Greed has certainly been good for executives and directors of Canada’s largest media conglomerate who have been looking after themselves while ordinary workers get screwed as the company restructures.

When Canwest filed for court protection against creditors for the TV portion of the company on Oct. 6, 2009, dozens of recently laid-off employees learned they would lose promised severance pay. For Pat Vanderburg, who has worked for CHBC TV in Kelowna, B.C. for the past 23 years, this will amount to a loss of over $95,000.

About 80 non-union retirees will lose promised Canwest-paid medical, dental and life insurance benefits. In addition, 120 former employees are facing reduced pensions.

Current shareholders, whose stock was worth $20 a few years ago (25 cents when trading was halted Oct. 6), will receive just 2.3 per cent of the new company when it emerges from the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act [CCAA] process.

Hundreds of suppliers, including Twentieth Century Fox (owed $8,524,006.05), Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment ($485,803.70), CBC ($35,809.46), Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc., ($428.04), Toronto Star ($95,627.64), Van Press ($55,877.77), Calgary Flames Foundation ($42,465.32), Adbusters Media Foundation ($9,060) and Pete’s Pest Control in Saskatoon ($54.60) will go into a line-up of unsecured creditors and receive a few cents on the dollar at best.

But three directors, four top executives and 13 other senior members of Canwest management will share $9.8 million in Key Employee Retention Plan (KERP) bonuses, in addition to their already substantial salaries, simply to keep working.

Of course this defies common sense, which tells all but those soaked in “business logic” that he who destroys a business should not be rewarded for it.

But the bonuses are but one manifestation of the ways in which the Canwest rich get richer through the power our economic and legal systems offer a corporate aristocracy. In addition to the bonuses:

• Certain “current and former management employees” who were participants in the Canwest Global Communication Corp. and Related Companies Retirement Compensation Arrangement Plan were paid out, on Sept. 4, 2009, the approximately $47 million promised to them. (Part of the payment will be made later, after a tax refund from Revenue Canada.)
• Certain unnamed Canwest senior executives will continue to receive their current benefits until at least one year after the company emerges from CCAA and then retirement benefits for life. (The cost per year of these benefits is blacked out on documents.)
• Canwest directors will be protected against any financial liability, up to $20 million. This protection receives priority over almost every other debt the company owes.

Incredibly, when the newspaper side of the business also enters CCAA, more such examples of Canwest executives helping themselves to the last tasty remnants of a corporate carcass will likely be revealed.

Those with the power to look after themselves have done so and it is all deemed perfectly legal. In fact, the “insolvency system” seems designed to allow a select few to have one more big slurp from the bowl of gravy, along with the lawyers and other bankruptcy specialists. How else to explain the KERPs that are an ordinary part of the insolvency process in Canada?

Of course, would you expect anything different from an economic system that proudly trumpets: “Greed is good!” Or from a legal system designed, shaped and paid for by those with the most wealth to protect?

In fact, greed seems to be the one constant as corporate empires are built and then destroyed.

The problem is that the logic of greed means they’ll stop only when nothing is left. If we don’t soon rein in the greedy, they’ll take everything: Our wealth, our health, even our planet.

It’s at moments like this, while light is shone on the unfairness of the system and its excesses and absurdities, that we need to consider our core principles.

Perhaps need should replace greed as the foundation of our economy. Perhaps equity and one-person-one-vote should replace wealth and one-dollar-one-vote as our way of governing the essential institutions that we call corporations. Perhaps a half measure of common sense could replace “business logic.”

U.S. and other NATO military contingents operating in the provinces of Afghanistan’s predominantly Pashtun south and east have been hiring private militias controlled by Afghan warlords, according to these sources, to provide security for their forward operating bases and other bases and to guard convoys.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has acknowledged that U.S. and NATO ties with warlords have been a cause of popular Afghan alienation from foreign military forces. But the policy is not likely to be reversed anytime soon, because U.S. and NATO officials still have no alternative to the security services the warlords provide.

A report published by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University in September notes that U.S. and NATO contingents have frequently hired security providers that are covertly owned by warlords who have “ready-made” private militias which compete with state institutions for power.

The report cites examples of major warlords or their relatives or allies who have been contracted for security services in four provinces.

In Uruzgan province, both U.S. and Australian Special Forces have contracted with a private army commanded by Col. Matiullah Khan, called Kandak Amniante Uruzgan, with 2,000 armed men, to provide security services on which their bases there depend. That case was reported in detail in April 2008 by two reporters for The Australian, Mark Dodd and Jeremy Kelly.

Col. Khan’s security force protects NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoys on the main road from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt, where more than 1,000 Australian troops are based at Camp Holland, according to the The Australian in April 2008.

Col. Khan gets 340,000 dollars per month — nearly 4.1 million dollars annually — for getting two convoys from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt safely each month. Khan, now police chief in Uruzgan province, evidently got his private army from his uncle Jan Mohammad Khan, a commander who helped defeat the Taliban in Kandahar in 2001 and was then rewarded by President Karzai by being named governor of Uruzgan in 2002.

The Australian Defence Force claimed to The Australian that Col. Khan is paid by the Afghan Ministry of Interior to provide security on the main highways of Uruzgan province. The Australian military had previously refused to confirm or deny Australian payments to Col. Khan.

CanWest News Service’s Mike Blanchfield and Andrew Mayeda reported in November 2007 that the Canadian military had hired a “General Gulalai” to provide security for an undisclosed forward operating base. Gulalai is a warlord in southern Afghanistan who drove the Taliban out of Kandahar in 2001.

The same reporters revealed that Col. Haji Toorjan, a local warlord allied with Kandahar governor and major warlord Gul Agha Sherzai, was hired to provide security for Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar City, where Canada’s provincial construction team is located.

Blanchfeld and Mayeda found that the Canadian military had given 29 contracts worth 1.14 million dollars to a company identified as “Sherzai”, suggesting strongly that the former governor of Kandahar, who had become governor of Nangarhar province, was the owner.

The Canadian military refused to confirm whether Gul Agha Sherzai is indeed the owner.

In Badakhshan province, Gen. Nazri Mahmed, a warlord who is said to “control a significant portion of the province’s lucrative opium industry”, has the contract to provide security for the German Provincial Reconstruction Team, according to the NYU report.

The report suggests that the U.S. and NATO contingents are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on contracts with Afghan security providers, most of which are local power brokers guilty of human rights abuses.

In addition to Ahmed Wali Karzai, it names Hashmat Karzai, another brother of President Karzai, and Hamid Wardak, the son of Defence Minister Rahim Wardak, as powerful figures who control private security firms that have gotten security contracts without registering with the government.

Two anonymous United Nations sources cited in the report estimate that 1,000 to 1,500 unregistered armed security groups have been “employed, trained, and armed by ISAF” and “Coalition Forces” for security services. As many as 120,000 armed individuals are estimated by the U.N. sources to belong to about 5,000 private militias in Afghanistan.

Most Afghan warlords are widely reviled, mainly because the private armies they continue to control carry out theft and violence against civilians without any accountability.

In his initial assessment last August, Gen. McChrystal referred to “public anger and alienation” toward ISAF, of which he is commander, as a result of the perception that ISAF is “complicit” in “widespread corruption and abuse of power”.

That remark suggests that McChrystal, who had carried out the Special Forces’ policy of relying on Afghan warlords for security in the past, was now expressing concern about its political consequences.

Jake Sherman, a co-author of the NYU report, was a United Nations political officer involved in the effort to disarm warlords from 2003 to 2005. He is sceptical that U.S. policy ties with the warlords will be ended.

“I don’t see how U.S. and other contingents could sustain forward operating bases without paying these guys,” said Sherman in an interview with IPS.

Beyond their continuing dependence on the warlords for security services, Sherman sees another reason for keeping them on the payroll. If the U.S. and NATO military commanders tried to cut their ties with the private militias, Sherman said the warlords “would actually become a security threat”.

Sherman recalled that during his period working for the United Nations in northern Afghanistan, local police were hired to guard a World Food Programme warehouse in Badakhshan. After a rocket attack on the warehouse, an investigation quickly turned up the fact that the police themselves had carried out the attack to pressure the U.N. to hire more guards.

The present U.S. and NATO dependence on warlord armies is rooted in the policy of the George W. Bush administration in the early years after the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001.

The Central Intelligence Agency put the commanders of the forces who had defeated the Taliban on the payroll and gave them weapons and communications equipment to help U.S. counterterrorism squads locate any al Qaeda remnants in Afghanistan.

The commanders used the U.S. support to consolidate their political control over different provinces or sub-provincial areas. Human Rights Watch observed in a June 2002 report on the new relationships forged between the United States and the warlords, “While the U.S. government does not view this policy as actively supporting local warlords, the distinction is often lost on Afghan civilians who see coalition forces openly interacting with the warlords.”

Larry Goodson of the National War College, who participated in the 2002 process called the Loya Jirga under which the first post-Taliban Afghan government was established, told IPS he had recommended from the beginning a “de-warlordisation” process, in which “we took nasty, sleazy characters and turn them into less nasty, sleazy bosses.”

But the warlords were kept on the payroll, Goodson recalls, mainly because the troops controlled by the former commanders were seen as “force multipliers”, in a situation where foreign troops were in short supply.

Three Israel-related events this year have stayed in the headlines, reflecting the importance of Israel in Canadian political and cultural life.

First, Canadian Ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was recently honoured at Canada Park — built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law — as one of hundreds of donors who helped establish the park on the ruins of three Palestinian villages. Just north of Jerusalem, it was founded in the early 1970s following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in the 1967 war. It is hugely popular for walks and picnics with the Israeli public, who are by and large unaware that they are in Palestinian territory that is officially a closed military zone. Former Israeli parliamentarian Uri Avnery has described the park’s creation as an act of complicity in “ethnic cleansing” and Canada’s involvement as “cover to a war crime”. About 5,000 Palestinians were expelled from the area during the war. A plaque bearing Allen’s name is attached to a stone wall constructed from the rubble of Palestinian homes razed by the Israeli army. The Jewish National Fund, treated as a charity for tax purposes, establishes and manages such parks on behalf of Jewish people worldwide. Canada Park is believed to be the only example, outside East Jerusalem, of the JNF becoming directly involved in managing land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Then there is the wildly popular exhibition, “Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World,” at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), a joint project with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), funded by the Toronto Tanenbaum family dynasty who coincidentally were instrumental in the creation of Canada Park. This exhibition provided a fitting gala premier for the museum’s ultra-modern wing designed by Israeli-American Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind, whose parents were Polish Holocaust survivors, also designed the Berlin Jewish Museum, the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck, Germany, and the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. The Dead Sea Scrolls, regarded as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century and including what is purported to be the oldest known version of the Old Testament (150BC-70CE), were found by a Bedouin shepherd in caves near Qumran, near the Dead Sea, and later by the Palestine Archaeological Museum (also known as the Rockefeller Museum) in a joint expedition with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and the Ecole Biblique Française between 1947-1956. The Scrolls were displayed at the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem until 1967, when they were seized and relocated to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem. Since 1967, additional (illegal) excavations and findings by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) took place in Qumran and the surrounding area, and artefacts continue to be (illegally) appropriated by Israel, under the auspices of the IAA.

Under international law and in accordance with Canada’s and Israel’s obligations as signatories to the 1954 UNESCO protocol for the “Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict”, Israel is not entitled to these artefacts. The repatriation of the Scrolls and millions of other artefacts to Palestine remains a key issue for those seeking peace and justice in the Middle East. In 2005, Canada signed other UNESCO conventions and protocols specifically aimed at preventing the removal and the exhibition of illegally removed artefacts from occupied territories, and adopted domestic Canadian legislation — the Cultural Property Export and Import Act — which makes it a criminal offense to import cultural property in violation of the conventions. The ROM, for its own part, is a member of the Canadian Museums Association whose Ethics Guidelines states that “museums must guard against any direct or indirect participation in the illicit traffic in cultural and natural objects that are: stolen, illegally imported or exported from another state, including those that are occupied or war-stricken.” The 1954 Convention clearly requires Canada to “take into custody cultural property imported into its territory either directly or indirectly from any occupied territory” and “return, at the close of hostilities, to the competent authorities of the territory previously occupied, cultural property which is in its territory.”

Israel not only continues to illegally excavate in occupied Palestinian territory but dismisses international law altogether (despite its UNESCO pledges), using archeology and discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls to reinforce the Zionist national narrative and the colonial project upon which the state was founded. Supposedly a science removed from political, religious, or ideological bias, archeology under the IAA is the very antithesis of this, being rooted in Biblical mythology. Artefacts like the Scrolls are, according to Amos Elon, “almost titles of real estate, like deeds of possession to a contested country”. Like British, French, and German imperialist functionaries before them, Israeli archeologists sift through the many layers of historical evidence in search of what will prove their belief that they are indeed God’s Chosen People, ignoring or rather destroying the intervening layers and interpreting finds to suit their needs. The thousands of years of non-Jewish Arab civilisation don’t matter. Historian Keith Whitelam says in The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, the modern state of Israel has “cast its shadow of influence backwards to claim previous periods as its ‘prehistory’.” The IAA is just as much a steamroller, flattening indigenous Palestine, as the Israeli Defence Forces, in their policy of archeological apartheid. Committee Against Israeli Apapartheid (CAIA) activist Ali Mustafa writes that Israeli archeology is explicitly categorised by the IAA as either Jewish/Israeli or Arab/Muslim in a process whereby ancient artefacts that supposedly belong to the Biblical era are actively sought after, while supposedly encouraging Palestinians to do the same concerning later Islamic periods. Following the Oslo peace process, Israel claimed it was prepared to assign jurisdiction of all “Arab” and “Muslim” archeological sites in the West Bank over to the PA; however, the offer was flatly refused, and the PA instead demanded control over all sites, as well as an immediate return of artefacts seized since 1967. The logic is simple: conflate all Palestinian history as Islamic (openly disregarding Christian and secular influences), and apply these reductive and simplistic binary terms to all artefacts ignoring the region’s shared past and overlapping cultural heritage. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the Scrolls should be seized by ROM and the Canadian government under their international obligations and held or handed over to UNESCO until their ownership is determined, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation concluded in June that “the museum feels the scrolls are legally held and both the federal and provincial government have expressed their support of the exhibition.”

The third event is the Toronto International Film Festival’s “City to city Spotlight on Tel Aviv”, in cooperation with the Israeli Embassy and the Canada-Israel Cultural Foundation. Along with the ROM exhibition, this PR scheme was to be the centre- piece of Israeli Consul Gissin’s special Canadian “Brand Israel” campaign, dreamed up in 2008 on his arrival in Toronto, using the same mass marketing techniques of “The Israel Project”, launched in 2002 in the US, to present a more “benign” vision of Israel to the Canadian public. The Israel Project uses “grassroots” encounter groups to hone their propaganda efforts. Canadian partners in the Project’s Canadian spin-off included Sidney Greenberg of Astral Mediaand David Asper of Canwest Global Communications, arguably the most powerful media magnates in Canada, who are funding a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel.

“Brand Israel” is intended to take the focus off Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. In The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary, Frank Luntz explains: “Americans want a team to cheer for. Let the public know GOOD things about Israel … The language of Israel is the language of America: ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ’security’, and ‘peace’”. Fleshing out how to rebrand Israeli atrocities, Gissin made it clear that his mission was to “make Israel relevant” to Canadians and use Toronto as a test market for the Israel brand during his term. The lessons learned from Toronto would inform the worldwide launch of Brand Israel in the coming years, Gissin said. Official Brand Israel logos and advertising can be found across Toronto in bus shelters, on billboards, on radio and TV. Gissin said the ad blitz would be “an attack on all the senses.” The idea was to see “how to introduce a brand into Toronto” with emphasis on “grassroots” exposure, to promote Tel Aviv as a city of peace, untouched by the wars Israel has waged since 1948, despite the fact that many Palestinian communities were destroyed and Jaffa annexed to make way for the emergence of modern-day Tel Aviv.

