More Middle-Eastern fallout, or, Can something ELSE happen somewhere? Please?

Please God, my last post on this for a while.

It seems the "principled stand" Stephen Harper is taking in support of Israel is killing what until recently looked like a sure shot at majority government. Just 32 percent of Canadians agree with him.
I've been accused of having a hard-on for Harper since before he was elected--in fact, they call me "Steve" at work, sometimes, and the ardent Liberals there bait me mercilessly. The political debate can get heady and heated. As this post will, in a minute.

The word that's getting tossed around more and more often is "neutrality", as in, "Canada should maintain its traditional neutrality with respect to the situation in the Middle East."

"Why?"
"Because taking sides is the wrong thing to do. There's evil on both sides, so no matter which side you take, you're endorsing evil."
"But not taking sides endorses both sides."
"No, it endorses neither side."

This is when I whip a little Edmund Burke on them. His actual quote is "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle", which has a nice ring about it, but it marks me as the snob I am. So I simplify it a little, the way it is usually misquoted: ""'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".

At this point most people have taken me for a lost cause and walked away shaking their heads. I could go on, though:

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis." --Dante

"There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction." --John F. Kennedy

Those few who have stuck with me even after I've brought out the heavy ammunition (and boy, they hate hearing a quote like that one from Kennedy, who was a Democrat!), will insist that Canada has no place in the Middle East, just as it has no place in Afghanistan. On the surface they're probably correct: we have limited economic interests in either region, and neither area poses any kind of immediate threat to our nation.

However...

I find it interesting that opposition to foreign intervention usually comes from the left of the political spectrum...the same people who claim to be intensely interested in the betterment of all humanity. Their definition of "all humanity" seems somewhat limited.

We are citizens not of Canada, which is an artificial construct, but of planet Earth. We share this globe with over seven billion people, most of whom are suffering in some way. That we close ourselves off from so much suffering is perhaps understandable: we are few, they are many, and the clamour of competing pleas for aid can become deafening in very short order.
But the natural outcome of our deafness is the illusion of "neutrality". As tribe pits itself against tribe far, far away from our borders, we rest in comfort on the sidelines and bleat about immediate ceasefires and a return to the status quo.

Memo to the world: Israel seems to have decided that the status quo's not working. Hard to blame them, really: they try to trade land for peace and find they've traded land for war instead. Even worse, they're expected to just sit there and take it when their enemies invade them, capture them, and kill them. Demands are made: if they get titted, they're allowed to tat, and that's it. At that rate, that tit-for-tat rate, it's clear this conflict will have no end, ever. Is that what we really want? Unending conflict?

No?

There really are only two alternatives to this standing by and doing nothing: siding with Hezbollah, or siding with Israel.
The world's media tends to side with Hezbollah. They magnify each Israeli airstrike, invariably describe Lebanese deaths as "civilian", and seldom mention the seemingly unlimited supply of Katyushka rockets in the Hezbollah arsenal. (Who's supplying these things? Syria? Iran? Both of the above?)
Why is this? Anti-Semitism--a phrase that means "hatred of Semites" and is thus semantically null, since Arabs are Semites too--is one simplistic answer. Another, which might hew closer to the bone, is "anti-Americanism". After all, Israel is often viewed as America-by-proxy. What's that Arab proverb? "The enemy of my enemy is my friend"?
As I've written before, we here in Canada have a visceral and knee-jerk reaction against anything the United States says or does...right or wrong. More than one person has suggested to me that Washington's staunch support of Jerusalem is a byproduct of Bush's Christian conservatism...one prerequisite of Armageddon and the return of Christ, according to the Bible, is a functional Jewish state. So there you have it: it isn't that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East; it isn't that "Jews are people, too"; it's simpleminded evangelism. Who knew?

Can we at least consider the heresy that America might possibly be correct in supporting a democracy against legions who want it expunged and will use any means to accomplish their end?
And spare me the poverty schtick, okay? Yup, it's true: Lebanon's poor. So are a myriad of other countries who aren't at war. But...well, a check of globalsecurity.org reveals forty current conflicts in the world. And what do you know, nearly three quarters of them involve Muslims.
Hmmm.
If Lebanon was richer, they'd have better weapons with which to annihilate Jews. They would have those weapons before all else. Why not? They'd rather kill themselves than better their lot, so long as they spill Jewish blood in the process.

In saying all this, am I claiming the wholesale slaughter of Lebanese is a good thing? I am not. The bombing of Dresden was not a good thing, either, but it was a necessary thing.

I suspect that in Canada at least, this desire for "neutrality" most of us claim is really an earnest wish to go back to sleep. The idea that war--dirty, stinking war--might be necessary is not something Canadians have had to grapple with for several generations, now. It's not palatable: it sticks in our craw. But people who are awake are trying to shake us out of our torpor. There is a war coming: these are but the first skirmishes. The war will be for nothing less than global supremacy. We may believe now that American hegemony is to be feared, but trust me, it's vastly preferable to the alternative.

Meanwhile, as ugly as we may believe our Prime Minister's stance to be, chances are Stephen Harper would agree with this quote, again from JFK: "A man does what he must — in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers, and pressures — and that is the basis of all human morality."
And that in a nutshell is what I respect about Harper. Political expedience does not enter into his equation. I may disagree with him at times--I have, and publicly, believe it or not--but I can't fault his integrity. He's doing what he believes to be right, the polls be damned.