Nice piece by Rick Salutin in the Globe and Mail:
In an interview published last week, Peter Kent, the junior foreign affairs minister, said “an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada.” It sounded like the guns of August, 1914. It was ridiculous. The Canadian Forces are overstretched, and Israel has perhaps the fourth strongest military in the world. Is this kind of myopic focus on one country and knee-jerk support for all it does appropriate to any government’s foreign policy – except Israel’s own? Surely it’s about more than buying a few Jewish votes.
So I’m grateful to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney for casting light on this behaviour. At a Jerusalem meeting, he said: “The existential threat faced by Israel on a daily basis is ultimately a threat to the broader Western civilization.” Aha! Then what we have here is a clash of civilizations, a new version of old dualisms such as Us/Them, East/West, commies/capitalists. That’s how foreign policy was often justified in the past. But why code it in terms of Israel? Because the old dualisms aren’t what they used to be.
They frequently carried, for instance, racist baggage: the white races against savages etc. Racism was official ideology back then. You caught a whiff of it last week when a British commander in Afghanistan told his troops they were going into “the heart of darkness.” Now anti-racism is official ideology. The clash of civilizations sounds like a less vile dualism, even if it’s kind of stupid.
But what civilizations? How do you separate them? A few decades ago, ours was a Christian civilization, and Jews were the designated Others. Now it’s Judeo-Christian. Why not Judeo-Christian-Muslim? Muslims lived and warred in the European “West.” Spain was largely Muslim for 700 years. The Greek classical tradition was transmitted to Europe via the Muslim world, in Arabic. Western civilization, whatever it is, includes Muslims.
Simplistic dualisms such as the clash of civs respond to some primitive human need for a reassuring division into us and them. The trouble is, they don’t work as well any more. The world has got too scrunched up, populations are intermingled and in touch. The lines blur, then fade. I mean, why does Jason Kenney refer to broader Western civilization? Is he trying not to offend Canadian voters of Chinese or Indian origin by including them as “Western”?
Not only Spain, but also Belarus, where four religious communities (Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Jews and Muslims) lived in peace together for centuries, as well as Turkey, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, which is also located (though marginally) in Europe and played an important role in Russian history and culture.