Stephen Harper has driven the anti-Semitic, NDP-linked website rabble.ca apoplectic

It seems that Stephen Harper's speech to the Israeli legislature was so forceful, and so infuriating to the anti-Israel far-left that its effects included giving writers like Gerry Caplan an aneurysm, resulting in serious cognitive impairment. Either that, or Caplan was intentionally dishonest, or just plain stupid in a column published by rabble.ca claiming "Stephen Harper contended that Israeli policies should not be criticized, especially in public.... As Mr. Harper put it, criticism of Israeli policies is "the new anti-Semitism..."

Except that Harper not only didn't characterize all criticism of Israel as being anti-Semitic, but exclusively refuted that assertion. What Harper said was,  "Of course, criticism of Israeli government policy is not in and of itself necessarily anti-Semitic. But what else can we call criticism that selectively condemns only the Jewish state and effectively denies its right to defend itself while systematically ignoring – or excusing – the violence and oppression all around it?"

Which is very different indeed from the deceitful charges made by Gerry Caplan. But it's necessary for Caplan to lie in order to try to lay claim to the same territory that Harper himself explicitly covered in his speech, that not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Harper never suggested it was, but what he did describe as anti-Semitic is the unfair, dishonest, disproportionate and obsessive criticism of Israel of the sort in which rabble.ca routinely engages.  In another rabble column published the same day, some very twisted efforts at logic attempting to remake some of Caplan's assertions are endeavored by Murray Dobbin.  Dobbin is a board member of the NDP-linked think-tank Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which is one of rabble's main funders, and the bizarre claim he tries to make is that Canada's strong support for Israel hurts Israel.

Rather more sinisterly, Dobbin suggests the repulsive, anti-Semitic trope that Jews are themselves responsible for anti-Semitism by supporting Israel when he wrote.  "by encouraging the most right-wing, intransigent government in Israel's history, Harper helps ensure a powerful global movement opposed to Israel -- and that opposition inadvertently provides comfort to anti-Semites."  

So according to rabble, if Harper supports Israel, or, it would follow to reason also that if Jews support it, they are really just encouraging the hatred they incur.

What must really has rabble riled is that they will be called out for the anti-Semitic garbage they promote, in its support for "Israel Apartheid Week", and anti-Semitic boycotts of Israel. Or sometimes rabble makes very little effort to mask its more blatant bias against Jews, as in an article last week by its Ottawa correspondent Karl Nerenberg, who essentially suggested that Canadian Jews' primary loyalty is to Israel and that the Harper government is cynically exploiting that sentiment.

Hamas' model mother

Of course rabble will protest that they aren't anti-Semitic and that some of their 'best friends,' including some of its correspondents and its founder Judy Rebick are Jewish. But it's only a particular type of Jew for whom rabble has any affinity. That would be the type that passes the litmus test of sharing their fanatical bias against the Jewish state, just as the Nazis were comparatively benevolent to Jews who assisted them in controlling the Jews they marked for extermination.

Speaking of marking Jews for extermination, rabble's writers took issue with Stephen Harper refusing to single out Israel for criticism. Just a week before his trip to Israel, the Prime Minister of Gaza's government, Ismail Haniya, threatened the lives of Israelis and called on young Palestinians to partake in jihad and "to love death for the sake of Allah as much as our enemies love life." Haniya then praised and extolled young Palestinians to emulate a woman named Reem al-Riyashi.

Hamas gets a terrorist's children to
celebrate the number of Jews her
mother murdered

For those not familiar with the name, Reem al-Riyashi was a female Palestinian suicide bomber. A repulsive sociopath, al-Riyashi left her two young children and embarked on a mission to blow herself up at the Erez border crossing. Declaring in her 'farewell video' that she hoped "the shredded limbs of my body would be shrapnel tearing the Zionists to pieces" so she could be "knocking on heaven's door with the skulls of Zionists."

al-Riyashi murdered four Israeli personnel and injured 10 more when she blasted herself to smithereens. Hamas then ghoulishly paraded al-Riayshi's children on its notorious kids' TV show Pioneers of Tomorrow, where the smiling youngsters were told what a great accomplishment their mother had achieved. Hamas also put out a music video where children are encouraged to follow in al-Riyashi's footsteps.

Yet for the bigots at rabble.ca, which is published by the spouse of NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies, it is Israel and only Israel that is the impediment to peace. And if rabble is to be taken seriously, anyone who denies that is just encouraging more Jew-hate.