Toronto Sun columnist Peter Worthington contrasts Canadian and Israeli attitudes toward citizens in distress:
"We [Canada] tend to abandon citizens in trouble, and sacrifice them in the name of not rocking diplomatic boats.
A Canadian citizen can be murdered by the secret police in Iran (Zahara Kazemi) with only a token tut-tut from Canada.
A Chinese-Canadian (Huseyincan Celil) can be kidnapped in Uzbekistan and deported to China where he’s been sentenced to death in absentia for human rights work, with Canada rejecting responsibility.
A Canadian (Bill Sampson) can be framed and sentenced to death and torture in Saudi Arabia, with our foreign minister believing the Saudi story that Sampson was guilty.
Liberal or Conservative, our government is dominated by a bureaucracy that seems eager to sacrifice citizens to avoid confrontation. That is not Israel’s way.
Israel has the responsibility and right to do whatever it feels it must to protect its citizens from future outrages."
And in a Calgary Herald op-ed, Michelle Stirling-Anosh argues that Israel?s Gaza incursion is about more than one soldier:
"While Israelis are committed to rescuing and returning any captured Israeli soldier, you might say the kidnapping was almost the last straw in the current situation.
The premise the Palestinians put forward for many years was, ‘You pull out of Gaza and we will leave you alone.’ So, despite much internal opposition and a great deal of emotional turmoil within the country, Israel finally pulled out of Gaza in 2005.
In return, the Israelis got dozens of Kassam missiles fired on them by the Palestinians almost daily from mobile stations in northern Gaza…
Then, some Hamas ‘militants’ (as CBC likes to call them) dug a really big tunnel under the internationally recognized border between Israel and the Gaza Strip and, with intent, attacked an Israeli army outpost, killed and maimed soldiers and took one soldier hostage…
Finally, the Gazans gleefully announced they have biological and chemical weapons, and that they had fired a chemical weapon at Israel the week before. The media don’t mention this fact anymore…"
