[National Post-Canada] Colby Cosh - At the upcoming general council of the United Church of Canada, attendees will be asked to vote on a resolution boycotting Israeli academic and cultural institutions. The language of the resolution says that Israel is "built mainly on land ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian owners." In view of the 1.4 million Arabs living within Israeli borders, Israel is not much better at ethnic cleansing than I am at cleaning my house. Using the term "ethnic cleansing" to characterize the founding of Israel makes the term elastic enough to include freely contracted purchases of land by Zionists under the British Mandate, as well as the Palestinian Jews' refusal to let themselves be starved and exterminated by their Arab neighbors in the 1947-48 intercommunal free-for-all. Individual Jews are "cleansing" the region literally just by being alive there. The nerve! The preoccupation with the injustice in the Middle East is nothing but an irrational political fad, helped along by a lamentable tendency to subject Jews to special, incessant scrutiny.
2009-08-07 06:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive