MONTREAL — Liberal MP Irwin Cotler has been described many ways – as a human rights crusader, former justice minister, member of the Order of Canada and even the “Alan Dershowitz of the North.”
Irwin Cotler
But Cotler said he was taken aback and offended at the end of December when Jewish conservative blogger Ezra Levant devoted an entire blog to characterizing Cotler as a “Jewish Uncle Tom” and the “Uncle Tom of the Liberal Party.”
According to the Levant blog, Cotler has put up with a party “that… abide[s] anti-Semitism and… anti-Israel sentiment” and hasn’t been “noisy [enough] when his own party was selling Israel down the river.”
Levant, who is Jewish, also wrote that at a purported dinner meeting in Toronto “in 2002 or 2003,” supposedly attended by Cotler, Levant, Senator Jerry Grafstein and the late media mogul Izzy Asper, Cotler allegedly portrayed Liberal stalwarts Eddie Goldenberg and Herb Gray as “official” and “court” Jews (Levant’s terms) who, as loyalists to then-prime minister Jean Chrétien, didn’t come to Israel’s defence when they should have, and thereby signalled Chrétien’s government to carry on with its middling support of Israel.
Now, Cotler has become the very thing he criticized, Levant wrote.
Asked about the blog at a recent press conference, Cotler said he was ambivalent about responding at first because – as his aide Howard Liebman put it – “that’s what Ezra would have wanted.”
But Cotler said he was nonetheless tempted to respond, “not because of me, but because of the implication that falsely represented what I said about other people.”
Cotler’s recollection of the meeting described is that it never happened, or if it did, he was not there.
“I was not a part of that alleged meeting,” Cotler said adamantly. “Ezra Levant is a free speech person and is certainly entitled to free speech, but while he is entitled to his opinion, he’s not entitled to rewrite the facts, and that’s basically what he has done.”
Cotler added that Asper, who died in October 2003, had been “a very, very close friend.” The meeting “never took place, No. 1, and the statement [Levant] attributed to me… at that meeting was never said by me.
“I never would say anything about Herb Gray,” Cotler continued. “I just spoke at a dinner honouring him. Why would I ever say things exactly opposite of the truth about someone I have so publicly extolled?”
Levant puts forward the idea that, as a Liberal, Cotler is “loyal to his masters” or stays acquiescent in caucus. This “is grossly false,” Cotler said.
Cotler pointed to an article in the Jerusalem Report published in 2004, shortly after he was named justice minister. Headlined “A troublemaker tamed?” the article described how Cotler – then a backbencher – was not shy to exhort his own government to blacklist Islamic terrorist groups, something it did less than three weeks later when it declared Islamic Jihad and Hamas illegal.
Cotler said he has also publicly “stood up” to criticize Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.
“It’s all a matter of public record,” Cotler said, noting that the Jerusalem Report story had also pointed out that it had once been thought Cotler’s willingness to be critical of his own party could cost him a seat at the cabinet table.
Perhaps, ventured Cotler, “part of it has to do with the fact that I am a Liberal,” and Levant’s “disposition towards Liberals is that we all should be an endangered species.”
