Hezbollah - Devoted Social Activists
There you have it, Hezbollah is comprised of a high-minded membership of social activists, fighters for peace and security, potential partners with Israel for togetherness-in-peace in the Middle East. We had it all wrong! What's the matter with us? Here we thought that just because the Hezbollah charter calls for the elimination of Israel, the killing of Israeli citizens and then again, Jews anywhere in the world, we mis-characterized them as terrorists. Silly us. How could we have been so wrong. I guess we were wrong because we imagined that we saw how deadly serious Hezbollah is, that we took the words of its leader Sheik Nasrallah seriously - hey, just kidding folks!So all it took was a cadre of like-minded Canadian Members of Parliament, carefully selected from each of the main political parties - oops the Conservative MP opted out, dear me - to go over there on a freebie visit paid for and orchestrated through the altruistic auspices of the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations. A fact-finding mission, no less. Where to? Why Qana, town of the horrendously deliberate Israeli bombing of a building housing 26 Lebanese civilians.
Now what would anyone clever enough to think through to the event, its aftermath and the public relations machinations of Hezbollah and its spokespeople imagine they would see? This was, after all, the centrepoint in a theatre of war, short and aborted as it was. It was from that very town, among so many others that Hezbollah, that brave freedom-fighting group launched its rockets against Israel, then hurriedly decamped as is their wont, to leave its residents exposed and directly targetted - good planning, fellas or is that fellahin.
So these three MPs, New Democrat Peggy Nash, Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj, and Bloc Quebecois Maria Mourani accompanied their gracious hosts to the scene of carnage and were righteously outraged and horrified, immediately bonding with the suave and charming Hezbollah representatives who so kindly showed them around. Could it be otherwise? After all, the unspoken laws of civil social exchange demands no less a response, and it was certainly incumbent upon them at that point, was it not? to condemn Canada's official stance on the war, its cause and its purpose.
How delightful for Hezbollah to have their view and vision affirmed as the right way to behave within the international community, let alone their own little closed corner of the world. Nothing like pricking the conscience of a world who obviously held the wrong side to account, to be told by one's guests that they had it all wrong, and Hezbollah should not have been listed by Canada as a terrorist organization. Nicey-nicey works.
Canadians viewed television footage of the three Canadian Members of Parliament meeting with Hezbollah members of the Lebanese Parliament - hey, how about that, their political counterparts; one cunning and devious, the other innocently stupid. These three sterling members of the Canadian parliamentary system must surely have failed their history assignments as children, and they've surely not improved in their ability to fully understand modern history, since then.
Still, viewers could see for themselves what a wholesome impact their visit and their declarations of support had on their counterparts, and what's more, the President of Lebanon, Fouad Siniora, whose gloating chiding of the Government of Canada over its wrong-headed stance in "favouring" Israel's right to self-defence, self-determination and selfish insistence on remaining a sovereign country within the Middle East, to the obviously wrong-headed detriment of the fanatical Islamists who declare their intent to push the country into the sea.
Matthew Fisher reporting for CanWest News Service quoted MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj as saying, among other delightful declarations, that Hezbollah should be removed from Canada's list of terrorists, while MP Peggy Nash added some helpful comments about reasonable dialogue between combatants, expressing her shame at the position of her government, and MP Maria Mourani nodded knowingly, with a pained expression of having been personally wronged.
The wisdom of Canadian Members of Parliament espousing a cause that would legitimate the means to an end, knowing full well that these very particular means do not justify this particular end goes without saying. There are times when diplomacy, open lines of dialogue do not work if you are not dealing with reasonable, open-minded people. Fanaticism has a peculiar effect of deadening the intellect to reason, diplomacy or compromise. That which appears to be reasonable, feasible, practicable to a Western aesthetic may not seem so to individuals raised in a culture and with a tradition that emphases honour is gained by killing one's adversary.
Well, this may just have occurred to these exemplary representatives of the Government of Canada, since now, although their words of conciliation and condemnation (the former for Hezbollah, the latter for Canada) have been immortalized in the annals of grossly incomprehensible stupidity in Canadian governance circles, both through newspaper articles where they were directly quoted, and through the medium of the electronic media where they can, any time they would like to, view and hear themselves in the company of their gracious hosts, mouthing words which they now strenously deny ever having said.
Egad, little wonder politicians in general are mistrusted by the public.
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, August 22, 2006
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