Rex Murphy: Canada’s not the enemy — but don’t try telling that to Stephen and Avi Lewis

One of the more forceful lines of Stephen Lewis’s speech in Edmonton in support of the Leap Manifesto last weekend was his forceful takedown of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the question of the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia. After complimenting Trudeau for his florid embrace of feminism, he gave a quite deft turn of the knife by asking how Trudeau the feminist could justify selling arms to Saudi Arabia, a “regime steeped in misogyny.”

It was a very good question, in that it highlights the importance of consistency when one takes ideological stands on the various principles of social justice. After all, you can’t wear the feminist T-shirt at home and traffic with misogynists abroad.

An equally just critique may be made of a certain Leap-authoring social justice activist. So it is fair, I think, to borrow the rhetorical firecracker Stephen Lewis tossed at Trudeau and lob it toward his son, Avi Lewis. Here the question is: can someone with an advanced social conscience work as a “journalist” for the kingdom of Qatar, as Avi did? I placed the word “journalist” in quotation marks because it is stressful to the mind to incorporate the words “journalist” and “Qatar” in the same sentence. We are, after all, talking about a country that once sentenced a poet to life in prison for a few bristling iambics about its hallowed leader (world scorn over the barbarous injustice eventually got the sentence commuted)...