Press Action ::: A Canadian AIPAC

Friday, June 18, 2004

A Canadian AIPAC

By Jordy Cummings

Conservative party leader Stephen Harper “I concede that they were softballs.”

This is the high circulation (think Forward) Canadian Jewish News reporter and activist in far-right circles Ron Csillag on his interview with Prime Ministerial candidate Stephen Harper, who told a large, mainly working class and elderly audience that only he could keep them safe. Perhaps this has become par for the course in the Bob Roberts-like era of post-McKinney manipulation, but Canada’s “Israel Lobby” has never been so AIPAC-esque.

It’s election season here and unlike the circus south of the border, we see two-hour policy-oriented debates. The two media-anointed frontrunners are incumbent Liberal Paul Martin and Conservative party head Stephen Harper, a man with close links to both the evangelical and White Power communities of Alberta.

While many Jewish neocons have argued to this writer that the pro-Israel foreign affairs Harper has “cut his ties” with Jim Keegstra, the holocaust denying Alberta schoolteacher, the fact that Harper once knew him should be of some concern.

Canadian Jews, like other Canadians to a large degree, are a good deal more progressive than their southern counterparts. David Frum drew no more than one hundred people to a talk at Toronto’s flagship Synagogue Holy Blossom, while a joint talk between Palestinian and Israeli peace activists drew a crowd of over a thousand, with people being turned away and closed circuit screening in Hebrew School classrooms.

This has always angered the right-wing self-appointed Jewish community leaders who, in reality, are part of the upper-class fraction of Canadians who are banking on a win by the troglodytic right-winger Stephen Harper and his openly bigoted (in that it does not consider the Canadian Charter of Rights to apply to gays, lesbians and other minorities,) pro-American Conservative Party. The Conservatives have banked on the genuine corruption and sellout of the Hubert-Humphrey-esque Paul Martin wing of the Liberal party. Thus, while it may not form the government, the socialist New Democratic Party (party head Jack Layton told Leo Panitch in Canadian Demension that he is still a “socialist ... and not a democratic socialist” well aware of what the latter phrase connotates) may see an increase in fortune.

The Liberal Party has traditionally been left-of-centre, but in the Chretien years, it became what Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin quipped was the “most right wing party in Canadian history” in terms of economics. Their incumbency is based on broken promises, and a recent spate of corruption, but even more so, over the justified fear that most Canadians have over the Conservatives, who don’t believe that gays and lesbians are protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as their promise to put the death penalty and abortion to an open vote, and even threatening to use the “notwithstanding clause” to veto “judicial activism.” In short, though, the Liberals aren’t that different. They “opposed” the war in Iraq while putting Canadian soldiers in harm’s way ... in Iraq! They also have moved away from the consistent Trudeau era liberal position that respected Palestinians as well as Israelis, to a far more overtly anti-Palestinian position.

Still, to the right wingers who have gained control of the Canada-Israel Committee (the Canadian AIPAC) and other lobby groups, even the Clintonian “Peace Process” style politics now espoused by the Liberals are not good enough. Thus, in the Canadian Jewish News we see the most horrifying manipulative interview, written by Ron Csillag, with Stephen Harper, replete with his grinning mug and no mention of his plans for military expenditures so great that even the Economist thinks he goes too far, and without challenging him about boldfaced falsehoods.

Having some past contact with Mr. Csilagg I wrote him and asked him if he had planned to “lob such softballs” at Harper. God knows, I know plenty of Canadian Jewish News reporters who complain at having their stories manipulated to serve Likud interests. Csilag conceded that his questions were soft, but denied any manipulative role on the part of the editors. This is not surprising given his role in championing partnerships between the Jewish and Evangelical communities, even with some groups that promised, according to one Jewish community insider, to “vocally support Israel only if the Jews stop agitating about gay rights and abortion.”

Csilagg denied that Harper made a specific assertion that he should have been called upon—that his “is the only party that supports the right of Israel to exist.” Imagine how this will read to Jewish seniors! Csilag and his Hasbarah comrades know what they are doing. When I pointed out this error to him, he was silent. The notion that only one party in Canada supports Israel’s right to exist is so laughable that people just may believe it. This may sound surprising to the Labor Zionist/Hashomer Hatzair types who populate much of the union establishment, linked with the NDP in Canada, not to mention Pro-Israel attorney general Irwin Cotler. The “right to exist” is a red herring, if not a codeword that Canada would move from its Clintonian position to one more resembling the new Bush-Sharon plan to allow Israel to annex much of the West Bank.

It would have been absolutely fine to let that statement go unchallenged, if they were alongside campaign propaganda from other parties. Csilagg asserts that Jack Layton has refused calls for an interview with the CJN, something not confirmed by the NDP press office, but would not be surprising given the attitude maintained by the CJN towards the NDP, this week dredging up 10-year-old moderately anti-zionist statements by an NDP candidate, last week attempting to derail my buddy Max Silverman’s campaign.

Csilagg and the Canadian Jewish News, including its editor Mordechai Ben Dat, who has privately told me that he can’t stand the Sharon government, are attempting a power-grab within the Jewish community, to send out an “AIPAC” like signifier to Canadian officials, particularly those within the wishy-washy Liberal party. This much has been clear for quite some time—only recently they justified the Rosenberg execution.

What is new, however, is the brazen and proud manipulation engaged in by a new generation of “Campus Watch” type Jewish activists and writers, mobilized as any leftist cadre, and behind them, the Canadian ruling class, playing divide and conquer between the Jewish community and the rest of Canada’s multicultural mosaic. Most Jewish elites—the Asper family—are solidly Liberal, but the new discourse is either neocon or neo-Kahane.

A few years back, a prominent Canadian politician from an old ruling class Quebec family complained to me that poor Canadians saw his party (Liberals) as the party of the Jews. I told him that it was the job of government to lift them out of that poverty, and that AntiSemitism existed because of the lingering sense of betrayal and reaction in small town Canada. He responded by claiming that it wasn’t up to him to change the attitudes of “backwards peasants.” The trick has always been to convince Jews that other minorities (Natives, Quebecois, Black Canadians) hate them and that only one party (earlier the Liberals; increasingly the Conservatives) can keep them—and Israel—safe. In turn, the NDP, until only recently, stayed quite quiet on the Palestine issue—and is well to the right of where many activists would like it.

Who stands to gain? Certainly not Israel or Jews. On the other hand, many of the companies licking their lips for the fat military contracts that Stephen Harper has promised them have some questionable backgrounds indeed.

Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.

More from Jordy Cummings