Politics: Canada: Update: War against Hizbullah leading to a 'regression from democracy' in Canada?

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Under the title, La politique confessionnelle (Confessional Politics in Canada), Jean-Claude Leclerc wrote a significant article in the French-language daily LeDevoir (Sunday,Aug6,2k6). That article is rendered in a free tranlation into English, with the help of Apple's Sherlock 3 app and SYSTRAN, by Albert Gedraitis. The article deserves a critical-textual analysis because it substitutes a sentimentalist approach, for the Canadian policy against terrorism (never once does Leclerc mention that Hizbullah is present in Canada too), an approach that slips and slides between terms with no crisp definitions. Be that as it may, there is also much to ponder in the underlying trends that Leclerc sees. -- Politicarp

Nowadays in Lebanon, long fragmented between religious groups, one finally seems to find a certain unity between Christians and Muslims; ...

So Leclerc begins, blithely suppressing the historic fact that some Christians have for several decades been in armed political alliance with some Muslims in Lebanon. In contrast, the Sunni Muslim layman, rebuilder, and politician of reconstruction Rafik Hariri, assassinated by Syria, was in alliance with another set of Christians, but not those like the resuscitated Gen Michel Aoun who now is allied with Hizbullah Shi'ites. Further, the Shi'ites in the Palestinian refugee camps are present in Lebanon not because they fled there from Israel, but because they left their homes at Syria's call only to be expelled from Syria when it lost that war against Israel. When Syria no longer found useful these Palestinian refugees it had created, they were expelled by Syria, forcing them into Lebanon where they were equally unwanted, and unassimilated ever since. Leclerc puts an obscene construction on the present mood which he reads ahistorically as inter-confessional "unity." I doubt many Christians will stay allied to the Shia-Hizbullah fanatics once they gain yet more power within Lebanon itself. Leclerc grasps onto a mere chimera, a glimmer not based on hope but resentment.

[Leclerc continues:] but will the war over there, overflowing politically to Canada, break a coexistence in many specific connections between our Jewish and Muslim communities? Nothing is broken yet, some of the committees for cooperative relations are activated, but there are also signs of tearing now in view.

Businessman Gerry Schwartz, chief of the Onex empire, an adviser of former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, spoke in praise of Stephen Harper for his pro-Israel position on the conflict in the Middle East.

That parties like the federal Liberal Party in Québec and the federal Bloc Québécois denounce Conservative leader Stephen Harper, because of his pro-Israel position – yet themselves are not embarrassed to adopt views no less unilateral, only confirms the failure of Canadian political thawt on the Middle East. Will any crisis, if serious, not thus encourage these politicians to suspend their electoral tactics? The ethnoreligious communities themselves, however, should have the wisdom not to yield to it.

North America > Canada

Admittedly, the Jewish community of our country supports Israel, even the war in Lebanon; whereas the communities of Arab origin along with the whole of the Muslims of Canada reject the action taken by the Israeli Defense Forces at the expense of the civilian population of Lebanon.

The sweeping generalization enlisting "[Canada's] communities of Arab origin and the whole of the Muslims of Canada" is more than questionable. It is prescientific in the worst sense, lacking any analytic value. For instance, Nedim Shehadi in openDemocracy, "Riviera vs Citadel: the battle for Lebanon" (Aug22,2k6) says something quite different about tendencies we mite also find among Muslims and more narrowly Arabs of Canada - whether Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Druze, Maronite Christians or others:

For the past two decades, since the latter years of the 1975-90 civil war, two competing projects have been running in parallel in Lebanon. One aims at building a Riviera, a Monaco of the eastern Mediterranean; the other a Citadel or bunker, at the frontline of confrontation with Israel and the United States.

Each of these projects has both a local and a regional dimension [and, to include Canada, a global dimension - P], drawing a different lesson from the civil war while connecting Lebanon to one or other of its neighbours in particular ways. Each has adherents from all strands of Lebanese society, and neither is purely sectarian. Each has a different vision of how to rebuild the state and ensure the security and prosperity of the citizen. In the regional aspect, Saudi Arabia has been the main investor in the Riviera, and Iran the principal stakeholder in the Citadel.