But all is not well in the Land of Nod. The Canadian government regularly opines it is assiduously monitoring anti-Semitism despite the absence of anti-Jewish sentiment and despite the pro- Jewish nature of the media in this most laid-back, multicultural of nations. But Canadian “grassroots” are not limited to pro-Israeli marketing groups. Despite mainstream media subservience to Canada’s vigorous and large pro-Israeli lobby, some people have had enough. Zionist propaganda efforts in this “so friendly” country have increasingly met with resistance, and all the Israeli consuls in the world cannot undo the damage that Israeli war crimes have done and continue to do, as the siege in Gaza and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements continue.

There are now strong citizen groups fighting Canada’s official support of every Israeli government whim. There are many Jewish anti-Zionist groups, such as Jews for a Just Peace, Jewish Voices for Peace, Not in Our Name, Women in Solidarity with Palestine, Independent Jewish Voices, and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAZ). Nonspecific Jewish groups include Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), Palestine House, Canada Palestine Association, and the above-mentioned CAIA, which has grown rapidly with centres in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Anti-Zionist activists have been holding vigils regularly at the Toronto Israeli Consulate for eight years now. They are organising the sixth Anti-Apartheid Week to be held soon on more than 25 university campuses across the country, and demonstrations and fundraising events on behalf of Palestinians are held regularly. IJAZ has launched a campaign “Divest from Israel: Support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel”, which includes stickering Israeli products in stores, requesting stores to de-shelve Israeli products, targetting businesses, organisations or government officials that support Israel, “organise a public tachlit service, a ritual that symbolises the casting away of our misdeeds, to spiritually divest from Zionist narratives and mythology and to atone for the ways that we have fallen short in countering them.”

Allen’s support for Canada Park, implicitly condoning Israel’s ruthless ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, has landed him in hot water. He had to deny any personal contribution to Canada Park, an External Affairs spokesperson insisting that he had not made a personal donation and that his name had been included as a benefactor when his parents gave their contribution. Uri Davis, an Israeli scholar and human rights activist who has co-authored a book on the JNF calls Canada Park “a crime against humanity that has been financed by and implicates not only the Canadian government but every taxpayer in Canada.” Canada Park is particularly sensitive for Israel because it lies outside the country’s internationally-recognised borders. The Palestinian inhabitants’ expulsion, Eitan Bronstein, director of the Israeli NGO Zochrot (Remembering), said, was a premeditated act of ethnic cleansing of villagers who put up no resistance.”We have photographs of the Israeli army carrying out the expulsions,” he tells tourists, holding up a series of laminated cards. According to Zochrot, 86 Palestinian villages lie buried underneath JNF parks. Zochrot activists regularly select a destroyed village, taking Palestinian refugees with them as they place a handmade sign detailing the village’s name in Arabic and Hebrew. Within days, the signs are removed. Bronstein said he believes signs erected by official bodies may have a greater impact in opening Israeli minds. “In a recent newspaper interview, a senior JNF official admitted that it would be hard to stop our campaign,” he said. “Slowly we believe Israelis can be made to appreciate that their state exists at the expense of another people. Only then are Israelis likely to be ready to think about making peace.”

With Zochrot’s efforts in mind, Uri Davis joined in an application to the Canadian tax authorities to overturn the JNF’s charitable status and said attempts to rename Canada Park “Ayalon Park” over the past decade suggested that the Canadian authorities were already concerned about the prospect of the country’s involvement in the park coming under scrutiny. In April, before the ROM exhibition opened, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and executives at the ROM were sent letters of protest from senior officials of the Palestinian Authority, including PA President Mahmoud Abbas, declaring that the scrolls were in fact illegally seized by Israel following its occupation and annexation of the West Bank in 1967 and calling for their repatriation. The ROM exhibition inspired a campaign of protest led by the CJPME trying to get ROM officials to adjust the display of the artifacts to reflect the fact that the Scrolls were confiscated from East Jerusalem during Israel’s 1967 invasion and occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, to use “West Bank (Israeli-occupied)” and East and West Jerusalem with 1948 Armistice borders on maps. CJPME’s Thomas Woodley said, “We would like there to be a balanced narrative. The ROM is presenting the scrolls entirely from the Israeli perspective. There’s no discussion about what happened between their discovery and their exhibition today.”

ROM met with CJPME members and initially agreed to make changes and even distribute an additional leaflet to be inserted into the museum’s brochure. Friday pickets were held throughout the summer to inform the public about the theft of the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, a visit by Al-Ahram Weekly to the exhibition revealed that no such changes were made, and the history of their discovery in Jordan and seizure in 1967 was finessed. ROM’s PR spokesperson Marilynn Friedman declined to answer questions about why ROM reneged on promises to accommodate CJPME’s concerns.Woodley said ROM director Thorsell was receptive, and assumes that the IAA vetoed any changes that would detract from the Zionist narrative. Tens of thousands of innocent schoolchildren are being respectfully shepherded through subterranean, darkened halls, and left with the impression that the ancient “Israelis” inhabited the kingdom of “Judea”, that their “descendants” heroically prevented the “pillaging of the Scrolls by Bedouin” and are the rightful owners. The mythical kingdoms of 10th-3rd century BC Palestine — for which there is no conclusive evidence — are carefully delineated and explained in commentaries as if they are actual history. A dazzling success story for the most part for Gissin’s “Brand Israel”.

The dust-up, however, continues to provide a platform for activists to educate Canadians and empowers demonstrators at the nearby Israeli consulate. It has provided a 6-month platform for re-rebranding Israel as the centre of 21st-century apartheid. And no amount of slick PR can undo the fact that merely by continuing to exist, despite all odds, Palestinians endure as testimony to the injustice of “The Israel Project” in all its manifestations. Palestinians only have survival itself as proof of the crimes committed against them, choosing to maintain traditional dress, religious faith (both Christian and Islamic), and the historical memory of the Nakba as their most meaningful and durable expressions of resistance. Though former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir notoriously declared that “there is no such thing as Palestinians,” Palestinian academic Edward Said more accurately explained that, “In the case of a political identity that’s being threatened, culture is a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration.” The battle being waged over the Scrolls is not so much about any particular ethnic, religious, or even cultural-based claim, but more importantly a means of opposing Zionist colonial discourse.

Finally, TIFF’s cozying up to the Israeli propaganda machine blew up into a global scandal, as a spontaneous movement of protest among a few filmmakers turned into an international incident, bringing 1,500 signatures from prominent Israeli public figures and the likes of Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, Guy Maddin, Walter Bernstein, and Harry Belafonte to the now historic “Toronto Declaration”. Leading Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, the catalyst for the declaration, refused to screen his latest film Covered in protest. Egyptian director Ahmad Abdalla withdrew his feature film debut Heliopolis, as did Ahmed Maher (The Traveller). The protesters were denounced in the mainstream media, called “opportunists, hypocrites, fascists, censors, storm- troopers, apartheid-supporters, intolerant totalitarians, a mob of homophobic anti-Semitic terrorist regime supporters” acting “effectively [as] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s local fifth column” by Canadian film producer Robert Lantos. Yet the protest overshadowed the festival itself and was a godsend for educating the wider public, which could not help but hear about the unprecedented protest, despite mainstream media indifference or hostility. Greyson condemned the opportunism of TIFF for its complicity with the Israeli consulate’s “Brand Israel” campaign. “I’m reminded of last year, when the opening night party for Passchendaele featured real soldiers posing on a Canadian Armed Forces tank. Many of us were disturbed by this uncritical collaboration with the Canadian army, currently fighting in Afghanistan. So I have to ask: who is politicising TIFF? Why hasn’t TIFF explicitly explained and repudiated the perceived Brand Israel connection, beyond vague disavowals? What’s the extent of Israeli sponsorship, beyond airfare, receptions, and the Mayor’s presence? Why an exclusive programme of Israeli state-sponsored features, when shorts could have provided critical alternative voices?”

Opponents of Greyson wrote to York University, demanding that he be investigated, fired, even deported. In a delightful irony, the popular 2nd Toronto Palestinian Film Festival opened just a few weeks after TIFF closed. “It feels like the days of the first anti-apartheid struggle back in the 1970s,” enthused one activist. BDS is already a buzzword among politically-aware Canadians. Of course, there was much momentum back then from the successful anti-Vietnam War movement, the Zionist control of mainstream was less stifling, and there was much stronger political awareness in those Cold War years. But the anti-apartheid movement eventually brought everyone on board, even the notorious Margaret Thatcher, who seeing the writing on the wall, joined in. This anti-apartheid struggle phase two is picking up steam, even among Israel’s best friends. In presenting the Toronto Declaration, Greyson explained that he had just returned from South Africa, where he visited the Hector Pieterson Museum, dedicated to the memory of the 1976 Soweto massacre, where over 500 school children and anti-apartheid activists were killed by security forces. Among other things, the museum documents how this event became a turning point for the world, “a line in the sand, a moment when we ostriches finally woke up and expressed our outrage against South Africa’s apartheid regime. During my visit to the museum, the 2008 words of former Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni echoed in my head: ‘Israel practices a brutal form of apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.’” Greyson was overwhelmed by the outpouring of protest at TIFF and predicted that “Gaza represents a similar turning point to Soweto, a similar line in the sand. A moment when it’s imperative to speak out against the outrages of the Occupation.”

It’s getting to the point that it’s hard to tell who is the biggest opponent of Obama’s plans to bring peace to AfPak: the Taliban, the Pakistani government, or the Nobel committee. Oh yes, or virtually the entire world beyond the Washington beltway.

As the world marked the eighth anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October, the Taliban were stronger than ever – their forces have increased nearly fourfold since 2006. “We fought against the British invaders for 80 years,” Mullah Mohammad Omar reminded the world on the Taliban’s website. “If you want to colonise the country of proud and pious Afghans under the baseless pretext of a war on terror, then you should know that our patience will only increase and that we are ready for a long war.” A statement from the leadership insists, “We had and have no plan of harming countries of the world, including those in Europe. Our goal is the independence of the country and the building of an Islamic state.” They call for the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops as the only solution.

So far, there is no hint that Obama is even considering this no-brainer. On the contrary, the war is now being fought on two fronts, with the US and Britain starting an extensive training programme for Pakistan ’s Frontier Corps (FC) in Baluchistan, the new battleground.

It is part of the Obama administration’s massive military aid package to AfPak – Pakistan will get $2.8 billion over the next five years in addition to $7.5 billion in civilian aid, but only if it satisfies US benchmarks by making progress in “anti-terrorism and border control”. The Pakistani government and army are furious, not to mention the 60 per cent of Pakistanis who see the US as the greatest threat to Pakistan – with good cause. In the past few months, US forces have stepped up their aerial bombardments of villages in the northern tribal areas. According to the Pakistani press, of the 60 cross-border US drone strikes between January 2006 and April 2009, only 10 were able to hit their targets, killing 14 Al-Qaeda leaders and 687 civilians. Even official US policy (to kill no more than 29 civilians for every “high-value” person) is being violated. At least 23 Al-Qaeda leaders should have been killed, nine more than the actual 14. This assassination campaign is a more ruthless version of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, and can only spur the Taliban and Al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts.

True, Taliban control of the Pakistan frontier province SWAT was brought to a brutal end during the past six months by the Pakistani army, though civilian corpses continue to be dumped, with accusations of revenge and official terror labelled at the army. And the almost complete lack of reconstruction aid by the Pakistan government – with winter approaching – means the Taliban will probably regain SWAT. Local opposition to the war against both Afghanistan and Pakistan’s frontier region, especially Baluchistan, continues to grow, with the long-simmering Baluchi campaign for independence gaining new life daily.

Obama’s war plans have reached a critical stage. In an arrogant gamble, much like General MacArthur’s challenge to president Harry Truman in 1951 over the Korean war, General Stanley McChrystal recently demanded publicly that Obama provide 60,000 more troops for Afghanistan, boldly stating the war would be lost without them. Faced with a similarly outspoken MacArthur, Truman just as publicly fired him.

McChrystal is said to have offered the Commander in Chief several alternatives “including a maximum injection of 60,000 extra troops”, 40,000 and a small increase. Common in military planning is to discuss three different scenarios in order to illustrate why the middle option is preferable, though this is usually done privately. But the Obama administration faces growing hurdles within his Democratic Party if he decides to go with even the middle option.

Obama’s review of AfPak is now centring on preventing Al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan – a narrower objective that could require fewer, if any, new American troops. Obama-Biden no longer see the primary mission in Afghanistan as completely defeating the Taliban or preventing its involvement in the country’s future, a policy strongly opposed by Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Gates-Clinton have a point: once the Taliban are acknowledged as legitimate players who are of no strategic danger to the US, then the horror of the past eight years becomes excruciatingly clear. The defeat of the whole criminal project becomes inevitable and will be just as devastating for the US as the Soviet defeat was for the USSR.

But the Gates-McChrystal super-surge is just about impossible in any case. The Institute for the Study of War reported recently that the US military has only limited troops ready for deployment, meaning that forces might not reach the warzone until the summer of 2010. There are only three Army and Marine brigades – 11,000-15,000 troops – capable of deploying to Afghanistan this year. Troops are plagued by a severe lack of helicopters and all-terrain vehicles.

Whatever Obama decides – 60,000, 40,000 or 2 – the troops will have little time after they arrive to turn things around. Even super-loyal Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper just reaffirmed that Canadian troops will under no circumstances stay in Afghanistan after 2011. Any plans for the indefinite occupation of Afghanistan as touted by some NATO and US officials are fantasy; Canada’s retreat will be part of a flood. Canadian government support for the war, like that of its bigger brothers the US and Britain, has all along been motivated by Afghanistan’s untapped resource potential. The TAPI gas pipeline – so named for its 1680 kilometre path from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and eventually India – is slated to be constructed starting next year on the very soil that Canadian and US troops now occupy in southern Afghanistan.

Harper’s best-case scenario is for the pipeline to go ahead with Canadian participation and for a miracle to occur – the Taliban’s sudden and unexpected defeat, allowing Canadian troops to come home, the pipeline and other resource deals signed, and assuring him of a Conservative majority in the next election.“ Canada has the potential to beat rivals because it has such an uncheckered history in that part of the world,” argues Rob Sobhani, president of Caspian Energy Consulting. “People like Canadians, Canadians are apolitical.” Even if the miracle doesn’t happen and the pipeline deal collapses, Harper realises his political goose is cooked unless the troops come home, so he is forced to wash his bloody hands of this betrayal of Canada’s traditional international role of peacekeeper.

Obama needn’t rely on the Taliban as advisers on how to end the war. Deputy-general of the China Council for National Security Policy Studies Li Qinggong reflected official Chinese thinking on 28 September in Xinhua: The United States should first put an end to “the anti-terror war” and “end its military action. The war has neither brought the Islamic nation peace and security as the Bush administration originally promised, nor brought any tangible benefits to the US itself. On the contrary, the legitimacy of the US military action has been under increasing doubt.” Obama should take advantage of international opinion to withdraw troops immediately. This is no doubt also the hope of the Nobel committee that put its own credibility on the line by awarding him the Peace Prize. The UN Security Council permanent members should “draft a roadmap and timetable”, including deployment of an international peacekeeping mission.

The delicious irony of the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (and Iraq) is that it is China, the US ’s real international rival, that has benefited most. Chinese investments (and workers) have been pouring in to both US warzones. The main effect of George W Bush’s two wars and Obama’s AfPak has been to promote Chinese business interests, leaving the US bankrupt and its army in tatters.

The Obama Administration objected to the move by Israel that discriminates against American citizens of Palestinian origin. However, there has been no protest from Ottawa even though Time magazine and the Israeli daily Haaretz ran lengthy articles focusing on a Palestinian Canadian businessmen harmed by this new policy. A few weeks ago the Globe and Mail reported that “Although some of the most high-profile cases of individuals being turned away involve Canadian citizens, the Harper government has, so far, made no protest.”

This silence bolsters claims by some commentators that under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, Canada has become (at least diplomatically) the most pro-Israel country in the world. Israeli officials concur. After meeting Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, four other Conservative ministers and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in July 2009, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has openly called for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel, commented:

“It’s hard to find a country friendlier to Israel than Canada these days. Members both of the coalition and the opposition are loyal friends to us, both with regard to their worldview and their estimation of the situation in everything related to the Middle East, North Korea, Iran, Sudan and Somalia. No other country in the world has demonstrated such full understanding of us.”

