Politics in democracies is regularly conducted within grey areas where issues are purposely blurred.
This is the nature of democratic politics—of bargaining and compromises where half-truths trump lies and over time the baggage such bargains are burdened with is inevitably ex-posed.
The discomfort of the leadership candidates in the Liberal party, and the schism within the Liberal ranks over Michael Ignatieff accusing Israel of committing a “war crime,” remind me of the above truism.
When asked recently (in French) on a popular Quebec TV talk show to explain a comment he made in August—he said he was “not losing sleep” over Israeli bombing that led to civilian deaths in the village of Qana in Lebanon—Ignatieff offered a correction that has unleashed a wide debate on where he and the Liberal party stand in relation to Israel.
Ignatieff told the Quebec audience: “It was a mistake. And when you make a mistake like that you have to admit it. I was a professor of human rights, and I am also a professor of the laws of war, and what happened in Qana was a war crime.”
Prime Minister Stephen Harper got into the fray when he observed that Ignatieff’s views were con- sistent with the “anti-Israeli pos- ition that has been taken by virtually all of the candidates for the Liberal leadership.”
Predictably, the Liberal leadership candidates then found it convenient to direct their attacks at the prime minister instead of each other.
Harper’s remarks might grate in the minds of Liberal supporters across the country, particularly in Ontario, for being offensive, simplistic and divisive—as an angry Bob Rae, Ignatieff’s frontrunning rival in the race, stated.
But since many Liberals have grown fat over the years by trading in half-truths, it would be useful to remind them and the country that Harper was also trading in half-truth by not indicating the history of the Liberal party that has for a long time carried in its baggage a disguised strain of anti-Semitism.
Canadians familiar with history will know the Liberal party of Prime Minister Mackenzie King turned its back on European Jews.
This occurred when Hitler was preparing for the Final Solution of the Jewish problem while unleashing Nazi-fascist terror against Jews before the outbreak of the war in September 1939.
King did not utter the infamous words “none is too many,” as Irving Abella and Harold Troper documented in their book by the same title, to deny Jews safe haven in Canada.
But he declared in Parliament in January 1939 that there would be no door opened for refugees by his administration.
It was Lester Pearson—first as a diplomat at the UN, then as the Secretary of State for External Affairs and later as Liberal prime minister—who finally led Canada to do the right thing in supporting the just cause of Jews in the establishment of Israel.
Pearson understood, as did many Ottawa mandarins in External Affairs serving under him (George Ignatieff, Michael’s father, was one among them) what was needed to contend with the dark strain of animus among some Canadians towards Jews, and yet befriend Israel for what this Jewish state represented in moral and historical terms.
Canadian Jews rewarded the Liberal party with their support through the years in gratitude for the simple decency and truthfulness of Pearson.
Yet the anti-Semitism King accommodated in all its vileness has remained troublingly dormant in the Liberal party.
The challenge now for Liberals is to purge the residue of any form of bigotry from their ranks, and show leadership in refusing ever to play opportunistically the interests of one ethnic or religious community of Canadians against another.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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