The Irish Senator and internationally recognized human rights activist, David Norris, delivered an eminently powerful speech concerning Gaza in the Irish Parliament on, July, 31st. In his speech Norris criticizes human rights violations of Israel carried out with the support of the United States and complacency of the international community.
Said Norris:
“I am not anti-Israeli, I am not anti-Semitic. I supported the state of Israel. In the forty years I have known the state of Israel and sometimes had a home there I’ve seen it completely changed. It changed from a left-wing socially directed country, to an extreme right-wing regime, that is behaving in the most criminal fashion and defying the world. Using – unscrupulously using – the Holocaust to justify what they are doing and it is time that rag was torn away from them.”
The video of his speech follows. Can you imagine any of our politicians speaking so forthrightly and with such impassioned integrity?
H/t Addictinginfo
Thanks for posting this, Lorne. It does being on a tinge of nausea when I have to think of our own parliamentarians, our opposition parties and their vacuous leadership. Even Mulcair, really? When in hell did the bottom fall out of our sense of decency?
ReplyDeleteTo try to answer what I know was your rhetorical question, Mound, I would say the bottom fell out when our political parties decided that pandering for power would take primacy over the public good.
DeleteIt is a fallacy to believe that the Netanyahu government speaks for the majority of Israelis, Lorne -- as false as the notion that the Harper government speaks for the majority of Canadians.
ReplyDeleteTrue, Owen, and aptly reflects what Mound said in his above comment.
DeleteI think we have to also consider the difference in the efforts in NA by the pro-Israel-at-all-costs lobby to crucify anyone here who dares do what this Irish Senator did have had over the past few decades as opposed to his home environment. I'm not saying this to make excuses, because I agree this needs saying and the inability of any leader (and I do not just mean the federal party leaders either, but any major voice in our society) here to do so is a massive disappointment to me, but it is not like there is no reason for it, and I think to ignore the reason in this discussion is to enable it to an extent.
ReplyDeleteI stopped getting into discussions on this topic myself because I was tired of the unending abuse (and I *always* made a point of being clear I was talking about Israeli government policy specifically when I did, never anything else, and still was hounded for my "jew-hating"), and with my health issues I only have so much stamina to work with so I pick my battles instead of engaging on all fronts I care about as I used to in my younger and healthier days. Now, when these forces focus on someone as insignificant as I am to that extent and I see them focus on more prominent voices even more so then I am forced to always take their presence as a factor in my mind whenever I look at such failures as one of the reasons for that failure of discourse to happen. Last time I looked the EU and Ireland especially does not have anywhere near the same overwhelming pro-Islreal-at-all-costs lobby presence that we in NA do, and I do think that is a factor which must never be forgotten about.
Our political dialogue on this issue has been massively distorted by that lobby's presence. It had been really bad in the USA for decades, but the past decade or two has gotten pretty ugly here as well, especially once the Harper regime came to power. I do wonder though how many Canadians are out there quietly watching the current dominance of this force and getting ever more frustrated by it, in the end it would not surprise me to see a massive backlash form against this force and Israel itself because of this blatant interfering in our domestic political affairs/conversations.
Your points are well-taken, Scotian, and ones with which I cannot disagree. To add to you observations, I also worry that given the current political climate, any criticism of the state of Israel (which, like yours, has always been my reference point) also encourages the real anti-Semites, who will seize upon just about anything in their hatred of Jews. Please understand that I am not saying that is a reason to mute criticism in any way; I merely make the point that politicos like Harper et al., in trying to squelch such legitimate criticism and conflate it with anti-Semitism, simply feed into into pre-existing prejudices.
Delete