Quebecistan – My 15 minutes of (Quebec-style) fame

By Barbara Kay

“L’affaire Quebecistan” began with the now-notorious “peace march” on August 6 in Montreal during the summer’s Israel-Hezbollah war. Publicized as a neutral protest against the war, it was in fact a pro-Hezbollah, virulently anti-Israel (and anti-Semitic) rally. In itself that wasn’t breaking news. A previous, more spontaneously organized march had taken place in Montreal July 22, one equally nasty in tone, and an obvious preview of what was sure to follow in any subsequent demonstration: “Worse than the Nazis” read one sign in French and Arabic at that march, “Israel taught Hitler and the student surpassed the master” read another (in French).

The August 6 rally was only one of six held around the world that day. All of them featured Hezbollah flags, anti-Semitic graffiti, and terror-supportive placards similar to those in Montreal (“Nous sommes tous Hezbollah”, “Longue vie a Nasrallah”, “Juifs assassins”).

What distinguished the Montreal ‘manif’ was that it was the sole such partisan demonstration to be endorsed and attended – no, led – by three political party leaders: Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Quebecois, Andre Boisclair of the Parti Quebecois and (9/11 conspiracy theorist) Amir Khadir of Quebec Solidaire; they were accompanied by federal liberal MP Denis Coderre, whose riding is predominantly Lebanese-Canadian.

The “peace march’s” organizing committee included 18 Islamist groups, but had deliberately denied participation to any official Jewish presence. The four politicians, who later claimed to be surprised by the racist subtext of the march, had signed on to a manifesto published several days beforehand, which described itself as a march for “Lebanon and Palestine”. The text exuded pity for Lebanese victims but not Israelis, called for peace in Lebanon but not Israel, and seethed with inflammatory language (“the severed heads of the children at Qana”). At a press conference, Denis Coderre and union leader Henri Masse waxed histrionic in reviling the “savage massacre of the Lebanese people by the Israelis”.

Complicit at the march’s conception, these politicians knew, or should have known, the nature of the ‘baby’ that would be delivered. Their disingenuous protests of being, in effect, ‘shocked, shocked’, speaks to duplicity, stupidity or extreme naivete, none of which are reassuring characteristics in public servants. Once the full extent of the demonstration’s hateful themes seeped out in media commentary and incriminating photographs, only the ignorant or the willfully blind remained convinced that the politicans were sincere in their denials of complicity with terrorist partisans.

My indignation at those politicians’ feckless behaviour was fuelled by having just read Londonistan, a recently published book by prize-winning British journalist Melanie Phillips. The title is the mocking name that is now associated with England’s capitulation to fear of her Muslim population’s radical elements. In this book Phillips indicts the whole spectrum of appeasing establishment institutions: spineless human rights groups; spiritually hollow, directionless church leaders; politicians hungry for Muslim votes; politically correct media in thrall to multicultural ideology; and a public too passive and too far gone in national defeatism to stand up to a clear existential threat by barbarians at the gate.

Britons are now paying the price for their cultural malaise: London was rocked by subway terrorism in the summer of 2005, and security forces there recently foiled a massive multiple airplane plot that would have resulted in many thousands of deaths. In both cases, homegrown Islamists were the culprits. Philips makes it clear that Londonistan could happen in any western city where Muslim immigrants have settled in critical numbers without integrating. The crucial enabling factor is a multicultural ethic in the host country that inculcates amongst minority groups an assumption of collective entitlements, even when such entitlements conflict with majority values. In practice Muslims demanded the right to guide foreign policy and to spew racist hatred in public, rights not permitted to other Britons.

With that warning in mind, I wrote a column, published August 9, three days after the march, in which I referred to Phillips’ book. With ‘Londonistan’ as a cue, my editor entitled the column, “The Rise of Quebecistan”, a provocative header to be sure, and there my troubles began. The name “Quebecistan” suggested, to those who hadn’t read my column, or had read a bad translation, or took their information from irate radio talk show hosts or misinformed friends, that I was accusing Quebecers themselves of sympathy for terrorism.

