A Palestinian woman whose house has been occupied by Jewish settlers argued with Israelis who came to celebrate Jerusalem Day in the mainly Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, Wednesday. (Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images) One picture is worth a thousand words.
A clear abuse of process is presently going on in a Canadian courtroom.
I have blogged about the Hassan Diab case before. Briefly, Diab has been accused of the bombing of a synagogue in France thirty years ago. Extradition by French authorities has been requested. Hassan was abruptly fired by Carleton University, and is currently out on bail, having to bear the considerable costs ($30,000 a year) of wearing a GPS device to comply with bail conditions.
France's case has crumbled. Diab's defence team was permitted to call expert witnesses, who demolished the evidence provided by the French government's handwriting experts, key to its extradition request. But Crown prosecutors here have sought delay after delay to allow France to rebuild its tattered dossier.
France has now withdrawn all that evidence--and has "discovered" a fresh new handwriting expert, who has written a 34-page report yet to be filed in court. Crown prosecutor Claude LeFrançois, shamefully, has demanded that the defence not be permitted to call expert witnesses a second time in rebuttal.
In France, only the prosecution may call expert witnesses. In Canada, the scales are more evenly balanced. LeFrançois appears to have forgotten which jurisdiction he is in.
Why the mention of Dreyfus? He, too, was framed on the basis of alleged similarities between his handwriting and that of the actual author of a document who had expressed treasonable intentions. He was exonerated by one handwriting expert, who was then replaced with an obliging new one who reported what his persecutors wanted to hear. The abuse of process that followed is well-known.
France may not have learned from its mistakes. But why are its machinations--for such they appear to be--being replicated in a Canadian courtroom?
Diab's lawyer is withering:
"At the 11th hour and 59th minute they withdraw their entire handwriting case and substitute a new case," said Bayne, who accused French authorities of finding a new handwriting expert in an attempt to save their case after the two they originally used were discredited by four defence handwriting experts, including a former RCMP document examiner.
Bayne said the 56-year-old Diab, who has no criminal record and can no longer work, "has depleted his resources, been imprisoned, fighting a case they have decided to change."
Bayne added he may file an abuse of process application and may now have to represent Diab for free since France's "war of attrition" is "disabling this ordinary citizen from fighting back."
In the Dreyfus case, anti-Semitism was an obvious factor in that gross miscarriage of justice. One cannot help but speculate that Diab's own ethnicity may be at play here, at least to some degree. It took only one complaint from B'nai Brith to get him booted out of his job at Carleton. And now a more than shaky case, hastily reconstructed by a foreign government, appears sufficient for a distinctly malodorous judicial persecution here at home.
Diab's lawyer is understandably upset. So should we all be.
Marci McDonald, author of The Armageddon Factor, is an anti-Semite!
Finally. The other shoe drops.
The far Right has been throwing the mother of all hissy-fits over McDonald's new book. Ezra Levant is beside himself, on top of himself, and on the other side of himself, getting things hopelessly wrong as usual. His allies in the blogosphere have fallen mindlessly into line: most of them, I suspect, have not read the book.
A lot of evangelicals, obviously, are objecting to it. Some dislike having their cover blown; other object to being tarred with the same brush. Considerable nitpicking ensues.
There's plenty of raw sexism as well. The word "hysteria" and its derivatives are everywhere in evidence. "Shrill," too. Centrist Paul Wells can't resist a snotty comment or two about the upstart female who appears to have upstaged him. According to the jacket notes, McDonald once did a study of the backroom dealing that led to Mulroney's Free Trade Agreement. She wrote a book on the basis of it. Wells sneers, "Really? A 'study'?" He was trying, no doubt, to strike a supercilious pose, but comes off sounding merely spiteful.
Now we learn that The Armageddon Factor merely appears to be about Christianist influence on government policy, but it's reallyabout Jews. So says David Frum. But could this be subtle satire, a "hidden agenda" tu quoque? Who knows. I've read McDonald's book. I can assure those who haven't that it really is about extremist Christians--Christianists, "Christian nationalists," choose your term. She does trace what might be termed a holy alliance of these fringe figures with groups such as B'nai Brith, and connects some of the dots at Rights and Democracy, but that's all rather old hat by now.
