Charles Adler: The NDP values ideology above truth, even in Afghanistan

National Post, Blogs, September 28, 2007

She wore a long black veil to cover her mind by Charles Adler Sept 27/07: “That’s over the top Charles. We never said Karzai was a puppet of the Canadian military,” said the NDP’s Alexa McDonough. Over the top?

Alexa McDonough in a radio interview on Adler on Line, was delivering the “scoop” that much of the messaging in a speech delivered by Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the Canadian House of Commons last year, was prepped for him by Canadian military officials. She insisted that the messages we got weren’t necessarily those that the people of Afghanistan would want us to have. By any objective standard, the NDP is calling Karzai a puppet. What’s over the top is not my characterization of the NDP position. What’s completely out of bounds and over the line is patently false charge that Afghanistan’s first democratically elected leader is a puppet of Canada’s Department of National Defense.

When I asked McDonough to name one single fact in the Karzai speech that was untrue, she said this issue wasn’t about the truth. The former boss of the New Democratic Party spoke volumes with that little chestnut. Ideologues care little about the truth. It’s all about ideology. Karzai,in the Canadian Parliament, simply delivered his boiler plate speech to the West. He talked about an Afghanistan where instead of schools being burned to the ground, they were being rebuilt, and instead of girls being denied the right to go to school, there were now two million of them attending. He talked about an Afghanistan where 20% of the members of their parliament were women, and where per capita incomes were going up instead of down.

Yes he was grateful to our military for helping to create a better life for many Afghans. The NDP could learn a lot from the graciousness of the Afghan leader. He has far more respect for our military than the NDP does. And it isn’t because military communications people laid down a few words on a piece of paper to help him get his message across. It’s because they laid down their lives to give his people an opporunity to have a life.

I gave Alexa McDonough three chances to come up with a single fact stated by the President of Aghanistan that wasn’t accurate. Three times she swung her propaganda bat and missed. The NDP’s issue, in their own words, isn’t about the truth. It is a remarkable confession from a Canadian political party which continues to offer feint praise for the bravery of our troops but consistently fails to admit that they have made a difference for the people who inhabit one of the poorest countries in the world.

When McDonough was asked if she could admit that our troops were doing some good down there, she would not do so. I offered her the litmus test of honesty by asking her to tell me how many of the 2 million girls now going to schools in Afghanistan would be attending school if our troops and other NATO forces had not been sacrificing their lives? “Charles you know that is a question that is impossible to answer.” “How about zero, Ms McDonough? That would be a truthful answer.”

She then called my arithmetic ridiculous. What requires public ridicule is the idea that the NDP has even a shred of moral authority on issues involving our military. What’s clear as a bell is that the party has no respect for the military because of their inability to distance themselves for their core pacifist ideology. The NDP refuses to acknowledge that sometimes when bad things happen to people, the only way to stop it is to kill the bad guys, or as General Hillier once called them, the scumbags.

The NDP refuses to acknowledge that there are times when the only way to help people is through armed force. It is not NDP rhetoric that opened up the schools of Afghanistan and converted the soccer stadium in Kabul from a place to execute “disobedient” women to a place where teams now play soccer. It is not NDP rhetoric that has created better health care for many Afghans and freedom from the Taliban barbarians that the NDP seem to prefer.

At least those headchopping, women hating Taliban types aren’t reading speeches that have been vetted by the Canadian military. Isn’t that something Canadians should respect? When given a choice between condemning the democratically elected leader of Afghanistan or the thugs that who would condemn that country to the dark ages, the NDP position is now crystal clear. And while Alexa McDonough did not have to wear a head covering to do an interview in Canada, a country kept free by the military she tries to diminish, the objective truth was concealed by her prepared talking points. For my part, I am eternally grateful to the Canadian military for keeping me free enough to have the opporunity to unmask the dishonesty of the party that some stooges of the left continue to call the conscience of parliament.

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