Former Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler was kidnaped by Al Qaeda for four months in Africa. Now he’s trying to talk sense about Israel/Palestine to the Canadian liberal party at a "thinkers" retreat with Michael Ignatieff listening:
Fowler charged the Liberals in the room with standing for little or nothing when it comes to foreign policy. He was even harder on the absent Conservatives, accusing their government of abandoning a Canadian legacy in the world, and, more specifically, of adopting an “Israel, right or wrong” policy that has undermined Ottawa’s credibility abroad. He asserted that there’s an “iron-clad link” between a failure to push for a fair resolution the Israel-Palestine problem and the rise of Islamist terrorism.
That was Maclean’s. Here is the Ottawa Citizen:
Former Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler has slammed Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s foreign policy, accusing the Conservatives of pandering to Canadian Jewish voters with a “reckless” Middle East policy that blindly favours Israel. He said politicians are merely engaged in “the scramble to lock up the Jewish vote in Canada (and) selling out our widely admired and long-established reputation for fairness and justice.
"I have no reason to love Islamic extremism or indeed terrorism of any stripe, jihadi or political, but I do deplore the abandonment of our hard-won reputation for objective analysis and decency as a result of our reckless Middle Eastern posturing.”
Fowler speaks with considerable experience in foreign affairs. Not only was he a civil servant for 38 years, he was the foreign policy adviser to prime ministers Trudeau, Turner and Mulroney; he was Canada’s longest-serving ambassador at the United Nations; and he was the personal representative for Africa for prime ministers Chretien, Martin and Harper.