McDonald assuredly does not write in what Wells insists is "near-panic." What she does do is to go into some detail about fringe elements on the religious Right, whose own pre-Rapture frenzy and moral panic is self-evident, and she maps what is in fact a complex entanglement with our current government. She believes--as do I--that such things deserve the light of day, and are even worth being concerned about.
What comes across is that Stephen Harper himself, while likely sharing at least some of the sketchy views of the "Christian nationalists," has been approaching them more as a constituency to be brought on-side. The strength of McDonald's book, in fact, is her sober description of what amounts to a political symbiosis.
For Harper it's all about target marketing and segmentation, as he assiduously courts a diverse electorate. He plays chess, not always very well, as he tries to get the anti-evolution, Rapture-ready bumpkins on side while not alarming the mainstream. She indicates rather clearly that his relations with the apocalyptics is actually a rather uneasy one, more a balancing act than anything else.
This is all finely calculated. One might think that the growing Muslim constituency would be a natural extension of the Conservative so-con base, for example, but it's pretty clear that Harper has sacrificed them for a net advantage. His blindly pro-Israel stance on the Middle East, as McDonald suggests, is biblical, or can be read that way, but in practical terms it also shores up support in both the Jewish and right-evangelical communities.
It's hardly surprising that the Rapture folks have learned to play the political game, and have had some success at it. Harper himself takes counsel from some of them, he has others in his caucus, and there are wealthy patrons who have helped this all along. It's not that Harper isn't simpatico, which he probably is; it's just that one could see that classic pragmatist making exactly the same moves if he weren't.
The considerable funds that his government has dispensed to the fundamentalists is balanced against his half-hearted moves on the abortion and same-sex marriage fronts. And his foreign policy, like that of all political Machiavellians, is a form of political pantomime enacted in a domestic theatre for the delectation of a domestic audience.
The book does take us for a sobering bus-tour through the wilds of konservative kristian kraziness, some of which is at a considerable remove from the goings-on in the PMO. McDonald gives us a series of illustrations of what must appear to most people as almost surreal--a creation museum here, Christian pirate broadcasting there, a youth leader who wants a "good" version of the Hitler Youth, even a theologian who wants to bring back stoning--and she provides plenty of background, both Canadian and American, about the recent resurgence of this kind of thing.
It's possible to cherry-pick errors and solecisms in the book, and her critics have gleefully seized on a word here and a sentence there, but she does make her case: there is a deeply reactionary groundswell out there, and it has achieved a strong and coherent political voice to which the Harper government is more susceptible than its predecessors.
The religious far-right is a wild reaction to modernism, let alone postmodernism, and the overlap with Conservative politics is plain to see. But if anything, McDonald has succeeded in persuading me that those nutters aren't running the show, no matter how much they'd like to.
Would a Harper majority increase their already considerable influence? That's indeed something to give us all pause on election day. There's no harm in sounding the alarm, as McDonald does: there are enough disturbing facts in her book to make ordinary Canadians take notice.
Certainly the shrieky reaction in some quarters--the tone of the criticism, the namecalling--gives it sufficient additional credibility to be taken even more seriously. But we're a long way from theocracy yet: consider the book distant early warning of a possibility, and let's govern ourselves accordingly.
Self-serving, political apologies after the fact don't cut it. In vodka veritas.
There are times when I'm willing to question my own values and beliefs. But incidents like this invariably come along to remove all doubt. The ranks of the far Right are populated by deeply evil people, with whom progressives have nothing in common. Nothing at all.
UPDATE: More howling Teabagger psychopathy here. [H/t reader Cliff]
I've been sitting on this one for a while, but it's time to raise a few questions about the suspicious death of an 18-year-old Black youth in Toronto, very possibly a victim of police brutality.
On May 5, Toronto's finest were involved in one of those "routine traffic stops" with which young Black men are all too familiar. Two teenagers ran from the car. One, Junior Alexander Manon, was first reported as having collapsed from a heart attack--a young, fit 18-year-old with no known medical problems. He was taken to hospital and pronounced dead.
Even the Toronto Starreported that the man had "no visible injuries" on the scene. If that is the case, perhaps the paramedics should be the ones being investigated.
Toronto's Emergency Medical Services (EMS) was responsible for putting the heart attack story out there. But the family's lawyer, Selwyn Pieters, saw the youth in the hospital: his eyes were blackened, there was blood all over, and his neck had been put in a brace. None of these things appeared to him to be symptoms of a heart attack, and it's a new one on me as well.
