A trend gets laid bare

Editorial

This week, Gay McDougall, United Nations Independent Expert on Minority Issues, is in Canada on a 10-day exploratory investigation of this country's treatment of minorities. Admittedly, Canada has a mixed record on the issue, with grave historical wrongs towards our aboriginal populations, but compared with, say, Sudan, Saudi Arabia or Iran, is Canada really where the UN's expert on minority issues should be rooting around for injustice?

This story was effectively buried by the surprising news that U.S. President Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The resounding response that overtook the media, it seems, is: for what? The answer? The same reason he was elected president, presumably: hope! The committee awarded Yasser Arafat the prize, remember, along with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, in 1994. This too was based on nothing but hope, as it now remains clear.

There was other news that defied belief – and rightly so. As it turns out, the helium balloon that the 24-hour news channels pursued across the Colorado sky was empty, nothing but an alleged hoax perpetrated by Richard and Mayumi Heene, parents of the six-year-old now known as "Balloon Boy." The Heenes, who met in a Hollywood acting school and who have appeared not once, but twice, on the TV program Wife Swap, are up on charges for letting the world believe their boy was carried off by a balloon, when he was safe aground the entire time.

There was also apparent confusion this week over who serves as Canada's head of state. The Governor-General and her Rideau Hall staff seem uncertain as to whether she is the representative of Canada's head of state or whether Michaδlle Jean herself is the actual head of state. First-year political science students recognize that Canada's Governor-General represents the Queen in Canada and fulfils the duties of the Crown when the Queen is out of the country, e.g.: at home in London. But Her Excellency and her staff seem convinced, according to recent public utterances and the GG's official website, that she is indeed the country's head of state. The prime minister's office has made clear that the Queen remains our head of state. In a less stable democracy, such a tussle might result in an increased state of readiness by the armed forces.

As if to put the cherry on the sundae that was this week, the University of Victoria was the site on Sunday for another Canadian appearance of the notorious anti-Zionist-poster-boy-without-tenure, Norman Finkelstein. The repeatedly debunked Finkelstein still draws conspiracy theorists and assorted Israel-bashers to his lectures.

How are all these diverse news items related? Each, in its own way, tells us something important about the world in which we live.

This is a world in which Israel – an oasis of democratic pluralism in a sea of terrorism, theocracy and repression – is accepted by otherwise reasonable people as an "apartheid state."

In a world where a new American president, well meaning though he may be but without a lengthy record in public life, wins the Nobel Peace Prize, legitimate questions can be raised about the juxtaposition of substance versus style, of ethereal hope versus tangible accomplishment.

In this world where people will do anything – literally, anything – to become famous, conventional assumptions about human behavior, parental responsibility, logic and reason can fly out the window. In the new hierarchy of human need, appearing on TV seems to be somewhere between sleep and sex.

In a world where even the representative of Canada's head of state cannot definitely name the actual head of state, is it any wonder that ordinary Canadians have limited knowledge or a distorted context of history and governance?

The fact that a UN official is rooting around Canada for injustice when minority groups in so many other countries are drowning in repression should give Canadians a small taste of the world Israelis have lived with all these years. The fact that the Nobel committee would make a choice like it did for this year's peace prize suggests a postmodern approach to empiricism. That parents would seek publicity in a bizarre stunt suggests Munchausen syndrome taken to ridiculous heights.

Each of these items, in their small way, could also help to explain how seemingly rational Canadians could buy into the hugely irrational, anti-empirical, ignorant ideology where Canada and Israel are equivalent to the world's real human rights violators, because information is consumed in bite-sized chunks by people without adequate foundations in the basic facts. Illusion is reality and publicity is gained, not by those who are deserving, but by those prepared to go to the greatest lengths to obtain it.

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