Men Of Honour

Canada has had and continues to have its share of social misfits, those whose ideology they claim to be honourable, and which is clearly at odds with the social and political attitudes of their time. They tilt at windmills in a somewhat less than honourable manner all too often, while proclaiming themselves to be motivated by social justice and honour.

One such is former FLQ member Paul Rose, who died Thursday from a stroke. The other is Amir Khadir, a Member of the Quebec National Assembly with the pro-sovereignty Quebec solidaire party. MNA Khadir felt that the Parti Quebec government and its ministers should offer a public condolence in respect of Paul Rose.

 

  Paul Rose

 

This is a man who was a convicted FLQ terrorist. A man whose activities and those of his associates committed to violent actions like placing bombs in mailboxes and kidnapping people to make their point of the necessity for Quebec to separate from Canada. Their actions raised the level of security imposed within Quebec to that of an apprehended insurrection. Then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau responded by imposing the War Measures Act.

The crisis ended with the murder of Quebec deputy premier Pierre Laporte during the 1970 October Crisis by members of the Front du liberation du Quebec. Mr. Laporte had been abducted from the front lawn of his home while playing a game of touch football with his nephew in October of 1970. That was the last time his family saw him alive. His strangled body was discovered in the trunk of a car.

Canadian troops were sent into the province to give the provincial police back-up as they carried out arrests of suspected FLQ members. The entire situation caused Canadians to look at themselves and their leaders with a certain amount of disbelief and in some quarters abhorrence for the wholesale manner in which people suspected of involvement in the FLQ were arrested, their civil rights 'arbitrarily' suspended.

The Parti Quebecois government has issued no formal comment on the death of Paul Rose. And Mr. Khadir felt this to be a unfortunate lack of sensitivity on their part. "You can share the reservations he had about his past in the FLQ, but no one can question his sincerity, his devotion, his integrity, his intellectual honesty", he insisted. It takes sincerity, devotion, integrity, and represents intellectual honesty to endanger the lives of people.

Not everyone's passion, disrupting peace and security is honourably sincere in the opinion of those who are adversely affected. And then there is the honourable MNA Amir Khadir, a physician and infectious disease specialist whose world view has been shaped in part by his birth in Iran, though he came to Canada as an immigrant with his parents when he was ten. He has been involved in humanitarian work in Zimbabwe, India, Nicaragua, Iraq and Afghanistan.

So much so good. And then, on the other hand, as though to point out how complex peoples' sensibilities are, the man also is rather notorious. Not only as a passionate separatist, but claiming to have modeled his protest alongside students last June over tuition hikes, as modelled on Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi. Bill 78 was to be disobeyed, according to this member of the Quebec legislature.

The comparison in that instance was to U.S. racial segregation prior to the civil rights movement. He became part of a 2010 boycott of a family-owned shoe store in Montreal carrying a line of Israeli-made shoes. He wrote a public essay in defence of Hezbollah's right to resist "oppression". And he spoke of the British royal couple Kate and William as parasites as they prepared to visit Canada in 2011.


Clearly a man of strongly-held convictions. Like Paul Rose. And he has just, coincidentally, called off his earlier insistence that Paul Rose be honoured in Quebec's legislature.