9/11 stunt, but you’re all washed up now, trying to relive your past glory like a cheap starlet. You used to be a luxury brand, but now you look more like a cheap knock-off. The Hezbollah, meanwhile, is building the brand one Zionist at a time.

Robert Fisk recently ridiculed suggestions that the current Israel-Hezbollah conflict is anything so tawdry as a religious war, instead describing Hezbollah’s attacks as proceeding from purely rational motives – to wit, a territorial dispute over the Sheba’a Farms, which surely has as many claimants as it has spellings. Of course, the Sheba’a Farms has been recognized as disputed Syrian-Israeli territory, and has at no time in its history belonged to Lebanon – which is precisely why the United Nations certified Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 to international borders. One wonders how he would explain the recent plot to blow up airliners departing Heathrow, a dispute over sovereignty of the concession stand in Terminal B?

Here’s a clue. The ink on the arrest warrants was barely dry before Muslim groups began issuing the usual qualified condemnations, predictably linking the planned terror attacks to British foreign policy. As it stands, the plotters were simply giving violent expression to a widespread opposition to British actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let's leave aside for a moment the inconvenient fact that when it comes to killing Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, other Muslims win hands-down over the hapless British. In fact, it's hard to see what stands between the wholesale slaughter of Muslims at the hands of other Muslims except the presence of coalition forces. But withdraw British forces, the thinking goes, and all those British-born jihadis will lose the will to fight and volunteer instead to groom kittens at the local SPCA.

Some time ago, a Montreal-area imam explained to the local paper why Islamic religious law encourages its women to veil. Unveiled women, he explained, might incite uncontrollable lust in Muslim men. Rather than control the impulse, so much simpler to just wrap women in a burqa and call it a day. And since independent British policy might incite uncontrollable rage in radicalized British Muslims, well, if we can’t accustom the radicalized Muslims to the policy, then accommodate the policy to the radicalized Muslims.

That might work when we’re talking about abandoning some Jews in Israel to the tender mercies of their Islamist neighbors, but what happens when the demand is the imposition of shari’a law – something polls suggest is the ardent wish of 30% of British Muslims? A similar poll last year reported that a commensurate 30% of British Muslims believe Western society is hopelessly decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to end it. Are these groups seriously suggesting that we allow our best interests to be dictated by those who most wish for our destruction? British foreign policy is a convenient pretext used by those whose real goal is the Islamicization of British society.

No amount of broad euphemism for Islamist terror is going to change the reality. Police can boast all they like of consulting with “cultural communities” prior to arrests, journalists can skirt the obvious and identify the suspects as “Asians” like they were Japanese tourists on holiday, and airline security can pretend that an 83-year old grandmother from Wichita is as great a risk to public safety as a bearded 20-year old with a well-thumbed copy of the Koran in his backpack and a lot of racked up airmiles to Pakistan. We can trot out the well-known aphorism that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but there’s no denying its converse, that the vast majority of terrorists are Muslims. And no amount of sensitivity training will make this one jot less true.

The immediate ceasefire

It is safe to say that a group whose flag boasts a fist rising from the first letter of the Arabic word for “Allah” to clench an AK-47 assault rifle above the globe is probably not inculcating in its young that delicate sense of amity and peace among nations one likes to see. One senses instinctively, for instance, that neighborly values are not among those being instilled at the training camps where 14-year old boys mark their rites of passage to full-fledged guerilla-hood in Hezbollah-land. I’m a bit of a Philistine myself, and to me the difference between a Manet and a Monet is six of one, half a dozen of the other, but fortunately you don’t need an advanced degree in art history to deconstruct this one. Give me a tableau in which Allah, a rifle, and a globe figure prominently, and I’ll give you a group that aspires to the worldwide domination of Islam, and isn’t shy about spilling a little infidel blood along the way.

The way I see it, if I were in a dispute with my Jewish neighbor over, say, a shed he’d built that I was convinced encroached on my land, and I really wanted to settle the thing constructively, the last thing I’d do is assemble some of my cronies to picket his driveway with signs featuring a swastika superimposed over a close-up of his face while chanting “Death to 2025 Pine Forest Grove”. And if soon afterwards I took to greeting him with a Nazi salute in what can only be described as a menacing manner, and began trucking in stockpiles of fertilizer and rat poison, conducting regular military drills on my front lawn, and setting off stink bombs in his backyard, it’s fair to say he’d have just cause for alarm.

But this is just my simplistic moral vision, just one of a splendid panoply of simplistic moral visions held by people everywhere. It could never compete, for example, with the simplistic moral vision articulated by one protestor at Sunday’s purported “peace” rally in downtown Montreal, who told a Canadian Press reporter, “I’m here as a citizen who doesn't want to see a baby die for ideological reasons… They should all get together and try to find a way to live in peace.”

