CHALLAH @ Robert Fulford
In the five months since the demonstrations began, the government has killed about 2,000 citizens. The official view is that the state is saving Syria from vicious gangs of criminals. State television reports that events are proceeding as they should.
Even Saudi Arabia and the Arab League have criticized Assad’s use of force. Barack Obama wants him to resign. So far, however, he remains committed to the homicidal style that kept his father’s Baath government in office for 29 years.
Last Saturday about 40 people with anti-Assad banners held a peaceful demonstration outside the embassy of Syria in Ottawa. They all appeared to be Syrians, according to the Ottawa Citizen reporter. They were talking about the monstrous government that’s ruling their homeland and the attempts by pro-Assad operatives in Canada to intimidate them. But on that occasion, where were all the Canadian-born experts on the Middle East, those vociferous and self-righteous moralists, who come out of the woodwork every time Israel appears to be in violation of some UN resolution or strikes back against an outrage like the killing of the bus passengers on Thursday near Eilat?
Where, during the Syrian protest, were the massed student armies from York University and Concordia and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education? Where were the legions of academics and trade unionists who are always ready to declare what policy should be followed by the wise and the virtuous? Where, for that matter, were Dykes and Trans People for Palestine, who make such a great noise in Toronto and whose website proudly declares they support everyone’s rights?
It happens that the answers to these rhetorical questions are the same in each case: They were all at work on their next Israeli Apartheid campaign. The truth is that leftish Canadians have only one interest in the Middle East, the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis. That appears to be their entire foreign policy. They insist they are not prejudiced; they are devoted to human rights, nothing more.
But when they consider the world beyond Canada, and choose which cause deserves their energy, they usually select the Palestinians. Their chronically narrow focus on a single conflict is self-blinding. It produces a weird aberration of opinion.
When conflict appears elsewhere on the planet, whether it’s in Tibet or Sudan or Syria, our left-wing morality police go limp. They exhibit passion on one issue only. How can they be taken seriously?
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