It's easy to be a couch critic

CLAUDIO GRUBNER SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

To the small but committed group of Arab apologists and Israeli detractors living in the West, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were nothing short of catastrophic.

Many tried to blame the September attacks on the United States' foreign policy, particularly what has been seen as a policy of unconditional support to the state of Israel. European journalists, fascinated with the plight of developing nations, and European politicians, mindful of the 80 million Muslims living there, searched for ways to separate their condolences from the lectures on international behavior they offered to their brothers across the Atlantic. And though, in the aftermath of the attacks, some Americans tried to cope with the tragedy through reasoned self-examination, what soon emerged was that America had been struck by an evil whose menace would only worsen with time.

And so it was that, while in the Arab Middle East the attacks of 9/11 were blamed on the Jews, America prepared its people for their first battle against terrorism – Afghanistan, one of the most feared battlegrounds in modern warfare.

The dilemma for the Israeli detractors and the war against terrorism was that either you were on the American side or you were on the terrorist side. Now, if you decided to go with the American side, how could you not side with Israel who has had to cope with bombing attacks on a weekly basis for the past two years?
Here is where the rationalization gets disturbing.

Members of the "left," always perched on their morally correct pedestal, have come up with an interesting solution to their dilemma: One has to differentiate between acts of terrorism that are born out of religious fanaticism (read Osama bin Laden) and those acts of terrorism that are carried out for territorial aspirations (read Yasser Arafat). The former is, apparently, the evil manifestation of terrorism, while the latter is rooted in the political aspirations of a people and, because it does not pose an existential threat to the West, we should conveniently view it through a different prism.

Another issue that gets my back up is the criticism levelled at Israel for using what is defined as "excessive force" against the perpetrators or abettors of terror.
What country, if not one deeply rooted in rational values, could withstand more than 50 years of systematic attempts at its destruction? The threats arrayed against that tiny state, the resources expended by its enemies, and the odium that permeates their view of Israel and the Jew are disproportionate and downright irrational.

To address these two main issues – namely that there are two types of terrorists and that there is excessive force being used against them – I am going to create a hypothetical Canadian scenario.

Suppose that our First Nations – who never went to war against our Canadian forefathers who signed treaties with us that we dishonored, who were relegated to reservations after we stripped them of their land, who suffered our attempts to destroy their culture, who lost their children to school programs that removed them from their families and subjected them to cultural genocide and often to physical and sexual abuse, who negotiated for generations to have their lands restored to them, who fought through our system of law and who have had their rights accepted by our Supreme Court – suppose that these people who have been truly disadvantaged by their submission to our conquest, decided tomorrow that 100 years of negotiations was enough and began to kill thousands of Canadian citizens in shopping malls, churches, schools and busses. Now, suppose that all these activities were financed by a hostile, resource-hungry United States who rewarded every new atrocity with more funds, weapons and training.

Here's what would happen: Every nation with an indigenous population would prepare plans to defend their non-native populations from possible action against them. Our way of life would be changed forever. Our economy would plummet, Parliament would invoke the War Measures Act, the country would be placed under martial law and an apoplectic public would march on Parliament Hill and demand that their armed forces do whatever is necessary to protect non-native Canadians from native Canadian terrorism. We would invoke our NATO treaties in the hope that they would protect us from further aggression.

Now, this is where the real tragedy occurs. Much of the world economies depend on the United States and they want to continue with business as usual so, instead of warning the Americans to stop supporting terrorism, they demand that Canada find a "just and lasting" solution to the problem with their First Nations.

It is easy for the left-leaning political couch potato to pontificate and redefine terrorism when the bombs are going off in somebody else's universities. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a nice Liberal, was never more popular than when he invoked the War Measures Act and put Canada under martial law when, after two kidnappings, the country demanded that he combat the threat posed by the FLQ. Did the FLQ pose an existential threat to Canada? No. Did they have territorial ambitions? Yes. Did we overreact? Yes. Did Trudeau get the job done? Definitely. Were we grateful? We were then.

In 1982, a month after Israel went into Lebanon, Shlomo Avineri, who is very representative of the Israeli left intelligentsia, asked the following rhetorical question: "What do you do when your next door neighbors [read Lebanese], who have sovereignty and territorial integrity over their property, begin to shoot at each other? And what do you do when your neighbor's tenants [read Palestinians] take that opportunity to start shooting into your living room?" Northern Israel was routinely peppered by Katyusha rockets. Israel went into Lebanon. Many years and lives later, Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israeli troops back into Israel and accepted UN cartographers to determine once and for all the border between Israel and Lebanon.

Have hostilities between Lebanon and Israel ceased? Have the missiles stopped raining down on Northern Israel? No. The Israel Defence Forces have determined that there may be in excess of 10,000 missiles of different sizes in Southern Lebanon pointed at Northern Israel.

Two years ago, the same Israeli prime minister offered the Palestinians a state of their own. It consisted of approximately 97 per cent of all the territory that Egypt and Jordan (there were no Palestinians then) lost west of the Jordan River during the Six Day War. Their counter-offer? The second intifada.

It is tragic that Israel does not have neighbors like the United States and Canada.

Claudio Grubner is a Vancouver man who has been mobilizing Vancouver's Jewish community to send support to Kinneret Boosani, a 23-year-old ballet dancer who was severely burned on her entire body by a suicide bomb last March.

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