Some questions for Leclerc: Are Canadian Muslims who have been tortured by the Iranian regime, or have relatives exterminated by it, rooting for Hizbullah in Lebanon? Are Sunni Muslims in Lebanon all rooting for Hizbullah? Are all the Shia Muslims in Lebanon rooting for Hizbullah? Leclerc's shellgame is so ill-informed about the crisscross of currents in the MidEast, particularly in Lebanon, that he is making erroneous assumptions about Canada's Muslims in the process. Contrary to the ins+ts of Shehadi and Archbishop Nasrollah Safir, Leclerc continues to pretend there is no Iranian War against Israel with Iranian commanders, specialists, and weaponry in Lebanon. Myopically, he dwells on the supine Canadian media.

The two camps find very strong support expressed in the Canadian media. One can consider that these mobilizations and these expressions of opinion are a democratic sign of health, but such alignments are also worrying.

Initially, for those Jews who are opposed to the warmongering policy of Israel or opposed even to the support that their community provides to Israel, it becomes very difficult to give a contrary opinion publicly. Rare also are the voices which, in the other camp, rejecting the acts of terror of even a legitimate resistance, express their protest. Will Jews who formerly fled persecution in Europe or Muslims who have found for many years in Canada a freedom that they did not have in their Muslim homelands, will these citizens have to keep silent again in our country?

Moreover, if Jewish voters, often close to the Liberal Party or New Democratic Party, desert them to support the Conservative Party, because of international political stances taken by the Tories, not motivated by [domestic] needs here, but instead by their concern for Israel – [a foreign concern] which will undergo the anger of voters in the event of re-election of an already-rejected [Tory] cabinet? On the opposite side, if the voters of Arab origin or Muslim culture, vote en masse for the federal Liberals, helping to bring to power people who are unworthy of office, won't those voters be accused of ignoring the interests of Canadians?

Again, this off-the-cuff attempt to exploit by means of a binomialist-confessionalist argument "Jews vs Muslims", while constructed to fite confessionalism gone amuck, is at the same time to endorse an anti-pluralist approach to faith-communities in the richness of their diversity of both confession and politics. It never occurs to Leclerc that numerous Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, listen attentively when a fellow Christian like the Archbishop of Maronite Christians in Lebanon states clearly that "the greatest threat comes from the regime in Tehran," Regime Change Iran (Aug15,2k6) trans by Banafesh Zand-Bonazzi from Farsi in Iran Press News.

[Continuing with the translation of Leclerc from LeDevoir:]

Jewish community

Admittedly, a bit before the demonstration yesterday [Sunday, Aug6,2k6] in Montreal, the Quebec-Israel Committee published a message of the Jewish Community of Quebec and Friends of Israel addressed to the leaders of the Quebec federal Liberals, the Bloc Québécois, Québec Solidaire and the Québec Federation of Labour. This declaration, written with respect and moderation, invites [the pro-Hizbullah side addressed] to consider aspects of the crisis which deserve to be discussed in all the media. One cannot speak [ill] of it as of many other interventions of Jewish leaders of Canada.

Quel hauteur! What arrogance, what an attitude of condescension to public statements of Jewish leaders of Canada -- except of course the one seleced for commendation, selected because of what Leclerc regards as its extreme rarity among Jewish leaders. Immediately after this snottiness, Leclerc pirouttes to claim "the public" is a monolith that condemns Israel in Lebanon and the Harper govt. That may be so regarding a narrow regional "public" in a march on a street in Montreal, with Bloc and NDP poseurs in the mix, but hardly representative of Canadian public opinion.

[Leclerc:] Whereas the public rejects more and more the action of Israel in Lebanon and the pro-Israel position of the Harper government, some of the personalities of the Jewish community lean from now on towards the Conservatives. Liberals certainly support Israel, but the Liberal parliamentary caucus is divided. Some are ill at ease regarding remarks of the Liberals' temporary leader, Bill Graham, former Foreign Minister, who [wants Canada] to hold to a so-called "balanced" position in the Middle East.

