Degree or Arrest?

It seems there is an aura of unhappiness among alumnus of Queen's University, that distinguished academic institution located in Kingston Ontario, known for the quality of its academic studies and the reputation of many of its former students having achieved fairly high professional and political office throughout their careers.

Unhappy, it happens, because their degrees have been contaminated in their estimation, because of the fact that Queen's University has invited former United States President Jimmy Carter to receive an honorary degree.  There are many who take exception to his pronouncements on Israel.  His writing, for example, equating Israel's presence in the Middle East as a Jewish State, with apartheid.

Former U.S. President Carter has some distinguished colleagues with whom his opinions are shared, like Bishop Desmond Tutu and former South African President Nelson Mandela.  All of whom question Israel's right of return extended to Jews around the world, but not to Palestinian Arabs who fled their homeland when it became Israel in 1948. 

It seems normal and acceptable to them that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, the Gulf States, Lebanon, for example, are Arab States.  That those Arab states expelled their millennia-old Jewish-Arab populations, appropriating all their belongings in the process seems not to bother them one whit, even though their numbers exceed those of the Palestinians to whom reparations have been offered.

Nor do they question the peculiarity that Israel happily absorbed all those Jewish-Arab refugees, while with the exception of Jordan, none of the other Arab states would consider giving citizenship to Palestinian refugees, preferring that they remain cankering sores on the body of the Middle East, the longest-reigning victim-refugees in the world's memory.

Mr. Carter was an abject failure as a president of the United States.  As a former president of the United States he is offending his country's laws by consorting with an enemy.  Hamas is clearly designated a terrorist group by the laws of the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan and elsewhere. 

Yet Mr. Carter has seen fit to be on a comradely footing of sympathy with Hamas's Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh who outspokenly clarifies his ideology and that of his terror group to have a singular purpose: the destruction of Israel.  It is simply not possible to identify Mr. Carter as anything but virulently anti-Semitic, as a result.

Jimmy Carter with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Palestinian children in Gaza City in 2009.  Suhaib Salem/Reuters

But anti-Semitism, while a regrettable moral disease, is not against the law.  However, supporting the activities of a terrorist group considered to be a threat to global peace and security certainly would be thwarting the law.  So it seems exceedingly strange that the civil-rights leftists who insist that Canada should arrest Carl Rove and George W. Bush when they appear in Canada remain silent about the appropriateness of arresting Jimmy Carter when he appears in Canada.