It’s not me talking—it’s the liberal media. The Vancouver Sun (Canwest Global). It’s their lead editorial today.
Thanks due Ottawa for helping citizens
Published: Wednesday, July 19, 2006
The tragic death in Lebanon of eight Canadians, including seven in one family, has punctuated the anxiety of the thousands of others desperate to get out of a country that was turned overnight into a battlefield.
More than 30,000 have registered with the embassy in Beirut to be kept abreast of the evacuation plan, which was scheduled to get underway today.
As the Canadian government scrambled to find a way to help Canadians flee the fighting, it has also faced a barrage of complaints from people stuck in Lebanon, from their friends and relatives in Canada and from opposition politicians that it has failed to do enough to protect our citizens who have been caught up in the conflict.
They complained about a lack of information. They complained that the embassy in Beirut was hard to reach by telephone. They complained that other countries have already started getting their citizens out while Canada is still getting organized.
It’s true that Canada was caught off guard by the outbreak of fighting in Lebanon. So were the Lebanese and the Israelis.
No one with the possible exception of the Hezbollah predicted the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others in the attack across the Lebanese border last week that triggered the latest round of bombings and rocket attacks.
Once the violence began, government officials in Lebanon and in Ottawa scrambled to find a way to get Canadians out of danger.
The magnitude of the task came as a surprise to most of us here in Canada, who had no idea that the number of Canadians in Lebanon numbered not in the hundreds or thousands, but in the tens of thousands.
Many are Lebanese who immigrated to Canada to escape the years of civil war. They have gone back to live or to visit their former homeland in the relative calm that was allowing Lebanon to start to recover from a generation of conflict before the bombs started falling again last week.
If the seven ships chartered by Ottawa to bring Canadians to safety are able to start operating as planned today, the government will deserve thanks, not criticism, for reaching well beyond our borders to help our fellow citizens in crisis.
No doubt lessons will be learned. One of those lessons should be that travellers abroad in a war zone can’t expect the same level of service from their government that they can get at home.
The Montreal Gazette agrees:
Government appears to have done a good job
It’s too soon, almost indecently too soon, to start getting on the Harper government’s case for not acting faster to evacuate Canadians from Lebanon.
[…] But we have much less sympathy for political critics who have been been quick to assail the effort. If they have constructive advice to contribute, it would be welcome. If they’re merely taking advantage of this crisis to score political points, they should be ashamed.
Meanwhile, the National Post editorial is on the mark:
Published: Wednesday, July 19, 2006
At the United Nations and in Europe, there is a clamour for the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force to Southern Lebanon. The hope is that, by physically separating the two warring sides, peacekeepers can make continued war between Hezbollah and Israel impossible.
Peacekeeping is a nice idea in theory, and it has even worked once or twice in various parts of the world. But in the context of southern Lebanon, the concept is not only laughably naive, but dangerous as well.
As informed observers know, there already is a peacekeeping force in the area, and it’s been there since 1978. But all the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has done is preside over the establishment of a de facto Hezbollah terrorist statelet on Israel’s northern border. Given the United Nations’ historic antipathy toward Israel, there is little reason to suspect that even a larger, better-trained force would rouse itself to offer the Jewish state any better protection.
[…]
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