You Can't Please Everyone

Thornhill MP Susan Kadis withdrew her support for Michael Ignatieff over he called the massacre of civilians by Israeli bombs a "war crime" on a French-language TV program.

He was explaining away his ealier comment about Qana, in which he said he "wasn't losing any sleep" over civilian deaths in Lebanon- a remark he later said was a "mistake". That comment apparently didn't offend Ms. Kadis, but it offended other people (like me, for example). And now that he has offended the Zionist lobby, he insists he's a "lifelong friend of Israel" (from the cradle to the grave!)- and "clarifies" his position yet again by calling ithe Qana massacre an "unjustified' and "terrible" human tragedy- of the sort that happened to both sides.

Come off it,"Iggy"! You're starting to remind us of Paul Martin!

Yes, there was tragedy on both sides. People on both sides were murdered and terrorized. But not quite to the same extent. Trying to be "balanced" in assessing a fundamentally unbalanced situation is itself unbalanced.

As for Ms. Kadis, she said she found Ignatieff's earlier "unprovoked comments" "very troubling," given that Israel's attack on Qana was a response to the "brazen kidnapping" of Israeli soldiers and missile attacks by Lebanese-based Hezbollah guerrillas.

"This was an attack intended to root out a recognized terrorist group who were raining down thousands of missiles on Israel," she said.

— which were themselves attacks in response to:
— tens or hundreds of thousands of bombs raining on Lebanon in response to:
— the "brazen" kidnapping of two, yes two, soldiers, in response to:
— Israel holding thousands of detainees held indefinitely without charge.

When we started bombing Yugoslavia while they were "rooting out" the terrorist KLA from Kosovo, arguments such as the one made by Ms. Kadis cut little ice. Was it that the Serbs didn't have enough "lifelong friends" in Canada? In any case, Slobodan Milosovic, who ordered this "rooting out", recently died in a cell in the Hague during his war crimes trial.

But of course, we don't put our "lifelong friends" on trial, do we?