"Pandering to Hamas supporters."
Did Pierre Poilievre go too far, or was it Commons speaker Greg Fergus? Do the current convulsions in antisemitism run from the bottom up, or the top down?
There is something horribly wrong about all this.
I want to quickly dispense with the question of whether the baddie here is Poilievre or Fergus so I can get to the heart of matter, and then to the subject of my column in the National Post: Liberal failure to outlaw pro-terrorist group Samidoun is mind boggling.
With apologies to readers who don’t nerd out on Ottawa politics, here’s the Fergus-Poilievre rumpus in a nutshell, and to be perfectly honest I can barely work up the energy to form a proper opinion on the subject because it’s all so childish and frivolous and stupid:
Polievre said a thing about Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly that Fergus declared intemperate and deserving of an apology. Here’s the mean thing Polievre said:
Mr. Speaker, I gave the foreign affairs minister two opportunities to condemn the increasingly common and terrifying anti-Semitic chants we hear in the streets, such as ‘Israel will soon be gone’ and ‘There is only one solution! Intifada, revolution!’ Twice she refused to condemn those remarks. She continues to pander to Hamas supporters and the Liberal Party as part of her leadership campaign rather than doing her job.
I will give her another chance. Will she publicly support Israel's right to retaliate against the tyrants of Tehran and the terrorists of Hezbollah and Hamas to protect itself, yes or no?
Joly huffed. Fergus interjected. Poilievre refused to apologize, so Fergus barred the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition from speaking in the House of Commons, if you don’t mind, for a day. As for Joly, she harrumphed out of the House into the chamber corridor to an assembled flock of Press Gallery worthies to upbraid Poilievre for the impropriety of his comments on such a solemn occasion: “You don’t frickin’ gaslight people.”
Digression: Poilievre’s timeout coincided suspiciously with a crescendo of whining noises that had been emanating from the Etobicoke Centre Liberal MP Yvan Baker over his own ongoing suspension from the House, going back to March 20. Baker had refused to apologize for his rather wild claim that a “Putin wing” of the Conservative Party had taken over in some sort of quiet coup.
Denouement: Fergus moved to resolve matters this way: He dropped his insistence that Poilievre apologize, he allowed Baker back into the Liberal backbenches, and he called it even.
Post script: I mean, really. Joly is a fabulously stylish embarrassment of a minister. I don’t think I need to belabour the point. I’ll leave all that to our pal Tasha Kheiriddin: Mélanie Joly is the one gaslighting Canadians about antisemitism. Since the October 7 massacre, this government has propagated a false moral equivalence between antisemitism and Islamophobia
Impertinent or not, is Poilievre wrong?
Poilievre is not wrong. “Pandering” barely comes close.
Polievre began the week with what might have been an intemperate or rather too political address because of the time and place - a gathering of Ottawa’s Jewish community on the Day of Remembrance. Poilievre’s remarks followed Trudeau’s. I’d take issue with some of Poilievre’s facts and his analysis, but the core of his observations is solid. Watch it for yourself if you like.
Noteworthy: Trudeau’s reception was muted, while Poilievre’s comments were cheered loudly. Poilievre did not adopt a Code Pink posture regarding the eventuality of Israel bombing Iran’s nuclear research and development infrasture. Neither did he shy away from from the obvious that I’ve tried to point out over the past 12 months, most recently here. This is what Poilievre says about the thing that ails us: "This ideology that seeks to divide out people based on race and ethnicity, that has led to these horrifying outbursts of hatred, are not from the bottom up. They are from the top down."
From the top down
Well, yes and no.
Everybody knows damn well that the Trudeau Liberals are dead men walking. Everybody knows that they have made crude calculations about swing ridings and vote margins. They’ve done the math. Canada’s Jews number fewer than 400,000 people. Canada’s Muslims number an estimated 1.8 million people, twice as many as 20 years ago.
Being mostly recent immigrants or first generation Canadians, Muslim-Canadians tend to come from countries where antisemitism and “anti-Zionism” is bred in the bone. It would be stupid and wrong to imagine that Muslim-Canadians are all brooding, untrustworthy Jew haters, but some Muslim-Canadian opinion poll data that I’ll be writing about soon has given me pause.
It’s not pretty. But it’s exactly what you’d expect when all they hear from their leading politicians, their professors, much of the news media and quite a few of their kids’ high school teachers is that Canada is a racist confabulation of genocidal settler-colonialism that’s riven by systemic Islamophobia and white supremacy.
You can look at the Trudeau government’s equivocations and retreats from long-standing Canadian foreign-policy principles regarding Israel and call it “pandering” if you like. You’d certainly be on firm ground if you said the Liberals have sunk so low in voter-preference surveys that they've been reduced to competing with the New Democrats for the affections of federally-subsidized "equity-seeking groups," and especially for the endorsements of dodgy astroturf "Muslim" quangos.
What in God’s name is going on here?
Oh yes. About my column, online as of Wednesday: Liberal failure to outlaw pro-terrorist group Samidoun is mind boggling. It truly is. Deep background for newcomers: The Curious Case of Khaled Barakat in the National Post, Samidoun: The Network in this newsletter.
Something very weird is afoot. The Trudeau government’s behaviour doesn’t make sense, or at least what they say just doesn’t add up. It’s not just the federal government, either. I’ve had some dark thoughts, which I should probably keep among friends of this newsletter.