Feeding frenzy

O wonderful! O wonderful! O wonderful!
I am food! I am food! I am food!
I eat food! I eat food! I eat food!
My name never dies, never dies, never dies!
I was born first in the first of the worlds, earlier than the gods, in the belly of what has no death!
Whoever gives me away has helped me the most!
I, who am food, eat the eater of food!
I have overcome this world!

--Taittiriya Upanishad

After a week of feasting on each other, bloggers seem to be returning to normal. There's too much real news out there, after all. But in my peregrinations through the bizarre realm known as Current Events, through a thousand media lenses and filters, I re-discovered once more the ancient truth that came to light over the past few days: we are all food. And by "we" I mean every living thing.

Some menu items:

• Tastes like chicken. Well, because it is chicken, although this all goes against the grain, in a manner of speaking. "Pasture? No thanks, I'm not in the mooood." What's next--tofu-eating tigers? The universe demands balance.
  
  
• When dog bites man... it assuredly is news. My favourite part of this story? "Peter Krantz, who carried out the autopsy, said that it was not unusual for dogs to eat their dead owners in order to survive, although he said it was more normal behaviour in cats." "More normal?" Good grief, just how much household anthropophagy has been going on while we've been discussing the war in Iraq and the weather?
  
  
• And speaking of pets... what goes around comes around. Nice doggie. Or, if you prefer, have a break. Have a Kit-Kat.
  
  
• Birthday bash. Maybe these party-crashers should have had an invite. But they didn't have to bite his head off.
  
  
• A fox guarding the henhouse? A bit like discovering that David Suzuki drives an SUV. Again, my favourite line: "'If indeed Ms. Dickerson does have ties to ostrich slaughterers, then it certainly seems dangerous to place any birds under her wing,'" said Matt Prescott, PETA manager of factory farming and vegan campaigns."
  

Back to our regular programming shortly. It's time for lunch.

Law 4

Asmahan "Azzy" Mansour, an eleven-year-old child, was recently thrown off a soccer pitch in Laval, Québec (by a Muslim referee), for wearing a khimār ("hijāb" actually refers to the entire modest dress of a Muslim woman). This head covering is allegedly in violation of the International Football Association Board's Law 4.

Reading this "law," however, one sees no prohibition of the khimār at all, only of equipment or apparel that is "dangerous to himself or another player (including any kind of jewellery)." It is simply not evident that this head-covering poses any threat whatsoever to safety. In Ontario, the soccer association permits it; but the Québec association has a "no headgear" rule. In fact, a QSF official, Valmie Ouellet, claimed that a similar call would have been made had any other religion been involved. I wonder: would we have seen the "no headgear" rule applied to the yarmulke?

Despite all of the misleading headlines and blogchatter, IFAB did not uphold the Quebec ban. It didn't want to touch this one, in fact, with a ten foot pole, talking vaguely to the press after a regular meeting and scurrying away, refusing even to state whether the referee's decision had been correct.

All this fuss and bother seems rather odd, on the face of it, because girls in khumur play soccer at the international level all the time. (The photograph here is of the Iranian national women's team receiving silver medals.) But not so odd if one sees this incident for what it is--a convergence of political acts. The khimār for young Muslim girls these days is as much a defiant statement of identity as it is a religious obligation. And Jean Charest's crude demogoguery, matching that of Mario Dumont, is simply playing to the Hérouxville crowd in the midst of an election campaign. The xenophobic undercurrents here carry us far away from an innocent soccer match.

"Azzy" Mansour is just a kid. But now she's the latest site of struggle in the on-going culture wars. Can we just get back to the game, please?

Child Abuse: Nine-Year-Old Canadian Held in Bush's Gulag

A nine-year-old Canadian child suffering from asthma is being held in a secure detention centre in Texas, under appalling conditions. Neither he nor his Iranian parents have been charged with anything at all. They were travelling to Canada, but had to make an emergency stop in Puerto Rico: US officials swept up the whole family and packed them off to jail. (This is starting to sound like a broken record, isn't it?)

If you follow the links, you will see that the father applied for refugee status ten years ago, under Canada's Old Government [tm]. He was sent back to Iran to be tortured, with his spouse and his infant child. (One wonders just how many more of these stories are waiting to be uncovered. The notion that we don't deport people if they are likely to face torture at the other end appears to be a polite fiction, to put it mildly).

