Some of the members of the Toronto Star’s liberal contingent are really getting desperate. Now we’ve got Linda McQuaig suggesting that Stephen Harper is an extremist — and based on what?

Based on Harper’s support of Israel.

Departing from Canadian political tradition, for instance, the Harper government has abandoned Ottawa’s long-standing attempt at even-handedness in the Middle East conflict, repositioning Canada as unequivocally on Israel’s side.

The Harper government also appears to have embarked on a disturbing and less-reported campaign to silence Canadian critics of Israel, in ways that threaten to undermine Canada’s tradition of open debate, particularly at our universities. The Prime Minister himself set the tone for this by appearing to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

“I guess my fear is what I see happening in some circles is (an) anti-Israeli sentiment, really just a thinly disguised veil for good old-fashioned anti-Semitism,” Harper told Montreal’s CJAD Radio in May 2008.

Ms. McQuaig then cites Jason Kenney’s use of the word “pogroms” to describe Israeli Apartheid Days, calling it absurd. Literally speaking, there’s a point, but those Star readers politically aware enough to support Israel usually make allowances for overblown rhetoric, from which no politician (even a good one) is immune.

She then weakens her argument further by citing support against Israel from Richard Goldstone’s UN report, and concludes that going after anti-Semitism is bad because it threatens the academic freedom of “open debate” at universities.

The big problem with Ms. McQuaig’s thesis is that her concept of “open debate” has never really existed in academia, particularly the universities of today. Because “debate” implies two or more sides to an issue, and all too often the organizers of such “debates” (if they’re not already members of one side) get swamped by one side, preferring to silence the other rather than rebut. (You only have to look south of the border, with the U.S. armed forces’ ROTC recruitment efforts in California, to truly understand the falsity of “open debate.”)

The other thing is, I’ve yet to see any evidence that Harper’s brand of pro-Israel sentiment is in any way out of the mainstream of Canadian popular thinking. So there’s no real way to characterize his position as an extreme one, despite Ms. McQuaig’s best efforts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 07:24 and is filed under Fisking Exercises, Harping, Media Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.