The family, in any case, isn't persuaded by the official version: The family of Manon do not believe that he suffered a heart attack. The driver of the vehicle says he witnessed police officers kicking and hitting Manon, but police have provided no confirmation to support these allegations. [Duh.]
A Facebook group quickly sprang up and rendered its verdict. (We can't blame the Toronto Sun for being a little snippy about this: like the Toronto Star, it had earlier given cover to the police by uncritically reporting the "heart attack" fiction.)
We really have more questions than answers at this point--and that by itself, after more than a week and a half, is disturbing.
Ontario's Special Investigations Unit was called in, as it is when a death or serious injury associated with police activity takes place:
No charges have been laid, but an SIU spokesperson said two officers have been designated "subject officers" — meaning, according to the SIU website, officers "whose conduct appears, in the opinion of the SIU director, to have caused the death or serious injury under investigation."
Another eight others have been designated "witness officers" in the case, the spokesperson said, meaning they were present but not directly involved in the incident being investigated.
So much for the initial "heart attack" nonsense.
An autopsy was conducted on the Friday after Manon's death. Its findings remain secret. Originally it was reported that the family had engaged a forensic pathologist of its own to attend and oversee the autopsy. That doesn't appear to have happened, or we would have heard something by now.
The SIU is looking for witnesses, but there are already two, who saw a savage beating administered to Manon by as many as seven of Toronto's boys in blue:
Kevin Faudar, 17, was a passenger in Manon’s car when they were pulled over.
“They f----- his s--- up,” Faudar said. “He did not collapse.”
Police allegedly told the duo they were going to tow the car and asked them to get out.
Faudar said he didn’t know why the cops were towing the car.
Officers were about to put Manon in handcuffs when he ran, Faudar said.
“They brought him to the floor and then they were on top of him after that,” he said.
More officers arrived and surrounded Manon, Faudar said.
He started to walk away from the scene when another cruiser arrived; those officers handcuffed him and put him into the back seat, Faudar claimed.
The next thing Faudar knew, an officer came over said his friend had “just passed away” and told him he’d have to come to the station to give a statement.
“I didn’t believe it,” Faudar said. “That’s the first person that’s died before my eyes.”
Faudar said there were no guns or drugs in the car and they weren’t speeding.
He walked out of 31 Division and was not charged, he said.
A witness on the scene and another passenger of the vehicle reported that: “They beat him up, he was on the floor, he wasn’t resisting. Two officers on him, punching him in the face, one kicking him in the ribs… And then five more come and jump on him… He’s not that big for seven boy’dem [cops] to be on him like that.”
We shall soon see--but not nearly soon enough--whether the SIU functions as a true investigative organization or just another police exoneration squad. We are told their investigation could take more than a month to complete. At this point, eleven days after Manon's death, all we have is a silence that roars.
Readers may remember Alain Préfontaine, the government lawyer who told the Military Police Complaints Commission to take a hike recently, who threatened a CBC reporter--and who vigorously cross-examined diplomat Richard Colvin when he had originally represented him as a "putative client," giving rise to a suggestion that he was in a conflict of interest.
That suggestion has now become an allegation. Five law professors* have made a formal complaint to the Law Society of Upper Canada:
The professors say that in 2009, Préfontaine, arguing on behalf of the government, gave various reasons why certain documents could not be produced for the tribunal. But they say he subsequently argued on behalf of... seven military police officers that they couldn't get a fair hearing without access to those documents.
The hearing was adjourned.
"It is alleged Mr. Préfontaine abused his joint retainer by playing one client off the other, forcing an adjournment and frustrating the tribunal as a whole. This appears deeply at odds with the ethical obligations of a lawyer."
The professors also raise questions about Préfontaine allegedly treating diplomat Richard Colvin as both client and adverse witness.
This will get interesting.
___________ *University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran, University of Windsor law professor Reem Bahdi, University of British Columbia political science professor Michael Byers, University of Ottawa law professor Pascale Fournier and Osgoode Hall Law School professor Craig Scott.
My co-blogger Marie Ève and the peerless Buckets graced my table last evening. A night of pure exhilaration and hilarity ensued. Gallons of wine and beer were sunk.