Two days after Harper won a minority government in January 2006, Hamas won Canadian-monitored and facilitated legislative elections. Quickly after assuming power Harper made Canada the first country (after Israel) to cut its assistance to the Palestinian Authority. The aid cutoff, which was designed to sow division within Palestinian society, had devastating social effects.

Ostensibly, the aid cutoff was due to Hamas’s refusal to recognize Israel. Yet, Canada has not severed relations with Likud-led Israeli governments, which do not recognize the Palestinians’ right to a state. Harper explained, “Future assistance to any new Palestinian government will be reviewed against that government’s commitment to the principles of nonviolence, recognition of Israel and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations.” But support for Israel was never made contingent on “nonviolence” or an end to settlement construction.

In March 2007, Palestinian political factions representing more than 90 percent of the Palestinian Legislative Council established a unity government. Still, the Conservatives shunned the new government all the while claiming to speak regularly (like the Israelis) with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. When the unity government’s Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti traveled to Ottawa on a global peace tour, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay refused to meet him. Barghouti, who represents a secular party, explained at the time, “I think the Canadian government is the only government that is taking such a position, except for Israel.” Barghouti had already met the foreign ministers of Sweden and Norway, the Secretary-general of the United Nations and then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

However, once Hamas officials were ousted from the Palestinian Authority (PA), Ottawa restarted diplomatic relations and financial support. “The Government of Canada welcomes the leadership of President Abbas and Prime Minister [Salam] Fayyad in establishing a government that Canada and the rest of the international community can work with,” explained MacKay after the unity government’s collapse in mid-2007 and the appointment of a new government in Ramallah. “In light of the new Palestinian government’s commitment to nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, and in recognition of the opportunity for a renewal of peace efforts, Canada will provide assistance to the new Palestinian government.”

With Palestinian society divided and a more compliant authority in control of the West Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency contributed $8 million “in direct support to the new government.” Part of this aid was directed towards creating a Palestinian police force “to ensure that the PA maintains control of the West Bank against Hamas,” as Canadian ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was quoted by the Canadian Jewish News. US Lt. General Keith Dayton, in charge of organizing the Palestinian force, never admitted that he was strengthening Fatah against Hamas but to justify his program Dayton argued that Iran and Syria funded and armed Hamas. Bolstering Fatah to counteract the growing strength of Hamas was the impetus for Dayton’s mission. However, the broader aim is to build a force to patrol Israel’s occupation, a fact Dayton does little to dispel.

In January 2007, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay offered an immediate $1.2 million for Dayton’s mission. A fifth of Dayton’s initial staff was comprised of Canadians, and during a press conference with MacKay in Jerusalem Condoleezza Rice said Dayton “has a Canadian counterpart with whom he works very closely.” Two years later, Dayton’s military training force in the West Bank reportedly included nine Canadians, 16 Americans, three Brits and one Turk.

In June 2008, a Harper government press release announced, “Canada is a strong supporter of Palestinian security system reform, particularly through our contribution to the mission of Lt. General Keith Dayton, the US security coordinator, and to the European Union Police Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support.”

Canada’s contribution to the Dayton mission was part of a $300 million “aid” package that began in December 2007. According to the government agency Public Safety Canada, “a significant component [of the $300 million will be] devoted to security, including policing and public order capacity-building. This five year commitment will go towards the creation of a democratic, accountable, and viable Palestinian state that lives in peace and security alongside Israel.”

But does anything close to a “viable Palestinian state” exist? Is Israel allowing it to be created? Growing Jewish-only settlements, Israeli bypass roads and the apartheid barrier all make a Palestinian state far from realistic in the short to medium term. Yet Canadian officials act as if Israel is working toward a Palestinian state.

In Gaza, Israel’s occupation has turned into a blockade. For 27 months, Israel has reduced food and medicine from entering the tiny coastal territory to a fraction of what is needed by the besieged population. Yet, the Harper government has refused any criticism of the siege. Canada was the only country at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to vote against a January 2008 resolution that called for “urgent international action to put an immediate end to Israel’s siege of Gaza.” It was adopted by 30 votes with 15 abstentions.

Instead, the Conservative government has been quick to congratulate Israel for any small pause in its blockade. In January 2009 International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda proclaimed that “We commend Israel’s decision to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance [to Gaza] through a temporary ceasefire.” A day after Oda’s announcement, Israeli forces fired on a UN convoy during a ceasefire, killing a Palestinian aid worker. There was no follow-up statement from Oda condemning Israel’s actions.

Compared to Ottawa’s cheerleading, most of the world was hostile to Israel’s attacks on Gaza last winter. In solidarity with Gaza, Venezuela expelled Israel’s ambassador at the start of the bombardment and then broke off all diplomatic relations two weeks later. Israel didn’t need to worry since Ottawa was prepared to help out. “Israel’s interests in Caracas will now be represented by the Canadian Embassy,” explained the Jerusalem Post (Ottawa had been “doing this for Israel in Cuba” since 1973). In August 2009, the Canadian embassy in Caracas also began providing visas to Venezuelans traveling to Israel.

For defining Canadian policy as “we support Israel no matter what it does,” B’Nai Brith International bestowed Harper with its Presidential Gold Medallion for Humanitarianism. The first ever Canadian to receive the award, Harper joined former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, and US Presidents John F. Kennedy and Harry S. Truman. For its part, the Canadian Jewish Congress gave Harper its “prestigious Saul Hayes Human Rights award, named for a former CJC executive director, the first time it’s been given to a sitting PM.”

Despite the government’s strident support for Israel, grassroots opposition to that country’s policy has never been greater. Recent protests against the Toronto International Film Festival’s spotlight on Tel Aviv were a major setback to Israeli public relations efforts. The festival embarrassment followed massive demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza, when many cities across the country witnessed their largest ever Palestinian solidarity demonstrations.

Alongside displays of opposition to specific Israeli policy, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign is growing. Many social groups such as Independent Jewish Voices and Quebec’s most active student Federation, ASSE, have joined the BDS movement, as have a number of unions, including the Canadian Union of Public Employees (Ontario), the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the teachers Federation in Quebec. Social movements in Canada have never been more critical of Israel.

A report launched today by human rights group Survival International shows that tribal peoples across the world are at greatest risk from swine flu, as many have poor immunity and suffer chronic underlying illnesses.

The Matsigenka tribe has already been struck by swine flu. © J Mazower/Survival

The report comes just days after supplies of body bags were delivered to First Nations communities in Manitoba, Canada, along with hand sanitizers and face masks.

First Nations communities in the province have seen infection rates of 130 per 100,000 compared with just 24 per 100,000 among the general population. However, although many households do not have access to clean water, the Canadian government delayed sending hand sanitizers to reserve communities, where alcoholism is rife, for fear that people would attempt to ingest the alcohol in them.

Grand Chief David Harper told CBC, ‘I make a plea to the people of Canada to work with us to ensure the lowest fatalities from this monster virus. Don’t send us body bags. Help us organize; send us medicine.’

Armand MacKenzie of the Innu Nation of eastern Canada, said today, ‘In Canada, I hope that the words “highest attainable standards of health” mean more than sending body bags to Indigenous First Nations communities. We need a real pandemic plan in partnership with Indigenous First Nations. Not body bags!’

The report also raises concern for isolated tribes who have no immunity to outside diseases and for whom even the common cold can prove fatal. Members of the Matsigenka tribe in the Peruvian Amazon have already been struck by swine flu, leading to fears for the health of neighbouring uncontacted tribes. Any contact with outsiders carrying the virus could devastate entire communities.

Stephen Corry, Director of Survival, said, ‘That tribal peoples are worst affected by swine flu comes as no surprise. Years of colonialism and forced assimilation policies have left them in destitution with chronic health problems. This report makes for sober reading but it should also serve as a wake up call to those governments that have ignored the health needs of their most vulnerable populations for too long.’

On 23 September, many western delegates walked out of the United Nations General Assembly chambers during Ahmadinejad’s speech. The United States accused Ahmadinejad of using “hateful, offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric.” Canada boycotted the address because, according to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, Ahmadinejad had said “absolutely repugnant” things about Israel. Neither country quoted what was repugnant or anti-Semitic.

A JTA article stated, “The lowlight, I suppose, would be this portion, where he attacks the ‘Zionist regime,’ accuses Jews of controlling the world and then blasts the United States, too.”²

From another JTA article:

Ahmadinejad spoke of “the elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,” during his speech to the UN, but otherwise didn’t mention his country’s nuclear program. Instead, he criticized Israel’s “inhuman policies in Palestine” and said the Jewish state had committed “genocide” in a speech that led to walkouts by numerous other countries in the General Assembly.³

First, Ahmadinejad never mentions the word “Jewish” in his speech. Second, the only time he uses the word “Jews” is when he talked about “prepar[ing] a conducive ground for all Palestinian populations, including Muslims, Christians and Jews to live together in peace and harmony…”

Third, as for “genocide,” Ahmadinejad said: “How can the crimes of the occupiers against defenseless women and children and destruction of their homes, farms, hospitals and schools be supported unconditionally by certain governments, and at the same time, the oppressed men and women be subject to genocide and heaviest economic blockade being denied of their basic needs, food, water and medicine.”

JTA does not deny the charges by Ahmadenejad.

There are plenty of Jews that acknowledge the “Jewish state” is committing “genocide.” There are plenty of Israeli academics who acknowledge the Nakba.⁴

The Goldstone report — as mitigating of Israeli war crimes as it may be in equating the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed — is further acknowledgment of Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians.⁵

JTA mentions an “apparent reference to Jews, ‘It is no longer acceptable that a small minority would dominate the politics, economy and culture of major parts of the world by its complicated networks, and establish a new form of slavery, and harm the reputation of other nations, even European nations and the U.S., to attain its racist ambitions.’”³

JTA conflates Zionism with Jewry. It is Zionism that is the enemy of Jews.⁶ It is Zionists who collaborated with Nazis during WWII.⁷ It is Zionists who practice racism. Ahmadinejad made an apparent reference to Zionists.

Without a doubt Zionism is rife in Israel,⁸ and it is much supported by Jews outside Israel, but there is also significant opposition to Zionism among Jews outside Israel. Humanity is diverse and so are Jews.

Double Standards in the West

The Iranian disclosure of a second uranium enrichment facility in Iran has raised the hackles of neoliberal politicians in the West.

Stephen Harper called it a “grave threat to international peace and security.”

At a G20 news conference in Pittsburgh, Harper said, “Iran, the combination of its abhorrent ideology and its interest in nuclear technology, combined with increasing evidence of its obvious disregard for international law and for its obligations, constitutes a grave threat to international peace and security.”

Since when is “interest in nuclear technology” a crime or something bad? To pursue nuclear technology is a right of all nations. Canada has a nuclear program; it enriches uranium. Does Canada mention its nuclear program in speeches to the United Nations? Does Israel mention its nuclear program?

As for “obvious disregard for international law,” is that unlike Israel with a string of condemnatory UN Security Council resolutions on record against it and numerous others vetoed by the US?⁹ Or is this not obvious disregard?

What is the “abhorrent ideology”? He couldn’t mean the pursuit of nuclear weapons because that would include the US, Britain, France, and Israel. And certainly Zionism is not an “abhorrent ideology” for Harper. He promised Israel would always have a “steadfast friend” in his government. Erstwhile Canadian prime minister Paul Martin once remarked, “Israel’s values are Canada’s values.”

US president Barack Obama stated that Iran must “be held accountable to international standards and international law.”

Are all states states to be held equally accountable by Obama? What about Israel? Will the state cited several times as a violator of international law by UN Security Council resolutions “be held accountable to international standards and international law”? Will Israel’s nuclear weapons be dismantled and its nuclear facilities subjected to IAEA inspection? Will the US — the aggressor of Iraq, frequent violator of international law, found guilty by the World Court in 1987 of terrorism — “be held accountable to international standards and international law”?¹⁰

Obama threatened, “When we find that diplomacy does not work, we will be in a much stronger position to, for example, apply sanctions that have bite.”

Diplomacy (if one can call it that) hasn’t worked for many decades in historical Palestine, and the only US sanctions are against the oppressed Palestinians for daring to resist dispossession and genocide. Conversely, the oppressor state receives billions in US “aid” and diplomatic cover in the UN.

Obama added, “I would love nothing more than to see Iran choose the responsible path.”

One wonders if that is like the “responsible path” that the US took in aggressing Iraq on pretext of possessing weapons-of-mass-destruction and killing over a million people? Or is the “responsible path” the one Obama took in deciding to up the military ante in Afghanistan, thereby increasing the violence and killing?

British prime minister Gordon Brown said, “The international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand.”

One wonders: is that like the lines the imperialist British regime drew in the Middle East when it carved up the Arab world, breaking its promise to its World War I allies? Is it like how the British decided to give away Arab land to Occidental Jews without asking permission from the Oriental inhabitants of the land? It would seem that Britain has a far from marvelous history of drawing lines in the sand.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy charged that Iran’s enrichment facility is “a challenge made to the entire international community… We cannot let Iranian leaders gain time while the motors are running.”

Yet France is the country that helped Israel develop the Dimona nuclear facility and become a nuclear power.¹¹ What about the Israeli “challenge made to the entire international community”?

Furthermore, the US, Britain, and France have a responsibility under the NPT to dismantle their nuclear weaponry. So what moral weight do such pronouncements from western leaders have? Is there something about the US, Britain, France, Canada, and Israel (this bellwether of colonizing or colonized states) that gives them some superiority in rights over other states?

Moreover, what does this reveal about the western corporate media, which merely serve as mouthpieces for the state’s interests rather than scrutinizing concentrations of power?

Choosing the Responsible Path

The US and other nuclear-armed states could gain much legitimacy if they act henceforth to eliminate stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

CBC warned, “Beyond sanctions, the leaders’ options are limited and perilous. Military action by the United States or an ally such as Israel could set off a dangerous chain of events in the Islamic world.”¹²

Would that be, as Obama puts it, choosing “the responsible path”?

1. Western media purports the revelation is because the US and its allies were aware of its existence. David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “U.S. and Allies Warn Iran Over Nuclear ‘Deception’,” New York Times, 25 September 2009.
2. Eric Fingerhut, “Ahmadinejad’s speech to the General Assembly,” JTA, 23 September 2009.
3. JTA Staff, “Ahmadinejad slams Israel as world powers turn up heat,” JTA, 24 September 2009.
4. For example, Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006). Does Pappe go far enough? See Kim Petersen, “Nakba: The Israeli Holocaust Denial,” Dissident Voice, 18 March 2007. Ethnic cleansing is argued to be genocide: Rony Blum, Gregory H. Stanton, Shira Sagi and Elihu D. Richter, “‘Ethnic cleansing’ bleaches the atrocities of genocide,” The European Journal of Public Health Advance Access, 18 May 2007. See also Kim Petersen, “Bleaching the Atrocities of Genocide,” Dissident Voice, 7 June 2007.
5. Richard Goldstone, “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” Human Rights Council, 15 September 2009.
6. See Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume One: The False Messiah (Clarity Press, 2009). I will write a review upcoming.
7. Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal (1983).
8. Etgar Lefkovits, “Overwhelming Israeli support of Gaza op,” Jerusalem Post, 15 January 2009.
9. ”List of United Nations resolutions concerning Israel,” Wikipedia.
10. See Nils Andersson, Daniel Iagolnitzer, and Diana G. Collier (Eds), International Justice and Impunity: The Case of the United States (Clarity Press, 2008). Review.
11. Peter Pry, Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984): 11.
12. ”Iranian nuclear revelation a grave threat: Harper,” CBC News, 25 September 2009.

If you answer the latter, take your place alongside the Harper government and other sectors of the political elite that attack a largely historic form of oppression to advance a present day pro-imperial foreign-policy and anti-immigrant/anti-aboriginal domestic agenda.

Despite a loud chorus claiming otherwise, anti-Semitism is a mere fig leaf of its former oppressive character. Six decades ago “none is too many” was the order of the day in Ottawa, which rejected Jewish refugees escaping Nazi concentration camps. This hostile anti-semitic climate continued into the 1950s with institutions such as McGill University in Montreal imposing quotas on Jewish students. But Christianity’s decline, combined with a rise in antiracist politics has significantly undercut anti-Semitism as a social force in Canada.

