Early last week, the federal Conservatives distributed fliers in predominantly Jewish ridings, accusing the Liberals of supporting Hezbollah—claims that, when examined, are clearly false.
The flier makes a number of assertions. The first is that the Liberal government “willingly participated in [the] overtly anti-Semitic Durban I [conference].” A diverse group of nations, including the European Union, the United States, and Israel attended the 2001 World Conference against Racism, named after the South African city in which it took place. The United States and Israel withdrew from the conference midway through in protest to wording in the drafts of the declaration that associated Zionism with racism, as well as text that referred to “holocausts” committed against non-Jewish cultural groups. It should be noted that references to Zionist racism were removed in the final text, and that the word “Holocaust” appears once in the declaration, used as a proper noun.
The Liberal presence was justified. Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, who attended the conference as part of the Canadian delegation, says that the Israeli delegation asked them to stay behind as observers. Even if this weren’t the case, to claim that Canada attended, and remained at the Durban conference because they supported anti-Semitism is simply ridiculous.
The flier’s second claim is that the Liberals “opposed defunding Hamas and asked that Hezbollah be delisted as a terrorist organization.” On the contrary, it was the Chrétien Liberal government that listed Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations in 2002. Even the social wing of Hezbollah, which foreign affairs minister Bill Graham initially resisted banning, was listed after reports that the organization’s leader had called for more suicide bombings.
The assertion that the current Liberal Party requested that Hezbollah be delisted seems to refer to Etobicoke Centre MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj’s 2006 fact-finding mission to Lebanon, after which he proposed reconsidering the ban on the social wing of Hezbollah, citing how integrated it was with Lebanese society, and expressing worries that denouncing and refusing all contact with every wing of the organization might inhibit negotiations. Although all signs indicate that Wrzesnewskyj’s comments were made in the interest of opening doors for a potential peace agreement, he later resigned from his post as deputy foreign affairs critic.
Lastly, the flier indicates that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff “accused Israel of committing war crimes during the 2006 conflict [in Lebanon],” which unlike the first two claims, is completely true. In a 2006 interview, Ignatieff identified an Israeli air strike in Qana, Lebanon as a war crime. He later backed down, saying that Israel “may have failed to comply with the Geneva Convention of the laws of war,” which does not necessarily mean it committed war crimes.
Ignatieff is trying to avoid angering potential voters, and in that respect, his claim against Israel was unwise. But these allegations raise a bigger issue: why is stating that Israel has committed war crimes considered anti-Semitism?
In a later CTV segment, Tim Powers, a Conservative political strategist, said “I mean, we only had [last] October Omar Alghabra, the Liberal MP from Ontario, saying things that are somewhat in line with anti-Semitism, so it’s important to point this out.” Powers was referring to a blog post by the former Mississauga-Erindale MP in which he expressed support for the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which was recently endorsed by the United Nations Human Rights Council. The findings called for an end to military hostility, saying that “we must always push to end violence and promote peaceful mediation that respects the rule of law.”
Agreeing with Judge Goldstone’s UN-backed report, which rightly accuses both sides of the conflict of war crimes, doesn’t constitute anti-Semitism, it indicates that Alghabra bases his judgements on reality, not on blind, immutable support of Israeli policy. The Conservative government’s conflation of anything but single-minded support for Israel with anti-Semitism is downright Orwellian, and should be insulting not just to Jewish Canadians, but to every taxpayer whose money was spent on these disgusting partisan attacks.
