Nowhere is this change more apparent than in the NDP’s flip-flops on the United Nations’ Durban II conference.  

Billed as an anti-racism conference, Durban I turned into an antisemitic circus. With luminaries of repression such as Iran and Libya organizing it, Durban II promises to be even worse. Our government declared Canada will have nothing to do with it. To their credit, the Liberals concurred and so did the NDP – at first. Then the activists within the NDP – the people who stand as candidates, campaign in elections and attend party conferences – revolted.

Yes, the purpose of Durban II is to demonize Israel and that’s exactly why NDP activists want Canada to attend. Stacy Douglas, the NDP candidate for Scarborough-Agincourt, is a good example of the type.

Douglas wrote an open letter to party leader Jack Layton imploring him to support Durban II. In her letter, Douglas doesn’t even pretend the conference has anything to do with countering racism.  Rather, she sees Durban exclusively as a forum for smearing Israel as an apartheid and colonial state.

The NDP also makes common cause with anti-Israel elements. In the Montreal riding of Bourassa, the NDP is running Samira Laouni as its candidate. Laouni works with the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC), an organization that calls on Canada to remove Hezbollah and Hamas from our list of terrorist organizations.  

The CIC’s stand is perfectly understandable, given that the organization’s president, Mohammed Elmasry, has in the past endorsed terrorism, saying that all Israelis over the age of 18 are legitimate targets.

The president of Laouni’s riding association was Hayder Moussa. The National Post reports that Moussa is also vice-president of the Association des Jeunes Libanais Museulmans de Montreal, an organization that plays Hezbollah’s war anthem on its web site.  

According to the National Post, Moussa was asked to resign from his position with the NDP “after the party learned of a controversial poem he had written, in which he was accused of labelling non-Muslim women as promiscuous drunks.”

Under pressure from the party’s anti-Israel elements, the NDP reversed itself and came out in favour of Canada attending Durban II.

“I’m encouraged they finally saw the light,” said Mohamed Boudjenane, executive director of the Canadian Arab Federation and a former NDP candidate.

But then eight NDP members of parliament, including deputy leader Thomas Mulcair, staged a counter-revolt and forced party leader Jack Layton to reverse course once more.
The NDP’s latest official stance is that Canada should participate in Durban II, but only if the UN can guarantee that antisemitism won’t be tolerated at the conference. Of course, with Iran helping to plan the conference, no such guarantee will be forthcoming.

In articulating the NDP’s new position, Jack Layton said nothing about the certainty that one of Durban’s main purposes will be to vilify Israel.  Why not?  

Certainly, some NDPers understand that, like Canada, Israel is a liberal democracy and a force for progress in the world. The vast majority of NDP activists, though, see Israel as Satan incarnate.

Consider the resolution passed at the 2006 NDP national convention damning Israel’s actions during the Second Lebanon War.  Beyond condemning Israel, the resolution supported Hezbollah’s pretext for war, calling on Israel to immediately quit the Sheba Farms area (which Hezbollah claims for Lebanon, though Israel captured the territory from Syria when Syria invaded Israel in 1967).  

Passing over Hezbollah’s history of murdering on order from Iran, the NDP resolution praised Hezbollah as a legitimate political organization and called for it to have equal standing with the legal government of Lebanon at a peace conference.

According to the Globe and Mail, Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP MP for Winnipeg North, asked: “Is it not important to recognize that Hezbollah is also a terrorist organization?”

Other delegates responded with boos, and 90 per cent of them voted for the resolution.
We’ll never see Jack Layton object to Durban II because its purpose is to demonize Israel. He can’t. For 90 per cent of NDP activists, hating Israel is what being “progressive” is all about.

Brian Henry is a Toronto writer and editor and a former member of the New Democratic Party. He’s an occasional Instructor at Ryerson University’s G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Studies, and a frequent contributor to H-Antisemitism, a scholarly forum for the discussion of the history of antisemitism.