Rob Breakenridge: Naheed Nenshi bends the knee to Avi Lewis and the far left

Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi with Iddo Moed, Israeli Ambassador to Canada, at the Calgary Stampede. (Photo credit: Embassy of Israel photo/via Facebook)

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CALGARY — Foreign policy is not typically a top of mind concern for voters at the provincial level in assessing those aspiring to lead as premier.

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No one in Alberta was looking to NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi for insight on Israel, Palestinians, or conflict in the Middle East. And despite the self-inflicted controversy Nenshi now finds himself embroiled in, we still don’t really have any meaningful insight into his views on any of this.

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The fact that he’s being dragged down by this issue is less a story about his own views, and more a story about his own judgement and — perhaps more importantly — the forces within his own party that he is clearly beholden to.

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Prior to Thursday, this wasn’t even a story. Perhaps it never would have amounted to much of a story if Nenshi had simply opted not to say anything.

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As we’ve now learned, on the previous Thursday, July 9, Nenshi had a brief encounter at a Calgary Stampede event with Iddo Moed, Israel’s ambassador to Canada. At one point, the two men posed for a photograph.

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Clearly, Nenshi knew who he was talking to and standing with. His initial impulse — the one perhaps he should have stuck with — was that this was no big deal.

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To various elements within his own party, however, this was a very big deal. A week after the photo was taken, Nenshi took to social media to post a lengthy and over-the-top “from the heart” apology.

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“After talking to many people in the community over the last couple of days, I better understand the immense hurt that has been caused to a lot of folks,” he wrote.

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It’s unclear how this caused any sort of measurable “hurt” or whether Nenshi himself even believes that to be the case. That he was compelled to write and post such a statement in the first place is quite revealing.

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This is someone who was a star candidate for the Alberta NDP, someone whose political brand was touted as an asset for the party. The Alberta NDP have held themselves up as a more moderate version of the party, and Nenshi has been going out of his way in recent months to distance himself from the federal NDP and its new leader Avi Lewis.

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As we can now see, there is no distance. The NDP has become co-opted by the far left and the far left has become fixated on the issue of Israel. The leader of the Alberta NDP is merely falling in line.

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The problem for Nenshi, however, is that he has already failed this ideological purity test. His subsequent grovelling won’t be sufficient and it just makes him look weak.

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Furthermore, his pandering to a narrow base on this issue will only hurt his political standing with the broader general public. While it’s certainly reasonable to take issue with how the Israeli government has prosecuted the war in Gaza, Canadians still overwhelmingly believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and its right to defend itself.