Straight Talk From Harper's Tories

It's hard to figure out which bias is stronger in the Canadian press: its hatred of Stockwell Day or its enthusiasm for the late Yasser Arafat. Combine the two and you get quite an explosion -- as The Canadian Press proved with an almost heroically biased hit piece on Mr. Day last week.

There was something simultaneously macabre and comic in the profound insincerity of the world-wide expressions of grief after the death of Yasser Arafat.

West Germany, for example, suffered more at Arafat's hands than any Western country except Israel. It was Arafat who planned and ordered the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics and Arafat's PLO that helped train and equip the Red Army Faction that waged terrorist war against the German state in the 1970s. Yet German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder described Arafat's death as a "great loss."

Arafat attempted to overthrow the Jordanian government in 1970 and repeatedly attempted to assassinate Jordan's King Hussein. Nonetheless, Hussein's son and heir Abdullah called for three days of public mourning on Arafat's behalf.

The government of France called Arafat "courageous" -- this of a man who regularly proclaimed his eagerness for a martyr's death -- and then told president Clinton that he could not sign the 2000 Camp David agreement because signing would put his life in danger.

Or consider the Canadian case. Only last month, Prime Minister Paul Martin opened the new session of Parliament by extolling his government's record of investing in children. This pro-child government might remember that it was Yasser Arafat who pioneered the deliberate terrorist targeting of children, beginning with attacks on Israeli school buses in 1970 and culminating in the Ma'a lot massacre in which gunmen seized an Israeli high school, murdering 21 students and five adults. Even so, the child-protecting Mr. Martin still felt obliged to express his "sympathy" to the family of Yasser Arafat.

Hypocrisy has its place in international affairs, but the rottenness of the perfumed pieties at the obsequies of Arafat could turn even a strong man's stomach. So Conservative foreign affairs critic Stockwell Day decided to strike one small blow for honesty: He issued no statement at all about Arafat's death. He did not dissent from Canada's official statement of condolence, but neither did he add to it.

Some members of the Conservative caucus objected to Day's austere reserve. They pressed Day to explain why he had not joined the international chorus of fake regret. On Nov. 16, Day responded with a short e-mail addressed to members of the caucus: "Some of you have asked why I have not released a statement of condolence or of sympathy. As you know, there are two sides to the Arafat story. You pick." To the e-mail, he attached a column I had written for the Nov. 9 edition of the National Post, "Twilight of a Terrorist."

One of the e-mail's recipients leaked Day's message to The Canadian Press, which on Nov. 22 obligingly produced a hit piece on Day with this breathtakingly twisted lead: "Stockwell Day is pointing to a report that Yasser Arafat may have had AIDS in explaining why he didn't send condolences on the death of the PLO leader."

In casting about to explain the otherwise dumbfounding mystery of how any Canadian politician could fail to applaud Arafat's life and career, CP seems to have concluded that the only possible explanation had to be hostility to people with HIV. No doubt CP will explain Stockwell Day's refusal to lament the death of Osama bin Laden as proof of his prejudice against victims of kidney disease.

My piece about Arafat did indeed raise the question of whether the PLO chief might not be suffering from AIDS. It did so to make a point about the shameful complicity of the international press in suppressing the truth about Arafat. Here was a case of one of the most famous people in the world dying a mysterious death in full view of hundreds of reporters -- and none of them seemed interested in asking the most obvious questions about his case.

They reported on Arafat's final illness in exactly the same deliberately blind spirit that they reported on his rule of the Palestinian areas ceded by Israel after Oslo. Arafat could steal billions, threaten journalists, violate treaties and order up terrorist attacks without media acknowledgement. In the end, he could even lose his life to an undiagnosed blood disease without exciting so much as a twitch of inconvenient skepticism.

Two weeks after Arafat's demise, we still do not know what killed him. But we know a great deal about the people he killed. Arafat died mysteriously. But there is no mystery about his life.

Canadians often talk about a moral foreign policy. Canadian journalists claim to admire straight talk in their politicians. Well Stockwell Day stood up for both truth and morality when he declined to hail a murderer and thief as a statesman and peacemaker. It is not Day who should be condemned, but the reporter who manufactured that concocted CP story. And if the Conservative party is looking to tidy up after this embarrassing controversy, maybe it ought to begin by identifying and disciplining the cynical politicians who used the cowardly device of an anonymous leak to score a point against a generous and brave colleague.