To this end, he and 15,000 other like-minded citizens marched with several prominent separatist politicians to call for an “immediate ceasefire”, an “end to hostilities”, “death to Israel”, and all the usual claptrap. OK, they weren’t explicit about the last one, and to give him credit one of the rally’s organizers, Imam Sayed Nabil Abbas of the Islamic Shiite Supreme Council in Canada, clarified helpfully, “We don't have any problems against the Jews. Our problem is with the Zionists.” In other words, he doesn’t have his heart set on killing all the Jews in order to destroy Israel, and if he could simply vaporize them with a giant Jihad Jew-ray gun and re-materialize them safely intact somewhere over South America he’d be just as perfectly content. And so Imam Sayed Nabil Abbas could walk broad-mindedly arm-in-arm with ultra-religious Rabbi Israel David Weiss, who opposes Israel’s right to exist as “forbidden by the Torah”, trailing behind them thousands of protestors bearing Hezbollah flags and pictures of Nasrallah and signs reading “Israel terrorist, Harper accomplice”, which sounds a lot snappier but no less offensive in a French accent, and the less concise but equally offensive “Israel learned from Hitler and the student has surpassed the master”.

But while there was a happy consensus that Israel was a terrorist state whose existence was a grotesque mistake on a par with the Nazi atrocities that engendered it, the verdict in re Hezbollah was a lot less slam dunk. Many, like protestor Asem Samhat, whose home village smack in the middle of Hezbollah country has been unsurprisingly targeted by Israel, hewed the Sayed Nabil Abbas line that Hezbollah, far from the terrorist organization it’s made out to be by an unfriendly Zionist-controlled media, is just a sadly misunderstood “resistance group” with a marked proclivity for the slaughter of innocents. Why get mired in such trivial matters as, say, the bombing deaths of 85 people in an Argentinean Jewish center in 1994, or 241 American servicemen and 63 U.S. Embassy personnel in Beirut circa 1983, when Hezbollah provides such unsurpassed social services? After all, how else is an impoverished family of six to afford to send little Hamid to martyr school? Granted, their shadow government has established despotic military rule over 25% of the country, popularizing a murderous totalitarian ideology and militarizing civilian population centers that have been virtually cleansed of Christians, but they sure make the trains run on time.

Media outlets such as the CBC reported the march like it was a watershed breakthrough in social coexistence. A rabbi and an imam, linked arm-in-arm like interwoven fibers in the Canadian cultural tapestry, led “Jewish and Muslim Canadians” in support of “Mideast peace”, with no mention of the muddied moral outlook that led protestors to denounce Israel as a “terrorist state” while hoisting flags of Hezbollah above their heads, and see no contradiction between the two. The only thing, in fact, to spoil this delightful picture of diversity was Stephen Harper’s obstinate support of Israel that “threaten[s] Canada’s international reputation” as “peacekeeper” and “mediator”, in the words of Liberal MP Denis Coderre. Those would be the same Liberals whose successive budget cuts slashed the size of Canada’s military to half of Cold War levels, ensuring an effective scarcity of peacekeepers should our international reputation ever need a boost. And separatist MP Gilles Duceppe leveled the by now tiresome accusation at Prime Minister Harper, parroted in various forms by many of the protestors, “He’s having the same kind of politics as George Bush, instead of having independent policy,” it apparently not being possible to pursue independent policy and produce something that coincides in any particular with a policy of George Bush’s.

In demanding an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, the protestors were not alone among world leaders. After making a barely veiled threat to use nuclear weapons against Israel, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, lauded by the French Foreign Minister this week as a “force for stability in the region”, stated that “the real cure for the conflict is elimination of the Zionist regime” but in the meantime, he’ll settle for “an immediate ceasefire”. This mild prescription for regional stability was something the folks at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, where he made it, could really get their heads around. The civilized world – and here I include France and Kofi Annan – was noticeably silent on the matter, unless you count the tepid reaction of Britain’s Tony Blair, who with the gift of understatement called the remarks “unhelpful” – I suppose in the same way that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a mere spot of bother.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d sure feel a lot better about the idea if those calling for an “immediate ceasefire” weren’t the same ones always crowding the mike to denounce the Zionist entity. It’s hard not to conceive of the “immediate ceasefire” plan along the lines outlined by Ahmadinejad: “Please hold still while we aim this nuclear thing. So hard to shoot a moving target, don’t you know! A little to more to the right, there’s a good fellow.” Now tell me again, why can’t we all just get together and try to find a way to live in peace?