As I recall, Buckets and I ended up debating the Ontario HST until Morpheus claimed us around 2:00 am. Marie Èvehad had the eminent good sense to depart by cab somewhat earlier. I don't know why he's complaining today, though. He supplied a fair bit of the ol' medicine himself, after all. It's the afternoon after the night before and I'm still feeling fragile. His fault.
Consider the CBC, where David’s late mother reigned, and which Harperites accuse of being left and Liberal. Should leftists defend the CBC? Hell, no, they should attack it – for being so far to the right.
Look at CBC’s prestige political panel: two of three members are Andrew Coyne, of hard-right Maclean’s, and Allan Gregg, who polls for Preston Manning to show how right-wing Canada now is. Its chief pundit is Rex Murphy, now also at the National Post.
Take former journalists in the Harper government, like minister Peter Kent and senators Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin – they all had serious CBC careers. Is CBC training right-wing media agents? The case is at least as strong as the Pakistani Taliban being behind the Times Square bomber.
The only Liberal media senator is Jim Munson, who came from CTV! CTV is now where I go for left-wing analysis. CBC management is so daft they may believe they are left because Harperites say so, prompting them to add even more conservative stuff, as they drift ever further to the right, at some point passing David Frum, still standing still, like ships in the ideological night.
Indeed, so eager is the CBC brass to please its overlords that it skirted hiring rules to bring the loathesome Kory Teneycke on board.
The CBC left-wing? Compared to what? Time to throw a brick through the Overton Window.
UPDATE: Reader Les Miller invites us to share the paranoia.
"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." Thanks to the efficient Harper government, Canadians are doing both at once.
Since 2008, there has been a spike in Christian funding by the feds--using our tax money. As reported in Straight Goods this past February (subscriber wall), Human Resources and Skills Development has been ladling out dollops of cash to right-wing evangelical groups:
In the period July 1 - September 30, 2009, for instance, 22 out of 173 grants made went to faith-based organizations, for a total of $889,016. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, by contrast, there were no grants to faith-based organizations meeting the search criteria (including in their names the word "Christ," "Christian," "Church," "Pentecostal," or "Baptist").
While many of the faith-based organizations that received funding do not fall into the religious conservative category, most do. The Word of Truth Christian Centre in Pickering, ON, for instance, received $192,033 for a project last year. (Shouters) National Evangelical Spiritual Baptist Faith International Centre of Canada in Toronto received $198,951. Eastside Church of God, Fresh Start Program in Swift Current, SK got $84,110. -- For some reason, since the Harper Conservatives came to power, faith-based organizations with extremist views suddenly have become responsible for delivering local employment programs in many Canadian communities. [emphasis added]
Wycliffe Bible Translators slurped up a hefty $495,600 of your money and mine. But that was dwarfed by the $3.2 million awarded to an outfit called Youth For Christ--and, while children living in poverty on a reserve in Attawapiskat have been denied a new school for years, Edmonton's Newman Theological College was recently awarded $4.2 million of Harper's largesse.
We're all tithing in spite of ourselves. And you needn't take my word for it:
For Christian universities, “It’s a historic change, and nothing short of amazing,” says Justin Cooper, president of Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ont., which received $2.9 million. The funds will help cover costs of increasing research and energy sustainability initiatives across campus.
Education funding is a provincial mandate, and Christian universities generally aren’t eligible, so they welcome the change. (Alberta and Manitoba are the exception: private colleges there have long been eligible to receive about half what a public institution might get for capital costs).
Christian universities that benefited from (the federal government’s Knowledge Infrastructure Program) include: Redeemer and Tyndale University College and Seminary in Ontario; Trinity Western University in British Columbia; The King’s, Concordia, Canadian, St. Mary’s and Ambrose University Colleges plus Newman Theological Seminary in Alberta; Providence College and Seminary and Canadian Mennonite University in Manitoba; and Atlantic Baptist University in New Brunswick.
A story that the mainstream media both covered and missed was the Prime Minister’s promotion of two individuals to senior positions in the PMO in March 2009. Darrel Reid became chief of staff and Paul Wilson replaced him as PMO policy director. Reid and Wilson have deep roots in both religious and political organizations. Reid was chief of staff to Reform Party leader Preston Manning while he was leader of the opposition. Later he became the president of Focus on the Family Canada, a conservative Christian lobby group that has worked against public childcare, same-sex marriage, and against adding sexual orientation to a list of minorities protected from hate crimes.
