Canadian human rights org is swallowed by the Israel lobby

When people tell me that in harping on the Israel lobby, I am seeing a conspiracy, I say they are correct, and respond that in 1858, Lincoln pushed the rise of the Republican Party because he saw a "conspiracy" of all the existing political structures– northern Democrat, southern Democrat, Whig, presidency, Supreme Court, Congress, the eastern press– in the racist colonization of Kansas/Nebraska in violation of the affirmed US policy, the Missouri compromise, which is a very neat parallel to the complete cooperation of the American power structure in the racist colonization of the West Bank in violation of stated U.S. policy. You simply cannot talk about foreign policy in that region without talking about the influence of the lobby.

And things are even worse now in Canada, where the orthodoxy is more extreme (and the conservative power structure is solidified by the Canadian hockey victory last night). Here is an amazing piece in Maclean’s showing how the Canadian human rights organization Rights and Democracy was taken over by neoconservatives with one concern, Israel.

In the midst of this process, the president of the organization–Remy Beauregard, who had been accused of palling around with terrorists– died. Note Beauregard’s distinguished career, and note that he had never experienced this type of scrutiny before.

Last June, Rémy Beauregard, the president of a federal government-funded human rights organization called Rights and Democracy, read aloud to his fellow board members from a long memo he had written. The memo was his response to an evaluation of his job performance written by two members of the federal government-appointed board, Jacques Gauthier and Elliot Tepper. The board’s chairman, Aurel Braun, had sent along his own note endorsing the evaluation, which was highly critical of Beauregard….

Beauregard’s written response to the performance evaluation, obtained by Maclean’s and revealed here for the first time, makes clear the extent to which this extraordinary controversy at Rights and Democracy was about the stance the organization, and by extension the government of Canada, should take with regard to Israel. Beauregard got into trouble with Braun and the others for disbursing grants that seemed to take sides in the Middle East conflict. Paradoxically, the Rights and Democracy board is now predominantly composed of people who have devoted much of their life to an unequivocal position: that no legal challenge to Israel’s human rights record is permissible, because any such challenge is part of a global harassment campaign against Israel’s right to exist….

He had spent 40 years working in government and non-profit organizations, after all, often in human rights. In 1986 he became the first person to run Ontario’s Office of Francophone Affairs, trying to figure out how to extend services to the province’s French-language minority. His work in that post has made him a nearly heroic figure among Franco-Ontarians. Later he ran the Ontario Human Rights Commission before working on a new constitution for Rwanda and human rights legislation for the Democratic Republic of Congao. He’d seen his share of tough fights.

But he’d never seen anything like this. His antagonists on the board were accusing him-in a secret memo they had fought to keep out of his hands-of failing to "improve the communications and interactions" between his office and the board. In his accompanying memo, Braun wrote that all this was "constructive criticism and it is hoped that it will be viewed in that light by Mr. Beauregard." Braun had then spent three months trying to ensure Beauregard would not be permitted to view it in any light at all.

That was the June meeting. Donica Pottie, the government representative, resigned from the board in September. Still short of a workable voting majority, Braun cancelled the October board meeting on two days’ notice. Three weeks later, the government appointed two new board members, Michael Van Pelt and David Matas. Van Pelt runs a Christian-oriented think tank. Matas is a former federal Liberal candidate who volunteers as legal counsel with B’nai Brith Canada.

When the board finally met again in January, Matas, who had already served on the board in the 1990s, and Van Pelt showed themselves to be reliable allies of Braun, Gauthier and Tepper. The removal of another board member and the resignations of two more gave Braun an unbeatable majority. And then Rémy Beauregard died. Of course nobody can know whether he would have lived longer in other circumstances. But his death throws more public scrutiny on Rights and Democracy than any of the players expected. 

Two public statements published simultaneously in Israel and Canada, days after Beauregard’s death, hint at the broader strategy behind the changes at Rights and Democracy. The first is an op-ed in the National Post signed by Braun and six of his allies on the board. Referring to the grants to Al-Haq, B’Tselem and Al-Mezat, they write that two of the groups "are active in the lawfare movement, which is a strategy of abusing law to achieve military objectives-in this case, to punish Israel for anti-terror operations."

The same day in the Jerusalem Post, Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar Ilan university, published an op-ed congratulating the Canadian government for "reversing course" on a policy of abusing human rights and international law "as weapons to demonize Israel."