Lies, local and global

Editorial

In a world where everyone is busy and countless human catastrophes compete for our attention, every cause needs a gimmick. For the anti-Israel movement to reach its target audience of the lazy and/or ignorant, Israel Apartheid Week is that come-on.

Israel Apartheid Week, for the uninitiated, is a festival of hatred that has taken place for several years now at the University of Toronto, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. This year, according to the international organizers of this annual intellectual atrocity, the festivities were supposed to expand to Vancouver. Alas, by Monday, the website – www.apartheidweek.org – had removed our city from the list of communities chosen to benefit from a week of unsubstantiated denunciations and appropriations of African tragedy.

The propaganda fest is scheduled to run in at least three Canadian cities and a dozen others Feb. 3-19, making the week 16 days long and thereby putting the lie to the only part of the moniker "Israel Apartheid Week" that had any legitimacy at all.

The idea that Israeli society in any way resembles that of the former South African regime does not deserve discrediting. Any moderate IQ can compare two historical cases and find similarities. This one is particularly egregious not because of what it says about Israel or for the offence it represents against truth or the experience of black South Africans, though these are not insubstantial. Israel Apartheid Week is contemptible because of the impact it has on its own perpetrators.

Zionism is not without its flaws or its disreputable advocates, but there has always been an inherently deceptive foundation to Zionism's opposition. From the assertion by Israel's (moderate) opponents that they support Israel's right to exist, when their every act betrays insouciance to Israel's survival, to the ahistoric narrative they purvey and the monotonous repetition of mindless slogans they chant – as though they are trying to convince themselves as much as anyone – the anti-Israel movement has never let truth get in the way of ideology.

Lies are a small price to pay for people committed to winning the propaganda war at any cost. Whatever coaching the International Solidarity Movement used to encourage a well-intentioned young Washington woman, Rachel Corrie, to serve as a human shield for weapons smuggling operations in Gaza cost a pittance compared with the propaganda return on investment the movement got from her tragic death. Now, even in Vancouver, a hagiographic play based on Corrie's experiences is attracting credulous audiences, and serving as a recruitment tool for the next generation of idealistic North American youngsters to throw themselves in harm's way for the cause.

It was not Israel's armed forces for whom Corrie's life was cheap; it was the ideologues who sent her to die in propaganda's name. This is among the worst but far from the only example of the ignoble approach taken by Israel's enemies. And while it is no joy for Jews and Zionists to listen to this crap, the real damage it is doing is not to us, but to them. The credibility of their movement – and that of their allies, which include mainstream politicians and journalists – suffers when truth and decency are sublimated to concepts like Israel Apartheid Week. More painfully, the impact of their approach on their mostly young adherents – such as those who set up the booths and hand out the photocopied falsehoods at Israel Apartheid Week – is creating a cadre of badly informed but fervent stooges, some of whom are apparently prepared to die for a cause of which they've only heard one side.

As if a ray of sanity in the darkness of the approaching Apartheid Week, it was left to the federal Conservative government to stand up for honesty in the discourse about the Middle East. A follow-up conference is scheduled for next year to review progress from the 2001 United Nations Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. Last week, Canada's government announced it would not participate, because indications are that the follow-up conference may be poisoned by the same extreme Jew-hatred that turned the 2001 conference, in Durban, South Africa, into a textbook case of exactly what the conference was supposed to combat.

That conference ended on Sept. 7, 2001. By the time the people who had witnessed the hatred returned to their homelands to recount the chanting, frothing mobs of anti-Semites they had seen, it was Sept. 11, and there were bigger things to think about. Now, the kind of people who perpetrate

Israel Apartheid Week will reconvene to review the successes of Durban. Canada, rightly, won't be there. Kudos to the government of Canada for making the moral choice. There has never been anything even close to an adequate recognition or condemnation of what happened at Durban in 2001. Unless and until the United Nations can ensure that the Jew-hatred that permeated Durban does not infect Durban II, the entire event should be cancelled – like Vancouver's Israel Apartheid Week.

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