October 22, 2012

Mr. Paul Dewar,
NDP Foreign Policy Critic

Dear Mr. Dewar

I read with disgust your comments in the Globe and Mail (Monday, October 22, 2012) regarding the NDPś position on the abduction, in international waters, of Mr. Jim Manley, a former NDP MP, and thirty others from the humanitarian ship Estelle.

The NDP ¨has urged both sides to show restraint¨. Apparently one side, Israel, has not shown restraint but continues a rogue policy of ignoring international law and UN resolutions. Abducting international human rights advocates while still in international waters, subjecting many to tasers and beatings and holding them in Israeli prisons is not showing restraint.

The two sides are not equal. The oppressed and the oppressor are never equal. This has never been a ¨conflict¨ between two equal states but rather the State of Israel with the fourth largest military in the world colonizing, brutalizing and murdering a basically unarmed indigenous people.

When supporting a union picket line, you take a side. The side of working people and the oppressed. When someone forces you out of your home and then occupies it, you take the side of the people forcibly evicted.

The NDP and each of its MPś are exposed, not as supporters of human rights, but as a party too cowardly to take a principled stand on the longest occupation in contemporary history and one which has produced the largest refugee population in the world.

You do not even have the fundamental decency to support one of your own former colleagues.

Brian Campbell
2762 Trinity St.
Vancouver, BC
604-254-1803

Mr. Thomas Mulcair, Leader of the Opposition
Ms. Libby Davies, Vancouver East MP
Mr. Don Davies, Vancouver Kingsway MP
Mr. Kennedy Stewart, Burnaby-Douglas MP

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