By arthur Weinreb
Saturday, November 11, 2006
amidst the pomp and ceremony of Saturday's Remembrance Day events to honour those who have so bravely fought in this country's wars, will be seen a lot of hypocrisy. For one day, many on the military-hating left will pretend to care about and honour those brave Canadians who made great sacrifices, sometimes paying the ultimate price, to protect our country and our freedoms, such as they are.
Most people tend to stereotype veterans. When we think of a war veteran, we think of a withered old 80-something man who, with a bunch of others, did something during the first half of the last century. Easily forgotten in all of this, are the young men and women who have recently seen action in the remote areas of afghanistan and are veterans in every sense of the word.
Suddenly this week, NDP leader Jack Layton has become the champion of the veteran in his fight to get more money for the vets and their families. The poppy-wearing Layton will attend Remembrance Day ceremonies including the one today at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.
It will be nothing less than an exercise in total hypocrisy.
Layton is always telling us that "he supports the troops”. That's a phrase that you rarely hear from the prime minister or people like retired general Lew Mackenzie. They don't go around saying how much they support the troops because they don't have to. Layton's idea of supporting the troops is to bring them all home. This is akin to supporting the country's firefighters by preventing them from ever entering a burning building or going anywhere near a fire. Lives of individuals would be saved, but there would be a cost. But cost is something that those on the left pay little attention to; not only does it not matter, but it will always be borne by someone else.
What would happen if the present day Layton could be transported back to the early 1940s? He and his fellow travellers would be accusing the very men that they now purport to honour of killing civilians and committing war crimes and other atrocities. Layton would want to put them before some international tribunal while arguing that Canada has no business in "Winston Churchill's war”. The left would be demanding that the troops be brought home NOW (as a show of support to those troops, of course). as far as any "crimes” committed by the Nazis would be concerned, they would be of no consequence. after all, those who like to see themselves as the champions of women's rights, give very little thought to how women would end up in a Taliban-controlled afghanistan.
Jack Layton loves to characterize the current campaign in afghanistan as "George Bush's war”. This is a further insult to the men and women who are putting their lives on the line on a daily basis so far away. Yes, George W. Bush did start the war after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. But Layton and his lefty buddies love to pretend that Islamofascism, if it exists at all, has absolutely nothing to do with tolerant and diverse Canada. Something will eventually happen here that will convince them otherwise but until it does, it is nothing more than a neo-con plot. By constantly referring to afghanistan as "George Bush's war”, those on the left show that they are more under the influence of the U.S. president than Prime Minister Stephen Harper could ever be.
Jack Layton of course is not unique in his thinking; he is just the most visible of the Canadian anti-war, anti-military crowd who don poppies in respect to veterans of the past while slamming the present members of Canada's military.
It would be so much better if these people just held one of their anti-war demonstrations on November 11 rather than bow their heads during a somber Remembrance Day ceremony. at least the hypocrisy would end.
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