Hypothetical role reversal

Gazette reporter Allison Lampert asks what would have happened had it been Arafat, not Netanyahu scheduled to speak back in September.

For Laith Marouf, a member of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, the answer is a resounding Yes. “To us, Arafat is corrupt; he is a criminal himself,” Marouf said. “We can’t have a double standard. We will protest criminals whether they’re Muslim or Arab or Israeli.”

[ . . . ]

“I’m sure the protest would have been loud, but I doubt it would have been violent,” said Yoni Petel of Hillel Montreal.

“Let Arafat speak. I would love to ask Yasser Arafat a few questions. I think he’s pure evil, but I’m not afraid of his ideas.”

Although Petel agreed the pro-Palestinian organizers of the Netanyahu protest largely despise Arafat, he said they wouldn’t have tried to stop him with the same zeal.

“Can you imagine (Samer Elatrash) standing up on a car screaming with a megaphone that he (Arafat) is a war criminal and we have to stop him?” said Petel in reference to the Palestinian activist’s actions in the Netanyahu protest.

“I doubt it very, very much.”

The hypothetical situation would pose a dilemma for Elatrash. On one hand, the Concordia student said he’d want to denounce Arafat’s corruption; on the other hand, he wouldn’t want a protest against the controversial leader to be misinterpreted as proof Palestinians are unable to govern themselves.

“I would try to stop Arafat from speaking but not if Hillel were part of the protest,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to lend our help to delegitimize Palestinian self-determination.”

Afraid that you might be aligning yourself with the Zzzzionists, Samer?

As always with a purely hypothetical question, the answers are predictable – and meaningless. Because nobody knows what would have happened since the situation itself never occurred. Laith Marouf can make the self-serving claim that of course SPHR would have rioted. Yeah right. And while I know that Hillel would have never resorted to the kind of disgusting display that we saw from SPHR, they probably would have tried to go through proper channels to voice their displeasure.

All that is missing the point, though. Lampert’s hypothetical is drawing some kind of equivalence between Netanyahu and Arafat. Netanyahu, a former elected representative of a democratic state, and Arafat, a dictator with the blood of thousands of innocent civilians directly on his hands.

Despite the Left’s best efforts to villify Netanyahu, he is not – nor has he ever been – a war criminal. They don’t like Netanyahu, they don’t like Sharon, they’re threatening more violence if Sharansky were to come to Concordia . . . the point is, they find it perfectly okay to use violence to shut down any speech that doesn’t fit with their world view. If Arafat were to come to Concordia, he’d probably look around and decide it felt a lot like home. He might even make it his new headquarters. A whole new meaning to “Gaza U”? Hmmmmm . . .