Leclerc is either naïve or disingenuous if he thinks "balance" should keep Israel from stopping arms smuggling from Syria and Iran into Hizbullah-run Lebanon during the ceasefire. Those who want Hizbullah and Hamas terrorism stopped, while wishing and praying for the best for all non-terrorist Muslims too, are going to gravitate to support of Israel and feel they can count only on Israel's enforcement of the ceasefire by actions that Leclerc and the Lebanese govt of Fouad Sinoria would disapprove. (Sinoria is the successor who's brawt shame to the cause of the assassinated fellow-Sunni Rafik Hariri.)

Yet the picture of Liberal disunity cannot be attractive to Jews, Muslims, or anyone else after the festering sores contracted during the fedLibs' Chrétien-Martin era have now been dragged into the l+t by the Auditor General and others. As Maisonneuve (perhaps the snottiest-of-all leftwing newletters in Canada) noted a month ago (Jul19,2k6):

...[I]nterim Liberal leader Bill Graham ... suggested that Harper’s position on the current Middle East crisis has sacrificed Canada’s traditional role as an 'honest broker' capable of mediating disputes between nations. Liberal leadership hopefuls have also jumped into the fray, according to Globe & Mail. But with each candidate offering their own prescription for how to end the violence between Israel and Lebanon, the party appears unable to muster even the semblance of unity. While campaigning in Quebec, Bob Rae forwarded the idea of UN peacekeepers patrolling the Israeli-Lebanese border, invoking the memory of Lester B. Pearson. Scott Brison, on the campaign trail in Toronto, dismissed Rae’s proposal, endorsing instead a platform similar to the [Conserv] government’s, much to the chagrin of many old-time Liberals. Indeed, Brison’s comments enraged Lloyd Axeworthy to such an extent that the former foreign affairs minister cuttingly remarked that Brison, an ex-Tory, was so new to the party that he “doesn't really understand what Liberal foreign policy is about.” For his part, supposed front-runner Michael Ignatieff stayed away from controversy. According to a spokesperson, Ignatieff was spending time with his family and would not comment" at that time.

So, those Jews formerly adherent to the Liberal Party who leave over the next six months, already had sufficient reason to re-examine their political moorings. Many may have been looking a long time perhaps for a big push, from the standpoint of the value-ensemble of each such Lib member, to go elsewhere--but where? For some, the move would be to the NDP, if support for the Jewish state of Israel doesn't matter much to that individual. For others.... One can't expect diehards to re-examine their political-party allegiance, Lib diehards like former Justice Minister Irwin Cotler (Montreal - where he's unlikely to get either Arab or Jewish votes in the next round of elections), unlikely to waver even the sl+test bit. But, quite aside from Cottler clones, numerous Jews, despite Leclerc's alarmism, will stay with the Libs--if for no other reason than to prevent the fedLibs from swinging over to an outr+t pro-Hizbullah pro-Hamas pro-Iran position.

[Leclerc:] Where the Liberal Senator, Jerry Grafstein, organizer and important member of the party, tried to put forward a position clearly pro-Israel [for party consideration], other eminent personalities of the Jewish community, up to now very near to the Liberals, broke [with the Liberal Party entirely over the Graham approach]. Thus the businessman Gerry Schwartz, chief of the Onex empire, [formerly] an adviser of [Liberal] ex-PrimeMinister Paul Martin, [now] speaks in praise of Stephen Harper. He and other people signed an advertisement in a Cornwall [Ontario] newspaper -- where the Conservative caucus was meeting -- congratulating the Prime Minister on his position on the Middle East.

His wife, Heather Reisman, owner of the Indigo [Books & Music chain of] stores, and a leading Liberal in the Trudeau years, closed out her Liberal Party membership with finality. Her change of allegiance, she wrote to close relations, is "total and unambiguous." Her husband had already said he was extremely impressed by the "courage" that the Conservative chief had shown -- before the war in Lebanon -- while refusing to accept the election of Hamas [to lead the Palestinian Authority].

Admittedly, the Jewish voters are relatively very few in Canada.

Somewhere between 351,000 total population and, at a stretch, possibly as many as 400,000, according to Wikipedia. - P] It should be added here the current statistics for Muslims: "There is no official estimate for Muslims in Canada. The unofficial estimate is about 600,000; about 300,000 of whom live in Southwestern Ontario."

