A Racist, Zionist Cabinet Minister, Selina Robinson, in David Eby's BC NDP government was Fired for Her Public Defense of Zionist Apartheid and Genocide in Palestine
by Gary Porter
Calls continued to mount for the B.C. Minister of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills to resign after making racist remarks about Palestine during a panel discussion sponsored by B'nai Brith, a prominent Zionist organization.
“They don’t understand that it was a crappy piece of land with nothing on it, ” said Salina Robinson in a Jan. 30 online panel of Jewish public officials
The former minister’s comment was part of an answer to a question, which included her saying that there is an “entire generation of young adults who don’t know about the Holocaust.”
“They don’t even understand that Israel was offered to the Jews who were misplaced, displaced. So they have no connection to how it started,” she said.
“They don’t understand that it was a crappy piece of land with nothing on it. There were, you know, several hundred thousand people, but other than that it didn’t produce an economy, it couldn’t grow things, it didn’t have anything on it, and that it was the folks who were displaced that came and the people who had been living there for generations, and together they worked hard and they had their own battles, right? We know the history.”
Robinson was portraying Palestine and Palestinians as a backward (indigenous) people who didn’t deserve their own land, that the Zionist settler colonists made the desert bloom. This is a Zionist trope meaning that the colonizers brought European capitalism, racism and militarism.
Of course Robinson’s purpose on January 30 was to justify the current genocide being carried out with no restraint by the fascistic government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. The much vaunted Israeli Defence Force, who are shooting women and children on purpose, are not elite forces. They are draftees, mostly badly trained who are primarily used as brutal prison guards over Palestinian ghettoes.
Netanyahu has already declared that Israel will defy the orders of the International Court of Justice to supply basic human necessities to Palestinians. On the same day as the Court ruling, Israel offering no evidence, claimed that 12 UN relief workers had participated in the Hamas raid on October 7. Instantly, Joe Biden declared the US was cutting off funds for the support of UN relief work in Gaza, as a clear sign of its disrespect for the ICJ. UNRWA employs more than 13,000 staff in Gaza, of whom 152 have been killed by Israel since the invasion began.
Martin Bunton, a University of Victoria Middle East historian and author of Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Very Short Introduction, says there are many inaccuracies in Robinson’s statement.
“At the same time as expressing alarm at the lack of knowledge of our younger generation and in the Holocaust, which is very alarming, she then goes to expose her (Robinson’s) own ignorance about the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it’s a gross inaccuracy,” Bunton told CHEK News in an interview.
“She talks about a crappy piece of land with a few thousand people, when in fact, the population in 1947 was 2 million. Now that 2 million includes 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs and about 600,000 Jewish Palestinians.”
Of course Robinson’s comments reflected the Zionist myths and lies about the founding of Israel. The Zionists say “it was a land without people for a people without land.” It wasn’t. With western imperialist sponsorship the Zionists brutally seized the land and displaced 750,000 Palestinians. Palestine’s destiny was not for the western imperialists and the ruthless Zionists to decide. It has been Zionist policy from the beginning to seize all of Palestine and to drive all the Palestinians out or murder them where they stand. Although Zionism is not a religious but a racist, ultra-nationalist ideology, it uses the myths of the Bible which describes the Jews as God’s “chosen people” to justify 75 years of violence, murder, torture and terrorizing of the Palestinian people. But biblical myths from thousands of years ago do not give any title to Zionists over Palestine. The holocaust inflicted on European Jews by Hitler offers no excuse whatsoever for the Zionists to commit a holocaust on Palestinians.
Zionist propaganda apes Nazi anti Jewish propaganda of the 1930s. One disgusting sample shows an IDF boot crushing a cockroach with Palestinian colours.
Several federal NDP members of parliament, including leader Jagmeet Singh, have weighed in on her comments with calls to reassess her position as minister.
On Instagram Saturday, Singh said that her comments were “offensive and irresponsible,” and that he has shared his concerns with B.C. Premier David Eby.
“She’s got some work to do,” was all Eby had to say during a press conference on Feb. 2.
Eby didn’t comment at the time on whether he’d fire Robinson or if she would resign.
Of course Marit Stiles, Leader on the Ontario NDP, summarily threw Sarah Jama, an MLA and a disabled woman of colour, out of the caucus and the party for calling for a cease fire on Gaza “prematurely”.
Stiles authoritarian move left Jama open to the actions of Conservative Premier Doug Ford, who, in line with his pro Zionist, racist, ablist and misogynistic views, moved to have Sara censured by the legislature which denies her the right to speak and represent her constituents.