Honest brokers

One of the advantages of seeing my twenties behind me is that as I get older, I no longer feel as strong a need to make others like me. Sure, there’s immediate family, close friends, and those whom I wish to curry favor with in the hopes of future gain, but in general I am by now a confirmed misanthrope.

Fortunately, my fellow Canadians are not nearly as curmudgeonly as I am. In fact, judging from some of the reactions to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s stance on the current Mideast conflict, Canadians are as desirous of being liked as you could wish.

For those of you not au courant on the latest in Canadian foreign policy circles, Stephen Harper’s bold stance in support of Israel has caused a bit of a flurry (as it were) here in the North. For a very long time (current historical and dendro-chronological estimates put it at about a century or two), Liberal leader Jean Chretien was Prime Minister, until he was succeeded for a very short time (so short that if you went to bed one evening and overslept the next morning by a couple of hours you might have missed it) by Paul Martin. Chretien and Martin, although belonging to the same party, feuded terribly and, to the delight of the opposition, publicly; but both seemed agreed in formulating foreign policy according to the maxim that whatever causes least offense is best, unless causing it to the Americans. In practice, this meant that when the Iranians tortured Canadian photojournalist Zahra Khazemi to death, we sent a strongly worded letter to the Iranian embassy, but when the Americans reneged on a softwood lumber deal we took them to the Court of International Trade.

Harper and Hamas were elected a day apart, and one of his first acts was to suspend aid to the fledgling terrorist government – thereby making Canada the first country to do so. (He would also make the long overdue decision to designate the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist group, reversing years of cynical Liberal pandering to the vote-rich Tamil community.) When the current conflict began, Harper made the seemingly outlandish claim that it was rooted in the fact that “the current Palestinian government is not committed to a peace process,” and, furthermore, that “there is an immediate crisis because of the actions of Hamas and the actions of Hezbollah.” He topped this off by calling for the end of “Hezbollah attacks on Israel”.

[Disclosure: I twice voted for Stephen Harper; once, when I expressed my intention of doing so to a colleague, I was met with the sort of horrified reaction usually reserved for people witnessing a horrible accident, followed quickly thereafter by accusations that I had been “duped”.]

Although he followed these statements with the largest mass evacuation of civilians in Canadian history, even escorting some home from Lebanon in his personal government jet (prompting some to wonder, “Haven’t they suffered enough?”), many in the opposition and not a few letter writers expressed indignation that Harper had not called for an “immediate ceasefire” or even a little “restraint”.

Jack Layton, the leader of the socialist NDP, decried the fact Canada was not sufficiently “distancing ourselves from the policies of the Bush administration”, it being considered quite sporting in the Canadian political establishment to accuse people you wish to deride of slavish devotion to the Bush administration. One letter writer, developing this theme, said Harper became “more puppet-like every day. When his master George snaps his fingers, Harper begs for biscuits.” While certainly graphic imagery that gets his point across admirably, it is not an entirely original idea to accuse those exhibiting any kind of commonality with the Bush administration of canine behavior; the idea, you will recall, was first popularized by the former Iraqi Information Minister. And a surprising number of people, among them some who wouldn’t know a foreign policy if it slapped them across the face with a subpoena from the Court of International Trade, dismissed Harper, a man the Economist described as intelligent and thoughtful, and who spent years formulating policy for the National Citizens’ Coalition, as a political “neophyte” who would do best to leave this sort of thing for his elders to sort out.

There were calls for Canada to send a “peacekeeping force”, despite the fact that, thanks to the Liberals’ budget-slashing measures, the entire Canadian peacekeeping force could probably be squeezed into a single Tim Horton’s with room to spare – and, come to think of it, probably is. Others expressed their concern that by taking a stand, Canada was forfeiting its role as a “mediator” and “peacemaker” in the Middle East. You would hear, for instance, a lot of bandying about of the term “honest broker” – an honest broker, presumably, being a person who says a lot of dishonest things about culpability being shared equally between parties whose relationship is irreparably broken. Many of those lamenting Canada’s storied peacemaking past would be surprised to learn that at no point during any of the significant breakthroughs in Mideast peace diplomacy – ranging from the first Camp David accords in 1978, through Oslo and the last Camp David negotiations in 2000, all the way to the so-called “Roadmap for Peace” – were Canadians in any way making themselves conspicuous by their presence. “Honest broker” in this usage is nothing more than shorthand for an ineffectual and unprincipled strategy of doing nothing, which may get us liked, but will never get us respected.

Oscar Wilde once said, “How many people are shocked by honesty, and how few by deceit.” Particularly, he might have added, when they’ve had so few opportunities to witness it in previous governments. Here’s hoping we’re in for a few more honest shocks from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.