In fact, both in “The Rise of Quebecistan” and another column I wrote on the same subject published in the Post August 17, “Quebecers in Denial: Counterpoint”, I made it clear that it was the appearance of sympathy, not with the terrorist group Hezbollah itself, but with supporters of Hezbollah that was the thin edge of a dangerous wedge. In the first column I said that “[The politicians’] official endorsement of last week’s march was a calculated appeal to dangerous elements in Quebec society”. And in my second column I clarified further: “The complicity of politicians, not with terrorism itself, but with those who support terrorism, indicates a penchant for appeasement of hateful attitudes. When hatemongers see non-judgmentalism in the governing elites, they batten on it. That is what happened in England and Europe and what could happen here if we are not vigilant.”

Quebec separatists took particular umbrage at my prediction that an independent Quebec would de-list Hezbollah as a terrorist group upon reading: “You can bet that Hezbollah would be off the official terrorism list by Day Two of the Republic of Quebec’s existence”. Again, I wasn’t suggesting that Quebecers approve of terrorist activity in Quebec. I was merely pointing out that politicians who were willing to endorse a pernicious manifesto that implicitly supported Hezbollah, and who marched with Hezbollah’s partisans would be politically opportunistic enough to cave in to pressure from Muslim-dominant ridings to de-list them.

My alarmism is not based in mere conjecture: A recent survey by the Association for Canadian studies (ACS) finds many Quebecers are soft on jihadists; in Quebec a stunning 77% of respondents deemed 9/11 “a response to U.S. policy” and 53% wanted Canada to “be more sensitive to the concerns of terrorist organizations in the Middle East”. (ACS director Jack Jedwab pronounced himself “astonished by the results – I knew there was a lot of naivete out there, but not this much”.)

Let’s do the math: In the march and the manifesto we witnessed those Quebec politicians who would be governing an independent Quebec failing to make any moral distinction between an illegal, self-declared genocidal militia committing an internationally acknowledged act of war, and a democratic country defending its sovereign territory. Add to this Quebec’s characteristic insularity, its general indifference to world affairs, and steadily rising numbers of Shiite Lebanese immigrating to Canada from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s most fervent support group. Tally up, and you have a sum total equal to – yes – a putative Quebecistan.

But the single most galvanizing feature of my column, the statement that aroused near-universal ire and denunciation amongst commentators in every media form, was the following: “[Quebecois’] cultural and historical sympathy for Arab countries from the francophonie – Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon – joined with reflexive anti-Americanism and a fat streak of anti-Semitism that has marbled the intellectual discourse of Quebec throughout its history, has made Quebec the most anti-Israel of the provinces, and therefore the most vulnerable to tolerance for Islamist terrorist sympathizers”.

I received about 300 e-mails with that quotation as the focus – perhaps 10% supportive of my opinion (of those, 80% Anglophones), 80% opposed (of which 90% were francophone), and 10% downright anti-Canadian and/or anti-Semitic (“Jews should not be allowed to own newspapers in Canada”). Most of my correspondents ignored the constraining words “intellectual discourse” and accused me of tarring all Quebecers with the brush of anti-Semitism. The same mantra-like phrase – “Quebec is the most open and tolerant society in the world” – was eerily repeated again and again.

The flood of responses I received did not, on the whole, offer rational arguments against my position so much as denounce me for assuming it, and demand an apology for voicing it. To be sure, there isn’t much they could argue about. For of course there is more reflexive anti-Americanism here than elsewhere in Canada, there is a fat streak of anti-Semitism running through Quebec’s intellectual history, and, as in all Left-dominated societies, there is a tendency to support the “resistance” movements of Israel-hating Arab terrorist groups. Nevertheless, as an Anglophone Jew writing for a national audience, I was writing about Quebec and was pilloried. Nobody paid much attention to those francophones who basically said the same things in French to Quebec.

