Pearson would have loathed ISIS, too

Mordechai Ben-Dat

Rear-view mirrors often have a warning to the driver not to trust the accuracy of the image they see. That same warning could apply to some pundits who reverently posit theories about the past without actually looking at the whole truth about the way things once were. 

In particular, I refer to the scorn certain writers heap upon Canada’s foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, which they consider a betrayal of our historic role there. One recent such expression appeared in the Globe and Mail on Oct. 26 written by Mark MacKinnon, a veteran foreign news specialist. MacKinnon regretted the government’s decision to join the allied military front against the Islamic State.

“Let’s pause a minute to mourn the passing of the Canada that we used to know, the country that saw itself as a ‘middle power,’ a force for peace and internationalism… Our decision to join the fight against an opponent [Islamic State] that – until this week – had never attacked us has been noted.”

But his main regret seemed to be over Canada’s policy regarding the Arab-Israeli dispute. 

“We were still the nation that had invented international peacekeeping [in the Sinai Peninsula] and perceived, most of the time, as something like a balanced mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

“Our changing posture in the Middle East – from balance-seeker to belligerent – has been evident since 2006. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s then newly elected Conservative government rushed to be the first in the world … to announce a boycott of the new Hamas parliament that Palestinians had elected… On my next visit to the Gaza Strip, the Hamas leaders I interviewed were perplexed… Why was Canada leading the boycott? What had Hamas done to Canada?” (my emphasis).

MacKinnon then ruefully eulogized Canada: “Consider this is a lament for the idea of a nation. A mourning for the Canada of old, the mention of which used to draw smiles in… the Gaza Strip.” 

Oh how he wishes he could once again see those missing smiles on Hamas leaders’ faces! But he displays no equivalent remorse, let alone misgivings, over the fact those same Hamas leaders shamelessly, even boastfully, announce their primary aim to annihilate the Jewish State of Israel. To be sure they were elected. But they have no loyalty to democracy. Their chief loyalty is to the appropriation of their religion for the sacred mission of genocide.

And what might the Canadian diplomat who made our country “the nation that invented international peacekeeping” think about Canada’s condemnation of Hamas and its terrorism?

Historian John English, who wrote the entry on former prime minister Lester Pearson in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, gives us a clue: “[Pearson] was pragmatic but deeply principled and his principles were based upon a liberal conviction that brutal dictatorships not only repress many of their own citizens, but also threaten the security of democratic nations.”

Pearson abhorred Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement in Munich and conveyed his views to the Foreign Affairs Ministry: “I think of Hitler screeching into the microphone, Jewish women and children in ditches on the Polish border… and whatever the British side may represent, the other does indeed stand for savagery and barbarism.”

Other Canadians, too, rely on the views of the inventor of peacekeeping to justify acting against genocidal regimes such as ISIS and Hamas.

In a recent article in the Huffington Post, Sheila Copps, Stockwell Day and Lorne Nystrom quoted Pearson from a lecture in 1955: “The fact is, that to every challenge given by the threat of death and destruction, there has always been the response from free men: it shall not be. By these responses, man has not only saved himself, but has ensured his future.”

Pearson believed there was no contradiction in a Canada that stands clearly against the savagery and barbarism of brutal regimes as well as one that is a force for peace and internationalism. Indeed, he likely believed that without being the former, Canada could never be the latter.