Perhaps Canada's New Government [tm] isn't interested in getting a young teenager out of Gitmo. But when the US starts jailing asthmatic nine-year-olds, won't a simple sense of decency move us to act?

We need to get a blogburst going on this one, folks. Send a politely-worded note to Peter MacKay, our Minister of Foreign Affairs. Remind him of Principle Two of the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child:

The child shall enjoy special protection, and shall be given opportunities and facilities, by law and by other means, to enable him to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity. In the enactment of laws for this purpose, the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration.

Jailing sick children--jailing any children at all--is barbaric. Let's stand up together against this child abuse in the name of "national security." And let's demand that our government do the same.

h/t verbena-19.

UPDATE: (March 12) Annamarie of verbena-19, take a bow. Take another one. And everyone who followed up on this, and wrote, and did all those things that people who give a damn do, take one too. Kevin is coming home. h/t this time to Hope and Onions, and I'm not even a cat-lover. :)

Globe & Mail hypocrisy, and the presumption of innocence

After seven years in a Canadian jail, without being charged with anything, Mohammad Mahjoub is finally being released. He has been held for seven years under a security certificate, a star-chamber mechanism through which a person can simply be imprisoned indefinitely and mistreated, right here in Canada, without the inconvenience of a trial.

Canada's Old Government [tm] issued the security certificate in this case, and tried to deport Mahjoub in 2004, admitting that it knew he would be tortured in his native Egypt. (Many of the players from those days are currently rebelling against Stéphane Dion's move to roll back some of the more draconian aspects of anti-terrorism legislation that they rushed to impose after 9/11.) Canada's New Government [tm] finds nothing wrong with security certificates. And "Canada's National Newspaper," the Globe and Mail, continues its slimy support of them, in a chilling editorial, "Canada's no dark hole for terror suspects." (The Globe, one might recall, objected only once to the use of a security certificate, in the case of Ernst Zundel.) Perhaps the most objectionable sentence in this defence of arbitrary measures that the paper claims to oppose on its masthead* is this one: "Their arrival in Canada, where they are assuredly not wanted, places this country in a dilemma."

Just for whom does this anonymous writer imagine he or she is speaking? Why are these men, presumably innocent before being proven guilty (the latter being something Canadian authorities seem reluctant to set about doing), "not wanted?" (And why are convicted neo-Nazi hate criminals like Zundel "wanted," if it comes to that?) One cannot help but observe that just a tinge of racism might be discerned in commentary like that. Arab surname=terrorist, right?

Of course, presumed innocence makes some people impatient. Even in "progressive" ranks, we find the occasional swipe at this fundamental principle, as in Terry Glavin's latest Chronicles post (go find it--he shall get no link from me). "[W]hat, exactly, [would] these protestors ... put in place of Security Certificates, and how many of them believe the detainees are innocent, and how many believe they're guilty[?]"

Easy. In answer to the first, a trial. In answer to the second, they are innocent until proven guilty. That should be clear enough, even to anonymous editorialists and gutter journalists.

UPDATE: (February 23) The Supreme Court of Canada has unanimously struck down security certificates as a violation of life, liberty and security of the person under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, no doubt leaving the aforesaid editorialists and journalists choking in its broad judicial wake. It will be interesting to see how this pusillanimous crowd reacts; I'll be following what they have to say closely. They might do well to reflect upon words I have quoted before, likely from Benjamin Franklin:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

UPPERDATE: (February 26) Well, crowing can sometimes mean that you end up eating crow. Bob Tarantino has some comments here that should be read. And I probably owe Lord Kitchener a beer. I'll need one myself to get the carrion bird down, and I hope I don't get West Nile.
____________
*The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate shall neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures. --Junius

Progressives and conservatives

OK, OK, on "what is a progressive" I'm about to give up. The horse is dead, like our friend the parrot:

'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

But what is a conservative?