Today, Jews are largely seen as white people. Canada’s Jewish community is well represented among institutions of influence in this country and there is very little in terms of structural racism against Jews (which is not to say there isn’t significant cultural stereotyping, which must be challenged). But in an inversion of reality, the more anti-Semitism declines as a social force the more it concerns the political elite.

Why?

As a way to silence critics of Israel, of course. More generally, the Conservatives, supported by the Jewish establishment, allege anti-Semitism to advance a broadly pro-empire foreign-policy.

In April 2009, Harper explained: “we are very concerned that, around the world, anti-Semitism is growing in volume and acceptance.” A month later, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister (formerly Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity) Jason Kenney told a European audience, “peaceful and pluralistic Canada sees signs that this evil [anti-Semitism] is newly resurgent.” Then, in a statement bordering on Holocaust denial, he added, “I also very acutely understand the nature of the new anti-Semitism, and I think it’s even more dangerous than the old European anti-Semitism.”

There have been few similar proclamations about racism directed towards First Nations, Blacks or any other group in Canada. A Canadian Newsstand search for Jason Kenney Islamophobia; Jason Kenney racism against Blacks; Jason Kenney missing Native/Aboriginal women brings up nothing of substance. On the other hand, a search of Jason Kenney and anti-Semitism elicited dozens of articles, including many strong comments from the Minister.

The Conservatives, which get few Jewish votes but are close with its right-wing establishment, have used the politics of anti-Semitism to crowd out action regarding more oppressive forms of bigotry. Despite the fact that Muslims and Blacks are more likely to be targeted, “Jewish organizations have received 84 per cent of the funding announcements under a federal program that provides security for groups at risk of being attacked in hate crimes,” reported the Canadian Press three weeks ago. “Forty-six of the 55 projects funded by Ottawa since February 2008 belonged to Jewish community groups.”

At the level of international diplomacy the Harper government’s cries of anti-Semitism are a transparent attempt to silence critics of Israeli crimes. But there is more to it. The accusations of anti-Semitism are a way to advance a broader right-wing foreign-policy agenda.

Beyond defending Israel, there are a number of recent instances where anti-Semitism has been used by Canadian politicians to advance ‘white’ or imperial policies. Last April, Virginie Levesque, a spokesperson for the Canadian Embassy in Venezuela, accused socialist oriented president Hugo Chavez of anti-Semitism. “The Canadian Embassy has encouraged and continues to encourage the Venezuelan government to follow through on its commitment to reject and combat anti-Semitism and to do its utmost to ensure the security of the Jewish community and its religious and cultural centers.”

That same month, two Liberal MPs presented a petition to the House of Commons claiming an increase in state-backed anti-Semitism in Venezuela. Former Liberal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler said Venezuela has seen a “delegitimization from the president on down of the Jewish people and Israel.” These unsubstantiated accusations of anti-Semitism are designed to further demonize a government that threatens North American capitalist/geopolitical interests.

Additionally, Canada was the first country to withdraw from last April’s World Conference against Racism in Geneva. Defending Israel was part of the Harper government’s motivation for pulling out of the conference; they also had little interest in discussing the dispossession of First Nations, colonialism or the African slave trade. An “anti-Semitic anti-West hate fest dressed up as anti-racism conference” is how one unnamed Canadian official described the meeting.

Claiming the conference was anti-Semitic was the only politically palatable justification for withdrawing. In fact, Israel was barely on the agenda as Naomi Klein describes in this month’s Harper’s magazine. She points out how pro-Israel groups effectively undermined extensive efforts by (largely) black activists to force the international community to define colonialism and the slave trade as crimes against humanity. “Perhaps the best way to describe the convergence of interests in Geneva is to say that pro Israel groups succeeded in convincing 10 governments to boycott a conference that they never wanted to come to anyway.”

It’s particularly ironic that the Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister has been the most fervent proponent of anti-Semitism politics. Claims of anti-Semitism do not in any way challenge white supremacy, something a multiculturalism minister should take on.

Harper gave Jason Kenney, the most right wing member of his cabinet, the immigration and multiculturalism portfolio. Is that because the Conservative party’s (anti-Aboriginal, anti-immigrant) base opposes multiculturalism? Does the focus on claims of “racism” against white Jews simply offer a convenient cover for continued white supremacy?

This outrage did not occur in the United States, but in Canada.¹ Under capitalism, all nations limit access to medical care, and Canada is no exception.

Why Ration Medical Care?

Most people believe that medical care is a human right, and everyone should have access to the care they need.

However, when profits matter more than human rights, medical care is rationed. People get only what they can pay for, or what employers, insurance companies and governments decide to give them.

The only way to provide medical care as a human right is to provide universal access.

Universal access should not be confused with improved access. Universal access means no rationing, so that the CEO, the factory worker and the homeless addict would all receive the best medical care that society can provide.

Politicians who talk about universal access to medical care don’t mean equal access, they mean that everyone should have some access or more access.

One cannot eliminate class divisions in medicine without also eliminating them in society, so capitalism keeps universal access off the agenda. We are not allowed to question whether medical care (or any essential service) should be rationed by class. We can dispute only the form and extent of this rationing.

Opposition to universal medical care is not only political, it is also financial. While productivity and profits are linked to the health of the workforce, employers don’t want to pay taxes to provide for medical services. And some capitalists reap huge profits from privatized medicine.

The ruling class shows no interest in what is medically preferable — universal access with an emphasis on illness prevention and social health. Its priority is to cut costs, maintain profit-making opportunities and keep the working class under control.

These concerns are addressed by a class-based, treatment-oriented medical system, where the rich have access to the best services, the middle class and skilled workers have limited access through pooled insurance programs, and the poor are provided with a bare-bones basket of government-funded services. This is the standard formula for medical systems under capitalism, with different nations displaying variations on this basic model.

While the debate to reform American medicine emphasizes the differences between the Canadian and American medical systems, both nations are deeply divided by class, and their medical systems reflect those divisions.

In the US, medical rationing is based on ability to pay. The resulting inequality is up-front and obvious. Canada rations medical care by under-funding the public health care system, bringing inequality through the back door.

US Rationing

All Americans can access medical services — if they can pay for them. Most can’t.

Sixty percent of the US workforce make less than $15 an hour. In 2005, the average annual insurance premium for a family of four ($10,880) cost more than the annual income of a full-time minimum-wage worker ($10,712), before deductibles, co-payments and the cost of non-insured treatments.²

Currently, 47 million Americans have no medical insurance. Those who have insurance can’t count on getting the care they need because insurance companies refuse to cover many conditions and set limits on how much they will pay. Whenever possible, they deny payment, forcing people to go without or pay out of pocket, making medical bills a prime source of bankruptcy.

In America’s free-market system, access to medical care is based on the ability to pay, and the working class is free to go without.

Canadian Rationing

Canada has established medical care as a legal right. In reality, the medical system is too poorly funded to provide comprehensive services to all, so some people are excluded altogether, and access is limited for everyone else.

To reduce the cost of medical programs, each province sets conditions on who qualifies for coverage. To obtain Ontario health insurance (OHIP), one must:

* be a Canadian citizen or a documented immigrant

* be a permanent resident of Ontario

* be physically present in the province for 153 days in any 12-month period

Visitors, transients, undocumented immigrants, and refugees without status are not covered.

As a final obstacle, a three-month waiting period is imposed before coverage begins. The Ontario government web site “strongly encourages new and returning residents to purchase private health insurance in case you become ill during the OHIP waiting period.”

In Canada, as in the US, the capitalist class exerts constant pressure to reduce government-funded social services. Bureaucrats are employed to measure “cost-efficiency” and achieve “cost-containment” by reducing the number of services provided, forcing health workers to do more for less and outsourcing to the private sector.

To keep costs down, medical school enrollment has been restricted to the point that Canada needs 26,000 more doctors just to meet the OECD average number of physicians-per-population.

Under-funding forces patients to wait for assessment and treatment, and half of Canadians report waiting longer than they consider reasonable.³ The seriousness of this problem is hotly debated on both sides of the border.

Advocates of privatized health care emphasize how long Canadians wait in order to discredit all government-funded systems, even though millions of Americans with no insurance essentially wait forever. In contrast, defenders of medicare minimize the problem of wait times, making it harder to fight for more funding for the system.

When people have to wait for essential services, those with money and connections find a way to get to the front of the line or to bypass it altogether. The longer the line, the more inequality grows, and the more pressure there is to develop private-sector alternatives.

Comparing the US and Canada

In Canada, 13 provinces and territories administer medical care, resulting in 13 different payers with limited transferability between them. There is also a market of competing private companies that provide workplace, group and individual insurance to cover medical services not funded by the provincial plans.

In the United States, government is the largest single provider of medical funding. About 100 million Americans (one in three) receive medical care through government-funded programs like Medicaid, Medicare, the military and government employee health benefits.

The basic difference between the Canadian and US medical systems is the proportion of government funding to private funding. In Canada, government pays 70 percent of medical costs, while individuals and private insurance companies pay the rest. In the United States, this proportion is reversed.

Government-funded medical systems offer two important advantages: the cost of medical care is socially shared, so that individuals aren’t crippled by medical expenses; and medical benefits are removed from the employers’ control, so that workers can change jobs without fear of losing access to care.

These advantages diminish when governments under-fund the medical system, forcing people to pay for their own care or rely on workplace medical benefits.

Because most Americans want a government-funded universal medical system, they could benefit from learning how Canadian medicare was won, and how it is now being lost.

The Fight for Canadian Medicare

Until the 1960’s both the American and Canadian medical systems were dominated by the private sector. Charitable organizations provided minimal care for the poor. Regular medical care was reserved for those who could pay and for those whose employers would pay for them.

Like their American counterparts, Canadian physicians and insurance companies vigorously opposed any reforms that smacked of “state medicine” or “socialism.” Neither business nor government supported access to medical care as a human right.

During the 1960s, popular pressure grew for universal health care. To contain demand, the federal government launched a Royal Commission to “study” the problem. The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) made its preference clear:

We favor a system of public health care that will be universal in application and comprehensive in coverage. We favor a system that will present no economic barrier between the service and those who need it. We are opposed to any provision which will require some people to submit themselves to a means test in order to obtain service. We look to a system of health care that will be regarded as a public service and not as an insurance mechanism.⁴

Despite the grass-roots demand for socialized medicine, where the State is both payer and provider, the Medical Care Insurance Act of 1966 established socialized insurance, a publicly-financed, private enterprise system “free of government control or domination.” It took five more years to implement the Act in all provinces.

In the province of Quebec, union demands peaked in the 1972 general strike. In response, Quebec incorporated medical services into a broad social benefits system, paid for and provided by the provincial government.

The Quebec working class is rarely credited for winning the most comprehensive socialized medical system in North America.

Rolling Back the Gains

The initial funding agreement for medicare was 50-50, with federal and provincial governments sharing the cost. In 1977, the federal government created a more complex system for transferring payments to the provinces and dropped its share of medical funding to 20 percent.

As federal funds diminished, the provinces were forced to pay more. The result was round after round of cuts to hospital budgets and other medical services. Because the provinces varied widely in their ability to pay for medical programs, the principle of equal access was eroded.

Medical care was still free, but there was less of it available. Private insurers rushed into the breach created by under-funding. The more services were cut from the medicare basket, the more individuals had to purchase insurance, pay out of pocket or go without.

In 1984, the federal government passed the Canada Health Act to reassure nervous Canadians that medicare was safe. Universal access to medical services was guaranteed on paper, but no funds were provided to implement the principle. Behind the scenes, politicians were preparing the ground for privatized health care.

In 1994, the Ontario government stated,

To have the effective launching pad it needs, the health industries sector must expand its share of its own home market. Steps must be taken to ensure that, as in other countries, the domestic market supports the development of globally competitive companies.⁵

One of these steps was to scrap regulations that ensured a minimum level of daily care for patients in nursing homes.

In 1997, the federal government declared,

Promoting Canadian companies as global health-keepers is the main objective driving the strategies and plans of the government for the medical devices, pharmaceutical and health-services sector.⁶

Behind the mask of health-care “reform” and “restructuring,” the Canadian medical system is being handed, piece-by-piece, to private industry in a manner similar to the dismantling of Britain’s National Health Service.⁷

Publicly-provided medical care is under-funded to the point of crisis, then condemned for its inadequacies. The private sector is proclaimed the only possible savior, and opponents are ridiculed as old-fashioned and sentimental. When the market fails to deliver, the public is told to adapt to “the new reality.”

Canadian medicare is currently so under-funded that, in 2004, Canada’s Supreme Court declared, “The Canada Health Act [does] not promise that any Canadian will receive funding for all medically required treatment.”

The CUPE Hospital Strike

The strongest opposition to the attack on medicare has come from unionized health workers. As operating costs rose and budgets fell, Canadian hospitals became a battleground. In every province, hospital workers fought cuts to staff and programs and out-sourcing of services to for-profit, non-union corporations.

In 1981, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) struck the Ontario Hospital Association. At one hospital, workers locked out management and continued working under their own elected committee. For seven days, 13,000 strikers defied provincial back-to-work legislation, the jailing of top union officials and the firing of key strike leaders.

When management refused to budge, the next logical step would have been to mobilize the other sections of CUPE for an all-out public-sector strike. Unwilling to take that step, union officials caved.

The defeat was substantial. Most small, local hospitals were closed. The remaining hospitals were merged into giant conglomerates managed by business consultants.

Privatization has decimated Canadian medicare. Tens of thousands of hospital nursing jobs have disappeared at the same time that hospital stays have been cut, so that fewer nurses care for much sicker patients. Deadly, infectious diseases sweep through hospitals that no longer have enough cleaning staff.⁸

Most rehabilitation and chronic-care facilities have closed or gone private, transferring the burden of caring for the sick, injured and frail to their families.

Hospital out-patient clinics have closed, and discharged hospital patients are now directed to family doctors for follow-up. But there are not enough doctors to meet the demand.

By 2006, fewer than 10 percent of Ontario family doctors were accepting new patients. Currently, five million Canadians (one in six) have no family doctor. Patients can wait weeks to see a doctor, months to see a specialist and many more months for treatment.

Funding cuts have severely damaged Quebec’s model medical system. In 2005, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that lack of timely access to treatment in Quebec was so serious that the province could no longer prohibit private funding for medically necessary services. Similar legal challenges are expected in the other provinces.

The Canadian experience proves that government-funded medical systems don’t guarantee timely access to needed medical services. Ironically, while many Americans long for a Canadian-style medical system, that system is disintegrating under the pressure of market forces.

We Need a Fighting Labor Movement

Hundreds of American labor organizations have endorsed HR 676 — The United States National Health Insurance Act to establish a national insurance system. However, endorsements alone will not be enough to defeat a powerful medical insurance industry, overcome resistance to increased State funding and counter the right-wing campaign against “entitlements.”

The people at the top of society believe that medical services should be rationed on the basis of class, and they raise the highest stink when anyone suggests that they share access with everyone else. They don’t want any restrictions placed on their access to “Rolls Royce” medicine, and they will fight tooth and claw to keep their class privileges. If you have any doubt of that, read What Happened in Chile: An Analysis of the Health Sector Before, During, and After Allende’s Administration.

If allowed to vote on the matter, most Americans would choose a universal health care system.⁹ Because we will never get to vote on it, we must build a mass movement that is large enough and determined enough to win it.

The extent of medical rationing that exists at any point in time in any nation is determined by the balance of class forces. Too little rationing generates a sense of mass entitlement (or equality) that can be difficult to contain. Too much rationing generates class anger that can also be difficult to contain.

It took a revolution in France to scare Germany into establishing Europe’s first national medical plan in 1883. In Britain, the National Insurance Act of 1911 was rushed through Parliament during a strike wave. And Canadian medicare was consolidated in 1972, the year of the Quebec General Strike.

The US is the only industrialized country without a national medical plan, because the American labor movement has been too weak to win it.

During the crisis of the 1930s, President Roosevelt conceded the New Deal, but excluded national medicare. To quell the protests of the 1960s, President Johnson conceded Medicare and Medicaid, but held the line on universal coverage.

American workers continue to be divided by race and dominated by union bureaucrats who collaborate with management. As a result, working and living conditions for most Americans continue to deteriorate, along with their health and their access to medical care.

