From yesterday's edition of
The Globe and Mail, Campbell Clark's article
"Israeli envoy fears policy shift".
Israel's ambassador says he is concerned that the growing number of Muslim Canadians might cause a shift in this country's Middle East policy.
Israel marks its 60th anniversary today and still feels isolated in the world. But it counts Canada as one of its few staunch allies on matters like UN votes, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will visit the country in June.
However, Alan Baker, Israel's ambassador in Ottawa, said Muslim communities have had an impact on the foreign policies of such countries as France, and he is concerned Canada might follow.
"The question is, how do you treat the results of this fact? Do you expect from these greater numbers that they will absorb themselves into Canadian society as Canadians or that they'll try to push Canadians to adopt their own values and principles? And this is the gist of the problem," Mr. Baker said in an interview.
He cited intensifying demonstrations when he or other Israeli dignitaries speak on Canadian university campuses that have led to speeches being cancelled. He also mentioned reports that some delegates to the 2006 Liberal leadership convention sought to use the Jewish religion of Bob Rae's wife against him.
"First of all, there's a Muslim member of Parliament, who's elected to one of the Toronto ridings ..., [Omar] Alghabra, who has been outspoken in his hostility toward Israel," Mr. Baker said.
"I've got nothing against the fact that Muslims are members of the Canadian Parliament. But it worries me that the type of political influence that we're seeing in Britain, in France, might ultimately reach the Canadian political system."
Mr. Alghabra, the Liberal MP for Mississauga-Erindale, said he is "at a loss" to understand why he would be called hostile to Israel, noting he supports a two-state solution for the Middle East.
I'm more than a bit taken aback. As a point in fact, the rapid growth of Canada's Muslim population has coincided with
greater Canadian official sympathy towards Israeli positions.
More to the point, there's hardly a necessary link between a large Muslim population and a country's relationship with Israel. Muslims, mainly of Turkish ethnicity, make up
one-tenth of the Bulgarian population. Nevertheless, even the very conservative Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs is quite happy to
claim that, after the
1990 restoration of diplomatic relations between Bulgaria and Israel, relations are quite intimate at all levels of society.
"Also Bulgarian-Israeli ties are very friendly both at government and at 'street level.' One high-ranking official told me tongue-in-cheek that if you ask a thousand Bulgarians whether they support Israel or the Palestinians and one says that he favors the Palestinians, it means he did not understand the question. One feels this attitude also in the newspapers. With Bulgaria, also, the restitution issue is settled.
(The JCPA also claims that the new European Union member-states are marked by the "absence of significant Muslim minorities." More fools they.)
Why have France's relations with Israel chilled? Blaming French Muslims, who don't exactly constitute a privileged group, or a popular group, or a powerful group, is plain silly. There was, in fact a very close Franco-Israeli relationship at the levels of diplomacy as much as popular culture, extending even to the French sponsorship of the Israeli nuclear weapons program. This relationships' 1967 downgrading was
triggered at least in part by de Gaulle's hostility towards the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Britain seems to have followed a broadly similar trajectory, et cetera. People tend to criticize Israel (and any other state) on various subjectively reasonable grounds; they don't do so because the person who owns the convenience store down the street is Pakistani. Duh.
People favouring the Palestinian position do so on their own reasonably legitimate grounds; people favouring the Israeli position do so on their own reasonably
legitimate grounds; people who are trying to establish an equitable settlement between the two sides, faced with a general incapacity and unwillingness for said peace, are doing so for their own legitimate grounds. The facts that Canada has half as many Jews as Muslims, or the United States the largest Jewish population in the world, or that Jews in most of central and eastern Europe are outnumbered by Muslims, are largely irrelevant.
"Do you expect from these greater numbers that they will absorb themselves into Canadian society as Canadians or that they'll try to push Canadians to adopt their own values and principles?" Baker asks. It might be mean, but it's quite right to point out that similar things have been asked in recent history of
Jews. We all know what
that led to.
One would have hoped that Israel would have dispatched to Canada an ambassador who was familiar with Canadian values. For shame.