I have been censored. Amazon sent me an email informing me that my review of Truth Be Told, an important new book written by #selinarobinson, does not meet its "guidelines." See the screenshot for the list of the possible ways in which the piece has run afoul of Amazon. How ridiculous! Here is the full text of the review:
It was said of the French Revolution’s degeneration into a movement that ended up guillotining some of its own most fervent supporters that, “the revolution devours its children.”
We might conclude the same of our own era’s “woke” revolution, whose cancel-culture guillotine was responsible for the political beheading of one of British Columbia’s most prominent social democrats, Selina Robinson.
Ms. Robinson’s fatal problem was that, even though she and her left-wing fellow travellers were linked arm in arm on such core “progressive” issues as LGBTQ+ rights, her pro-Israel, pro-Zionism views on the Palestinian question were profoundly out of step with the denizens of Canada’s left and its political vehicle, the New Democratic Party.
The prevailing orthodoxy of these ideological warriors is that the Jews of Israel are colonialist settlers whose very existence oppresses the Palestinians.
As Robinson—who proudly described herself as “the Jew in the crew” of the B.C. NDP government—points out in her book, Truth Be Told, this ahistorical belief has become a fixation of the left, one that she argues is grounded in de facto anti-Semitism.
Truth Be Told tells the story of how Robinson’s courageous defence of Israel, in the wake of Hamas’s October 2023 massacre of 1,200 Israelis, made her the target of virulent anti-Semitism, for which she received precious little support from her colleagues in government.
It also eventually led to her political decapitation after she flippantly described the territory, that Jews were given after the Second World War, as a “crappy piece of land.”
Robinson tells of how, even though she quickly and deeply apologized for the remarks, B.C.’s NDP Premier, David Eby, succumbed to relentless demands, for her political head on a platter, from Muslim leaders and others who characterized those “four fatal words” as racist because they demeaned the Palestinians who also claimed the area as their own.
After Eby pressured her into resigning from her position as Minister of Post-Secondary Education, Robinson then suffered a final insult when her plan to bring B.C.’s Muslim and Jewish communities together—a plan she had been asked by Eby to develop—was dismissed by Eby’s chief of staff as “too political.”
This was the final straw for Robinson, who decided in March 2024 to quit her party’s caucus and sit as an independent Member of the Legislative Assembly. In a public letter she issued explaining her decision, she said she could no longer tolerate the hypocrisy and “cowardice” of her party.
“This is not the party I signed on with—it has become a party that is afraid to stand with people, people who are hurting. It is now a party that puts politics and re-election before people,” she wrote.
On the subject of politics, while Truth Be Told can best be described as Robinson’s cri de coeur about the importance of standing up to hatred in defence of the truth, it can also be read as a primer on the characteristics of poor leadership, as epitomized by Eby.
I served alongside of Robinson for two years on Coquitlam City Council and found her to be a principled politician who did not let dogma stand in the way of doing the right thing for the people she served. She earned my respect.
This important book, for which I provided some pre-publication editorial advice, only deepens this respect.
(More info on the book here: https://www.amazon.ca/Truth-Be-Told-Selina-Robinson/dp/1069165107)