So the NDP top leadership acts quickly when an elected member speaks out for the oppressed. But Eby was waiting to see if he could get away with keeping the racist Robinson in his cabinet, or whether the public outcry would force him to act.
What happened next?
“It’s a political decision that is made by the Premier and the cabinet,” said David Black, associate professor of communications and culture at Royal Roads University.
Black says there isn’t any legal recourse to have Robinson removed from her position and it would be a decision made within the party.
“Part of the political calculation that any premier is going to make at this time is whether firing a high profile Jewish cabinet minister – when these issues are on the foreground for all of us, no matter what our identity may be – whether that is the right course of action,” said Black.
He believes that removing the minister could set the tone of where the government stands on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“It may well be seen as putting a marker down with respect to the debate around Israel and the Palestinians and the rightness and wrongness of what is happening before us now,” he said.
Of course the rank and file of the BC NDP thought they were putting a marker down by unanimously calling for a cease fire in Gaza at their convention last November in Victoria. The convention was exhilarated by the vote. Eby should have put a clear marker down months ago, years ago and certainly the instant he was informed of Robinson’s vile remarks.
We should remember that Eby became leader only after the NDP brass disqualified fossil fuel opponent and indigenous rights supporter Anjali Appadurai as leadership candidate on spurious grounds, leaving Eby as the sole candidate.
Recently, Robinson was also accused of intervening in the re-firing of an instructor at Langara College for praising the Hamas attack on Oct. 7.
“First, there was a rally on October 28 in downtown Vancouver, at the north side of the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was packed with hundreds of people, perhaps over a thousand, of all ages, some carrying signs, many wearing keffiyehs. Among the speakers was a young woman, Natalie Knight, an instructor at Vancouver’s Langara College, who referred to the October 7 Hamas raid as “amazing… brilliant.” A similar view was expressed by retired American military analyst Scott Ritter, who called the attack the “most successful military raid of this century.” Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh quoted an Israeli official’s admiration for the “dazzling ingenuity” of the Hamas tunnel system. On November 3, Knight defended her remarks at another rally.
Who is Natalie Knight? Originally American and of Indigenous background, she holds a doctorate from Simon Fraser University (her work won SFU’s Convocation Medal in 2019, with high praise from her professors). She sits on the editorial board of two local literary journals, one of them the well-known Capilano Review, and participates in left and community organizations. Her advisor praised her “community activism and institutional service,” and Knight herself as “one of the most accomplished scholars I have ever taught… one who will make an enormous contribution to public debates and urgent social issues.” And indeed she has, though not in the way her advisor probably imagined. Knight was hired by Langara College in Vancouver to teach English.” Sheila Delaney, Canadian Dimension.
The Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC accused the Zionist, Robinson, of influencing the college to fire Dr. Natalie Knight after the college reinstated her. The college said that the instructor did not violate the law or college policies.
However, one day after Robinson tweeted her disappointment that she was reinstated and met the college president. Dr. Knight was again fired from the college the same day.
Of course, NDP members and BC voters made it clear to a weak and unprincipled Premier Eby that firing Robinson is a decision to be based on principle, not a “political calculation” based on cowering before a powerful and well-heeled Zionist lobby.
A petition of over 11,000 signatures, including many New Democrats, rapidly circulated. Several Palestinian Mosques have denied Robinson entry. An NDP caucus retreat planned for Surrey in preparation for the budget and throne speeches was cancelled due to expectations of a mass demonstration calling for Robinson’s resignation. Several indigenous nations made their hostility to Robinson’s continuance in the cabinet clear. Robinson issued a partial apology for describing Palestine as “a crappy piece of land” but not for pleading the case of racist, apartheid Israel. She wanted desperately to keep her cabinet post.
This entire incident demonstrates the gulf in the NDP between the membership who support the workers and the oppressed at home and around the world, and the top leadership of the party who support the ruling class and their vile allies.
With a provincial election looming this year, Eby finally realized he had to fire Robinson from the cabinet. For him it was a political calculation, not a matter of principle.
But how can an open Zionist and racist be allowed to sit in the caucus of a labour party. For years the NDP brass have disqualified political candidates from running for the party for criticising Israel’s apartheid system. This is what Marit Stiles did to MPP Sarah Jama in Ontario.
But almost overnight a powerful mass movement in support of the Palestinian struggle for freedom forced the International Court of Justice to decide that the powerful case presented by South Africa accusing Israel of genocide had merit and would proceed. And Premier David Eby of BC, an opportunistic defender of the capitalist ruling class if ever there was one, was forced to go against his own instincts and fire a Zionist racist from his cabinet, while retaining her in the BC NDP caucus. Eby must go all the way. Throw Robinson out of the NDP caucus!