Wilson has worked for Trinity Western University, which is based in Langley, B.C. and is one of the largest evangelical educational institutions in Canada. Trinity established an Ottawa “campus” in 2001 in an old mansion near Parliament Hill. It houses the Laurentian Leadership Centre, which places students as interns with Ottawa-based organizations, predominantly with MPs. Wilson co-ordinated that internship program but when the Conservatives won election in 2006, he left Trinity Western to become a senior policy advisor to Vic Toews, then the justice minister. Wilson later served in a similar policy role for Diane Finley, the minister of human resources.
Of course, we've been watching this shoddy theocratic drama play out for months in microcosm at Rights and Democracy. And--not to belabour the point--we're paying for it.
DawgNews has learned that the province of Saskatchewan is poised to allow physicians to refuse blood transfusions to patients in provincial hospitals if it offends their religious beliefs--and may widen the law still further.
The Saskatchewan Minister of Justice has referred legislative options to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal for what he called "guidance." "There are two legal positions," he said. "One, the rights of patients. But there's also the Charter right to religious freedom. Neither right has priority."
Two options have presently been placed before the court. The first would permit Jehovah's Witnesses employed as physicians in hospitals to refuse to administer transfusions. The second would allow all physicians to opt out of any procedure if it is contrary to their religious beliefs. Lawyer Mike Magoo, arguing on behalf of of the Christian Constitution Foundation, said today that doctors should not have to "park their rights at the door" of hospitals. "You shouldn't be blackmailed into treating a patient if doing so offends your firmly-held convictions," he said.
"It's up to hospital management to ensure that sufficient secular humanists are on hand. Just so long as those folks stay out of the geriatric ward," he quipped.
Magoo is hoping that the courts give their approval to the "open exemption" option. "It's really a matter of conscience," he said. "And that should apply to anyone in a free society." But even the proposed religious opt-out clause is insufficiently broad for real freedom of conscience to be exercised, in his view. "A white supremacist is permitted freedom of belief under our Charter," says Magoo. "Why should a doctor with those views be forced to treat non-whites? Or a doctor with anti-racist beliefs be forced to treat white supremacists, for that matter?"
Faith healers, too, would have the right to withhold conventional treatment, he said. Asked why they would seek employment at hospitals in the first place, Magoo said: "At present, of course, they don't. But with open exemption legislation, the barriers would fall. They'd be able to exercise their rights to employment as well as their rights to religious freedom on the job, without discrimination."
Asked what would happen to members of groups who might be adversely affected--in busy hospital emergency rooms, for example--Magoo said, "Look, the province can't fight discrimination by discriminating itself. If there's a problem, hospitals should just establish more diversity in their hiring practices."
"I'm no Robin Hood," says Tony Musulin--but note the hed at the link. Folk narratives are indelibly inscribed in our collective soul, no matter how stubbornly he refused to perform. He's now serving three years in prison for making off with about $15 million--or somewhat less--in a Loomis security van that he drove for a living. After ten years with the company, he says he simply wanted to get back at his employer:
"As I was single I couldn't have holiday during the summer, they didn't pay me all my hours, we were not respected," he told the court. "I respect the law but at a certain moment I crossed over to the other side because of all these injustices."
Rather half-heartedly, it seems to me, he submerges his personal sense of grievance in a class-struggle narrative:
He blamed his employer almost entirely for his actions. He had put himself in danger for Loomis every day for 10 years, he said, but still earned just $1,700 a month. He said he was forced to drive the same route every day, a duty that “will drive you crazy.”
He added that his employer fired people for no reason and regularly asked the drivers to carry millions of dollars more than the legal limit.
Mr. Musulin said he didn’t plan the heist, but decided on the same day that he had had enough.
Musulin had, it must be said, a certain lack of imagination:
He testified that after hiding the cash and ditching the truck, he went to Italy because “Italians are cool” and he could eat pasta. But he said he soon ran out of money. He decided to turn himself in after he saw TV reports and realized how much attention he was getting. The comedic potential in those lines seems boundless. "The Spaghetti Bandit," perhaps. A man pleading poverty with a garage-full of money, like a Wall Street executive--with, however, far more plebeian culinary tastes.