[Leclerc:] But businesspeople of [Canada's Jewish] community, if not its Community organizations, generally gave their support to the Liberals. A massive displacement towards the Conservatives in the ridings acquired by the FedLibs in Toronto and Montreal would have the double effect of weakening the FedLibs and reinforcing the Conservatives [in Parliament]. Already the crisis of the Middle East sows the squabble among the candidates vying to lead the FedLib Party.

Not only Liberal Member of Parliament Jim Karyagiannis, organizer of Joe Volpe's party-leadership campaign [now defunct - P], resigned this post because of the support of the ex-Minister of Immigration for the policy of Israel, but some other candidates to succeed Paul Martin note a surge of citizens of Muslim culture into the ranks of the party. Tho the Muslims of Canada come from different countries and policy currents, they are nevertheless strongly linked in their rejection of support for Israel.

Again, this is quite superficial because many cross-currents both of confession and politics disturb this complacent binomialist conjunctivitis expressed by Leclerc. Au contraire, for instance, Shi'ites in Iraq and elsewhere are divided between a politics pro- and contra-Iran, with many who waver back and forth, and usually are found somewhere waiting in between for new turns of events. In Iraq, one of two contra-Iran Shi'ite parties not only resents Iran's imperialistic pressures on Iraqi parties, politics, and religion but also points to the class-basis of the Iranian mullocracy, speaking in Iraq for a class-exploited stream in Iran itself where that stream had once helped elect Ahmadi-Nejab to the Presidency; but a stream where the poor are reportedly now extremely disppointed with his failure to deliver, as economic conditions there worsen for them under the President and the mullocrats who treasure dreams of themselves heading a new Caliphate.

All these factors feed back also into North America, and into Canada, among both Arab and non-Arab Muslims alike. What Leclerc's whole attitude takes as its premise is that these communities will regard the necessary bombing by Israel of Hizbullah infrastructure in South Lebanon, and the extreme hurt it did to some civilians among whom the terrorists were embedded, is for Leclerc obviously and overwhelmingly more important than a free democratic Lebanon and a resistance to Iranian mullocratic imperialism and class-favouritism. Leclerc imagines that Arabs and Muslims have very short, immediate horizons--only! Almost as short as his own. [Returning to Jean-Claud Leclerc's article, "Confessional Politics in Canada" :]

An old story

The political alignment of communities according to different if not opposite beliefs would not be a precedent in Canada. For a long time in the past, Catholics especially supported the Liberals, while Protestants supported especially the Conservatives [and New Democrats - P]. At an early period, the one side opposed persecutions of French-speaking Catholics attributed to the Orangemen [Northern Ireland origins], while the other side opposed the people from France or from Ireland, regarding them as marked by an irremediable "papism."

This reading of confessionally - linked politics in Canada is again extremely binomial, but also false to the kernel of truth the situation reported by Leclerc had contained. Papal and Jesuit dominance in those days exploited the Magisterium to keep the francophone population of Québec on the signeuries and then the farms, resisting industrializations. Skilled tradesmen from Northern Ireland tried to protect their hegemony in the various trades, keeping Catholics out of the apprenticeships wherever possible. So, confessionalization was not then nor was it ever nor is it now "pure confessionalism," because of the multi-factoral realities that impinge on even the most dogmatic of churchly-ideologists. As a matter of fact, the most confessionalistic configuration in Canadian politics today is that of the established secularist ideology which prevents confessional groupings with a unique philosophy of education from forming and running competent schools with tax-support. In Ontario we have two established confessions entrenched in tax-supported schooling: the secularist Humanist (atheist) and the Catholic. All others are excluded. Québec has struggled for some time with the process of deconfesionalization / secularization of tax-supported schools--but some exceptions seem to escape this de facto atheization (that is, an unstated reconfessionalization--"unstated" because no one admits what's going on). The truth is that secularistic Humanism is the dominant confession in Canada in most societal spheres above the level of family--that is true whether or not those in (minority) govt power are Conservatives (including some atheists of course and including some Christians with widely differing views of the relation of faith-confession to political responsiblities).

