Israel Matzav

Sunday, February 02, 2014

Video: Canadian Employment Minister Jason Kenney thanks the nutters at Oxfam, he's buying a SodaStream!

Canadian Employment Minister Jason Kenney says he's going to buy a SodaStream machine. And he has lots more to say about his trip to Israel.

Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: Jack W).

Labels: Canada, Jason Kenney, Scarlet Johansson, SodaStream, Stephen Harper

Thursday, January 23, 2014

An oxymoron comes alive

And you thought that the idea that a political party could have honest, moral positions was an oxymoron. An honest political party? A moral political party? A political party that does the right thing, even if it costs them politically? Meet the Conservative party of Canada. I cannot tell you how impressed I am with this interview with senior member Jason Kenney.

The Times of Israel: In light of Harper’s very supportive speech, many Israelis think he was spot on, broadly speaking, and that the rest of the world doesn’t get it. Why is there a gulf between Canada and very few other countries on the one side, and the rest of the world on the other, where Israel is concerned?

Jason Kenney: Partly because as our prime minister said, “it’s always easier to go along to get along” — that is to say, [to follow] the path of least resistance. That certainly characterized Canada’s status quo-ante policy.

It’s no secret that the foreign ministries of most Western countries have an institutional bias against Israel that is probably informed by the fact that there is one Jewish state and dozens of other Islamic and Arabic states. That frankly informs the professional public service in most Western foreign ministries.

You mean there are 20 times as many diplomats who have served in Arab countries?

And 40 times more in Muslim countries. That’s right. The prime minister more or less intimated that in his speech. That means you’ve got dozens more diplomats and foreign policy wonks who absorb a particular perspective which is frankly and obviously hostile to Israel.

So that becomes the default position. It takes a profound act, it takes great intentionality on the part of political actors, to overcome that kind of institutional bias to begin with.

Secondly, the political incentives are not in favor of this. In the United State of course, with a large constituency of Christian Zionists, and the not insignificant influence of the Jewish community, there’s always been a strong political constituency generally to support Israel, but that doesn’t exist in Western Europe and it doesn’t exist in Canada.

The Jewish community constitutes 1% of our population at most, and there’s no Christian Zionist constituency to speak of. For most people, if they’re not familiar with the complicated politics and history of the region, they don’t understand why a government would want to take clear positions on this.

So you’ve got an institutional bias built into most Western foreign ministries, you’ve got a lack of political incentives to take these positions. I think that helps to explain it.

Those are the only two factors, or would you bring other factors into the mix? Is anti-Semitism in there somewhere, if not the dominant feature? Demographics — the fact that, for instance, there are 10 times as many Muslims as Jews in France? That hardly encourages a French MP, say, to take a fair-minded position on Israel and the region.

The positions that we have taken have been demonstrably against our electoral advantage. Some of the superannuated foreign policy establishment in Canada have grasped for an explanation as to why our government has taken these arguably contentious positions. And the simplest explanation they can come up with, which is really the dumbest, is that the Conservative Party has taken this position to advance our electoral interests. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is this: With the Jewish community representing less than 1% of our population, it tends to be concentrated in urban core electoral districts which have typically been inaccessible to the Conservative Party.

During the Lebanon conflict in 2006, our prime minister was flying to his first G8 summit, in Saint Petersburg, the day after the IDF began its operation in Lebanon, and he was asked by our media to respond. He was advised by officials to take a pass: Get to Saint Petersburg, hear what the consensus is, and follow it. That’s the Canadian modus operandi. He said no, I think under the circumstances we need to assert Israel’s right to defend itself. So he went to the back of his plane and said in a press scrum, he said, Under the circumstances I think that Israel’s reaction is restrained. Well, this quote was considered verboten by many, and it was played along with images of the devastation in Lebanon for the next several weeks and our party lost over the course of the six weeks of that conflict I think about eight percent in the public opinion polls.

So right from the very beginning we’ve been willing to spend political capital to do what’s right on this issue.

On anti-Semitism, one thing that’s not recognized here perhaps is that in addition to the positions we’ve taken on Israel and the politics of the Middle East, we’ve also become a global leader in combating anti-Semitism and promoting Holocaust commemoration, education and research. This year Canada’s chairing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. We hosted the last meeting of the inter-parliamentary coalition for combating anti-Semitism. That led to the Ottawa protocol, that essentially said that not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, but those who tend to single out Israel for opprobrium or condemnation or question the legitimacy of the Jewish state are arguably giving expression to hateful views.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Canada, Conservatives, Durban II Conference, Jason Kenney, Second Lebanon War, Stephen Harper

Friday, September 23, 2011

Conference on the Perils of Global Intolerance: The United Nations and Durban III - Part 2

Here are the rest of my notes on Conference on the Perils of Global Intolerance: The United Nations and Durban III. Unfortunately, I missed a chunk in the middle for work....

