Beyond propaganda

Editorial

This was a week redolent with historical memory. On Remembrance Day, we paid tribute to those lost in service to our country. Just a few years ago, our Remembrance Day cenotaph services and school assemblies marked the sacrifices of those in two world wars. Now we have new generations of sacrifice, with heroic Canadians being remembered for service in Afghanistan.

Adding to the historical memory of the week was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. While not the single most significant event in the transition from communism to emerging democracy across eastern Europe, the fall of the wall was certainly the most symbolic and visibly emotive.

And there was the memory this week of events on the nights of Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, when a carefully staged pogrom across Germany and Austria marked, for European Jews, the end of the beginning and then beginning of the end. Kristallnacht is considered to be the moment when the Nazis' panorama of anti-Semitic legislation turned into the comprehensive annihilation we know as the Holocaust.

But memories are being made even as we reflect on the meaning of the tumultuous 20th century. The battle for historical memory continues, with democratic countries heading for a 21st-century showdown against the ideology-driven misrepresentations purveyed by dictators and terrorists and repeated by gullible apologists. In a particularly disturbing shift, Turkey, once Israel's least problematic neighbor, has been adopting rhetoric belonging to another realm.

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan went toe-to-toe with Israeli President Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, early this year. The Turkish leader took the opportunity to take a swipe at Israel over the Gaza war, inciting a raised-voices interaction uncommon to the staid economic summit. Later, Erdogan accused Israel of crimes more grave than those committed by Sudan in Darfur.

The Turkish leader's tirades were alarming, not just because Turkey was one of Israel's erstwhile least hostile regional neighbors. It is also disconcerting because Turkey is a member of NATO – the only

Muslim-majority member of the North Atlantic alliance. The incidents have prompted observers to question whether Erdogan is seeking to turn his country's orientation eastward, after a period of opening to the West.

There is a truism that states one is entitled to one's own opinions; one is not entitled to one's own facts. It is fair to criticize Israel and its handling of the Gaza war. It is unconscionable and irrational to make comparisons between that defensive action and the genocidal intent of the Darfur catastrophe.

International estimates say 300,000 or 400,000 people have died in Darfur as a direct result of Sudanese policies of starvation and murderous, proxy-militia rampages. Any comparison of the deliberate, unprovoked attempted genocide of the people of Darfur with Israel's self-defence is beyond logic.

Any doubts as to the Turkish PM's motivations were eliminated after he was greeted, upon his return home at 2 a.m., by 5,000 "jubilant" supporters waving Turkish and Palestinian flags.

Likewise, Iranian leaders who incited, funded and supplied the weapons that Hamas used against Israel in last winter's war, wipe their bloody hands clean of any knowledge of a ship Israel intercepted last week.

The Israeli military intercepted a ship destined eventually for Syria, seizing 320 tons of weapons en route from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, accounting for the largest cache of smuggled weapons ever seized by Israel, consisting of thousands of rockets, hand grenades and mortar shells.

Iranian state TV carried that country's minister of foreign affairs, Manouchehr Mottaki, denying that they had anything to do with the weapons shipment. Having one's own TV network makes it much easier to also have one's own truth.

In perhaps the brightest light in a dark epoch, anti-government protesters in Iran demonstrated that not all oppressed people are willing to accept at face value the scapegoating that the Arab and Islamic world have engaged in for six decades.

While the chant of choice in Iran since 1979 has been "Death to Israel," today's anti-government protesters are declaring: "Neither Gaza nor Lebanon; my life is only for Iran."

This is an encouraging silver lining in a dark cloud, not solely because of the brave step it represents in an ongoing movement for democracy in Iran. It also demonstrates that a people, even after 30 years of incessant anti-

Semitic indoctrination, are still capable of seeing the difference between legitimate foreign policy and the exploitation of race prejudice as a scapegoat to deflect attention from domestic atrocities.

There is no reason to believe that this Iranian common sense will spill over into other Middle East countries. It is notable, nonetheless, that people subjected to comprehensive propaganda can see beyond and identify the truth. In a time when historical memory is deeply contested, this faint chant from half a world away is an encouraging sign.

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