Seven Oaks Magazine.

The following letter was sent to Tarek Fatah some ten days ago. The response was so flailing and off topic that we felt it was worthwhile to post the original note to him as an open letter, though we have no illusions of generating a coherent response or a change of course. Mr. Fatah’s slide to the Right – in his case from the NDP to the Liberals, and from opposing Israeli apartheid to collaborating with authorities and some of the most repellant columnists the corporate media has on offer – is hardly unique, but disturbing nonetheless.

We met a couple of years ago in Toronto at a rally opposing the November 2004 siege of Fallujah. At the time, I congratulated you on a letter you and 24 other Arab and Muslim NDP members had sent to leader Jack Layton, urging him to take a stronger stand in opposition to the apartheid wall that Israel is building to annex additional territory in the West Bank of occupied Palestine.

What a difference two years can make. It would have taken quite a macabre imagination to envision the political journey you have made in such a short period of time.

I would not dare to call you an apostate of the Left, knowing the cynical way in which you have distorted the words of your critics to criminalize the Muslim population at large. And before you fire up a response, let me assure you that this critic of yours is very secular, downright atheistic in fact. Some of the things I do believe in very strongly are progressive principles of solidarity, and opposition to attacks on civil liberties and wars of Empire. (I also support the democratic right of any religious community to organize a breakfast at Liberal convention, but this is an abstract principle for me, since I would never join a political party that takes massive corporate funding, sent Canadian soldiers to Afghanistan without debate, detained 5 men and held them under the Orwellian Security Certificate laws, slashed transfer payments resulting in creeping privatization of health care and skyrocketing tuition fees, enforced sanctions on Iraq which UNICEF estimated killed at least half a million children, and which has a very recent history of being scandalous corrupt.)

Recently you have trampled upon these progressive principles repeatedly in your seemingly endless quest for one more byline in the Globe & Mail or Toronto Star, and your apparent ongoing desperate need to speak on behalf of all “good Muslims”.

What else could explain your brazen hypocrisy of abandoning the NDP in favour of the Liberals because the NDP was introducing a “faith caucus” to outreach to people in various religious communities? (Only to follow-up, mere months later, with this nonsensical piece of sour grapes in the Globe & Mail, all about – big surprise! – the fact that religious communities and, gasp, their organizations, have an influence inside the Liberal Party.)

What else could explain your endorsing Bob Rae, who announced his own resignation from the NDP in the National Post, complaining that MP Svend Robinson’s trip to Palestine showed that the party was too anti-Israel?

What else could explain your finking, and that is the word, to the RCMP on leaders in the Muslim community and in the columns of notoriously racist columnists like Margaret Wente?

You have indeed gone a long way in a short time. Perhaps a period of introspection and quiet reflection on the frightening potential for harm of the late middle-aged male ego is in order.

Perhaps, somehow, there is a bridge you can find back to progressive politics, and criticism of the power structure, both economic and political, that engenders so much injustice in our world.

You could, if you wanted, turn the fire of your word processor and email away from everyone in the Muslim community and the progressive community with whom you differ, and turn your words back to Palestine.

The wall that you once urged Jack Layton and the NDP to speak so decisively about is still being completed, its imposing structure having further concretized apartheid separation and oppression for the Palestinian people. The misery of Gaza has grown exponentially, aided and abetted by the criminal aid cut-off imposed by the likes of the Harper government. Surely it is wrong to spend one’s time feeding the corporate media’s appetite for Islamophobia when the Palestinian people are facing starvation at the hands of their colonizers.

You could, if you wanted and if you are still concerned about the issue, take the initiative to write a letter to your now fellow Liberal members, and collect signatories urging Stephane Dion to speak out clearly against the Israeli wall and against the siege of Gaza. The Globe & Mail might not publish such a letter, but writing it would be the right thing to do.

You could even -- for what it’s worth -- ask your good friend Bob Rae if he would sign it.