The word derives, obviously enough, from the verb "to conserve." But when we look at the words and deeds of so-called "conservatives," here is what we see (and please note that not all conservatives subscribe to any one of these positions):

• Blatant disregard for the environment, to the point that ex-professors speaking for the oil and coal industries have more credibility than thousands of climatologists
  
  
• Enthusiastic support of war, now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and no doubt someday in Iran and Syria. Many conservatives have supported in lock-step every single American imperial adventure in living memory
  
  
• Anti-evolution thinking (sometimes risibly called "Intelligent Design") that entails a radical departure from two centuries of meticulous scientific observation, substituting blind faith and misrepresentation
  
  
• The destruction of civil discourse, and its replacement with vilification and screechy namecalling
  
  
• Opposition to the notion of human rights, to the point of defending security certificates, the Guantanamo concentration camp, permanent special measures and torture

One might be forgiven for asking what, precisely, these conservatives want to conserve.

Well, wait a minute, in all fairness: they do want to conserve traditional forms of marriage (to the exclusion of any other form), traditional forms of sexuality, and the dominant culture. But that's too easy--none of these need conserving, because they're not under attack in the first place. Claims to the contrary are just tactical: a man and a woman can still get married as easily as ever, heterosexuality looks like it will soldier on somehow, and the dominant culture, allowing of course for the fluidity of the notion of "culture," is not about to give way to one of mad mullahs, stoning and beheading, at least the last time I checked.

So perhaps we need to re-draw the political map. Conservatives, at least the ones I have been referring to here, don't want to conserve, but to destroy. It's leftists, at least the ones who are these conservatives' favourite targets, who want to conserve: the environment, human beings, respect, scientific inquiry and human rights.

Do we have here the key, perhaps, to resolving that "progressive" problem I mentioned? Let's call ourselves Canada's New Conservatives [tm] and really throw a spanner in the works--just in time for the next election.

Quote of the week

"In conservative Egypt, few are likely to stand up for the rights of a gay Israeli spy who quits Islam."

Progressive dirty pool

A cautionary word, first of all, to my readers: I am here departing from a position that I have argued for strongly on a number of occasions--namely, that progressive bloggers should go easy on each other in their blog-posts. Unique circumstances, which I shall describe, lead me to make an exception. I am, needless to say, posting this as Dr.Dawg, not as a ProgBlogMod.

Terry Glavin, a member of Progressive Bloggers, runs a blog called Chronicles & Dissent. (No link, sorry. Go look it up.) He writes columns here and there, and he recently reviewed a new book by Nick Cohen in The Tyee. Cohen is worth reading, although exasperating on occasion: I once had a few words to say about him here. He raises uncomfortable questions that the Left needs to wrestle with, even if he does so in a style that resembles fingernails on a blackboard.

Glavin, however, is no gadfly on a lazy horse, more of a horsefly looking for blood. His weapon isn't puckish critique, but slander. You can get the measure of Terry pretty quickly, in fact, by reading a column of his that appeared a little while ago in the Georgia Straight. (My comments are in italics, in square brackets.)

StopWar's peace is about opposing Israel
By Terry Glavin
Publish Date: August 3, 2006

Things started at a July 18 demonstration in Montreal, when a small group of young Lebanese showed up with a sign that read “Peace for Lebanon and Israel”. They were shouted at and shoved around and driven off. Their sign was torn up. The event then proceeded, with people carrying placards that bore the flag of the fascist organization Hezbollah and pictures of Hezbollah's rabidly anti-Semitic leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

[COMMENT: 1)A more balanced view of the give-and-take between demonstrators and counter-demonstrators may be found here: http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/07/73342.htm
Note that one of the counter-demonstrators adds a comment in the Comments section. There was no organized attempt to shove around or drive off counter-demonstrators. The peace demo was not monolithic: note the references to the “triumph of Islam” demonstrator, whom at least one peace demonstrator figured was a plant (Comments section). 2) One should be careful of applying Western concepts like “fascist” too loosely. It obfuscates, rather than clarifies. And one should also be wary of calling any Arab leader “anti-Semitic” without proof (see below).]

Before the month was out, you could fairly mark July 2006 as one of the most squalid months in the history of the “left” in Canada.

[COMMENT: Empty, insulting language.]

On July 22, at a Toronto rally sponsored by the Canadian Peace Alliance, there were Hezbollah flags, strapping young men in Hezbollah T-shirts, Nasrallah's fat, stupid face in placard-sized photographs, and pictures of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier and lyncher of homosexuals.

