A few people were asking me why, as a vocal Kennedy supporter, I haven’t weighed in on the the whole Thomas Hubert/Borys AlphabetSoup case of Middle East foot in mouth disease. Well, my main reason is that I’ve been fairly busy over the past few days (and will be for the next few). But, more importantly, I really don’t see this as a Kennedy campaign issue.
Take example one. We have a 19 year old kid who said some really stupid things on his blog. No one’s denying that. But there are a lot of bloggers who say really stupid things. I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that what Shoshanna Berman writes is representative of the Ken Dryden campaign or Ken Dryden’s position. So to even imply that this kid somehow represents Kennedy really seems unjust (after all, it’s not like he’s the campaign manager or anything). Thomas apologized and resigned over his comments so I don’t see any need to keep picking on the kid.
The second example is of Borys who, truth be told, shouldn’t have made public comments on this without running them by the party first. But, in all fairness, given that only six countries in the world consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization, I don’t think that part of his musings is as extreme as some are painting it to be. As for his other comments which may have offended people, Borys wasn’t speaking in his role as a Gerard Kennedy supporter – these were his personal opinions. I didn’t see a single blog attack claiming that Michael Ignatieff was anti-Israel after his main Quebec organizer marched in a parade which was described as follows “a virulently anti-Israel rally, and scattered amongst the crowd were a number of Hezbollah flags and placards“.
The bottom line is that the Israel question is one of the most controversial in politics and there are people on both sides of the issue who go too far. With respect to the Kennedy campaign, I was very pleased to see their fast response to these incidents. In both instances there was a quick press release reiterating Gerard’s position which has been known for a long time (since he was one of the first candidates to comment on the Middle Eastern situation).