the blog quebecois

I was flipping through some old magazines prior to throwing them out putting them into a neat pile for the recyclers when I ran across a small article (it was on one of those gossipy-what's-happening pages with four or five items) in the June 2005 issue in the now-defunct Saturday Night.

It was about the worst foreign affairs minister Canada's ever had, at least in my memory: Lloyd (Soft Power) Axworthy, and some of his favorite internet bookmarks.

Let's see. The BBC; the UN; the New York Times. No shockers, those.

Oh, and what's this?

I've just discovered the blog site Daily Kos, having become one of their subjects. It certainly seems to touch a lot of nerves in a lot of different places. Maybe we should rethink our foreign policy and get on the blog system. [What for the love of God this means is anybody's guess. -- ed.] It's a whole new network, a very potent and surprising kind of experience.

If you were wondering what inspired the mighty Kos himself to write about Axworthy, it was the incredibly juvenile, taunting "open letter" that he had penned in the Winnipeg Free Press to US Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice. My considerably less flattering take on it is here.

Did anybody else notice (Officially Screwed did) that when Stephen Harper a few days ago accused the majority of the Liberal leadership candidates of being anti-Israel, the immediate, furious denials were as if he had accused them of anti-semitism?

Bob Rae, for one, was quick to note that his wife and children were Jewish.

That's all well and good; but Harper wasn't denouncing you for not having a Jewish wife and children. He was pointing out that your party has consistently demonstrated an anti-Israel bias. (To be fair to Rae, he did break with his former party in 2002 over its virulently anti-Israel positions.)

Whatever could have caused Harper to reach that conclusion? Aaron Goldstein has a nice roundup of statements by Liberals that might have misled him.

Here's our boy, Lloyd:

[Scott Brison] doesn’t really understand what Liberal foreign policy is about. He’s almost at the forefront of a very small group of nations [Brison is a nation? -- ed.] who say whatever Israel does is right . . . We’re becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It's long been a truism of the left that being anti-Israel does not mean being anti-Jewish. That's certainly the pose that the Daily Kos tries to maintain.

The hysterical reaction of Liberals pinned with the first of those labels might indicate otherwise.

I leave it for the reader to judge. Here's a pastoral essay by one of Kos's diarists, "Imagine A World Without Israel":

We could bring down the Wall, send prisoners home, and families could be reunited.

We could dismantle checkpoints, open crossings, and pull down barbed wire fences.

There would be no more settlements or armed settlers because the people would be united.

We could replant trees and olive groves and rebuild battered cities.

No more suicide bombers or sniper fire, and no more dead civilians.

Give or take a few million Jews, I'd wager.

Sometimes it's a bit more explicit, as in this entry, hurriedly rewritten, but not before Little Green Footballs got a screencap:

Israel is showing the entire world why the Iranian President was absolutely right to suggest that Israel cease being a sovereign state as is.

So does Lloyd Axworthy embrace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's proposal to extirpate Israel from the face of the earth? Dunno. But his preferred choice of reading material raises a few questions. It also casts a bit more illumination on this curious little story.