[COMMENT: 1) “fat, stupid face” – pointless namecalling. Does Glavin actually have anything of substance to say? 2) Without holding a brief for Ahmadinejad, and his latest antics, did pictures of him represent the CPA, or only the people who carried them? As noted, the demonstration was hardly monolithic.]

To be clear about the depths of this squalor: Hezbollah glorifies death and war to the point of making pornography out of it,

[COMMENT: “Pornography?” Examples? Or is this simply a “snarl-word” used for rhetorical effect?]

calls Jews the descendants of “apes and pigs”

[COMMENT: A reference to a 1998 speech by Nesrallah where he is alleged to have said this has some currency in anti-Hezbollah circles, but quotes like this prove elusive to track down. They seem to erupt exclusively in pro-Israel publications and websites; one has to ask why such things would not be proudly reported in certain Muslim ones. I am not stating that Nasrallah has never uttered such words, or harbours such sentiments; only that they appear to be reported only by his enemies. (Incidentally, Sura 5:60 of the Qur’an, whence all this “apes and pigs” talk keeps arising, does not refer to “the Jews.”)]

, and happily disseminates such fascist classics as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

[COMMENT: Nasrallah “happily disseminates” this rot (which certainly has some currency in some Muslim countries)? Do we have proof here, or simply more allegation?]

Nasrallah himself is helpfully unambiguous about his hatred of Jews: “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak, and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology, and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say 'the Israeli.'?”

[COMMENT: This oft-quoted statement has a somewhat mysterious origin. Its “primary” source may be found here: Saad-Ghorayeb, Amal (2001), Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion, Pluto Press, p.170. But it appears from her footnote that she got the quote second-hand, from a Hezbollah ally, Mohammed Fnaysh. This is pretty shaky stuff, but it doesn’t stop pro-Israel groups from using it. CAMERA sources the quote to an article in the New Yorker: www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_is. The article quotes Saad-Ghorayeb, quoting Nasrallah, a quote that had been, as indicated, quoted from somebody else. None of this, as noted, is to argue that Nasrallah might not indeed have all of the opinions and attitudes attributed to him. I just would have wanted stronger proof before joining in the demonizing.]

To be clearer: while the Canadian Peace Alliance has been busy with its “Don't Attack Iran” campaign, Ahmadinejad's regime, which is explicit about wanting Israel obliterated, has been busy funding and arming Hezbollah and trying to assemble a nuclear arsenal for itself.

[COMMENT: 1)“wants Israel obliterated.” This, too, has received wide circulation, although Ahmadinejad clarified this a little by stating recently that he expected Israel to go the way of the USSR. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/] Whether we approve of this sentiment or not, it’s a far cry from calling for nuclear obliteration, which is the usual interpretation given in the Western media. 2)“trying to assemble a nuclear arsenal for itself.” This is a common charge, but where is the proof?]

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, on the same day that trade unionists and “peace” activists

[COMMENT: Note the shudder-quotes. Another cheap rhetorical trick.]

were marching under Hezbollah banners in Toronto,

[COMMENT: “Under” them? They didn’t have their own banners? This would be a first for the labour movement.]

about 300 people gathered at the Vancouver Art Gallery for a rally cosponsored by Vancouver's StopWar Coalition. The rally's main speaker was Rafeh Hulays, who has openly declared in a letter to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Hezbollah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers””the event that set off all the bloodletting in Lebanon””was “legal, moral, and necessary”.

[COMMENT: Is this all Glavin has got? A speaker at a rally once said something somewhere else, something that could not remotely be deemed anti-Semitic? In fact, the kidnapping of the soldiers occurred after a kidnapping the day before by the IDF, in Gaza, of two Palestinians thought to be members of Hamas, Osama Muamar and his brother Mustafa Muamar. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Shalit]

Shortly after his July 22 address to the Vancouver peace rally, Hulays was again writing to Haaretz, admitting that he didn't believe in peace anyway. “I no longer do,” he wrote. “There are many monsters that need to be dealt with. Israel happens to be the biggest, ugliest, and most dangerous.”

[COMMENT: By this time, Israeli forces had bottled up the entire population of Gaza, with the threat of massive civilian deaths looming (http://counterpunch.org/tilley06302006.html), and had killed more than 300 Lebanese civilians [http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/2]. One can understand Hulays’ emotional state at that point. But in any case, this has little to do with the CPA rally.]

