Liberals need to deal with fruitcakes in the ranks Posted: January 07, 2009, 5:00 PM by Kelly McParland - National Post
When Stephen Harper won the leadership of the newly united Conservative party, he put considerable effort into chasing the worst of the right-wing loonies from Tory ranks.
Nutbars had done untold damage to the party over the years. Liberals, and Liberal-friendly press hounds, knew that at some point in any campaign, some right-wing fruitcake could be counted on to spout off about gays or God or the abomination of allowing women to wear pants, and a few million votes would go “poof”, just like that. Harper did his best to put a lid on it, earning himself much abuse for “muzzling” party members, especially from Liberals and hacks upset that their fun would be spoiled.
Michael Ignatieff might want to consider something similar, though, considering the trouble a few Liberal bloggers are causing over the situation in Gaza. Liblogs, a site that aggregates blogs from writers identifying themselves as Liberals, has become alarmed enough to post a notice distancing itself from the venom being spewed by anti-Israeli bloggers on the site. Posted by Jason Cherniak, who runs the site, it reads: Liblogs is not affiliated with the Liberal Party of Canada. It is a non-profit organization without charitable status and we provide an advertising service to bloggers who identify themselves as Liberal Party supporters. We take no responsibility for what those bloggers write and only remove them for actions that go beyond reasonable discourse. Such decisions are made by a Board of Directors and I am only one vote out of five.
As President of Liblogs, I speak on behalf of the organization. While I will never force bloggers to adopt my view, I feel it is my responsibility to lay out the official position of Liblogs on the fighting in Israel and Gaza. Individual bloggers are free to disagree as long as they do so in a mature and civil manner.
I have very strong views on the history of the Middle East, but it is not necessary to consider such historic arguments when talking about Gaza. Instead, we can focus on relatively recent events. I believe that those events prove beyond any doubt that it is Hamas, and not Israel, that is responsible for the current fighting.
In the summer of 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza. This was a complete and total withdrawal, where even settlers whose families had lived in Gaza for decades were withdrawn to Israel. It was everything the world had ever asked from Israel as far as the Gaza strip was concerned. No matter what you might think of the past, Israel clearly made a decision to disassociate itself from Gaza and give the people of Gaza a chance to set their own destiny.
And they did. In January 2006, the people of Gaza elected Hamas. Hamas is an organization that denies Israel’s right to exist and has used suicide bombers to attack civilians even in times of absolute peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Even after this provocation, Israel stayed out of Gaza.
In June 2006, Hamas attacked Israel and kidnapped a soldier while killing two others. In June 2007, Hamas began an internal civil war in which they rooted out and killed all representatives of the elected Palestinian president and the opposition party, Fatah. Eventually, by June 2008, Israel was able to negotiate a cease fire with Hamas, the “State of Calm Agreement”, brokered by Egypt. That agreement fell apart in December 2008 when Hamas once again began attacking Israel with rockets imported from Syria and Iran.
Israel showed nothing but restraint from the summer of 2005 until December 2008 in its relations with the people of Gaza. There can be no reasonable disagreement that Israel has the right to defend its citizens. The undeniable truth is that if the elected government of Gaza had not attacked Israel, then Israel would not have attacked Gaza.
People who do not like the response need to evaluate who is truly responsible, and demand that governments around the world start to take action to save the people of Gaza from their own elected government. It is time to stop blaming Israel for being attacked by a government that wants to destroy the Jewish state.
Liblogs has been under assault for several days by Ezra Levant, a Conservative blogger who knows something about causing havoc. Levant posted an “anti-semitism round-up” that quoted liberally from Liblogs, setting off a fierce anti-Ezra counterattack from some of his targets. Saner Liberals have been unimpressed by the whole ugly display. Jeff Jedras, who blogs as “A BCer in Toronto”, issued a plea for calm, writing: “I am getting increasingly frustrated at some of the garbage I’ve been reading of late on the Liblogs aggregate though. I’m staunchly in favour of people’s right to free speech, even if what they say makes them look stupid, and luckily that same right to free speech also allows me to speak-up and say so when people are saying stuff that is pretty dammed stupid. And there’s been a lot of that the last few days.”
Liblogs appears to have cleaned out the worst of the hate messages. But it has to be worrying to a party that is accustomed to viewing itself as the voice of middle-of-the-road reason, and which makes a habit of portraying Conservatives as extremists and cranks, to discover so thoroughly healthy a nest of fringe-dwellers infesting its ranks.
Ignatieff's own position doesn't differ much from Stephen Harper's, but the lack of backbone in the party leadership in recent years has opened the way to the type of indiscipline that used to plague the Tories. The new leader should get out the pest control spray fast. Industrial strength. Kelly McParland National Post |