Once more, harper displays his simplistic view of, and sales pitch on...everything.
(I)n contemporary debates that influence the fate of the Jewish homeland, unfortunately, there are those who reject the language of good and evil. They say that the situation is not black and white, that we mustn’t choose sides.
…And we declare our faith in humanity’s future in the power of good over evil. - Harper
This is a very dangerous stance for anyone to take, let alone the leader of a country. Who is fit to define absolute good for all? Who can unerringly lock down what is evil? No one, because contrary to what steve says, the universe and all it holds is not inherently divided into two camps of diametric opposites.
So when a megalomaniac like steve comes along trying to impose his world of absolutes upon us, he is shoving everything, everyone, and all actions onto one side or the other of his personal lines of division.
These lines of his aren’t static, though. He knows there are shades of grey. We know this because he constantly wades into them, selecting one point or another and placing it on whatever side of the line is convenient at the time. Coalitions are bad. Coalitions are good.
As he messes with truth, he polishes up the new version into tightly scripted talking points, short and snappy ones meant to appeal to dumb emotion, or speeches that draw on metaphors and symbols so ingrained many people accept them as holding something akin to reality.
“As I said on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, Israel appeared as a light, in a world emerging from deep darkness. Against all odds, that light has not been extinguished. It burns bright, upheld by the universal principles of all civilized nations — freedom, democracy and justice.”
Israel - A light coming out of the dark…burns bright…then - freedom, democracy and justice. The Good Guys (Good), obviously. And, in steve’s world it goes without saying that anyone who attacks them in any way are The Bad Guys (Evil).
There. That was easy, wasn’t it? Saves all that agonizing over who is right, what is the best course of action…
Except – and whenever anyone tries to say good is on one side and evil is on the other, there’s always an except – harper and people like him have already decided what action they want you to take and based on that, they decide how to re-define what is good and what is evil...for today.
While the substance of anti-Semitism is as crude as ever, Mr. Harper said, its method is now more sophisticated. “Harnessing disparate anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-Western ideologies, it targets the Jewish people by targetting the Jewish homeland, Israel, as the source of injustice and conflict in the world and uses, perversely, the language of human rights to do so,” the Prime Minister said. “We must be relentless in exposing this new anti-Semitism for what it is.”
New anti-semitism is of course…Evil. It’s the new evil, so it gets to be defined by harper, and it suits harper to define it as vaguely and broadly as possible so that he can use his new definition as a weapon against as many opponents as possible.
The definition only becomes an effective weapon for harper if enough citizens accept that meaning. If enough do, then a self-serving, divisive, narrow-minded fundamentalist has managed to alter the character and dynamics of our society, and not in a good way. The us-and-them mentality prevails over tolerance and appreciation of those who open our minds to other perspectives. Fear replaces the desire to understand, and physical aggression occurs more often because there is no real desire to work things out with the Evil ones anyway.
It’s a sad Canada harper would shape.