There was a brief press availability during the conference break. It was especially interesting listening to Zuhdi Jasser describing his Congressional testimony and how they tried to pigeonhole him into a right v. left scenario and how the left got its talking points from the Islamists. None of the speakers really had a definitive answer on why the left is so enthralled with the ‘Palestinians’ and the Islamists generally, who stand for so much that is anathema to the Left.
Douglas Murray speaking – he is hysterical. He says that he picked up the New York Times only because the hotel delivered it. He says that Yasser Arafat after his death gets better coverage than Republicans. Arafat was greeted at the UN by ‘wife beater Idi Amin and Nazi Kurt Waldheim.’ He then reads from Moynihan’s 1975 rejection of the Zionism is racism resolution.
He’s hysterical.
Simon Deng is a Sudanese Human Rights activist. He is furious about UN for ignoring enslavement of southern Sundanese by Arabs – instead the UN is only focused on the ‘Palestinians.’ He himself was tricked into slavery by an Arab when he was 9 years old!
Says he’s been to Israel five times visiting Sudanese refugees. Says they were promised shelter in Egypt but escape to Israel where they find shelter. They have to dodge Egyptian bullets to get there. Deng is blasting the notion that Israel is racist. The room is so silent you could hear a pin drop. He talks about black Jews in Israel (presumably Ethiopians). He says that the people who suffer the most from the UN are not the Israelis but the people ignored by the UN as part of its big lie against Israel.
Deng just announced in the name of the President of Southern Sudan that their embassy will be built in Jerusalem – not in Tel Aviv. They will not be part of Durban.
Jon Voight is next. He praises Deng, and then all the other speakers. Anti-Semitism is a disease.
Jason Kenney, Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism points out Canada’s lead role in boycotting Durban. He explains why.
Mike Huckabee is the last speaker. I will have to leave in the middle.
Obama’s speech yesterday applies to the ills of humanity like a mother kissing a child’s wound when she has no medicine. Obama’s speech won’t resolve conflicts. He doesn’t understand why so many Jews support Obama. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. He talks about the NY9 election last week and says it shows how Obama has no clue what’s at stake in Israel.
Talks about first trip to Israel in 1973. People came to escape tyranny. Israel stands and fights for its very existence. It’s irrational to think that Israel giving up increasing amounts of territory will bring peace, just like it’s irrational to think that a Barack Obama speech will bring peace to the world.
He says that if UN votes on ‘Palestinian state’ US should cut off all funding and kick them out of the US. We have pressured Israel more for building bedrooms than we have pressured Iran on building nuclear bombs. And Obama’s response has been ‘can’t we all just get along’?
How many rockets from Canada would it take for US to react? One. But Israel has taken 4,000. US can’t ask other nations to do what US won’t do. He mentions Fogel family.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Douglas Murray, Durban III, Jason Kenney, Jon Voight, Mike Huckabee, Simon Deng, Zuhdi Jasser

Monday, June 20, 2011

Canadians urge UN to drop Durban III

A series of interviews with participants at the Conservative party conference in Ottowa this past week ought to be music to the ears of Israelis.

When asked about Harper’s government taking the lead in rejecting the UN Durban Review Conference in Geneva (Durban II) in 2009 and the Durban III event slated to take place in New York City on September 21, Jason Kenney, the minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, said: “Under the previous liberal government, Canada participated at Durban I [in 2001], and I think there was a pretty broad recognition after the fact that it was mistake for Canada to lend its good name to that circus of hatred at Durban I.”

Human rights groups and the US and Israeli governments said the UN World Conference against Racism 2001 held in Durban was marred by rabidly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic groups’ protests and a resolution that singled out and attacked Israel.

When “our government came to office, we were the first country in the world to announce that we would not participate in the Durban II review conference. We did so because our assessment was that a repeat of the some of the most egregious aspects of Durban I was likely... because countries like Iran and Libya were on the organizing committee for Durban II, which was all we needed to know,” Kenney, 43, a charismatic MP and gifted public speaker from Calgary, Alberta, said.

The organizers of the Durban II conference invited all of the NGOs from the Durban I event, including some of the most “egregious anti-Semitic” groups, and scheduled meetings on Jewish High Holy Days, “presumably to limit the participation of Jewish NGOs,” he said.

According to Kenney, Canada decided that the Durban process was “basically irredeemable” and the “UN should drop it.” It has become a “sick joke and sullies the reputation of the UN,” he said.

Canada was the first country to announce, on November 25, 2010, that it will not participate in the Durban III conference in New York.

“Navi Pillay and her crew should stop the process and realize that the poison at Durban I” has placed “the entire process under a permanent cloud,” Kenney said. Pillay is the UN high commissioner for human rights and oversees the Durban conference process.

“A conference that gives a platform to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to advocate genocide is a sick joke,” and advocates of Durban should stop defending the process, Kenney said.

He pointed to Canada’s multicultural system as the “most successful model of pluralism” and said Canada is always keen to participate in a legitimate process to address xenophobia, hatred, prejudice and racism.

Canada has set a example for the world on how “to deal with diversity in a positive way” and “the official policy of multiculturalism is an example to other liberal democracies, he said. Canadian multiculturalism rejects cultural relativism, Kenney said, citing such “barbaric cultural practices” as “honor killings,” female genital mutilation, and forced marriages.