Another "Anti-Zionist" Own Goal In The Globe And Mail

This one is too amusing to pass up.

Whatever cynical but otherwise comparatively sane points public policy analyst Gerald Caplan might have wanted to make by instructing Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to "brush up on reality" regarding the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, he buys his own shovel, digs his own grave with it and jumps head first into the hole without so much as a so long, it's been good to know you. 

Caplan's shovel is the fanciful proposition that Harper is merely an unlettered peace-talks enthusiast. You can tell the hole he starts digging with it is going to be a grave straight away, because Caplan's argument requires the further suspension of disbelief that any old critic of Israel will be smeared as an antisemite, "since that’s how critics of Israeli governments are normally treated." The he jumps into the hole and starts yarding mounds of earth upon himself by instructing Harper to properly inform himself by reading three books - one by a sad and dispirited Israeli politician, the other by some humanitarian worker who has spent time in the West Bank, and the third by Canada's own Michael Keefer.

Keefer is a 911-conspiracy fruitcake who enjoys the benefits of tenure at the University of Guelph,which is by itself a hilarious embarrassment to an otherwise reasonably useful Canadian university. But Keefer is perhaps even better known for having proclaimed that the police bust of the infamous and comically incompetent Toronto 18 terror cell was a war-on-terror "frameup" and the poor lads were tortured in the bargain. Nevermind that they all ended up confessing to their crimes and never once claimed to have been tortured, we must soldier on, we must continue to expose the lying Zionist media that secretly pulls the strings of the capitalist-imperialist hegemon, yada yada bla bla bla.

And don't you dare wonder aloud if maybe something like antisemitism may be at work, say, here, at a Toronto event where Keefer and his friends were explaining how Islamist barbarism is just a lie the Zionists who control the media have all foisted on us hicks and rubes: Among the literature that visitors were urged to take was a newspaper with content smacking of antisemitism, for example, “it’s a fact” that “Zionists [are] controlling the media,” “Zionists in Canada don’t care about Canada’s sovereignty and are willing to join the US, where they control Bush,” “Zionists attack our advertiser [not named]… threats by Toronto Zionists who attack the messenger rather than improve themselves and their nazi [sic] ways,” and “Rothschild owned big pharma killers.”

Whatever you do, do not be so vulgar and common as to notice such things, Caplan urges. "This is truly opportunism of a perverse kind."

Whatever you say, Mr. Caplan. I'm sure the prime minister and the rest of us will take your advice quite seriously now.

Terry Glavin is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.