Right Honourable Parliamentarians

Here we go again. Another Israel-bashing gabfest, a celebration of critiquing Israel the state, having nothing whatever to do with anti-Semitism. And anyone who claims otherwise is a slanderous cretin. The current Conservative-led Government of Canada finds it odiously offensive that anti-Semitism is on the rise. That same government is sturdily supportive of the State of Israel and its government decisions in its zeitgeist of ongoing violent adversity.

Canada was the first, and originally, only member of the United Nations that decisively determined that its attendance at the scheduled Durban II, United Nations conference on racism would blemish its own battles against racism. Recognizing, as it did, that the 'conference on racism' was, in actual fact, a conference celebrating and practising racism, along with anti-Semitism. This is the country that most Canadians should be proud of.

Evidently, however, not all Canadians, not by a long shot. Cue some Members of Parliament, where the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Association has extended a most peculiar invitation to a Canadian academic who is not at all shy about his stance in naming Israel an "illegitimate state", and who went out of his way to support a fledgling boycott of Israeli academics by the Ontario branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

Here we have elected members of the Canadian Parliament, not leftist student bodies, not socialist union members infiltrated by Canadian Arabs incensed by the Israel-Palestinian conflict, deciding in the interests of free speech their entitlement to bring into the House of Commons a radical academic speaker who slanders another democracy. One who equates the Israeli 'occupation' of the Palestinians with a "kinder, gentler genocide" than that perpetrated on the Jews by the Nazis.

Professor Michael Neumann, who teaches philosophy at Trent University, claims personal knowledge that Israel plans the eradication of the Palestinians from the geography of the Middle East. Eerily similar to the claims by Iranian President Ahmadinejad of his country's plans for the State of Israel. This supremely knowledgeable academic has posted his opinions regarding Zionist influence on the Internet.

"If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism or the destruction of the state of Israel, I don't care", Professor Neumann wrote on the web site. Although he does not appear to be averse to destroying either Israel or the United States, he claims, in his publication The Case Against Israel: "In practice, wiping out a powerful state like Israel or the U.S. would cause even more suffering than letting it survive."

Effectively proving his humanity. Which may explain why Real Menard, the Bloc Quebecois MP co-chairing the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Association who invited the good professor to address all those parliamentarians interested in hearing the whole truth, the real truth and nothing else, is eager to have him make his presentation.

Canada; morally, intellectually, politically conflicted. Just kind of flirting with anti-Semitism, nothing serious, mind.