Is Ignatieff going wobbly on Israel?

I was impressed with Michael Ignatieff’s unequivocal support for Israel’s defensive war against Hamas terrorists and their missile attacks against Israeli civilians. It was a welcome change from Ignatieff’s slanderous charge that Israel had commited war crimes in its 2006 defensive war against Hezbollah terrorists, and their missiles.

But is Ignatieff going wobbly?

In his new shadow cabinet, Ignatieff promoted the execrable Denis Coderre to the post of defence critic. Coderre proudly marched in an anti-Israel rally where Hezbollah flags were openly flown. Coderre was also promoted to be Ignatieff’s Quebec lieutenant. Mark Holland, another anti-Israel Liberal (skim through this appalling newsletter for several examples), is on the Public Safety/National Security portfolio.

And Irwin Cotler, the Liberal party’s human rights expert, and an ally of Israel, was fired from the shadow cabinet altogether.

Is Ignatieff backsliding? How much longer before he dusts off his 2002 proposal – that the U.S. should send in troops to force Israel to stop defending itself? Some excerpts from Ignatieff’s article:

Ignatieff comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa:

When I looked down at the West Bank, at the settlements like Crusader forts occupying the high ground, at the Israeli security cordon along the Jordan river closing off the Palestinian lands from Jordan, I knew I was not looking down at a state or the beginnings of one, but at a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control.

Ignatieff comparing Israel to France’s treatment of Algerians (who were massacred by the tens of thousands):

Repressing a population bent on national independence destroyed the French Fourth Republic in Algeria, and it will kill Israel.

Ignatieff’s belief in the moral equivalence between Israelis and Palestinian terrorists:

Eighteen months of extremism on both sides ought to return everyone to the realities: that loveless coexistence and separation within two secure states is the only political future that does not involve the indefinite sacrifice of the young people on both sides in a mutually reinforcing death cult.

That’s just amazing. Israel, whose unofficial motto, “chai”, which means “life”, is an extremist death cult on par with suicide bombers who target civilians.

… neither side is capable of making peace, or even sitting in the same room to discuss it.

Israel is not capable of making peace? Israel gave up more than 50% of its land mass, including oil reserves, to Egypt in return for peace. Israel offered the West Bank and Gaza to Yasir Arafat in 2000, and the U.S. offered to sweeten the deal with billions of dollars, in return for peace – an offer Arafat rejected, in favour of another intifada. Does Ignatieff not know that the charters of both Hezbollah and Hamas call for the destruction of Israel?

That’s the bad old Ignatieff, the “Israel is a war criminal” Ignatieff. It’s been Ignatieff’s fashionable view for most of his life – until last month, when he boldly stood by Israel, rejecting the growing anti-Israel wing of his party.

Ignatieff’s reward of Coderre and Holland, two of his party’s worst Israel-haters, and his demotion of Cotler, should be a concern to all fair-minded Liberals, and to Canadians who had hoped that Ignatieff had ended the anti-Israel detour permitted under Stephane Dion.