Conrad Black: Call for Canada to Recognize Palestinian Statehood Is Both Ridiculous and Wrongheaded

Commentary The stampede in many Western countries to champion the Palestinian cause has been a thoroughly nauseating spectacle of misdirected righteousness, faddishness, and racist bigotry. This past week, following the announcement that Ireland, Norway, and Spain proposed to recognize a yet-to-exist Palestinian state, Canada’s New Democratic Party proposed that this country do the same. This was just reflexive political opportunism by the NDP. It is a new variant on the cowardly Western practice of purporting to support both sides in a war of life and death that only one side can win. Hamas, which governs Gaza by terror, and the now rather disabused but still oppressive Palestinian Authority that governs in the West Bank, could have had their Palestinian state any time in the last 25 years. But that would have required them to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, which the Palestinian leadership promised to do at Oslo in 1993 but has never done. It also would have required the reduction of the Palestinian leaders from among the most important political personalities in the world because of the strategic importance of the Middle East, to being merely leaders of another dusty little Middle Eastern country....