A Good Friend to Israel, a Bad Public Speaker

Stephen Harper can't talk good.

Last week Stephen Harper made a speech at an inter-parliamentary meeting on anti-Semitism. It went largely unnoticed, which is a shame according to an editorial in the Ottawa Sun. “If Prime Minister Stephen Harper had the oratorical style of a Barack Obama, the nuanced elegance of a Pierre Trudeau, or the fire of a John Diefenbaker, his speech last week on anti-Semitism and Israel would be put on a pedestal,” writes the editorialist. It’s also true that if he had the body of a Heidi Klum, he’d be on the cover of Sports Illustrated, but the Sun’s point that if Harper were better at speaking more people would like his speeches, is hard to argue. More contentious is the editorial’s condemnation of a statement made at the same conference by Michael Ignatieff, who said anti-Semitism would be alleviated somewhat by the settlement of the Israeli-Arab dispute. The Sun says this idea is ridiculous because “preaching the hatred of Jews has been a staple in the Islamic world long before Israel took its first breath.” The Sun seems to be saying that the Palestinian problem has no role whatsoever in generating anti-Israel or anti-Semitic sentiment on top of whatever baseline hatred exists in the Muslim world, which is hard to swallow.

In The Mark today, Stephen Scheinberg makes the astute observation that because Barack Obama is now handcuffed by a Republican House on domestic issues, the only area where he retains significant influence is foreign policy. Scheinberg predicts that there is little hope of progress in Iraq or Afghanistan, and instead Obama will focus on reining in Iran. “(T)he Obama team believes it essential to keep much of the Arab world onside” if the U.S. is to take tough action against Iran, Scheinberg writes, “and the key to that is to show progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace.” He sees signs Obama is taking a more aggressive stance with Israel to force them to continue peace talks. How are those talks going, by the way? We haven’t heard anything about them for several weeks now, so presumably they’re humming along just fine.