In this regard I was particularly impressed by the frankness of Jacques Brassard, PQ Minister of Natural Resources from 1998-2002, and as ‘pure laine’ nationalist as they come. In a La Presse op ed on August 31 Brassard said (my translation): “There is at the heart of Quebec’s nationalist movement a certain number of ideological postulates that bother me and have always embarrassed me. …for example, this hatred of Americans by a high proportion of militants, embedded like a canker in the brain….the sovereigntist movement has been widely contaminated by the ideology of the Left…Another example…is tied to the war between Israel and Hezbollah. It indicates this unhealthy tendency, at the heart of the sovereigntist movement, to adopt in every circumstance an unfavourable – not to say hostile – stance toward Israel. That has always embarrassed me…And how can one not be troubled when one sees the sovereigntist leaders participating in a demonstration visibly controlled by the partisans of Hezbollah?…it grieves me because I realize that the old anti-American and anti-Israel reflexes are still very much present…”

Statistics and polls support both Brassard’s and my opinions. They consistently reveal attitudes in Quebec that diverge from the rest of Canada on the topics of anti-Americanism, Jews and Israel:

· A Compass poll asked the question: Do you think Jews have too much power? The Rest of Canada answered ‘yes’ in the proportion of 10%, in Quebec it was 28%;

· 38% of Quebecers, as opposed to 27% in the rest of Canada, think 9/11 was partly the result of Israel’s actions in the Middle East (ACS);

· A Globe/CTV poll indicates that 53% of Canadians in general,, but 72% of Quebecers think Stephen Harper supported Israel to be in line with George Bush and his administration;

• Amongst Canadians, 53% or higher, depending n the province, are concerned that terrorism is a greater risk today than it was pre-9/11, while only 38% of Quebecers think there’s more danger today than in 2001;
• While 57% of respondents in the rest of Canada said Canada should be more concerned about home-grown terrorists than foreign terrorists, only 35% of Quebecers are concerned about home-grown terrorism.

*

From my vantage point at the eye of the media storm, the reigning motif of “l’affaire Quebecistan” was hypocrisy:

There was the hypocrisy of those Jewish community spokespeople the French media routinely apply to for comment. They issued apologies for my views, as if I were writing as a Jew and speaking for the community, rather than as an individual columnist, whose ethnicity should be irrelevant to my arguments. Why, for example, did a lugubrious Victor Goldbloom tell a Radio-Canada reporter that he was “desole” by my remarks, instead of saying, as he should have, ‘Why are you asking me about this columnist’s views, strictly her own? The fact that she is Jewish is meaningless to me and should be to you too’.

Goldbloom’s reflexive gesture, to appease the ruffled feelings of Quebec’s ethnic nationalists, was a perfect example of the tendency amongst Quebec’s “court Jews” to concede the right of Quebecois to treat us as a group every time an individual Jew expresses a controversial opinion, rather than insisting that Jews be treated as individuals, surely our right in “the most tolerant and open society on earth”.

Then there was the hypocrisy of those sanctimonious ordinary Quebecers who in their indignant responses to me congratulated themselves on their compassion for the Lebanese victims of Israeli reprisals, and who boasted of their pacifism (this was the second most frequently recurring theme in the e-mails I received), insisting against all evidence that the August 6 hatefest was a neutral “march for peace”.

To those Quebecers I would simply ask: Where were your marches for peace when Yasser Arafat’s PLO terrorized Lebanon in an attempt to take over the country? Where were your marches for peace during the Lebanese civil war, when violence, death and chaos stalked the land? Where were your marches for peace when Muslims persecuted Christians and chased them from their homes? Why is it only when it is Israel moving to eliminate terrorists from Lebanon soil that we see this sudden upsurge of compassion for the Lebanese?

(And why, amongst the many diatribes againt Israel, was there not a single reference to Iran or Syria’s active involvement in Hezbollah’s actions? One of the more depressing facets of this experience was my exposure to the abysmal historical ignorance displayed by the great majority of my Quebec respondents about the Middle East in general and Hezbollah’s genocidal raison d’etre in particular. The impression I got from my feedback is borne out in a Compas/Western Standard poll finding that in the rest of Canada Canadians favour treating Hezbollah as a terrorist organization by a factor of 5:1, in Quebec by a factor of 2:1.)

Finally there is the hypocrisy of the mainstream Quebec media and political elites. From the hyperventilational tone of the editorials in La Presse and Le Devoir after my column appeared – “raciste”! “anti-quebecois”! - one would think the mainstream Quebec media and political class were repressed Victorian women swooning with “the vapours” upon catching sight of a naked man.