His folk-hero status, in any case, soon evaporated. Yes, in tough economic times he defied nameless and faceless thieves, the ones who batten upon the ordinary folks who suffer the dire consequences of their mistakes, and pay for their bailouts. And yes, he committed his deed without violence.
But something was missing.
It was considered the heist of the century, and the Loomis employee became an instant folk hero for people who blamed their own financial hardship on a banking system gone out of control.
They learned Tuesday that their Robin Hood wasn’t a hero bent on breaking the banks, but rather an ordinary man who was mad at his boss.
From another account:
The seamlessly and peacefully carried out robbery came when France was feeling the full effect of the financial crisis and earned Musulin a legion of fans who declared him a hero of the people. Internet groups sprang up, T-shirts were made and bumper stickers reading "Tony Musulin: Without Hate or Violence" sold well.
That devotion lessened after police found the majority of the money in a safety deposit box in Lyon. His popularity then plummeted after he handed himself in and claimed to know nothing of the remaining €2.5m. [emphases added]
How can we explain this contradiction--that finding the money alone diminished Musulin, and not finding all of it diminished him still further? Before the money was found, it existed as potential: fire stolen from the gods by a doomed, heroic Prometheus. Then it--but not all of it--turned up, and so did he. Once again, it was only money, and the now-unresisting Musulin was just a person who had stolen it. And the outstanding funds, if they exist, have more likely than not been squirreled away for his own eventual use, or so we might suspect.
Writes one commenter:
A common theif [sic]. He had no intention of giving the money to the poor. People believe whatever they want to believe. It has nothing to do with reality.
Note the palpable sense of betrayal in this counter-narrative--and its profound inaccuracy. What people "want to believe" is their "reality," whether romantic myth, gritty working-class naturalism, or the vast constructs of law and science. The commenter wants to believe that Musulin is a "common thief" with no altruistic designs. (Yet in other contexts we extol such in-it-for-themselves people: we are called upon to admire their greed-driven individualism. "Captains of industry." "Self-made men." "Rags to riches." Must only the poor have noble purposes?)
Musulin, in a word, disappointed. He was just a grunt with a lousy job and a miserable employer, and he acted on impulse. And he didn't have a clue what to do next. When he started to hear about himself in the media, he meekly turned himself in. He didn't fit the hero narrative one little bit. But that "reality" is just another narrative. He was a man out for himself, driven beyond endurance by his circumstances, taking a risk and making his fortune in a moment. Like a gambler, or a lucky day-trader. We are less sympathetic, because we are less involved. So he now becomes an object lesson, a not very bright or very brave lawbreaker who quickly got what was coming to him. Order in the universe is restored, even if it's a universe in which most of us feel dispossessed and powerless.
Upon Musulin, in fact, we merely inscribe our own stories,* what we "want to believe." No matter what we say of him, as Meister Eckhard once said of God, it is not true. We don't know him. He comes to us mediated, a series of accounts to which we add our individual flourishes. But on the infinite playground of language, he can be discovered, again and again, in his numerous guises and roles. Everyman, you might say--or, no one at all.
__________ *CORRECTION: "Our own stories" is problematic. The shift from a subject-position of resistance ("Robin Hood") to a subject-position of oppression (the law, the lawbreaker, the punishment, the restoration of order--resistance to which had, just previously, been celebrated) is a function of power and ideology. We might think we are generating these stories, or at least making them our own, but it would be more accurate to say that they are telling us.
Sebastien Togneri, the senior ministerial aide who ordered the "unrelease" of a sensitive document last July that might have cast a negative light on the Harper government, testified before the House of Commons ethics committee today.
He was reportedly less than impressive--bumblingly hesitant and unclear in his answers. Conservative MP Greg Rickford (Kenora) to the rescue! Magic word!
[He] took committee chair Paul Szabo to task for the general tone of the hearing, which Mr. Rickford said had been “politicized.” Then he mentioned the money that went missing a decade ago in the Liberal sponsorship scandal.
It is not reported whether or not the Liberals on the committee instantly disappeared in a puff of smoke. Not that they don't routinely do that anyway, of course.
