Merci, Stéphane Gendron

Editorial

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is urging a Montreal radio station to fire a talk-show host who moonlights as mayor of the small Quebec town of Huntingdon.

Stéphane Gendron, who hosts the program Face à Face on the privately owned V Television Network, called Israel an apartheid regime, said it does not have a right to exist and endorsed the ongoing ridiculousness of a boycott against a small Montreal business that sells Israeli-made shoes.

The Wiesenthal Centre deserves kudos for raising the profile of this individual and his views. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is investigating. But getting him fired will only make him a free speech martyr.

There is a bigger issue here. The reason we oppose the silencing of unpopular opinions is because it is better to know them, hear them and refute them than to drive them underground.

Gendron’s remarks are a wake-up call to Canadian supporters of the state of Israel – but maybe not for the reasons the Wiesenthal Centre thinks. Rather than decry them, we need to redouble our efforts to refute them in the marketplace of ideas.

We obviously still have a significant job ahead of us to educate many Canadians about the right of Israel to exist – and to exist as a Jewish state. Gendron expressed the happy, but ignorant, idea that Israel could become a peaceable bi-national state, ignoring the stated intentions of the Palestinian leaders with whom he, presumably, thinks should coexist with Israeli leaders in some sort of bi-national parliament. Applying rose-tinted Canadian glasses to the conflict in Israel-Palestine is one of the major challenges Zionists face. We need to let Canadians know the history of both the Jewish people’s millennia-long attachment to the land and the absolutist rejection of the Arab world to Jewish self-determination, which has worked to create and prolong this conflict in the face of decades of peace-seeking and concessions by Israel. And, yes, we need to explain – again – the cataclysmic historical realities of Jewish statelessness.

If anyone should be taking action against Gendron, it should be the voters of Huntingdon, who ought to be ashamed to have him as their representive. As for Canadian Zionists, we should thank Gendron for reminding us to do our job.

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