"A tale of two ghettoes"

Shoppers Drug Mart is being accused by the editor of the journal Adbusters, of acceding to a demand by the Canadian Jewish Congress to pull all its copies of the latest edition which controversially decided to portray the situation of Gazans as analogous to that of European Jews who were herded into closed ghettos during the Second World War. That kind of lobbying to defame a journal exercising freedom of expression is not acceptable in a country that celebrates freedom of speech.

That is a pretty unassailable contention. People should be free to spout or to publish any kind of claptrap they feel compelled to, irrespective of whether or not it represents a slanderous interpretation of history and current affairs. The audience that will believe a reinterpretation of historical and current affairs to fit a specific mindset and scenario will welcome it. And there are many more who will regard that perception of equating Hamas-run Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto as horrendously shameful.

Who care, actually, what Adbusters publishes, and what its editors promulgate? How many Canadians actually read the magazine, or would bother to give it more than a passing, perhaps nastily-startled glance? If it writes such repugnant trash its readership is geared toward an element that relishes it, and they deserve one another.

The shrill grievance of its editor in a "counterpoint" column titled A tale of two ghettoes in Tuesday's National Post simply identifies its author as grossly, deliberately ignorant of what he writes. He conveniently, for his argument, makes no mention whatever of the incessant and ongoing violence directed against Israel and its Jewish population by Fatah and Hamas and other violent Palestinian Arab militias.

There is no concession to the fact that the country has never been able to relax its awareness of potential attacks by neighbouring states, nor the reality of suicide attacks or rockets being lobbed over its borders, or attacks by Palestinians infiltrating Israeli society. Palestinians are 'confined' in Gaza because of a need to keep violence at bay.

The blockade was put into place, in accordance with international law, once Hamas whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, violently ousted Fatah and took over governance of Gaza.

Hamas's constant conveying of military weaponry into Gaza is one very good reason why Israel undertook to control what entered the territory and what would be denied entry. Because of constant rocket attacks, the government of Israel may have reasoned that a tight blockade might help in convincing Palestinian Gazans that they would do better to disavow Hamas and make peace with Israel in return for lifting the blockade.

Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters, points out the suffering of undernourished children in Gaza. Both the Palestinians and the Israelis would be in a far better position to ensure adequate nutrition is available for each of their child populations if less funding was available for munitions and more for food. Israel too operates food banks for its underprivileged.

It is an outright fabrication that Gaza represents a squalid, impoverished, frightened population threatened with extinction. There are upscale shopping centres in Gaza, people drive late-model vehicles, and there are consumer goods available to those who have the wherewithal, just as occurs anywhere else on Earth.

Gazans are restive at being unable to readily travel where they wish, due to the blockade. There is a solution: acknowledge Israel, sue for peace. Most Gazans might wish to take this tack, it is clear that the Hamas leadership would label them traitors and the antidote for being a traitor is being a dead one.

The "humanitarian missions ... turned away with lethal force" that Kalle Lasn refers to in his slanderous piece of writing represented a deliberate provocation, a convoy meant to provoke violence by initiating it, using lethal force which was, of necessity, reciprocated. The references to 'disproportionate' force places the writer in a clear classification, one he/she would deny as being anti-Semitic in nature.

The Gaza incursion was a necessary response to ongoing rocket attacks. Hamas militias deliberately set up their weapons depots and rocket launchers within crowded civilian areas, drawing return fire quite purposefully to those same sites. Hamas used civilians, including children, schools and medical centres, as shields for their weapons launches. This is a formula used by Hezbollah as well.

There is nothing that will quite satisfy people like the writer of that article as much as the eradication of the State of Israel. That ambition is shared by many, both in the Middle East and within a wider swathe of society for whom the presence of Jews anywhere has always represented an anathema.

So, although one can only celebrate the issue of freedom of speech as a privilege to be enjoyed by all free people, this free person is quite content that "Three-thousand-five-hundred copies of Adbuster will no longer be sold at Shoppers Drug Mart's 515 Canadian stores."