A week later, the StopWar Coalition held another demonstration on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, this one to protest “Canadian complicity in Israeli war crimes”. This time the featured speaker was Hanna Kawas, who openly campaigned against Ottawa's 2003 decision to ban three notorious Palestinian terrorist groups. The StopWar Coalition joined him in that effort.

[COMMENT: Here is the full story (both sides):
www.cpavancouver.org/letter_to_solicitor_gene]

Odd thing for an antiwar group to do, you might say, since war is the reason these terrorist groups exist.

[COMMENT: Unpacking the assumptions in that sentence may be a waste of time. Suffice it to say that many so-called “terrorist” groups exist to defend against the terror imposed by states, e.g., the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, termed “apartheid” by Nobel Laureates Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter.]

But this isn't about peace at all. “Peace” is just code for opposing Israel. This is about war.

[COMMENT: No, “peace” is code for “peace.” Which will never be achieved so long as Israel continues to occupy Palestine.]

Actually, two wars.
One is the just struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom, for their own state, and for peaceful coexistence with Israel.

[COMMENT: Ah. A ray of light?]

The other is an Islamist war against modernity, against liberalism, and, as always, against the Jews. In that larger war, the Palestinian cause is a cover, the Palestinian poor are fodder, and there is no shortage of useful idiots to make light work of it all.

[COMMENT: Back to bluster, assertion and insult. Glavin has no real arguments, it appears.]

Take the famous British demagogue George Galloway, for instance. While Nasrallah's face was being paraded around downtown Toronto on July 22, Galloway, at a similar rally in London, fairly screamed these words: “I am here to glorify the leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.”

[COMMENT: Was that pompous idiot at the CPA rally? I must have missed something.]

Then there are Galloway's friends in the Socialist Workers Party, whose Canadian affiliates provide the key staff positions for the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, and the War Resisters Support Group. And on it goes.

[COMMENT: Well, don’t stop now. First we got second or third-hand quotes attributed to Nasrallah. Now we get “key staff positions” in the peace movement, staffed by “affiliates” of the Socialist Workers Party, some of whom are apparently “friends” of Galloway (who is not a member of the SWP, in case anyone needs reminding). That’s a rather tenuous set of linkages.]

Still, StopWar is perfectly entitled to argue that pro-war, fascist Jew-killers should be allowed to raise money, propagandize, and otherwise operate freely in Canada. Argue away, you might say to StopWar. Just not in my name.

[COMMENT: Emotive language like this is always a good substitute for thought and facts when you have neither of the latter. Has StopWar ever argued any such thing? Or is “pro-war, fascist Jew-killers” just code for “anyone Glavin doesn’t happen to like?”]

But that won't quite do if you're a member of the B.C. Teachers' Federation, or the Hospital Employees Union, or the Vancouver Green party, or the New Democratic Party, or the United Church of Canada. If you belong to any one of about 160 organizations that StopWar lists as endorsing members, or if you simply happen to live in Vancouver or Burnaby, then StopWar is speaking in your name.

[COMMENT: In its own words, too, not in Glavin-speak. But Glavin doesn’t actually quote StopWar; he’s too busy slandering it.]

And don't you dare try to speak for yourself about these things. You will be told you don't know what you're talking about, or that you've “bought into” something called the neoconservative agenda, or, worse still, that you're a Zionist.

[COMMENT: By “speaking for yourself,” could Glavin mean supporting Israel to the point of calling its murderous Lebanon adventure a “measured response?” Do supporters of the Palestinian people never speak for themselves? These empty assertions raise far more questions than they answer. Who will be told such things; and by whom; and on the basis of what?]

So, in July 2006, while Israel was fighting for her very life,

[COMMENT: At this point Glavin is simply hallucinating. Anyone checking out the Lebanese civilian casualty count, the infrastructural damage, the sealing off of Gaza, must wonder what planet Glavin inhabits. Israel massively attacked Lebanon and Gaza, and caused enormous carnage, suffering and destruction--not the other way around.]

and Lebanon and Palestine were being ground to bits,

[COMMENT: By a country “fighting for its life,” I presume.]

and Iraq was descending deeper into a hell of throat-slitting and suicide bombing, Canada's “antiwar” left had openly opted for war.

[COMMENT: Not proven by a single part of this florid polemic.]