Indeed, on this issue, many Jews and Muslims are on the same side in being opposed together to confessional schools with tax-support; while others of both communities are on the other side being in favour of tax-support for diverse confessional schools willing to support a peaceful and dialogical pluralist society. What does that phenomenon do to Leclerc's hypthothesis, besides demonstrating the logical incoherence of his hypothesis and its foundation in sentiment? ... at best. That's why Leclerc has nothing interesting to say about the confessional political expressions of the past in Canada. What he does say is so simplistic that it exposes his streak of spiritual arrogance quite nakedly:

[Leclerc:] One makes fun of [Canada's past confessional politics] now, but these politico-religious appartenances delayed the advent of the democracy which prevails nowadays.

Again, Leclerc is so superficial and monofactoral that he is the one about whom one begins to laff. The Ulstermen, for instance, may have been largely anti-Catholic, but in the other direction they were also radically democratic among themselves in establishing, accrediting, and democratically-governing their own Presbyterian churches and Orange lodges. Others of the British stock likewise knew the practice of democracy and of dissent in the political arena from churchly experiences first of all. They also put strong stress on civil order, duty, and work. That's how democracy came to Canada, and that's from where the Catholics of Québec grudgingly first encountered it. But, thank God for British Catholic historian Lord Acton, John Dahlberg-Acton (1834-1902) and the establishment of a Catholic democratic tradition of the laity in the Canadian milieu, which had to fite churchly-hierarchism all the way, beginning the struggle for the redefinition of the social doctrine of subsidiarity, under the older version of which Québec groaned.

One can be very thankful indeed also to all the other human intermediaries in Canada, human instruments who advanced the democratic vision of the country and brawt it to a measure, not a fulfillment (much is still lacking), but a temporarily adequate measure of democratic thawt and practice--albeit now based one-sidedly on secularistic Humanism, with no doctrine of subsidiarity at all, and nothing like the emerging Protestant social doctrine of sphere-specificity, with each sphere relatively sovereign. The learning of a deeper pluralism remains ahead, and it mite just as well begin with Leclerc as he clears his head of his mockery, monofactoralism, and superfical binomial constructs.

[Leclerc:] The Liberals admittedly knew how to benefit from the Catholic feelings which prevailed then in Québec and in the French-speaking minorities elsewhere within the country. Later, the Liberals widened their urban bases to other minority communities, mostly immigrants. Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, great multicultural agglomerations, made it possible more recently for the FedLibs to escape from Conservative advances [in parliamentary elections].

By now, the Protestants, already reduced by Leclerc to the worst current in Ulster Presbyterianism, have completely disappeared from the journalism professor's reportorial discourse. An erasure to be sure. Nor does he acknowledge the long haul forward in Christian ecumenism (something much more than a churchly affair), thus he cannot grasp that at the moment many informed Christians, both Protestants and Catholics, are taking quite seriously Archbishop Safir's warning that the main problem in Lebanon is not Israel, no matter how unbearable the bombings were for civilians among whom Iran's Hizbullah is embedded. Far worse is Hizbullah, the colonialist vanguard of the dream of a new Persian Empire of mullocratic confession.

[Leclerc:] However, the PC minority govt of Stephen Harper appears well determined to make openings in these Liberal ridings.

True enuff!

Today Palestine opposes Jews to Muslims,

Not true enuff. The missiles of Iran thru Hizbullah that destroyed Muslim Israeli villages give the lie to this statement, tho Leclerc is sufficiently crafty to shift here from Lebanon to Palestine, without mentioning the terrorists of the Hamas govt. And what of the Christian villagers on both sides of the border, some on the Lebanon side aligned with Hizbullah thru Gen Aoun; some not, and quite aware of their Archbishop's dread of the Iranian puppeteers behind the terrorists.

[Leclerc:] tomorrow Kashmir opposes Muslims to Hindus,

Kashmir has been torn between its Muslim majority and its mostly Hindu minority which favours remaining part of India, the arrangement that has held since the partition of British India into Pakistan and modernday India. Pakistan couldn't hold itself together on the basis of a general Muslim confessionalism, and broke apart into modernday Pakistan and Bangladesh. India still embraces millions of Muslims who didn't join the Muslim exodus at the time of partition. India has a longstanding confessional-political problem that will last at least another century. At present at least five states of India have passed anti-conversion laws sponsored by fantical groupings of ultra-Hindus alarmed at uncoerced conversions from Hinduism to Buddhism and Christianity. Marxist parties (outfront confessional atheist political formations to be sure) in India often support these anti-conversion laws.

or other places which see Christians and Muslims in conflict.