We need to build a new labor movement that will fight for comprehensive, universal medicare. The trillions of dollars being spent to impose US control over the Middle East would more than cover the cost of a top-notch national medical system.

We need a fighting labor movement that pays more than lip-service to the principle of “an injury to one is an injury to all” and actively supports health workers who are fighting for higher staff-to-patient ratios, lower work loads and the right to blow the whistle on deficient and dangerous patient-care conditions.

Every day, the world becomes a sicker place. And every day, the gap grows between what people need and what capitalism is willing to provide.

Our challenge is to build a labor-based, mass movement that will reject medical rationing, fight for universal medical care and keep on fighting to end all class inequality.

1. Cited in Lepage-Monette, A., “Programs that work: Ensuring health care for the uninsured,” Medical Post, Toronto, March 4, 2008, p.6.
2. Colliver, V., “Health plans dwindle in U.S.: Number of firms offering insurance drops as costs rise,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 15, 2005, p.C-1.
3. The mortality risk for those who waited longer for hip surgery was 22 percent higher than for those treated within two days of admission to hospital. The Canadian Institute for Health Information. Health Indicators, 2007.
4. Cited in Fuller, C. (1998). Caring for profit: How corporations are taking over Canada’s health care system. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
5. “Healthy and Wealthy, A Growth Prescription for Ontario’s Health Industries.” Report of the Health Industries Advisory Committee to the Ontario Ministry of Health, March 1994.
6. National Sector Team: Health Industries, “Canadian International Business Strategies – ‘97-’98,” Report for Industry Canada, March 20, 1997.
7. Pollock, A.M. (2004) NHS plc: The privatization of our health care. New York, NY: Verso.
8. Valiquette, L. et. al. (2004). Clostridium difficile infection in hospitals: a brewing storm. CMAJ, July 6, Vol.171, No.1.
9. On November 3, 1998, Illinois residents voted on the “Bernardin Amendment for Universal Health Care” which states, “Health care is an essential safeguard of human life and dignity, and there is an obligation for the State of Illinois to ensure that every citizen is able to realize this fundamental right. On or before May 31, 2002, the General Assembly by law shall enact a plan for universal health care coverage that permits everyone in Illinois to obtain decent health care on a regular basis.” Eighty-three percent of voters in Cook County and 71 percent in the downstate/suburban areas endorsed it. The vote was not binding.

A new documentary by filmmaker Damien Gillis shows how current practices used by Norwegian-owned companies operating in Canadian waters continue to threaten wild salmon and the iconic species that feed on them, including grizzly bears, bald eagles and killer whales. The film, Dear Norway: Help Save Canada’s Wild Salmon, also features testimonies from local scientists, fishermen and First Nations chiefs detailing the dangers posed by open-net fish farms to British Columbia’s biologically diverse ecosystems.

More than 50 Pure Salmon Campaign partners and global allies sent a letter to King Harald of Norway asking him to help protect wild fish populations from Norwegian-owned salmon farms. The campaign also invited King Harald to a screening of Dear Norway at Aqua Nor. Norway’s king officially opens this year’s trade show and will be joined by Norway’s fisheries minister, Helga Pedersen as well as the Canadian fisheries minister, Gail Shea. Aqua Nor runs from August 18-21 (The Pure Salmon Campaign’s booth is # B-111C).

“The weight of scientific evidence my colleagues and I have published in peer-reviewed journals shows that sea lice from Norwegian-owned salmon farms are pushing wild pink salmon toward extinction,” said Alexandra Morton, director of the Salmon Coast Field Station. “I personally invite the King of Norway, together with fellow passionate angler John Fredriksen, to come out to the Broughton Archipelago to bear witness themselves to the poor practices of Marine Harvest, Cermaq and Grieg.”

Despite repeated calls for reform, the Norwegian government – a major shareholder in the aquaculture industry – has yet to take responsibility for its management practices in Canada.

“Norwegian salmon farming companies continue to disregard our peoples’ directives to alter their business practice, to respect our territories and natural resources,” said Chief Bob Chamberlin of the Musgamagw Tsawataineuk Tribal Council. “This is in direct conflict with the Norwegian Government’s support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is a real shame that such behaviour from Norwegian companies is acceptable and in conflict with international positions made on behalf of all Norwegian Citizens”

Norwegian-owned companies control more than 90% of British Columbia’s salmon farming production.

“It is ironic that the King of Norway is opening the world’s largest farmed salmon trade show in one of only two fjords where wild salmon are fully protected from salmon farms,” said Geir Kjensmo, chairman of the Norwegian Salmon Association. “In view of the declines in wild salmon and sea trout stocks and rise in sea lice infestation here in Norway, the Laksfjord protection in the Trondheimsfjord and the Tanafjord must be extended to completely cover other fjords. And the message coming loud and clear from Canada is that wild Pacific salmon must be afforded protection from Norwegian-owned open net cages misplaced on migration corridors.”

“Norwegian authorities must look to British Columbia and learn from the severe, documented effects that sea lice from the fish farms are having on the migrating wild smolts,” said Vegard Heggem, a river owner on the River Orkla near Trondheim. “Norway should take a leading role to quickly develop and implement the use of closed containment systems like Preline. This looks like a potential way that salmon can be farmed without destroying the stocks of wild, migrating fish both in BC, Norway and other areas where salmon is farmed”.

Other countries also feel the effects of open-net salmon farms.

“In Scotland and Ireland, many of our most iconic stocks of wild sea trout and salmon have been very hard-hit within those areas where Norwegian companies own the majority of the salmon farms,” said Fiona Cameron of the Sea Trout Group in Scotland. “All of the organizations that have an interest in wild salmonids agree that something must be done urgently to reduce the impact of commercial salmon farming.”

To watch Dear Norway: Help Save Canada’s Wild Salmon. To read the letter sent to King Harald. To read more about Aqua Nor.

Even a close observer of the Canadian press would know almost nothing about the ongoing demonstrations, blockades and work stoppages calling for the return of elected President Manuel Zelaya. Since Zelaya was overthrown by the military on June 28 the majority of teachers in Honduras have been on strike. Recently, health workers, air traffic controllers and taxi drivers have also taken job action against the coup. In response the military sent troops to oversee airports and hospitals across the country.

For more than a week protesters from all corners of the country walked 20 km a day and on Tuesday tens of thousands of demonstrators converged on the country’s two biggest cities, San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa. These demonstrations prompted the de facto regime to reimpose a curfew in the capital, which had been in effect in the weeks after the coup.

This resistance — taking place under the threat of military repression — has gone almost entirely unreported by leading Canadian media. So has Canada’s tacit support for the coup.

Last Tuesday the ousted Honduran Foreign Affairs Minister told TeleSur that Canada and the US were providing “oxygen” to the military government. Picked up by numerous Spanish language newspapers, Patricia Rodas called on Canada and the US to suspend aid to the de facto regime.

During an official visit to Mexico with Zelaya last week, Rodas asked Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who was about to meet Harper and Obama, to lobby Ottawa and Washington on their behalf. “We are asking [Calderon] to be an intermediary for our people with the powerful countries of the world, for example, the US and at this moment Canada, which have lines of military and economic support with Honduras.”

To my knowledge, no Canadian media reported Rodas’ comments. Nor did any Canadian media mention that Canada’s ambassador to Costa Rica, Neil Reeder, met coup officials in Tegucigalpa last week. The Canadian media has also ignored the fact that Canada is the only major donor to Honduras yet to sever any aid to the military government.

Latin American (and to a lesser extent US) media have covered Ottawa’s tacit support for the coup more closely than the Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen and most of the rest of the Canadian media. When Zelaya tried to fly into Tegucigalpa a week after the coup Canada’s minister for the Americas, Peter Kent, told the Organization of American the “time is not right” for a return. The New York Times ran two different articles that mentioned Canada’s anti-Zelaya position while Bloomberg published another. Many Latin American news agencies also printed stories about the Conservative government’s position, however, the Canadian media was uninterested.

A few weeks later Zelaya attempted to cross into Honduras by land from Nicaragua. Kent once again criticized this move. “Canada’s Kent Says Zelaya Should Wait Before Return to Honduras,” read a July 20 Bloomberg headline. A July 25 right-wing Honduran newspaper blared: “Canadá pide a Zelaya no entrar al país hasta llegar a un acuerdo” (Canada asks Zelaya not to enter the country until there’s a negotiated solution).

After publishing a number of articles about Ottawa’s position in the hours and days after the coup, Mexican news agency Notimex did a piece that summarized something this author wrote for rabble.ca. Then on July 26, Notimex wrote about the Canadian Council for International Cooperation’s demand that Ottawa take a more firm position against the coup. Both of these articles were published (at least online) by a number of major Spanish-language newspapers.

Finally, a month after the coup there was a small breakthrough into Canada’s dominant media. A sympathetic producer at CBC radio’s The Current provided space for Graham Russell from Rights Action, a Canadian group with a long history in Honduras, to criticize Ottawa’s handling of the coup. Unfortunately, Russell’s succinct comments were followed by the CBC interviewer’s kid gloves treatment of Minister Peter Kent. Still, the next day the Canadian Press revealed that Ottawa refused to exclude Honduras from its Military Training Assistance Program, a program rabble.ca reported on days after the coup.

Uninterested in the Conservative government’s machinations, the Canadian media is even less concerned with the corporations that may be influencing Ottawa’s policy towards Honduras. Rights Action has uncovered highly credible information that Vancouver-based Goldcorp provided buses to the capital, Tegucigalpa, and cash to former employees who rallied in support of the coup. As far as I can tell, the Halifax Chronicle Herald is the only major Canadian media outlet that has mentioned this connection between the world’s second biggest gold producer and the coup.

Under pressure from the Maquila Solidarity Network, two weeks ago Nike, Gap, and another US-based apparel company operating in Honduras released a statement calling for the restoration of democracy. With half of its operations in the country Montréal-based Gildan activewear, the world’s largest blank T-shirt maker, refused to sign this statement. According to company spokesperson Genevieve Gosselin, Gildan employs more than 11,000 people in Honduras. Without a high-profile brand name Gildan is particularly dependent on producing T-shirts and socks at the lowest cost possible and presumably the company opposed Zelaya’s move to increase the minimum wage by 60% at the start of the year. Has Gildan actively supported the coup like Goldcorp? It is hard to know since there has yet to be any serious investigation of the company’s recent activities in the country.

The Canadian media’s coverage of the coup demonstrates the importance of independent media. We need to support news outlets willing to challenge the powerful.

What the plaque fails to mention is that the site where Cornwallis directed the colonists/settlers to erect Halifax was on the Mi’kmaq settlement of Jipugtug (anglicized to Chebucto).² The Mi’kmaq, considered themselves the sovereign power in Mi’kma’ki (the present day Maritimes),³ but Cornwallis did not recognize this sovereignty, and he did not consult the Mi’kmaq about his plans.

Halifax historians Judith Fingard, Janet Guildford, and David Sutherland wrote of Cornwallis’s attitude toward the Mi’kmaq: “That arrogance set in motion the train of events that led to tragic violence, the memories of which would long complicate race relations in colonial Nova Scotia.”⁴

What it did set in motion was the murder and dispossession of the Original Peoples of Mi’kma’ki, and one outcome was the eponymous honoring of the Cornwallis. Cornwallis has streets, schools, etc. named after him in the province.

Naming places and buildings after a person is common practice, but usually not when that person is an inciter of genocide. Principle 8 of Canadian Permanent Committee of Geographical Names states, “Personal names should not be used unless it is in the public interest to honor a person by applying such a name to the geographical feature. Names should be derived from persons who have significantly contributed to the features selected.”⁵

Author Daniel Paul wrote that Cornwallis and his council raised a “company of Volunteers” by offering a bounty on Mi’kmaq (women, children, infirm; it didn’t matter).⁶

The British had “unwavering resolve to dispossess the Mi’kmaq of everything and to subjugate them absolutely.”⁷ The Mi’kmaq were forced on to reserves too small to provide an adequate means of subsistence. This reduced the Mi’kmaq to a state of dependency, subordination, and internal colonization.⁸

Credentials of a Genocidaire

That Cornwallis is a genocidaire is apparent from the proclamation Cornwallis and his council issued on 1 October 1759. The proclamation set a bounty on the scalps of Mi’kmaq. One can read from the proclamation:

That, in order to secure the Province from further statements of the Indians, some effectual methods should be taken to pursue them to their haunts, and show them because of such actions, they shall not be secure within the Province…

That a reward of ten guineas be granted for every Micmac taken, or killed.⁹

In 1750, the bounty was raised from 10 to 50 guineas. Paul said this bounty is still in effect, having never been repealed by the federal government.

To reclaim this sordid history, the Rename Cornwallis Initiative is underway, drafted by school teacher Cheryl Leblanc-Weldon and Paul, to redesignate these landmarks named after a genocidaire. The petition reads, in part:

To: To the Governments of Canada, Great Britain, the province of Nova Scotia, and all its municipalities and school boards

… Professor Geoffrey Plank of the University of Cincinnati comments about their rational [sic] for approving such a barbarous course of action:

“If the Micmac chose to resist his expropriation of land, the governor intended to conduct a war unlike any that had been fought in Nova Scotia before. He outlined his thinking in an unambiguous letter to the Board of Trade. If there was to be a war, he did not want the war to end with a peace agreement. ‘It would be better to root the Micmac out of the peninsula decisively and forever.’ The war began soon after the governor made this statement.”

Therefore, we the undersigned, because we firmly believe that no person who attempted genocide should, under any circumstances, receive public honors, express support for changing the name of all public entities such as schools, streets, parks, etc. which currently honor the name of Edward Cornwallis, founder of the British colonial city of Halifax which is currently the capital city of the province of Nova Scotia, Canada.

We ask this be done as a move towards restoring justice to the Mi’kmaq First Nation People of Nova Scotia. Governor Cornwallis, as part of the machinery of colonization, attempting to destroy them completely, oversaw the infliction of terrible suffering and indignities on men, women and children of the Mi’kmaq Nation. Morally, no Nation that self-describes itself as civilized, can justify honoring such a man. His action demands that he be condemned by honorable caring citizens, not honored!

Opposition has arisen to the Rename Cornwallis Initiative. Joseph Bogle calls accusations of genocide against Cornwallis “a blatant lie.” He has started a counter petition to preserve the name of Cornwallis that has garnered 12 signatures (as of 12 August 2009).

LeBlanc-Weldon said, “I am pleased with the progress of our petition as it continues to grow on a daily basis. I think the fact that the counter petition only has 12 signatures pretty much shows that there is not a vocal opposition to our desire for change.”

Bogle’s accusation is counter to the colonial records.¹⁰

Governmental Inaction

The former Nova Scotia heritage minister Bill Dooks argued against the redesignation. Dooks said, “Changing a name does not change what happened. I cannot change the past.” No one asked Dooks to change past events. The designations are current, and that is the change being sought.

The new social democratic government in Nova Scotia also seems uninterested in the redesignation. David Denny, advisor to Heritage Minister Percy Paris, communicated in a statement: “This is not a matter under consideration or review by the new government at this time.”

Changing Names

Redesignation has been the historical practice in Canada; witness the renaming of Mt. Stalin in British Columbia to Mt. Peck and renaming the Ontario town of New Berlin to Kitchener (who is held by many to be a war criminal himself¹¹ ). Furthermore, many place names are reverting to their Indigenous names; for example, the Queen Charlotte Islands are now usually called Haida Gwaii, the Mackenzie River is Deh Cho, etc.