And the words on the placards left no doubt about which side it was on: “We Are All Hezbollah”.

[COMMENT: Ah. Was this on all the placards? Or is this a not-so-subtle attempt to suggest that the anti-war movement is "all Hezbollah?"]

So, to sum up: the Left is morally corrupt, hypocritical, and anti-Semitic. Got that?

Now, a sloppy, dishonest, yellow-sheet "journalist" would usually be easy to ignore--there are, after all, so very many of them. But not only is this one going that extra yard by posing as a "progressive"-- he also practises a form of moral cowardice that is exemplary, in its way. Over at his place, he referred to a commenter at The Tyee, recently banned by the Tyee's timorous and inconsistent editor, David Beers, as a "Jew-basher." Knowing Terry's proclivities, I asked for proof. Big mistake.

A short, rancorous exchange commenced, which spilled over into the comments section of another one of his posts, on Monbiot and the 9/11 conspiracy theorists. I quoted this short passage:

The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical.

I was attempting to make the point that one can offer observations like this without being a conspiracy theorist, or "anti-Semitic." (The quotation is from an article in Ha'aretz.) Indeed, I clarified this in my next post, noting Terry's propensity to paint the peace movement and the Left with overly-broad brush-strokes. But you won't find that post: he deleted it. And he went on to say

I certainly can't help you, and I'm not going to engage in a debate with you. You're the internet equivalent of serial crank-telephone caller, or an anonymous graffito artist. Hanging up on some nutcase on the telephone is not a denial of free speech, and graffiti is not debate. It's vandalism, so if you come back here and try to post anything short of an abject apology, I'll delete you. You are perfectly free to go and cry about it and tell more lies about me from the safety of your anonymous nickname somewhere else.

His concern about my "anonymous nickname" (no, he doesn't write very well either) would be more convincing if he weren't surrounded by panting acolytes with names like "ndude" and "Blazing Cat Fur" and "Bookmistress," whose "anonymous nicknames" don't seem to cause him any bother, but no matter. I don't do abject apologies on demand for the likes of him--that sort of thing smacks too much of the glory days of Stalin for my taste. I refused, therefore, and indicated my continuing problems with his mischaracterization of the Left, but that further post was deleted as well. Then his echo-chamber buddies jumped to, with their own crude slander, but no responses on my part were permitted. Osip Mandelstam, writing of the aforementioned Redeemer of the Masses, referred to such people:

And around him the rabble of narrow-necked chiefs--
He plays with the services of half-men

Who warble, or miaow, or moan.
He alone pushes and prods.

Let's be clear: this is Terry's combox, and he can do what he wants with it. If you can't be Czar of your own blog, after all, we've come to a sorry pass indeed. But you are still open to criticism if you use it as a platform for vilification (e.g., some egregiously inaccurate and silly comments about my former union), while refusing the right of rebuttal to the target. It's...a character thing.

Herewith, then, another contribution to our on-going debate about what it means to be "progressive." It has meant, in the recent past, lock-step support for the good citizens of Hérouxville and defence of the Chinese head-tax. Now it apparently means slandering the peace movement and offering up your blogspace to anti-union character assassins with a guarantee that they will froth unopposed. Perhaps a better question, then, for those still interested, is: what isn't "progressive"?

Targeting Professor Attaran

h/t to My Blahg for getting me riled.

Reading the right-wing blogs and the reams of abuse to be found in their comboxes, Professor Amir Attaran, in the faculty of law at the University of Ottawa, is the new Great Satan of the "rah rah" set. For daring to raise the possibility that prisoners, whoops, that's "detainees," have been abused by Canadian troops in Afghanistan, he has become subject to what Robert McClelland rightly calls a swiftboating. He has an agenda. He's inconsistent. He's a Muslim, so that should tell you something. He's a sneak who has managed to raise, once again, his original concerns about turning prisoners, whoops, there I go again, "detainees," over to the tender mercies of the ex-Northern Alliance types in charge of Afghanistan.