Indonesia and Nigeria are two places where these two groupings have come into conflict, and in certain places Christians have fawt back to prevent the imposition Sharia (Muslim) law. Fite back: that's remarkable, especially in Indonesia, where overall Christians are a small and vulnerable minority often terrorized by Islamofascists. Was it wrong for some Jews in the Warsaw ghettoes to f+t back against the Nazis?

Lebanese Christians, Pakistani Christians, Indonesian Christians, Nigerian Christians--these are all people for whom many Canadian Christians and our friends, including some atheists, have concerns for survival in genuinely pluralist democratic civil orders--and largely we extend this concern to Israeli Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists. But not to terrorists, no matter to whatever religion they may claim allegiance. But also, in all these cases, there are multi-factoral contexts; both in Indonesia and Nigeria, for instance again, demographics play a part (h+ birthrates, inadequate economic infrastructure). Regarding Nigeria, a Muslim scholar of that country has said that the conflict between the two broad confessional communities there arose from the failure of complacent Islamic politicians to maintain the agricultural base of the Muslim-majority North, necessitating the exflux of multitudes of Muslims displaced by Muslims to Christian and animist areas of the country.

[Leclerc:] One can't miss abroad how [a number of] crises will have repercussions in the various communities established in Canada.

Yes, indeed, they will. But this Leclerckian remark teaches us nothing new, nor anything we didn't already know. Indeed, the implicit presuppositions of Leclerc here are: that we didn't see it coming, that we can divert it, that there is nothing good about it or that come from the dynamic around the actual faith-comfessions involved, that amelioration of extremes in confessionalisms presently gone a muck is no goal worth considering, and that these implicits form the basis of the following false conclusion of Leclerc:

The country will experience a serious democratic regression if parties put their international political choices in place of votes in Canada, or if communities put their own historical interests before the interests of the whole of the country.

Here we see at point-blank, the utter tendentiousness of Leclerc's entire hypothesis. That there is some magic "internal voting-interest" in which no confessional concerns of any kind can have a legitimate role (except the silent actually-dominant confession in Canada of pseudo-neutrality, agnosticism, and atheism), a pure internal voting-interest that can be opposed to all "foreign" (confessionally-tainted) considerations is a bizarre conceptualization at best. But when Leclerc uses as governing metaphor in what follows, the impasse at Québec's Concordia University a while back, one begins to think he is so myopic that he fails to consider that the Jewish-students-vs-Muslim-students conflagration as, first of all, an exhibition of what both sides had learned from the at-hand Québec politics which they, their parents, and their community's leaders had lived thru in Québec's own internal politics. Confrontation, confrontation, confrontation. Québec politics from the FLQ to PQ leader Parizeau's outr+t antisemitism, and on, all this had tawt the students nothing else than violent confrontation of deed and word.

[Leclerc:] Rather than cutting themselves off into opposed camps, as did certain Jewish and Muslim students of Concordia University sometime in the past, the communities related to the peoples of the Middle East would be better inspired if they favoured, in a land of welcome which does not threaten them, the rapprochements that injustice, fear and resentment make so difficult in their fatherland of origin.

There is no internal injustice, fear and resentment in Canada, at least none of which immigrants are aware?

A view further to the left of Leclerc, extremist in tone and mindset, constantly deploying the term "racist," etc., against all of organized Jewry in Canada and against all policy enacted by the Conservative govt of Canada, constantly deploying "Bush" to found a guilt-by-association argument, can be found exposited by Dan Freeman-Maloy at great length at Znet, Public Contempt for Palestinians and Lebanese: Israeli aggression receives official Canadian endorsement" (Aug16,2k6).

– Politicarp

Canadian Jewish Liberals a casuality to Hisbullah
Gen Michel Aoun since return to Lebanon from exile
Grassroots Lebanese Christians want Hizbullah disarmed