John Greyson and Tarek Loubani have been portrayed as innocents abroad, humanitarian do-gooders who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. This picture is inaccurate and incomplete. The two are hard-core anti-Israel activists who’ve been mixed up in Middle East politics for years. They should have known what they were getting into.
When they were arrested, the two were on their way to deliver medical equipment to a hospital in Hamas-controlled Gaza. The whole world knew that the situation in Egypt was highly volatile. The government was determined to shut down the Muslim Brotherhood (an ally of Hamas) and unlikely to look kindly on a couple of foreigners who decided to film a bloody crackdown.
Jon Kay in the National Post:
Egyptian military authorities have been co-operating with Israel in controlling the flow of weapons and militants to and from Gaza for years. But till now, Western pro-Palestinian activists generally have preferred to play down this fact. The case against Israel works best when it is presented as a simple morality play about indigenous Arabs battling neo-colonialist Jews. And so the fact that many Arab leaders in the region (including not only those in Egypt, but also Lebanon and Jordan) share Israel’s fear of Palestinian militancy is seen as an embarrassment to the conceit of anti-Zionist solidarity.
(to be fair to John and the NP, they did do a couple of articles touching on the radical fanaticism of Greyson and Loubani before.)
I think Jon's article is overly optimistic in its assessment that the Greyson/Loubani saga will refocus the Canadian radical left away from its anti-Israel depravity onto real human rights crises, but he does make some very valid observations about the other facets of this episode.
Sun News, as its viewers are aware, has been providing the complete story on Greyson and Loubani from the start:
The whole Palestinian thing is nonsense. I know actual Palestinian-Canadians. Most Palestinians know they are just being used by activists to attack Israel. Similar to the way activists use Native people to attack the Canadian government.
ReplyDeleteThat's a well known "secret." I'll be discussing this on Michael Coren's show on Sun News Network today, and it's a point I was planning to bring up.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to seeing. It is disgusting to see these anti-Israel activists dig up anyone they can with some sort of Palestinian heritage to put out in front.
ReplyDeleteThey also ignore the fact that, other than in Jordan, Palestinians are treated like garbage. They have a lower legal status than the rest of the population.