Irwin Cotler, the Jewish Uncle Tom

Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is one of my favourite books. It's by far the most powerful political call to action I've ever read -- clever, touching, at times laugh-out-loud funny and heart-wrenchingly sad. It was also staggeringly popular in the 1850s: 300,000 copies were sold in its first year in a U.S. population of just 23 million (3 million of whom were slaves).

Adjusted to today's U.S. population, that's like selling 4 million copies in a year -- of a 500-page political manifesto. That's Harry Potter sales territory. No wonder Abraham Lincoln, when he met Stowe, said "so this is the little lady who made this big war".

Of course, before I read the book I had heard the phrase "Uncle Tom" to describe blacks who were disloyal to their race. So I was quite surprised to read what Tom was actually like -- loyal, generous, patient, Christian. He certainly wasn't the enemy in Stowe's book: she focused her fury on white apologists for slavery, and even moreso on those whites who claimed they were against it, but did nothing to change it. (My favourite chapter is this one about a senator who was publicly harsh on runaway slaves. His wife, who would never "trouble her head with what was going on in the house of the state", insisted they harbour one who showed up at their door in a snowstorm.)

Tom wasn't anti-black. And he wasn't pro-slavery. He simply had inertia. He wasn't a reformer. He had discovered the few comforts of being a slave, and focused on those. He was resigned to things. And then there was his personal loyalty to his masters. The book's subtitle is "Life Among the Lowly". That was Tom -- by destiny or by choice.

Which is why Irwin Cotler is the Uncle Tom of the Liberal Party.

Cotler is not anti-Semitic, of course. He's not anti-Jewish or anti-Israel (although he occasionally does very strange things, like support the Jew-hating terrorist Omar Khadr, and promote the U.N.'s anti-Israel International Criminal Court). But, like Uncle Tom, he puts up with a party that does abide anti-Semitism, and certainly anti-Israel sentiment. And, far worse, he put up with it when the Liberals were in government -- and even when Cotler himself was in cabinet.

A Jewish Uncle Tom? If you've read the book, you'll know that's a perfect comparison, especially his protests when other Jews say they're not satisfied with how the Liberals treat them. And Cotler is hurt -- hurt! -- that people would question his party's views on Israel, and dare to send a brochure about that to his -- his! -- neighbourhood. He even raised a point of privilege about it to the Speaker of the House. If only he had been so noisy when his own party was selling Israel down the river. But there were no self-righteous press conferences or Parliamentary speeches then.

Like Uncle Tom, Cotler is loyal to his master -- and they occasionally throw him some crumbs in thanks. But, more often, they use his loyalty as "proof" they're not anti-Israel, and to try to hush up those Jews who are impatient.

One more Cotler anecdote before I come to my point.

I can't remember when I first met Cotler; I think it was in 2002 or 2003 when the late Israel Asper was helping to organize a new pro-Israel lobby effort. This was in the wake of the Durban fiasco that the Liberals had disgracefully attended; the second Intifada was still hot; and Canadian media and politicians were too often siding with terrorists and terrorist states over democratic Israel. The pro-Israel case was losing in the court of public opinion.

Asper called together a small meeting in Toronto -- a half dozen people or so -- to talk over dinner about what to do. Sen. Grafstein was there; so was Cotler. To my surprise, I was invited too.

I was fascinated by Cotler's description of how the Liberal government dealt with matters of Israel. Cotler explained that there were indeed Jews in high ranks in the PMO and cabinet, including the deputy prime minister at the time, Herb Gray, and Jean Chretien's senior advisor, Eddie Goldenberg. But Cotler said that when an issue came up about Israel, and Chretien would take a reading of the room, the Official Jews were silent -- so Chretien would naturally assume that they approved of his position, or at least didn't object enough to speak out.

Cotler's point was that Chretien was not actively anti-Israel, or at least he didn't regard himself as that -- he certainly wasn't on some ideological warpath against Israel. He would look at the Jews around the table and, hearing no complaints, would adopt his course of action. So his policies were passively anti-Israel -- the passivity being that of his court Jews.

Asper called these Jews "the Jews of silence". Sort of like Uncle Tom, really -- they liked being porch slaves a lot better than being field slaves, so why cause a fuss?

Cotler said other interesting things that day, including identifying some of the key anti-Israel policy advisors in the government (such as Claude Laverdure). But his main point was that the Jews in the party were simply complacent and compliant -- and even the Israeli embassy wouldn't speak up. Cotler said the Israeli ambassador would tell Chretien that, second only to the U.S., Canada was Israel's best friend. It was probably true, too -- though that's not saying much.

Chretien thought he was a friend of the Jews and of Israel -- they were certainly friendly enough to him in return, especially on the fundraising side of things.

There was a trace of defensiveness to Cotler's explanation that night: after all, he implied, could Jewish Liberals really take a more pro-Israel stance than the Israeli embassy itself? There's something to that -- Israel's diplomats had very low expectations, but that had become a political obstacle to improving policy. But the main thrust of Cotler's report was one of resignation: the Liberal government, left to its own devices, would be of little help, and the Jews within that government were Jews of silence.

That was six or seven years ago: Cotler was calling Goldenberg, Gray and other Liberal Jews Uncle Toms.

Who's the Uncle Tom now?

Well, Cotler is. And I said so in passing in my blog entry about the Liberal Party's support for an anti-Israel lobby group called KAIROS:

That was fine with the Chretien government and fine with the Martin government and fine with the Liberal Party's porch Jew, Irwin Cotler. They kept giving seven-figure grants of taxpayers dollars to KAIROS...

That was a week ago, but my Liberal friend Jason Cherniak -- one of the last 100 Jews in the Liberal Party -- finally read that item (he reads out loud, so it takes longer), and issued this response on Twitter:

do [Conservatives] care @ezralevant makes Cotler p0rch m0nkey puns?

And this is the point of the within blog post -- besides an opportunity to point out that Irwin Cotler has become an Uncle Tom Jew, just like he once accused Gray and Goldenberg of being.

I used the phrase "porch Jew", an anology to the dichotomy between field slaves and house slaves. Cherniak read that as code for a racist anti-black epithet ("p0rch m0nkey") that I have never used in my life. His implication makes no sense anyway -- but it is a window into his mind. When Canada's top young Liberal hears the word porch, he thinks of racist slurs.

It reminded me of that Liberal Party photoshop contest that showed an assassination of Stephen Harper.The murder joke was the worst of it, but the contest also featured a lot of gay-themed attacks on Harper, as Robert Jago pointed out. Same sort of thing: anti-gay bigotry is a high crime to Liberals -- unless they're making the insults themselves, in which case it's high-larious!

Same with other bigotries. The obvious example is Warren Kinsella's misogyny and anti-Chinese bigotry, which would have been firing offenses for a Conservative, but were only objectionable to the Liberals when they started to cost them votes. And then there's the issue at hand: the Liberal party's growing anti-Israel nuttiness that would be called Jew-hatred if it came from the right instead of the left.

I understand Cherniak's situation: it must be tough to support a leader who accused Israel of war crimes. But at some point, he's got to decide whether growing up to be am Uncle Tom like Cotler is really the right ambition.

In the meantime, Cherniak should learn to read certain words -- oh, say like the country Niger -- without chuckling like Beavis and Butthead.