The renaming of landmarks, buildings, and institutions that honor the genocidaire Cornwallis should only be a beginning. The city of Amherst, “Nova Scotia” is named after British army officer Jeffery Amherst notorious for advocating biological warfare against Original Peoples.¹²

In front of the Halifax Public Library is a statue of the bulky mass of Winston Churchill — the man who advocated “spread[ing] a lively terror” with poison gas. His words reveal his racism: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas… I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes… ”¹³

Racism, and indifference, by Nova Scotians also affect the Rename Cornwallis campaign. “In some cases it’s a racist thing. They say ‘[the Mi’kmaq] lost, too bad’… or ‘lots of people did things wrong, it was war, don’t judge it by today’s standards.’ Others say ‘it doesn’t affect my life,’ but when they find out about it they say ‘yeah, it should change,’” said Leblanc-Weldon.¹⁴

1. Jipugtug is the original designation by the indigenous Mi’kmaq people. Halifax is the colonial designation.
2. Judith Fingard, Janet Guildford, & David Sutherland, Halifax: The First 250 Years (Halifax: Formac Publishing, 1999): 8.
3. See map.
4. Fingard et al.: 13.
5. William B. Hamilton, The Macmillan Book of Canadian Place Names (Macmillan, 1978).
6. Daniel N. Paul, We Were Not the Savages: A Mi’kmaq Perspective on the Collision between European and Native American Civilizations (Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Press, 2000): 109-113.
7. Paul: 115.
8. Harald E.L. Prins, The Mi’kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Cultural Survival (Harcourt Brace, 1996): 7.
9. ”A Monstrous crime, a day to remember in Canadian history,” Shunpiking: People of the Dawn (First Nations Supplement), 13 (49), Fall 2007: 14. See also Daniel N. Paul, “British Scalp Proclamations: 1749 and 1750,” www.danielnpaul.com.
10. “It is ironic Europeans who were responsible for diminishing Mi’kmaq life documented much of what they were destroying – in explorer’s logs, trade letters, missionary letters, colonial records, and so forth.” Prins: 4.
11. See “The crimes,” AngloBoer.com.
12. ”Jeffrey Amherst and Smallpox Blankets,” Native Web.
13. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (Noonday Press, 1992).
14. Ben Sichel, “Renaming Cornwallis,” The Dominion, 17 July 2009.

First, there was the report in the Mexican media on July 29 that an investigation by officials from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police into the murder of U.S. independent journalist Brad Will affirmed the conclusions drawn by the Mexican Federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR) regarding his death. The PGR, contrary to all available evidence, claims Will, shot in Oaxaca in 2006, was killed at close range by a anti-government protester. The media reports raised more questions than they answered. For example, why was the RCMP investigating this, and why, as evident from the reports, did they carry out such a clearly laughable investigation?

These questions and more were answered when Brad Will’s family released a statement soundly debunking the so-called RCMP report. As it turns out, there was no official RCMP investigation. It was merely three retired RCMP officers who did an “investigation” which the Mexican government then presented to the media as an official RCMP report. Today, Physicians for Human Rights – a group that actually did investigate Brad’s murder – issued a press release that similarly called into question the veracity of the ex-RCMPers report. James Stephen, Phil Ziegler and Gary Buerk certainly have some serious rebutting to do if they don’t want to be tarnished as integrity-free hacks-for-hire. Although I’m sure there’s always a market for those types.

The conclusions of another “investigation” regarding Oaxaca were released Tuesday by Mexico’s Supreme Court. They took it upon themselves to investigate the actions of the state and federal governments who brutally repressed the 2006 uprising. Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court found the use of force – which left 27 dead and hundreds injured, arrested and tortured – to be legitimate. This is the same court which found the murders and mass rapes by police that occurred in Atenco in 2006 to be unworthy of investigating either.

But one question remains – why all these reports stating how the Mexican state is not at fault for the atrocities of 2006 in Oaxaca? The answer can be found in Plan Mexico, aka the Merida Initiative. The three-year, $1.4 billion aid (mostly military) package to Mexico and Central America has a human rights requirement for Mexico. Yearly, the U.S. State Department must certify Mexico’s respect for human rights and the Congress must approve that certification. If that doesn’t happen, then Mexico loses 15% of the Plan Mexico funds. Of course, Mexico gets the other 85% no matter how many people it tortures and kills, but it could do it much more effectively if it got 100% of the funds.

Also, later this month both Clinton and Obama are to visit Mexico to see how the U.S.’s hegemonic efforts under the tutelage of Felipe Calderon are holding up. The family of Juan Manuel Martinez Moreno – the Oaxacan social activist being framed by Mexico for the murder of Brad Will – is requesting an audience with Obama in Mexico City. The Mexican government would of course rather avoid this and any other scrutiny of its human rights record, while at the same time receiving all the Plan Mexico funds. So the timing of the non-RCMP and Supreme Court reports saying that everything is fine in Oaxaca is no surprise.

However, it appears that their efforts have all been for naught. For while Clinton’s State Dept. dutifully certified Mexico’s human rights record this week, even though human rights complaints have risen 600% under Calderon’s regime, Senator Leahy on Wednesday blocked the certification from being voted upon in the Senate, basically saying he doesn’t believe the State Dept. Maybe Amnesty International got to him. This means that, at least for the time being, the Mexican government will only have 85% of the Plan Mexico funds at its disposal to deploy against the social movements demanding justice and an end to impunity. Which, given that Plan Mexico shouldn’t exist at all, is still appallingly too much.

Remember, for instance, when France didn’t support the illegal Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq, a debacle that was incredibly called a “crusade” by our foolish past president, and which has needlessly killed perhaps over a million people.

France and “Old Europe,” where antiwar protests were commonly huge, were condemned by the reactionary Republican base. Who will ever forget the ridiculous absurdity of indignant conservatives renaming French fries “freedom fries”? No wonder goofy Sarah Palin later became their darling.

Well, they’re at it again, claiming that Canadian “socialized medicine” is an unmitigated disaster. It costs a fortune in taxes, they say, and features unacceptable service delays and denials.

But that simply isn’t so, as any fair-minded, honest appraisal readily reveals.

In truth, Canadians pay just a fractionally higher amount in taxes than we do. However, they get a substantially greater public-welfare bang for their buck.

As Rhonda Hackett of the Denver Post put it, “Canadians are afforded many benefits for their tax dollars, even beyond health care (e.g., tax credits, family allowance, cheaper higher education), so the end result is a wash.”

Then there’s the assertion that Canadians allegedly can’t get care when they need it (callously overlooking the plight of 50 million Americans without any medical insurance whatsoever!).

Hackett’s June 7th article also addressed that canard:

There are no requirements for pre-authorization whatsoever. If your family doctor says you need an MRI, you get one. In the U.S., if an insurance administrator says you are not getting an MRI, you don’t get one no matter what your doctor thinks — unless, of course, you have the money to cover the cost.

Most compelling is what a Canadian poster over at Common Dreams recently said:

Last year, I was found to have a genetically defective heart valve that required open-heart surgery. In coming to that conclusion, I underwent several very expensive diagnostic procedures for which there was ABSOLUTELY NO WAITING PERIOD. The operation itself involved a team of surgeons, a team of anestheticists, a team of profusionists and several nurses. Again, ABSOLUTELY NO WAITING PERIOD. After the surgery, I spent ten days in intensive post-op care. The cost in the U.S. — hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cost here in Canada — ZERO.

Desperate to keep their profitable medical stranglehold on the American masses, Big Pharma and insurance giants, with full Republican complicity, are dipping deeply into their bag of dirty tricks.

One of those is a very misleading TV ad currently making the rounds. It features a Canadian woman who went to the United States for purported lifesaving surgery for a brain tumor that Canadian doctors supposedly wouldn’t perform.

In fact, as reported by Julie Mason of the Ottawa Citizen on July 20th, she actually had a “Rathke’s Cleft Cyst on her pituitary gland. To quote an American source, the John Wayne Cancer Center, ‘Rathke’s Cleft Cysts are not true tumors or neoplasms; instead they are benign cysts.’”

The lady was given appropriate appointments with Ontario specialists but chose not to wait the reasonable period. Her resulting surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona cost $97,000.

Interestingly, that case is being pumped by Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, whose state has an average yearly income of just over $37,000. It sure looks like his constituents could use affordable health care!

Perhaps the best-stated case for why our country desperately needs health care change came from Democratic Ohio Congressman and former Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, speaking not long ago to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now:

The insurance companies have almost a death grip on our political system. And they can have so much power that they can exclude 50 million people and trap another 50 million in confiscatory premiums, co-pays and deductibles, just jettison millions of Americans into bankruptcy. And yet, we still have this system. And people are saying, ‘Well, you know, we can’t have a government-run system’ Well, frankly, we tried this system controlled by private insurers, and it’s been a calamity for America.

Let’s quite trashing our friends north of the border, adopt what they and the rest of industrialized humanity have done right, and put an end to the grim reality of routinely seeing “spaghetti feed” fund-raiser signs and collection cans at U.S. supermarket checkouts for grievously ill Americans who can’t afford vital, genuinely lifesaving medical care.

And whose names appear next in newspaper obituaries.

Surely the richest country on earth can do better for its populace.

Despite the threat of military violence, hundreds of thousands of Hondurans have marched, gone on strike and blocked highways to reverse the coup. Almost every country and major institution in the world has condemned the coup. But the Canadian government seems to support it.

Foreign Affairs remained silent in the hours after Zelaya was kidnapped by the military. Eight hours after Zelaya’s ouster a Foreign Affairs spokesperson told Notimex news agency that Canada had ‘no comment’ regarding the coup. It was not until late in the evening, after basically every country in the hemisphere denounced the coup, that Ottawa finally did so.

Canada, reported Notimex, was the only country in the hemisphere that did not explicitly call for Zelaya’s return to power. Unlike the World Bank and European Union, Ottawa has not announced plans to suspend aid to Honduras, which is the largest recipient of Canadian assistance in Central America. Nor has Ottawa mentioned whether it will exclude the Honduran military from its Military Training Assistance Program.

At a special Organization of American States meeting a week after the coup, Canada’s minister for the Americas, Peter Kent called for Zelaya to delay his planned return to the country claiming the “time is not right.” On Sunday, after the coup government refused to consider the return of Zelaya as proposed by mediator Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, Kent again called on the elected president not to reenter his country. “A return to Honduras prior to a negotiated resolution is strongly discouraged.”

Kent has yet to denounce the coup government for killing peaceful protesters and arresting thousands, but he did respond to Zelaya’s recent comment that Hondurans had the right to “insurrection” against an illegitimate government. On Sunday Kent said, “we call on all parties to condemn any and all incitement to violence in this ongoing crisis.”

This was just Kent’s most recent attack against Zelaya. At the special OAS meeting two weeks ago Kent said “there has to be an appreciation of the events that led up to the coup,” blaming Zelaya for clashes with the army, Supreme Court and Congress. Before the coup Kent criticized Zelaya’s plan for a non-binding public poll on whether to hold consultations to reopen the constitution. “We have concerns with the government of Honduras,” he said in early June. “There are elections coming up this year and we are watching very carefully the behaviour of the government and what seems to be an attempt to amend the constitution to allow consecutive presidencies.”

This is parroting the U.S. (and Honduran) neo-conservative argument that an elected president can be made illegitimate if he consults with the population as to whether or not it wishes to change the constitution. If this were to stand, then Hondurans would forever be captive to a constitution written by a right-wing, military-backed government.

Ottawa’s hostility is likely motivated by particular corporate interests and Zelaya’s support for the social transformation taking place across Latin America.

From 1996-2006 Canadian companies were the second-biggest investors in Honduras. Zelaya’s move earlier this year to raise the minimum wage by 60% could not have gone down well with the world’s biggest blank T-shirt maker, Montréal-based Gildan, which employs thousands of Hondurans.

Likewise, announcing that no new mining concessions would be granted during his term could not have made Zelaya popular with Canada’s powerful mining sector, which has some 1,300 properties in Latin America. An interesting note in this regard is that Vancouver-based, Goldcorp Inc., which runs a controversial open pit, cyanide-leeching gold mine in the country, provided buses to the capital, Tegucigalpa, and cash to former employees who rallied in support of the coup, according Rights Action.

More broadly, the Harper government opposes Zelaya’s gravitation toward the countries leading the push toward a more united Latin America. A year ago Honduras joined the Venezuelan led ALBA, Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our Americas, which is a fast growing response to North American domination of the region.

Canadian corporations, with more than $100 billion invested per year in Latin America, cannot be pleased.

Since touring South America two years ago, Harper has worked to stunt the region’s growing rejection of capitalism and U.S. dependence. In March Harper referred to the far right Colombian government as a valuable “ally” in a hemisphere full of “real serious enemies and opponents.” And after answering questions regarding Venezuela in April he said, “I don’t take any of these rogue states lightly.”

The recent announcement that Canada would shift ‘aid’ from Africa to Latin America is part of an attempt to slow the region’s transformation. The region’s most pro-capitalist governments, in Colombia and Peru, will benefit from this increased aid as will regional civil society groups whose views most closely align to Ottawa’s.

Supporting the coup in Honduras is a continuation of this policy; an attempt by Ottawa to block Latin America’s leftward shift.

Sri Lanka, considered a banana republic and economically far worse than its prosperous but tiny neighbour Singapore, has chosen to challenge a country listed on the top of the lists of the Human Development Index by the United Nations. Canadians armed with Canadian passports sail through any immigration desk around the world with ease and respect. Even the Cubans who hate Americans love Canadian passports.

Canadian passport holders can enter anywhere in the world while the majority of the countries around the world need visas from Canadian consular offices in their home countries and those, too, are not easy to get because the Canadian immigration system is very strict. But, Canadians do not face such hardships in getting visas to any other country.

Canada reaps

Recently Canadian Minister for Immigration denied entry to the maverick British parliamentarian George Galloway. His application for a Canadian visa was rejected in March 2009. Canada claimed that he was a threat to national security as he was an advocate for stopping the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and donated money to the Hamas-led government of the Palestinian territories.

Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, justifying Canada’s decision, said “I don’t see why we should make exceptions and override the decision of our professional border security agents in making a judgment about the inadmissibility of someone who provides funding and resources to an illegal terrorist organization.”

There is a saying in Tamil – “Vithai Vithaithavan Aruvadai Seivaan” (One who sowed the seed will reap the harvest). So it is poetic justice for Canada which labels even a British parliamentarian with terrorist tag to see one of her top parliamentarians booted out for the same reason! Unlike Canada, Sri Lanka is world’s most politically unstable and financially bankrupt Third World country begging for loans from IMF.

Sri Lanka tagged Canada’s much respected politician as a threat to national security. He has more than three-decades of public service experience and was the premier of Canada’s largest populated province, Ontario. Currently, he is Canada’s main Opposition Liberal Party’s foreign affairs critic. Sri Lanka has simply thumbed its nose at Canada and that too in the most uncivilized way. Canadians consider this as a great insult to their country, but the million dollar question is whether Canada will take sweet diplomatic revenge or just remain mute?

Rae’s testimony

Soon after Bob Rae spent 12 hours at the Bandaranaike International Airport in Katunayake, he was bundled out on a plane to England where he issued a statement. He said: “In the evening of Tuesday, June 9, 2009, I arrived on a flight from Delhi to Colombo, Sri Lanka. I had successfully applied to the Sri Lankan High Commission for a visa and had discussed my visit with the Sri Lankan Commissioner, the Canadian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, and with officials from DFAIT.”

He stated: When I arrived at immigration in the company of two Canadian High Commission officials, I was, after some delay, told that I was being refused entry on the grounds of national intelligence. Since that time I have spent over twelve hours at the airport trying to find a reason for this decision. I have had the full support of officials here and in Ottawa. The Government of Sri Lanka is sticking to its position, and I am being put on a plane to London at 1:15 p.m. Sri Lankan time.

Further, he said: “The Sri Lankan government has made this decision because they have apparently reached some ill-conceived and defamatory conclusions about me. But, after thirty years of public service at home and abroad, I have to say this decision reflects on them, and not on me. I have fought against violence and extremism all my life. Everyone knows that, and the record of my actions, speeches and reports is there for all to see. What they now also know is that the government of Sri Lanka is afraid of dialogue, afraid of discussion, afraid of engagement. All I can say is shame on them. If this is how they treat me, imagine how they treat people who can’t speak out and who can’t make public statements.”

The personal statement released by Bob Rae leads us to believe that he is really fed up with the Sri Lankan government’s decision and he, too, indicates that the decision made by Sri Lanka was actually a shameful act inflicted upon Canadians, not personally against him. Sri Lanka’s stance is quite understandable when it has ignored respect for humanitarian law and calls for a political process. Instead, Sri Lanka lambasted western political and diplomatic representatives as “White Tigers” on the payroll of the LTTE. We have seen similar tendencies elsewhere—Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma—but possibly nowhere as systematic and blatant as in Sri Lanka.