You can be as politically incorrect as you want in Quebec without fear of a backlash – as long as you say it in French, like Jacques Brassard. As long as nobody outside Quebec is hearing your message, the sky’s the limit on free speech. For example, considering it was treated like a live grenade when it appeared in the Post, I naturally thought my column’s use of the word Quebecistan was a first. Imagine my surprise when a francophone friend drew my attention to an article by French novelist Maurice Dantec (July 29/06) in a conservative political quarterly, Egards, called “Bienvenue au Quebeckistan”. The piece is a scorching indictment of Quebec’s naivete and pacifism in the face of Islamofascism, which, he warns, has already reduced France – “Frankistan” - to ontological defeat.

On the same day as Dantec’s article appeared in Egards, its editor, Jean Renaud, had an op ed published in Le Devoir, “La Betise de Nos Elites”. This article takes up with far more eloquence and verve the very same themes as the ones for which I was excoriated, and furthermore is written in a tone of scorn and contempt for Quebec’s intellectuals and political leaders that I am much too timid to employ:

“…How can we explain our hatred of the Hebrew state?

“…Our pacifists are already the gravediggers of our liberties. The anti-militarist and left wing quebecois mentality is, when all is said and done, forging a tool for Islamism and its henchmen.

…

“In its de facto choice of Hezbollah, the Quebecois elite, stupefied as much as stupefying, has placed itself at the right hand of civilization’s enemies. The Quebecois, who no longer kneel before God, are visibly ready to prostrate themselves before terrorists. This propensity to invite, to cajole, to support and flatter throat-cutters is preparing us… for a literally disastrous future. Nowhere in [North] America is a renewal of our elites more urgent than in Quebec.”

Them’s fighting words. If the Post had published Renaud’s piece in English, all hell would have broken loose amongst Quebec’s media and political elites. In fact Renaud’s op ed elicited many angry letters from Le Devoir readers and 800 hits on Egards’ website in the days following the article’s appearance. That kind of furious feedback should have been the fulcrum for intense public debate. But since the piece was written in French, and the odds of any media in English Canada picking it up were infinitesimal, it received no further commentary from Quebec’s media professionals, and sank like a stone from public life.

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I’d like to end on a positive note. Amidst the protestations and insults, I also received responses from several members of a small, but resolute constituency of informed, intellectually spirited quebecois who fully appreciate the necessity for vigilance against political appeasement of Islamist aggression. They are staunch supporters of Israel, not because they are Jewish or have special feeling for Jews, but because they see Israel as a rampart of democracy standing against a storm of irrational tribalism and ancient blood quarrels. It has been a privilege to enter into ongoing correspondence with them, and I will continue to be educated and enriched by their knowledge and insights.

As to my detractors, Quebecers are – if I may use the ironic metaphor in the most gun shy of the provinces – quick on the draw when offended. But they are also eager to be understood. And so am I. The temperature of many of my e-mail exchanges came right down after a few back and forths. With some originally hostile correspondents I ended up downright chummy – especially when (to their astonishment – why? I’ve been here 42 years) I answered them in French.

After numerous radio and TV interviews, I was able to clarify my position and to my surprise, several talk show hosts engaged in sympathetic and conciliatory exchanges with me (merci, Benoit Dutrizac!). And when the first wave of indignation passed, I noticed that several high-profile mainstream commentators – Alain Dubuc, Denise Bombardier and Lysiane Gagnon – had pitched their critical tents within hailing distance of my own.

Islamofascism isn’t going away any time soon. There will be other marches, other attempts by Islamic groups to control the political agenda, other politicians – not just in Quebec, but everywhere in the West – willing to take the course of least resistance, as did Mssrs Duceppe, Boisclair and Coderre on August 6.

During l’affaire Quebecistan, a lot of ink and air time was wasted on shooting the messenger. Let’s hope the next time around - and in a free society there is always a ‘next time’, meaning criticism from within or without of any political entity that seeks to uphold its dominant ideology and speech codes through legislation, political action and cultural expression - Quebecers will instead concentrate on the message in whatever language it is framed.

The message of “The Rise of Quebecistan” was that Western civilization is now at an existential crossroads and the values that created the freest and fairest society on earth are in jeopardy. The only political “resistance movement” worthy of our support today is the resistance against appeasement of our civilization’s enemies, abroad and right here at home.