Well, just who is this guy? Actually he's not a Muslim, although so what if he were? He's married to a practising Catholic. He's an academic with international credentials in law and public health issues. He's a human rights activist--he doesn't confine himself to scholarly articles and books--and one of his targets has been Robert Mugabe, as it happens. But he's just too brown for some folks--not a "real Canadian." (He was actually born in the US, and is a naturalized Canadian citizen.) This is the sort of repulsive racist calumny that he has been subjected to recently:

I have received a very great amount of hate mail, saying that I am not a real Canadian. Well, I am. And I have received quite a lot of other material attacking me -- and I won't use the real language because it's really vulgar -- as a damn Muslim. Use your imagination to substitute for damn.

And here's a small sampling of combox chatter:

Right out of Al-Qaeda's textbook. The fact that the claims are coming from a professor here in Canada is somewhat worrying though. Either he is a sympathizer for Islamic Terrorists or worse, a collaborator.

--

Another good leftist professor shilling for the enemy--I'd like to know what these "detainees" were up to when they were arrested?

--

It's quite obvious where the professor's loyalties lie.Not once was he questioned as to why he is so interested in this aspect of the Afghan operation, and why he would spend so much time and effort to bring this to light. His own history may bear some looking into.

--

Attaran.."you're busted"...now tell us who your accomplices were...at the very least this punk should lose tenure.

--

Who told this prof wannabe about what happened over there....Send him over there with no protection and let him go out without a flak jacket. Don't let your kids go to that university.

--

What's Attaran's motivation? Well, he's a Muslim who has ingratiated himself into western politics in order to help achieve Islamist goals. Kitman is obvious in his deceptive cover as a 'humanitarian.'

Had enough? Believe me, these are just a few rancid drops spattering from the unsavoury racist stew that's a-boiling fast and furious on the starboard side of the blogosphere at the moment.

It is disappointing to see that even in relatively respectable right-wing blogsites, like Daimnation and The Torch, Attaran himself has become the issue, and the media who have given him prominence recently--not the issues of human rights abuses that he has raised. In a foetid fog of "patriotic" drivel, he has been accused of an agenda-revealing inconsistency: he has complained that the abuse of "detainees" has not until now been investigated by the military; but he had earlier cast some doubt upon the impartiality and thoroughness of the military investigating itself. I see little contradiction here. Even a biased investigation is preferable to sweeping the matter under the rug.

The brass, at least, are taking the possibility of abuse of "detainees" seriously. Now, if we could only track what's become of the "detainees" handed over to the Afghan government's torturers interrogators. That's a far larger question, of course, one that Professor Attaran has been pushing for a year or so. Maybe it's time some people stop fixating on the man's skin colour and start getting a mite curious themselves.

Five things that bug me

My memory could be deceiving me, but I recall that the redoubtable Canadian curmudgeon Gordon Sinclair--whose latter-day incarnation, Don Cherry, is but a poor imitation--once wrote a column with a similar heading. (For him, it was more likely ten things. Or fifty. But what the heck.)

Having officially achieved curmudgeonly status, at least in age, and just ask the kids, I thought I'd start modestly with five perennial blogospheric annoyances that call aloud for irritable comment. So here goes, in no particular order.

1. Bloggers who don't allow comments. You read a really provocative piece, left, right, centre, it doesn't matter, and then you look for the comment button, and it isn't there. The blogger in question has committed the unspeakable sin of trolling you and then taping your mouth shut. Be it known that this qualifies as torture under the UN Convention. Aren't bloggers supposed to foster controversy? Then why the gag?
   
   I know that some people have good reason, or say they do. Kathy Shaidle sees comboxes as "occasions for sin," and, lacking her theological knowledge, how can I presume to argue? (I am assuming that she is referring to her own possible fall from grace, not that of her visitors, but I could be mistaken.) She has been known to venture out into the combox world herself, though, especially when trolled.
   
   But at least Kathy has offered us an explanation. Others simply post, and you can take it or leave it, but there will be no discussion unless you want to go somewhere else. That's dirty pool. It's censorship! It's a violation of the right of freedom of speech! At least, I'm sure I know people who would make that argument. Personally, I think it's just party-pooping, not a Charter violation. But it's irritating.
   
   
2. Bloggers who ban commenters. Now, I think I'm a nice enough sort of fellow, not a troll, at least not all the time, but yesterday I managed to get banned from two blogsites. The word "echo-chamber" leaps to mind, but that's too simple. I think we have here a pathology, manifesting itself in various stages. Remember that I'm not talking about lumpen purveyors of abuse, profanity, all of those egregious violations of the rules of hospitality that call for immediate banishment. I had a couple of those once, and sent them packing. I'm talking about--wait for it--disagreement.
   
