Tehran: ‘Ottawa has become Israel’s ‘lap poodle’

Posted on June 2, 2012 |

Recently, the Stephen Harper’s government in Ottawa has put another ‘crippling sanction’ on country’s 400,000-strong Iranian-Canadian community to show its surveillance to the Zionist regime – whose president Shimon Peres on his visit to Ottawa last month lauded Harper’s support for Israel “never indifferent, never neutral“.

Canada has just stopped issuing visa to Iranian tourists or relatives planning to visit Canada. Now they must go to Canadian embassy in Turkey to get visa. Ottawa and Tehran have not exchanged ambassadors for decades. Each country is represented by lower-level diplomatic staff. Ottawa’s last ambassador in Tehran, Kenneth Taylor (1977-80) admitted himself in 2010 that he was a CIA Station Chief in Iran. The annual trade between the two countries have dropped down to $200 million.

Last month, Iranian deputy foreign minister and Tehran’s representative at the EU, Ali Asghar Khaji, gave a rare interview to Washington-based reporter, Paul Koring, for Canada’s second largest daily, The Globe And Mail. In the interview, Khaji voiced Tehran’s opinion about the regime in Ottawa, whom Netanyahu had called “the most trusted ally of Israel”.

“The United States remains the Great Satan. Israel, rarely mentioned by name, is dubbed the “Zionist entity.” And in the view of Tehran – where Canada was once regarded as an independent voice, perhaps even an honest broker – the new Conservative government in Ottawa is seen as a toadying, out-of-step, Bush-era belligerent,” wrote Koring.

”The strident, official Canadian rhetoric and accusations about Iran are ill-founded, unproductive and probably not shared by most Canadians. And now, Ottawa has imposed petty inconvenience to its hostile policy, forcing Iranians to travel to Turkey to get visas to Canada,” says Khaji.

“It seems your government has completely failed to understand the passage of time, it’s still living in the Bush era. Canada is still following in the Bush footsteps and remains under the influence of the Zionist regime,” said Khaji.

Ali Asghar Khaji is right in his opinion of Harper government. Ottawa’s blind support for the Zionist regime have been challenged by Jewish, Christian and Muslim Canadian intellectuals. This immoral support has tarnished Canada’s image in the Muslim world, at United Nations and the UN Human Right Commission.

Stephen Harper believes that criticism of Israel is “an old-fashioned anti-Semitism” while his junior foreign minister, Peter Kent, claimed in 2010 that an attack on Israel is attack on Canada. In February 2012, while visiting Israel, Ottawa’s foreign minister, John Baird, told the Jerusalem Post that “there was indisputable evidence Iran was developing a nuclear arm program”. The hoax has been dismissed by both the US and Israeli intelligence agencies. In February 2012, Baird had compared Ayatullah Khamenie’s remarks against the Zionist regime (cancer) to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and invoked images of Holocaust to support Israel’s right to attack Iran.

Canada’s top Holocaust scholar, Professor Deborah Lipstadt, has this advice to Israeli ‘lap poodle’ like Harper and Mitt Romney: “It was unbelievable. It made me cringe. Israel doesn’t do everything right“.

Ottawa has criticized Iran for human right violation while ignoring huge human right violations against Canada’s Native Indians or lifting finger at human right violation against Jewish women in Israel. For example, Israel has no civil marriage. Rabbis rule on weddings and divorces and control the personal status of every Israeli citizen. Ultra-orthodox males have been involved in a spate of attacks on women, who have been punched, sexually harassed and ordered to the back of public buses.

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