JUBAL'S HARPER:

Jews embrace Stephen Harper (LORRIE GOLDSTEIN, 10/20/06, Toronto Sun)

The real story when Prime Minister Stephen Harper addressed the annual award of merit dinner sponsored by B'nai Brith in Toronto Wednesday wasn't what he said about Israel.

It's that the huge crowd containing many of the Canadian Jewish community's movers and shakers treated Harper like a rock star.

There was a standing ovation when he first came into the room and more of them during and after his speech, which was really nothing more than a repeat of previous statements he's made in support of Israel and against terrorism.

But the audience was buzzing. Here, finally -- after 13 years of maddeningly "nuanced" Liberal foreign policy on the Mideast -- was a Conservative PM standing up strongly and unapologetically for Israel, Canada's ally in the war on terror.

After Harper finished, Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B'nai Brith, didn't just thank him for attending the dinner, which honoured Toronto businessmen Walter Simon Arbib and Surjit Singh Babra, co-owners of SkyLink, for their charitable work and promotion of inter-faith dialogue.

Instead, Dimant said of Harper's election victory to the largely Jewish audience: "I believe the Almighty has answered our prayers".