Canadian Tamils don’t trust Rae

Though Tamils in Canada think Bob Rae is an opportunistic and a wily politician. When he contested the election in Toronto Centre, where a sizeable number were ethnic Tamils, he promised that he would speak in support of right to self-determination for Tamils in Sri Lanka and he would support Eelam Tamils in Canadian parliament. However, after he got elected, his promises turned out to be empty rhetoric.

He often described Sri Lanka as a “Model Democracy” and decried LTTE’s terrorism. He was quick to decry LTTE’s “extremism and violence” but was slow to condemn state terrorism unleashed against Tamils. Bob Rae will, at least now, realize the real face of Sri Lanka.

During his frequent visits to Sri Lanka since 1999, as Chairman of Ottawa-based Forum of Federations, he met the leaders of Sri Lankan political, religious, and community organizations. He took part in the peace talks held in Oslo, Geneva, Tokyo and other cities. He dined with the LTTE leadership during his visits to the LTTE’s former strong-hold and its political headquarters, Kilinochchi. He participated in all the seminars and meetings organized by anti-LTTE movements in Sri Lanka, Canada, and England.

When this writer asked Bob Rae to comment on the present plight of Internally displaced persons in Sri Lanka and other questions about Sri Lanka, he said he would not be able to answer any questions yet, except to say, “I really do believe that they are less important than ensuring better conditions in camps and a better future for all the people living in Sri Lanka.”

Another liberal party parliamentarian from Scarborough, Agincourt Jim Karygiannis, said he, too, applied for a visa at the Sri Lanka’s High Commission in Ottawa to travel to Sri Lanka. The officials told him that they would not have any problem issuing the visa, but they are not responsible once he arrived at the airport because the Sri Lankan defense ministry may or may not permit him to enter the country. He then decided not to travel to Sri Lanka.

Upon assuming power, the right wing conservative government led by Stephen Harper banned the LTTE as a terrorist organization and followed two years later placing the community based World Tamil Movement (WTM) on the terrorist list. However, the Sri Lankan government did not show gratitude to the Conservatives. When Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Conservative MP Deepak Obhrai applied for visa to Sri Lankan High Commission in Ottawa, the High Commissioner denied him a visa. Obhrai said he wanted to visit Sri Lanka in early June 2009 to see conditions in the internment camps. The time is now ripe for Liberals and Conservatives to become cognizant of the ultra-chauvinist Sri Lankan state and its oppression of the Tamil people. For behind Colombo’s public parade of bodies of dead rebels and tasteless celebrations of ‘victory’ over the Tamil Tigers, there hides today a horror list of unspeakable war crimes committed by the Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime.

The time is ripe for Canada to review its diplomatic and political relationship vis-à-vis the failed state of Sri Lanka.

As of June 1, 2009, Canadians and Americans alike require an Enhanced Drivers License (EDL), a NEXUS card, a FAST card, a passport, or a Secure Certificate of Indian Status to cross a Canadian-American land border. In Canada, only Ontario, Quebec, B.C. and Manitoba have moved ahead to develop provincial EDLs; the Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island governments have all decided not to provide these high tech, low privacy, cards to the constituencies (Source). To apply for an EDL in a participating province, all you need to do is undergo an intensive and extensive 30 minute face-to-face interview at your provincial equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles. Your reward for being verbally probed? A license that includes a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag and a biometric photograph. The RFID tag includes a unique number, like your Social Insurance Number (SIN), that is transmitted to anyone with an RFID reader. These readers can be purchased off the shelf by regular consumers, and number your EDL emits is not encrypted and does not require an authentication code to be displayed on a reader. Effectively, RFID tag numbers are easier to capture than your webmail password.

EDLs are an incredibly expensive ’solution’ for individual Canadians to purchase, given that in Ontario alone an EDL will cost almost $30 more than a passport. Further, Manitobans have turned a cold shoulder to these cards; only a few thousand residents have adopted them out of an expected hundred thousand or so. In Ontario, my contacts have told me that the responsible ministry has yet to provide policy documents or manuals to the front line staff who are tasked with issuing these licenses. Without their scripts, how will these staff members play their parts in issuing each Canadian a little piece of the great North American security theater?

EDL programs are big ticket items that Canadian provinces are being pressured to pay for in order to satisfy the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), a unilateral American policy directive. While fiscal conservatives might argue that in this period of reduced government incomes and ballooning debts, such big ticket items should be carefully evaluated, we might ask them why government should be any more careful of spending money on EDLs than it is in otherwise ’securing’ the border? As recently reported by Dean Beeby, $8.7 million dollars have been spent since 2006 on gates, barriers, fences, sirens and signs to catch people who are trying to illegally cross the border. The catch? Gates have fallen on cars. Cameras can’t actually catch the license plates of illegal night-time border crossers. Automated video analysis systems don’t work. It would seem as though the various props of our Broadway security show should be returned to the manufacturer as defective or even dead on arrival!

If broadcasting an equivalent of a radio-accessible SIN and high financial costs to individual Canadians weren’t enough, there are additional privacy-related issues with EDLs. While the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner/Ontario is promising that future generations of EDLs will integrate ‘privacy by design’ principles, insofar as future cards won’t broadcast their unique identification numbers without first being activated, the current licenses that are being deployed in that province are absolutely devoid of any real protections (the much touted ’security sleeve’ is demonstrably faulty). While integrating privacy by design is a positive step forward, Ontario is the only province that has publicly discussed this at length. Moreover, even in Ontario there has been little comment about the worries of government creating massive databanks of facial images that are designed to be rapidly searched. As it stands, facial recognition technologies are sub-par at meeting the expectations that the public has developed from watching 24, Heroes, and other works of science fiction. In fact, massive amounts of research needs to be done to improve accuracy rates of facial recognition technologies, and a large database to conduct tests on to develop the technology is just what the scientist ordered. Thus, while the facial images that are taken of individuals will be of minimal use to government agencies at the moment, we cannot assume that ‘privacy by technological incompetence’ will be something Canadians can rely on over the long term.

Perhaps most importantly, privacy advocates’ underlying worries about these cards have not been addressed. As I have previously noted,

“In the cases of both radio tags and biometric data, there exists a serious danger of function creep. As more and more members of the Canadian and American public carry these devices, increased pressures will extend how these documents are used, exceeding their initial purpose of securing American borders” (Source).

While various RFID proponents have insisted that RFID tags cannot, in practice, be used to track user data, the web cookies that we download after visiting websites were never intended to let companies track us. Just last year however, the Wall Street Journal published an article revealing that, lo and behold, the company that will do no evil (i.e. Google) is using web cookies as an “Internet tracking technology that enables it to more precisely follow Web-surfing behavior across affiliated sites” (Source). RFID tags are meant to track cattle as they move around the world; surveillance is the reason for their very existence. Why would we ever assume that this technology would ultimately be used for some other purpose as soon as it were applied to human targets, when other evidence demonstrates that non-surveillance technologies are readily requisitioned to monitor our daily activities?

This worry about pervasive surveillance is something that Dr. Andrew Clement has discussed in various presentations through the Canadian IDentity Forum. He has noted that, despite government assurances, there is no evidence that real speed enhancements will be realized at the border. At most, Canadians can expect to pass through borders 5-10 seconds faster than they do right now. Moreover, while there are claims that EDLs are somehow ‘more secure’ than present licenses, this is just another part of the script in the Canadian/American security theater. You see, to qualify for an EDL, individuals must show foundational documents (e.g. birth certificates) to prove that they are who they claim to be; where a foundational document is successfully forged the ’security’ offered by the EDL is defeated. Moreover, the RFID tag can be copied, letting another person clone the tag’s unique number. When Ms. Daghum comes to the border with her cloned tag, she can have Ms. Ouziel’s profile brought up on the border guard’s screen. If Ms. Daghum physically appears like Ms. Ouziel, then a border guard could be fooled about the authenticity of the RFID tag based on the information called from government databases. The RFID is insecure and the biometric image currently unreliable — how, again, do these cards actually make us safer (as opposed to making us feel safer) from terror threats?

If high costs, minimal border-crossing efficiencies, unreliable biometric images, and easily duplicated RFID tag numbers aren’t enough to make you wonder about the capacity of EDLs to secure the border, I’ll leave you with two concluding points. RFID tags, and the data that they emit, contribute to what scholars such as David Lyon and Kevin Haggerty have termed ‘the surveillance society’, or a society where “[w]e are inadvertently handing over to centralized authorities an infrastructure of visibility the likes of which no society has ever seen before” (Source). Canadians regularly moan that they can’t protect their own privacy but, by refusing to adopt an EDL and using a passport instead, they will find that protecting their privacy is actually cheaper than buying into the surveillance society. Get a passport, and congratulate yourself on being a privacy advocate by taking yourself out to dinner on your EDL-related savings!

Second, as has been noted by Canadian civil liberties groups;

“[A] passport is an internationally recognized travel document that gives the holder certain rights, while a driver’s licence is not . . . If the U.S. decides to deport a Canadian while she is carrying her passport, she must be deported back to Canada.

A Canadian carrying a driver’s license could be deported to anywhere in the world” (Source).

We are all unfortunately aware of the horrors that can occur when suspected ‘terrorists’ are sent to places such as Syria. While Maher Arar’s case does demonstrate that a passport will not necessarily persuade American authorities to act in within the confines of law, an EDL will not legally persuade foreign authorities that you should be sent to Canada instead of a torture cell in Syria. Even in a world where a passport has diminished legal standing in the eyes of American authorities that diminished standing is better than the absolute lack of legal standing that EDL-holders are left with.

In summation, you’d be well advised not to take part in this most recent act of the Canadian-American security theater. You’ll pleasantly find that there’s a reduced entry fee to the security show with a passport (with money left over to buy a drink and snack!). Far more importantly, the passport might actually prevent the ushers/border guards from deporting you to a truly horrible place to ‘enjoy’ unspeakable acts of barbarity. Be your own privacy advocate, boycott the EDL, and buy yourself a passport if you want to cross a Canadian-American land border.

I almost went down on my knees to beg [President] Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley-Smoot Tariff. …That Act intensified nationalism all over the world.

– Thomas Lamont, banker and economic adviser, June 1930

Now is a time where we have to be very careful about any signals of protectionism.

– President Barack Obama, February 19 2009

From the purely economic point of view nothing speaks against free trade and everything against protectionism.

– Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Austrian economist

When the economy is booming, foreign borrowings and imports of goods and services from other countries are most welcome. They allow for more spending without inflation and they raise living standards. It is a version of having your cake and eating it too. In an economic downturn, however, the political reflex of populist politicians is to turn protectionist and to become economic isolationists by raising trade barriers. In such an environment, foreign competition becomes a convenient scapegoat for the crisis, even though the causes of such crisis are most often purely domestic in nature.

Regarding trade, the Obama administration seems to have adopted the “good cop, bad cop” routine, extolling the virtues of free trade in presidential speeches while letting Congress pass protectionist measures in series. The fear here is a repetition of the 1930s when American politicians rushed to pass the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff act of 1930 that triggered an international trade war and which accelerated the worldwide economic downturn. World trade plummeted into a spiral downward and domestic production for exports contracted everywhere. Normal trade links were disrupted and intricate inter-country production arrangements were dismantled.

Indeed, in a misguided attempt to fight the economic downturn, governments all over the world rushed to adopt self-destructive “beggar-thy-neighbor” policies, in a futile attempt to devalue each other’s currencies and to reduce their imports in retaliation, forgetting that one country’s imports are the other country’s exports. The consequence was that from 1929 to 1933, the value of world trade contracted by two-thirds, going from $5.3 billion to $1.8 billion.

The world economy went down with world trade and every country was worst off as a consequence. A severe recession was then turned into a worldwide economic depression. This is because trade protectionism in the modern world is the equivalent of “cutting off your nose to spite your face” and its main consequences are to spread poverty and economic dislocations.

Some seventy years later, the same mistakes risk being repeated. Most modern economies are interrelated and if politicians begin to unravel such an economic integration, the consequences may be even worst than in the 1930s, because economic integration is much more advanced and prevalent than it was then.

World trade is already contracting due to the current global financial crisis, a decline in commercial bank trade credits and a drop in private investments. According to the World Bank’s projections, total world trade in goods and services this year is expected to fall 6.1 percent. The decline will particularly hurt large export-led economies such as Mexico, Germany and Japan.

The issue of protectionism is also particularly important for Canada, the U.S.’s most important trade partner. The United States and Canada not only share this continent, but they also have a mutually beneficial trading relationship that has been enhanced with the signing of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement on October 12, 1987. This treaty was enlarged in 1994 to include Mexico with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As a consequence, there are no tariffs on most goods that pass between Canada and the United States.

In 2008, Canada’s trade with the United States accounted for about 76 percent of its total international exports and 63 percent of its imports, while U.S. exports to Canada represented about 20 percent of total American exports. A lot of American jobs are tied to American exports to Canada. In fact, Canada is the leading export market for 36 of the 50 U.S. States and Canada is a larger market for U.S. goods than all 27 countries of the European Community combined.

Moreover, Canada is the single largest exporter of total petroleum to the United States, supplying the U.S. with more than 2.5 million barrels per day. What is more, this oil supply is guaranteed under Nafta. There is also an important and growing cross-border trade of electricity between Canada and the United States that links the two economies.

This does not mean, however, that trade frictions between Canada and the United States do not exist. Sometimes politicians behave as if the trade agreement between the two countries did not exist. A case in point is the routine inclusion of “buy American” provisions in spending bills voted by the U.S. Congress, which can be considered overt protectionist trade-distorting measures and contrary to the spirit and the letter of the free trade agreement.

If the lessons of the past have been learned, governments should resist the temptation to export their economic problems abroad and should work instead to stimulate their economies without resorting to protectionist measures. What is needed now is to avoid sending the world economy into a self-reinforcing contraction that would hurt everyone.

In the case of Palestine/Israel, the Zionist-owned or -controlled media will attempt to control the discourse. The Lobby and Zionist media have controlled discourse most effectively. To assure future control, the message reaching the next generation must also be controlled.

In Toronto, one alternative public school, TheStudentsSchool (TSS), studies the occupation of Palestine and the war crimes committed in perpetuating the occupation. That was too much for the manifestly Zionist National Post newspaper.³ An indignant article was published, and an investigation of TSS teacher John Morton was launched.

Barbara Kay, whose disinformation I have covered before,⁴ is zealously vigilant against education about the Zionist occupation – something she views in a bizarre reversal.

Kay uses George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a metaphor: teachers are “pigs” and high school students are “newborn puppies.”⁵ Kay charges that TSS is indoctrinating the high school students.

Some of Morton’s colleagues within the Toronto District School Board (TSDB) reacted “with dismay” at his possible censure from “a misleading and possibly libelous article which appeared in the National Post.” Morton’s colleagues labeled Kay’s Animal Farm analogy “preposterous” and “the opposite of what is alleged to be happening at TSS and other schools – i.e. repression of open discussion and debate of the Israel-Palestine conflict…”

The TSDB communique argued that making students critically aware was a moral imperative:

For teachers and school administrators to ignore this situation, especially as conflict in the region assumes proportions of a humanitarian crisis, would be pedagogically unsound, morally irresponsible and contrary to principles of inclusive curriculum and the TDSB’s Equity and Foundations Statement. Moreover, as citizens of a state that is a signatory to the Fourth Geneva Conventions, we have the obligation to educate our students about International Law and how to think critically about states which are in violation of it.

Indoctrination?

Kay advocates debating “both sides of the story.” This is reasonable. However, long after facts have been established, the demand for “balanced reporting” becomes disingenuous and is, itself, a bias. For what is meant by “balance”? Does balance mean that when confronted by 100 verifiable facts of war crimes that 100 specious and mendacious factoids from the perspective of the war criminals must be presented? What does the application of critical thought hold for a universal balancing of views?

I took Kay up on her penchant for discussion and emailed her asking for clarification/substantiation of eight points.⁶ First, I questioned whether Kay was implying that high school learners lacked sufficient critical thinking ability, and I asked what evidence she had that the learners were indoctrinated and that their critically thinking was being suppressed?

She went off on another tangent:

*Implying* that high school students have not yet mastered critical thinking? My dear, most adults with university degrees in my opinion have not mastered the art of critical thinking, for critical thinking is not so much a matter of basic IQ as it is exposure to a wide variety of *objective* facts, a wide variety of opinion around those facts and a great deal of practice in analysis and interpretation – not to mention a certain historical referential depth that no high school student can be expected to have.

