New Democratic Party Purges Candidates Over Pro-Palestine Positions in Lead Up to Canadian Elections

By Marion Kawas

Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, August 29, 2015

Thomas Mulcair of the New Democratic Party and the ardent supporter (aka puppet) of the Israeli apartheid regime Excerpt:

Canadian governments have a long history of complicity in Palestinian dispossession. As early as 1947, Lester B. Pearson, then Under Secretary of State for External Affairs and future Canadian Prime Minister, played a key role in drafting and passing the United Nations Partition Plan, so much so that Zionist groups dubbed him the “Balfour of Canada”.

Successive governments have carried on this tradition of one-sided support, although often under the pretense of “peacekeeping” and being a “honest broker”. Fast forward to the last decade, which has brought the Conservative government into power under PM Stephen Harper, famous for such comments as “Through Fire and Water, Canada will Stand with You” made during his speech to the Israeli Knesset in January, 2014. Harper has crafted a policy of zero tolerance for everything Palestinian, from BDS to funding for UNRWA, and also upped the ante by trying to make any criticism of Israeli policies “illegal”. Recent examples are the January 18, 2015 Memorandum of Understanding between Canada and Israel that committed to develop  “a coordinated, public diplomacy initiative both bilaterally and in international and multilateral fora to oppose boycotts of Israel, its institutions, and its people within three to six months” and the announcement just last month of the “expansion and modernization” of the Canada Israel Free Trade Agreement. ...

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Marion Kawas is a long-time pro-Palestinian activist, a member of BDS Vancouver-Coast Salish and cohost of Voice of Palestine.