"The Cairo Clique"

Terry Glavin has a piece posted to 'Z' Word about the Canadian "peace" movement and its alliance with "anti-Zionists" and theocratic terror groups. It's pretty long, but it's worth it.

This absence of a progressive agenda is perhaps particularly true of the Canada's "anti-war" movement. It is not uncommon for erstwhile Canadian leftists to cite Eric Margolis, a Canadian founding editor of Pat Buchanan's American Conservative magazine, as an authority on Afghanistan. Even York University political science professor James Laxer, a veteran of debates on the Canadian left, argued that foreign troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan no matter that the result could well be "a fascistic theocracy."

But there is second significant factor that makes Canada's new "anti-war" formulation completely different from its predecessors. Uprooted from a solid working-class conception of internationalist solidarity, it came to serve as the base for a mobilization on behalf some of the most pro-war, antisemitic, homophobic, and tyrannical Islamists in the world.

In the weeks leading up to what became the NDP's 2006 "troops out" convention, Canada's newspapers were full of heartbreaking stories about the Second Lebanon War, and Canada's main "anti-war" groups were busy staging demonstrations across the country.

In Montreal, some young Lebanese Canadians showed up at an "anti-war" rally on 18 July with a sign that read "Peace for Lebanon and Israel." They were shouted at and pushed around, and had their sign ripped up. The parade proceeded, with groups of marchers carrying the flag of the clerical-fascist Hezbollah, and other marchers carrying huge photographs of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

A few days later, at a large demonstration in Toronto sponsored by the city's Stop the War Coalition, there were more Hezbollah flags, young men in Hezbollah t-shirts, and more placard-sized photographs of Nasrallah and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, the Stop War Coalition offered up its podium to a high-profile Palestinian activist, Rafeh Hulays, who announced to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that he doesn't subscribe to any "anti-war" position when it comes to Israel. Of the world's many "monsters," he wrote, Israel is "the biggest, ugliest, and most dangerous."

Through the summer of 2006, it was commonplace to hear left-wing voices dismissing any public rebuke of these obvious contradictions as a "smear" of the peace movement, contrived from isolated incidents and heat-of-the-moment excesses involving a minority of protesters.

But these contradictions run straight across the movement's leadership, right up to the national umbrella organization, the Canadian Peace Alliance.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at April 3, 2008 07:34 AM