But I don't want to talk about that. All internecine backroom wars--and I'm familiar with them--play out much the same. Differences become personal; offices begin to resemble a Canada Packers' kill floor; and at the end, there are battered winners and gutted losers, all with stories to tell, but they usually don't.
I'm more interested in the reaction in certain quarters to what is, in fact, reheated news.
It's my fortune--or misfortune--to have friends who despise each other. They know me better than to try to enlist me in their mutual antagonisms. And normally I know better than to get involved in them--but there are exceptions.
I get on pretty well with Warren, but I have no problem with Skippy Stalin, who loathes the man, dissecting his reasons for departing. It's all fair, witty and well-written comment wherein good points are made, if not exactly damp with the milk of human kindness. But some political types aren't content to maintain focus. If they hate someone, then no one in that person's immediate vicinity is safe. Skippy, in fact, knows precisely what I'm talking about.
I do have considerable difficulty, therefore, with this kind of thing. There is no excuse whatsoever for it. Is that what political discourse at Jay Currie's place has become? Waving a person's private life around in the air, no matter whom it hurts, to a chorus of dirty schoolboy sniggering?
Stay classy, Jay.
I won't bother offering that admonition to your baying regulars, because they had no class to begin with. But you know better, and are better, than this. Or so I have believed up to now.
This time, the ol' foamer is leading the charge against Marci McDonald's new book about the influence of Canadian theocrats on the Conservative government. It hadn't even appeared when his pot boiled over (today's the day), but an excerpt did find its way into the Toronto Star, and the Usual Suspects suffered massive head trauma as a result.
Well, first, to be fair: the Star's editor messed up, incorrectly identifying Karen Sellick's Canadian Constitution Foundation as a "Christian advocacy group," when McDonald herself had actually stated that the CCF (wicked acronym, by the way) had advocated for Christianists. Not the same thing, and not Ezra's fault for reading what was there.
But his main beef seems to be with McDonald's mention of the far-right B'nai Brith activist Joseph Ben-Ami. He incorrectly claims that McDonald identifies him as Christian, which she does not. (And she wouldn't, because she knows better. As far back as 2006 she was writing about Ben-Ami and his provenance.) There is, however, a Christian connection, which Levant conveniently ignores--because he simply can't be unaware of it.
Ben-Ami, in fact, played a central role in forging an alliance between B'nai Brith and the Christianists (part of a general rapprochement whose theological underpinnings are sketched out here). A disillusioned former member of BB, Stephen Scheinberg, notes:
A key person in furthering the alliance was Joseph Ben-Ami, a bearded, pleasant individual and an Orthodox Jew who took on the role of BBC’s government affairs representative in Ottawa. He had worked previously for Stephen Harper and then for Stockwell Day as a policy aide, and played a leading role in Day’s leadership campaign. I believe that Ben-Ami was central to the effort to build this alliance. He would go on to work for two of the numerous front organizations established by Rev. [Charles] McVety—the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies and the Institute for Canadian Values. McVety seems to believe that his multiple groups will further the belief in the power and influence of the Christian right here in Canada. According to a 2006 article in Walrus, McVety’s Institute was established as “a direct riposte to bill C-38” which legalized same-sex marriage.
Scheinberg's article is worth reading in full. I would bet a fistful of loonies that McDonald did so in the course of researching her book.
A Palestinian woman whose house has been occupied by Jewish settlers argued with Israelis who came to celebrate Jerusalem Day in the mainly Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, Wednesday. (Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
Marci McDonald, author of The Armageddon Factor, is an anti-Semite!
From mocking people with Parkinson's disease, the hatriots have now moved on to laugh at people with cancer.
I've been sitting on this one for a while, but it's time to raise a few questions about the suspicious death of an 18-year-old Black youth in Toronto, very possibly a victim of police brutality.
My co-blogger Marie Ève and the peerless Buckets graced my table last evening. A night of pure exhilaration and hilarity ensued. Gallons of wine and beer were sunk.
Guest editorial from Rick Salutin:
DawgNews has learned that the province of Saskatchewan is poised to allow physicians to refuse blood transfusions to patients in provincial hospitals if it offends their religious beliefs--and may widen the law still further.
Sebastien Togneri, the senior ministerial aide who ordered the "unrelease" of a sensitive document last July that might have cast a negative light on the Harper government, testified before the House of Commons ethics committee today.
Well, what else is new?
