Mr. Robinson’s affairs

Editorial

The most dangerous place to be in the Middle East last weekend may have been anywhere between Svend Robinson and a television camera. Robinson’s visit to the Middle East may not have accomplished a great deal, but it did reinforce his reputation as a member of Parliament who knows how to get on the news.

Unlike many MPs who sit catatonic on the backbenches, Robinson has used the pulpit of a parliamentary seat to advance his views on a massive range of issues making, over the years, some useful interventions.

This wasn’t one of them.

Robinson has been an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and a critic of Israeli policy. He met with representatives of Canadian Jewish Congress earlier this year and, in a subsequent interview with the Bulletin, assured the Jewish community that he condemned all manner of violence.

This is a remarkably easy out. We have heard this argument from every Palestinian apologist since this intifada began. After harshly condemning Israeli actions and accusing Israel of being an occupying power and so on, these critics always have a quick and easy escape clause when confronted with the realities of Palestinian terror attacks. They condemn violence on all sides. Critics will tear a strip off Israel for its military actions but, when terrorists murder Jewish kids in a pizzeria or a discotheque, there is a gentle tsk-tsking and denouncing of “violence on all sides.”

Canadians and others who do not differentiate between the terrorism of the Palestinians and the defence of a democratic nation make a grievous moral error.

That error is likely to be repeated next month when nine more members of Parliament representing several political parties shuffle off to the Middle East.
But Canada, like Israel, is a democracy. Canadians, unlike citizens of Arab states, are free to disagree. Robinson, whose voice for the disenfranchised is so often heard, would be silenced on many of these issues if he were a resident of any Mideast country outside Israel.

But he is to be commended for one thing. He paid his own way to the region. (He was in Geneva on government business and covered the expenses for the Middle East leg of the trip out of his own pocket.) The MPs who are scheduled to go next month are being sent at the expense of Palestine House, a Toronto nonprofit group with an obvious pro-Palestinian slant.

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