Note on Quebec vote

Editorial

A footnote to the Quebec provincial election Monday, which may have repercussions down the road, is the election of a member of Québec Solidaire, a hard-left sovereigntist coalition movement.

Federalists and others seeking reason and stability were delighted to see Liberal leader Jean Charest win a third term, taking a majority government after being reduced in 2007 to a minority. Charest, as flawed as any politician, is nonetheless an island of good sense in a province where such a characteristic is not necessarily a vote-getter. But the election of a radical anti-Israel provocateur representing a fringe left-wing extremist coalition should not to go without notice.

Amir Khadir, the Quebec Solidaire co-leader, won the riding of Mercier, on the Plateau Mont-Royal, defeating Parti Quebecois star Daniel Turp. Originally from Iran, Khadir has dedicated a large part of his activist life to Palestine – in the sense that he has spent a great deal of time blaming Israel for Palestinian conditions. Khadir's attention to Palestinians rests on traditional assumptions about Israel, including the myth of a monolithic and fanatical Jewish dogmatism toward Israel.

"It is a historical wrong for the Jewish establishment to support unequivocally the Israeli state in whatever it does," Khadir said during the campaign.

This aspersion – that Jews blindly support everything Israel does – is one of the left's favorite and evidently most effective libels, even as they make an ostentatious show of anti-Israel Jews in their ranks. It is all the more hypocritical and irrational given the panoply of violence, human degradation and abrogation of progressive values demonstrated daily by the Palestinian Authority and, worse, by the Hamas dictatorship in Gaza, all of which are supported with hardly a whisper of reservation by North American and European "progressives."

Whether this wedge in the door of the Quebec National Assembly will have any long-range repercussions to the discussion in Canada about Israel and Palestine remains to be measured. But the tenor of Canadian politics right now means even the fringiest of fringe parties should not be underestimated. This election saw the collapse of the Action democratique du Quebec (ADQ), an upstart Quebec movement led by a once seemingly charismatic young leader, Mario Dumont, who almost won the election two years ago. Dumont and his party have demonstrated that they are unafraid of playing with the fire of Quebec's time-honored xenophobic undercurrents. The alarming rise of the ADQ in 2007, even in light of its retrenchment Monday, is a warning of the volatility of traditional electoral allegiances.

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