The left's new bad guy

At some point in his first or second year, the average undergraduate comes to a dreadful, shocking, thrilling, intoxicating realization: Everything I was taught to believe until now is a lie. We're not the good guys. We're the bad guys: the West, white people, my parents, whatever. Grasping this insight is the key to enlightenment, and enlightenment is the key to, among other things, pulling chicks. As time passes, most of us move on to a more balanced understanding of life. But that first rush of exhilaration at having pierced the veil, at being granted the power to see through the lies that hold others in their thrall, never really leaves us, and retains its ability to shape our thoughts throughout our lives. In its most benign form, it presents itself as a harmless contrarianism, of a kind to which this column might occasionally succumb. But under pressure, worked and reworked through the recombinant loops of the obsessive mind, it can progress through various strains of Marxism to conspiracy theories, UFOlogy and worse. The reflexive oppositionism of so much of the left, its instant identification with whoever or whatever is most hostile to the society of which it is a part, most closely resembles that of the undergraduate. It is a badge, a pose, a lifestyle, an arrangement of reality that is pleasing to believe, a reminder to the believer of the third eye of enlightenment that is his gift. Yet in this country it can take on a rather uglier form, insofar as the object of its loathing can be displaced onto another society, quite apart from our own. Until now, the locus of this disaffection was the United States. Lately, disturbingly, it has centred more and more on Israel. Anti-Americanism has mutated into something that might at best be called anti-Israelism, and at times looks alarmingly like anti-Semitism. Which brings us to the present wretched state of the Liberal party. That the party's left wing has long been a hotbed of anti-Americanism is news to no one. Indeed, so entrenched was this attitude among certain sections of the ruling party that it resembled something of a state religion. (A leftist in the States is compelled by his beliefs to remain profoundly alienated from his country, and from such notions as patriotism. In Canada, such was his patriotism.) But that tendency to locate all the blame for the world's ills in a single country has now attached itself to Israel. I don't wish to pick on poor Borys Wrzesnewskyj, the party's former deputy critic for foreign affairs, who has suffered enough. He meant well, I am sure, and probably regrets having ever opened his mouth on that ill-starred trip to Lebanon. But the habit of mind his words revealed did not spring from nowhere, nor is he by any means alone in the party. And while Borys's worst sin is an (admittedly spectacular) lack of judgement, there are others in the party, such as the recently departed vice-president of the Young Liberals of Canada in B.C., Thomas Hubert, who plainly harbour more virulent sentiments: if not that Israel is the "most vile nation in human history," one that "survives on the blood of innocent people," certainly that it is the primary source of conflict and instability in the region, and that its own human rights failings are of such a kind that it should be singled out, amongst all its neighbours, for condemnation. Understand, this is not even "moral equivalence," though God knows the party has enough subscribers to that particular doctrine: the lazy, poisonous belief that the struggle between Israel and its antagonists, like that earlier between the West and the Soviet bloc, is an unseemly squabble on which we should take no sides, but rather should stand apart, ready to serve as "honest brokers." To the left, to Mr. Hubert and his ilk, Israel is not merely "just as bad" as those who would destroy it, but if anything somewhat worse -- because, one assumes, they are on our side. At least, I hope that's all it is. Or perhaps there is a link between them: between the pseudo-neutrality that is one strain of recent Liberal foreign policy, and the anti-Americanism, shading into anti-Israelism, that is the other. An unwillingness to take sides was, of course, one of the ways in which we were supposed to distinguish ourselves from the Americans: They were warlike and ideological, we were peacekeeping ecumenicals. But perhaps there was something else at work. A refusal to make moral judgments, to distinguish between the merely flawed and the truly evil, may in time lead to an inability to do so. Having gotten out of the habit of judgment, the muscles can atrophy: If "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," then it is all too easy to forget, not only who the terrorists are, but who are the freedom fighters. If anti-Semitism is the "socialism of fools," perhaps anti-Israelism is the pacifism of knaves.