Critical thinking might well be an underutilized skill. But my query was not about whether high school students had “mastered critical thinking.” I asked whether she denied that students have “critical thinking ability.”⁷

Kay took extreme exception to students being presented the film Occupation 101⁸ in a room without any adults present:

It is the role of a high school to prepare its students to think critically, which involves exposure to thinking, not memorizing. The school in question is shutting down critical thinking and presenting one side of a story as though it were settled fact, which is not the case at all. The story they are being fed is being presented by advocates and activists in a political cause, not by history teachers. That is why I call it indoctrination and it is indoctrination by any definition of the word.

Indoctrination according to Dictionary.com: “to instruct in a doctrine, principle, ideology, etc., esp. to imbue with a specific partisan or biased belief or point of view.” Critical here is “biased belief or point of view.” Facts are not partisan or biased, and hence, the presentation of facts is not indoctrination. Ergo, to label something as indoctrination requires that the critic refute the facts, thereby exposing them as biased beliefs or falsehoods. Kay did not do this, and she ignored my invitation to refute the facts. Kay merely asserts. Abraham Lincoln compellingly argued that “assertion” is an inexcusable falsehood: “I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.”⁹

Kay states, “Gaza is not occupied – Israel left in 2004 – and you make no mention of the provocations that caused this war.”

As for Gaza not being occupied, that is semantics. When a country’s airspace, borders, and coast are controlled and blockaded by another entity (a UN official called the blockade “devastating” for Palestinians¹⁰), then I submit that it is equally or more sinister than an occupation; it is a siege.

Kay evaded each question that I posed in our “discussion”; instead she resorted to personalized attacks:

If you knew anything of the history of the area, and of the five wars – all started by the Arab states – and of the terrorism that predated the Occupation against Israel, perhaps we could have a discussion. But your ignorance and bias and hostility are set in stone. And that is precisely why it is dangerous for young students to be listening to people like you, and not to be presented with an alternate view.

In Kay’s worldview, it is an “Occupation against Israel”!

Orwell on Democracy and Censorship in Animal Farm

Kay rails against any depiction of Israel as the aggressor without presenting the Zionist viewpoint,¹¹ saying this endangers democracy and must, therefore, be stopped. The absurdity of Kay’s position is easily revealed by an analogy which would require that each time Nazi World War II atrocities are mentioned that a Nazi viewpoint must be presented for balance.¹²

Kay advocates a veiled censorship: young learners can be presented information that is disputed by another group as long as the disputing group can present its information. As I have argued, this is fine when each side substantiates its facts. However, facts must not be balanced with factoids.

While Animal Farm does depict the dangers of indoctrination, Kay has missed much of the point of Orwell’s novel. In the intended preface to Animal Farm — itself subject to censorship — Orwell argued against the suppression of uncomfortable truths: the silencing of unpopular ideas and inconvenient facts by “censorship that can be enforced by pressure groups.”¹³

Orwell wrote,

If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

Orwell argued for freedom of speech; he did not advocate any fettering of speech with provisos to balance “the truth.”

Orwell held it to be a fact that “intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist.”

Kay concluded her article, “George Orwell said it with puppies and pigs, but the message was the same: HAIA, whose reach is extending into other high schools as I write, is dangerous to democracy and must be stopped.”

Is this really Orwell’s message of danger to democracy? He wrote,

[T]here is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.

I submit that Kay has twisted the thought of Orwell and the evidence for her claims is either non-existent, mendacious, or wrapped in ad hominem. Readers are invited to critically contemplate and draw their own conclusions.

I further submit that Kay and the National Post feigned a desire for both sides of an “issue” to be presented. The Zionist media is concurrently attempting to silence university professors. Dennis Rancourt, a tenured full professor and highly recognized physics professor at the University of Ottawa, is being hounded — purportedly for his “political views about the Palestine-Israel conflict” — by the CanWest Global Communications Corporation (owner of the National Post) through its Ottawa Citizen newspaper and a recently appointed pro-Zionist university president, Allan Rock.¹⁴

Education and Conscience

We live in a world ravaged by the scourge of war, a world where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, where socialism is a taboo word, where corporations have the rights of persons, and when the capitalists run their corporations into the ground, the masses are expected to acquiesce to socialism for the capitalists.

It is in the powerful nations, often built through the dispossession of the land and resources belonging to the Indigenous peoples, that capitalists, their corporations, and their private banks have grow topsy-turvy gargantuan, enriching themselves off war, looting resources, and by immiserating the workers until the workers could no longer buy what the companies made; consequently, the greed of the companies spelled their own downfall.

But what could keep such a system charging along head on until its own predictable doom? Why would the people not solidarize, withdraw their labor, demonstrate in the streets, and refuse to be killers and cannon fodder for the government’s military? I submit that the answer lies largely in the controlled worldview presented to the masses via the corporate media.

Propaganda and disinformation are mighty tools. It is said that information is power, so if one controls information, then one would, according to the aphorism, be powerful. The media are a preponderant source of information. There is an inherent bias in that the corporate media have the money to dominant the presentation and propagation of information in the world.

There is also another adage which holds that power corrupts, absolute power corrupting absolutely. Thus the masses are presented a worldview that conforms to the parameters set by the capitalists and their desire for money, control of information, and power – which, ultimately, will lead to the greater corruption of capitalists and their eventual downfall (unless or until bailed out by socialism).

How to escape the onslaught of propaganda and disinformation? Certainly not by censorship; because who will be entrusted with the responsibility to censor? It is necessary that people be empowered to think for themselves, to be open-minded and sufficiently skeptical to information presented to them, to research, discuss, analyze, and draw conclusions – what is commonly referred to as critical thinking.

Consequently, unfettered critical thinking is not something one would expect to be encouraged within a capitalist society, and certainly it wouldn’t be expected in the corporate media except as a mere buzzword or ethereal concept, something designed not to draw too much serious attention.

The Foremost Task of Education

What should be taught in society’s schools? In a statement to a Brooklyn church minister on 20 November 1950, the renown physicist Albert Einstein put forward his thought:

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Our morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education.¹⁵

The ways of the past have not eliminated inequality, poverty, racism, and warring. It seems obvious that a new direction is called for.

Within the education system, social justice entered the high school curriculum last September in the province of British Columbia. Opening the doors to social justice issues and inviting critical thinking pose powerful challenges to the old power structure.¹⁶ A better way lies in exposing (not indoctrinating) young minds to the ethical paucity of capitalism; the alternatives of anarchism, socialism, and communism; the ravages wrought by imperialism, colonialism, and Zionism – including arguments for and against. Preparing learners for critical thinking is crucial, but critical thinking alone is insufficient. Learners must be exposed to issues of life, morality, and social justice and be encouraged to analyze, draw their own conclusions, and defend them. When the ground is prepared, a potential arises for an increasingly enlightened and sophisticated younger generation. The world needs a generation that can organize, plan, demand, and build a better society where social justice has meaning beyond academic discourse – where social justice might become a reality.

1. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Available at The Complete Works of George-Orwell.
2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964): 7.
3. The National Post even deigned to publish a story wherein the Simon Wiesenthal Center evoked the WWII Holocaust for the fraudulent news of Iran requiring labeling of its Jewish citizens. See “Iran eyes badges for Jews,” National Post, 19 May 2006. Removed from the Post site, but available online at Free Republic.
4. See Kim Petersen, “Defining Racism,” Dissident Voice, 26 November 2007 and Kim Petersen and BJ Sabri, “Defining Israeli Zionist Racism,” Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, & 12Dissident Voice, December 2007-January 2008.
5. Barbara Kay, “Barbara Kay: Teaching hate at Toronto’s alternative school puppy mill,” National Post, 4 March 2009.
6. Kay, to her credit responded to this writer, neither John Morton nor anyone from with TSDB responded.
7. The entirety of the email correspondence is readable here.
8. Occupation 101 is highly recommended and viewable online.
9. Roy P. Basler (ed.), Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1946): 187. Limited availability online.
10. Reuters, “UN to Israel: Ease ‘devastating’ Gaza blockade,” Haaretz, 3 April 2009
11. This is fine because the Israeli viewpoint often corroborates the abuses of the Jewish state that Kay denies. For example, see Amos Harel, “Testimonies on IDF misconduct in Gaza keep rolling in,” Haaretz, 22 March 2009.
12. Kay, however, poses on the issue of balance in education as she knows well — or should — that it does not exist within the corporate media. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have meticulously documented this in their Propaganda Model. See Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002).
13. See George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press” (Proposed Preface to Animal Farm).
14. See “Statement by Dennis Rancourt Regarding His Dismissal by the University of Ottawa,” Academic Freedom, 10 April 2009.
15. Heklen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Albert Einstein — The Human Side: New Glimpses from His Archives (Princeton University Press, 1979): 83. It should also be noted that the editors in their book make the argument that Einstein was a Zionist. It is debatable.
16. One school board in southern BC sought to censor the teaching of the Social Justice course in its district causing demonstrations by the students. Catherine Rolfsen, “Gay-friendly course halted by Abbotsford school board,” Vancouver Sun, 21 September 2008.

Galloway’s talk, “Resisting War from Gaza to Kandahar,” sponsored by the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, would have provided Canadians with a first hand account of conditions in Gaza following Israel’s invasion and destruction of that walled in strip of Palestinian land during the three week war from December 27 to January 18, 2009. Galloway is one of a handful of foreigners to see the devastation that others could glimpse only from You Tube videos made available through Al Jazeera news service. All western journalists were banned from Gaza by Israel’s IDF. Galloway led a convoy of trucks from England to Gaza carrying relief provisions for the people. The convoy entered Gaza just over a week ago.

Contrary to the CJC contention that the banning should be seen as a security measure under section 34 (1) of the immigration act, a close reading of the act would suggest that Galloway cannot be perceived as a person (c) “engaging in terrorism” or in (e) “acts of violence that would or might endanger the lives or safety of persons in Canada,” but rather an individual, by virtue of his recent experience in Gaza, who would be upholding the intent of Canada’s Criminal Code, Sections 318-320. Canada’s Criminal Code, passed in 1970, builds upon the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 1966, the conventions of which support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as defined by the Charter of the United Nations.

According to the Nizkor Project “The premise underlying Canada’s anti-hate laws is that in a democratic society, identifiable groups must be protected against racism, including its verbal manifestations, in order not to limit their basic freedoms and thereby their full participation in Canadian society.” Nizkor asserts that the catalyst for this legislation might well have been the experience of Nazism, “that unchecked racism and hate propaganda could lead even a highly educated, cultured and democratic society to justify the most heinous crimes against humanity.”

How does this code apply to Galloway’s “Resisting War from Gaza to Kandahar”? The answer would appear to be in the importance of his eye witness account of the conditions in Gaza resulting from the invasion and his investigation of those conditions from Gazans, NGOs, and newspaper reports made available since the attacks. Multiple human rights organizations including B’tselem out of Jerusalem, the PCHR in Palestine and Human Rights International have brought varying allegations of Israeli war crimes before the International Court and the United Nations, crimes of disproportionate force in a civilian enclave where escape was impossible, crimes against civilians intentionally executed especially of women and children, crimes against international law for the use of banned weapons like white phosphorous, and crimes against the Geneva Conventions through the use of children as human shields. Additionally, the United Nations envoy for human rights activities in Palestine, Richard Falk, has brought forth a report that details Israeli war crimes suggesting that the fact that the people of Gaza could not escape made the invasion even more of a crime since it meant that civilians had no recourse from the weaponry of this massive military incursion into the densely populated cities of Gaza.

Now to the actual sections of the Criminal Code as they are applicable here. Section 318: Advocating Genocide and Section 319: Defining Genocide. “The criminal act of ‘advocating genocide’ is defined as supporting or arguing for the killing of members of an ‘identifiable group’ – persons distinguished by their colour, race, religion or ethnic origin. The intention would be the destruction of members of the targeted group. Any person who promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence, and liable to imprisonment…” Section 319 defines genocide as “any acts committed with intent to destroy an identifiable group – such as killing members of the group, or deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction.”

Given the knowledge that Galloway brings regarding “criminal acts committed with intent to destroy an identifiable group – such as killing members of the group, or deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the groups physical destruction,” because that identifiable group is distinguished by their colour, race, religion and ethnic origin, it would appear that Galloway has a responsibility to bring such awareness, no doubt recognized by the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, before the Canadian people to protect members of that group who reside in Canada.

In short, the CJC and the League of Human Rights of B’nai B’rith, along with other Jewish organizations that have supported the Israeli invasion of Gaza, including the Harper government, would appear to be guilty of promoting “unchecked racism and hate propaganda” that could “justify the most heinous crimes against humanity.” Clearly these organizations and the government of Canada realize the avowed intent of Avigdor Lieberman, a self- promoted Zionist and a member of Olmert’s government that executed the “war” in Gaza and now a member of Netanyahu’s new government, to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, including if necessary the use of the atomic bomb on them. It would appear that the Harper government and the Jewish Canadian organizations support Israeli governments that, in Lieberman’s words, want to “execute Israeli Arabs that are members of the Knesset,” or “Destroy the foundation of all the [Palestinian] authority’s military infrastructure … not leave one stone on another. Destroy everything.” Civilian targets included. Bomb all Palestinian commercial centers including banks and gas stations.

Ironically, it is not the Canadian Jews that are in danger by Galloway’s appearance because he is a “terrorist” and a security risk against the Jews as potential victims, but the fact that he brings information that identifies the Zionist party of the Israeli government, particularly in the form of Lieberman’s racist party, Israel Beytenu, as terrorists intent on destroying Palestinians. Hence the real danger in Canada exists for the Palestinian people living there not the Jews. Indeed, one might argue that it is the responsibility of the Canadian Government to support Galloway’s efforts to enlighten the Canadian people to the dangers inherent in the actions of the CJC and the League of Human Rights of B’nai B’rith of Canada that forced the Canadian immigration authorities to ban Galloway.

According to the Canadian Council on Human Rights, Section 319 (3), an individual cannot be convicted of breaking the Criminal Code if the statements or information provided can be established as true, are relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which is for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds it is able to be believed as true and is expressed in good faith and intended to point out … matters tending to produce feelings of hatred toward an identifiable group in Canada.” Quite obviously, the information George Galloway brings about the intent of the Israeli government as noted above is true and is of importance to the safety of Canadian citizens of Palestinian descent, since groups supportive of the genocidal acts committed by that government as alleged, recorded and advanced by respected Human Rights organizations before the proper world authorities, wants to prevent the citizens of Canada from hearing such information; they are the guilty parties not George Galloway.

It should be clear from the evidence presented here that a disturbing picture of an Israeli government emerges, one intent on the destruction of the Palestinian people as stated by members of that government and by the polls taken in Israel of Jewish support for the invasion, 94%, that a concerted effort to commit genocide against an identifiable group, the Palestinians, because of “race, ethnicity, and religion,” by “promoting the killing of members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction, ” is occurring, all actions condemned by Canada’s Council on Human Rights through its Criminal Code as defined in sections 318-319.

Alykhan Velshi, Jason Kenney’s spokesman, “said that the act (immigration act 34) was designed to protect Canadians from people who fund, support or engage in terrorism.” This article makes clear that those who “fund, support or engage in terrorism” are those who convinced Kenny to ban Galloway. He could provide Canadians with accurate, recent, detailed information related to the intended destruction of the people of Gaza and their livelihood. He can provide pictures and testaments from NGOs and the people of Gaza about the actions of the IDF as they launched missiles from the sea, from the air and from tanks on the surrounded civilians of Gaza, how they used illegal chemical weapons on children and women, how they intentionally destroyed United Nations schools housing children and mothers knowing some or all would be victims of that action, how they leveled with white phosphorous the humanitarian store house of the United Nations so that the people could not have food and water, how they maintained the locked gates so that no one could leave and no needed medical and food supplies could enter, and how even the soldiers of the IDF have now reported on the intentional killing of children and women.

This information is vital to the Canadian people if only to provide the truth that their government wants to suppress, if only to mark indelibly who the real terrorists are in Canada that want them, like their neighbors to the south, to be ignorant of that truth.