David Frum and Taking a Punch
... an evening with the man who coined the phrase "axis of evil" ...
David Frum is the sort of person I can sit and listen to, but would probably not want to have dinner with. So, when I heard he’d be giving a keynote speech on June 5 at a venue a short walk from here, I bought tickets.
His topic was “Democracy's Reckoning: Crisis in the US. Lessons for Canada.”
He prefaced his remarks with a short remembrance of Canada’s role on D-Day, the 80th anniversary of which we would all be commemorating on June 6.
The young and innocent men who landed on Juno beach were there to take a punch, he said … by which he meant Canadians were there to distract and weaken German defences arranged along the coast, which they did, at great cost. Frum wanted to make the point that sometimes to help everyone else out, you have to to make sacrifices.
That was an interesting thing to say. I wondered if he would come back to that before the end.
The crisis in America he was there to discuss was Donald Trump. He had recently written than the choice for America in the November election was between Donald Trump or the rule of law. Frum was firmly in favour of the rule of law.
The audience seemed pretty happy with Frum’s talk. With one possible exception. At the very end, with only a few minutes left for questions, a young man stood up at the back and asked if, in some cases, lawlessness wasn’t really the only moral response to an injustice. He didn't say so explicitly, but we could all tell he was talking about student protests in support of Palestine.
Frum answered that there is a difference between dissent and lawlessness. In a democracy, if you need to break the law to support your cause, you will also submit yourself to the legal processes that ensue, and use that process to make your point. Think Rosa Parks.
If, however, you are thinking about what those students are protesting, you might wonder why Frum, a staunch supporter of Israel, did not clarify who was “taking the punch” in that particular conflict, and who should submit to legal processes.
Like I said, I would not eat dinner with this guy.
I find it troublesome that discussions of the current conflict have no context. I am sure if you poked people they would acknowledge that Israel's present actions are not something they dreamed up to distract their populace from other issues (Squirrel!) ... and two wrongs definitely DO NOT make a right. That being said, will protest and divestiture or recognition of a Palestinian state reduce the probability that Hamas (and others) will regroup hiding in the midst of the populace to prepare their next attack? This feels a little like the parent that tells the child to stop hitting the sibling and the child knows that the sibling is gonna hit them again and then go hide behind the parent while loudly proclaiming innocence or false justification. Ineffective and unproductive.