   I will forebear to name the two individuals involved. That would be rude, but, more important, pointless. In one case, I simply became an unperson: all posts of mine, innocuous as at least some of them were, vanished into the outer darkness. I would call that Stage Two, Stage One being the elimination of specific posts--a cyber-slap, rather than blogocide.
   
   Stage Three consists of the elimination of your own posts, but not of the posts that attack you. A visitor to the site might be put in mind of Osip Mandelstam's line about "just enough people for half a dialogue." There are accusations and rough commentary about someone or other, but the target has simply been removed, able to listen but not rebut. Perhaps out of my unfailing generosity of spirit, I insist on regarding this cyber-cowardice as a sickness, not a crime. It's just too obvious for there to be intelligent planning behind it.
   
   
3. Blogrolls that fuss about their identity. I need to tread lightly here. Every blogroll has a theme, a commonality, a reason for affiliation. If it doesn't, then it's not really a blogroll, but an agora, and that's what the political blogosphere already is, isn't it? We don't really need mini-versions when we have all outdoors. So I don't expect to see Warren Kinsella trying to join the Blogging Tories, at least yet (joke, Warren, no writs please), or Stephen Taylor getting listed as a Blogging Dipper...well, you get my drift. And on Progressive Bloggers, whatever the heck a "progressive" is, I don't expect to find white supremacists, "men's rights" types, or people who complain about the Chinese moving in next door.
   
   But what to do if one of these surfaces right here at home? Being the good progressives that we are, we agonize about it. Blogging Tories, on the other hand, just kick people out. If I was ever critical of them for this (and I don't recall being so), I take it all back. There's something to be said for expediency on occasion. We could learn from them.
   
   
4. One-trick ponies. Do you ever come across bloggers--I know you have--who really only have one issue, and beat it to death for post after post? The "Muslims are a danger to us all" crowd, for example, or "Jack Layton's moustache sucks," or "Onward to victory in Afghanistan," or "Androgenic global warming is a socialist hoax," or (my current favourite) "the Left are a bunch of anti-Semites." I mean, get a life! There are so many uncleared, untilled fields just waiting for ideological seeding. Kate McMillan runs a blog that really does cover the waterfront. It's interesting, damn it, even if it puts a progressive's teeth on edge. Ditto, closer to home, with Robert McClelland. (What is it with these Scots, anyway?) Incidentally, I'm just picking two sort of equal-but-opposite folks here as examples, so no one should feel left out. There are plenty of interesting blogs out there, right across the political spectrum.
   
   
5. Shills. Again, naming no names, I am weary of blogsites that pop up like mushrooms whenever there's a political convention of some sort. They are so transparent, just a obvious way of avoiding campaign spending limits, and they're boring. Get yourself a real blogsite, like my friend Cerberus, and plug away by all means, but show a bit of imagination. And staying power. (Speaking of which--are you still there, Ted?)

Well, that's about it for me at the moment. Feel free to add your own items to the list. Such as--the propensity for bloggers to make lists?

UPDATE/CORRECTION: (February 9) It should be noted that Robert McClelland co-blogs with the excellent Paladiea. I apologize for having to be prompted on this.

The Good Terrorist

Luis Posada Carriles is not exactly a household name, but it should be. He's a terrorist, a mass-murderer who engineered the bombing of a civilian airliner, along with his good buddy Orlando Bosch. George Bush père was CIA director when the murders were committed, making him Posada Carriles' employer. His administration nixed Bosch's deportation in 1990. If Posada Carriles' last name were Almrei, say, or Jaballah, or Mahjoub, he'd be a headliner. But he's one of ours, see. And the people he killed on Cubana Airlines flight 455 on October 6, 1976 were "seventy-three dogs."

Bosch is now living a quiet and contented life in Miami. Carriles, however, who escaped from Venezuela where he was to stand trial for terrorism and sneaked into the US in 2005, is sitting in a New Mexico jail on immigration charges. Venezuela has demanded his extradition, but Bush fils isn't about to give up his anti-Castro freedom fighter, who has applied to become an American citizen.

Meanwhile, back in Canada, three men who have been held in jail for years on "security certificates," odious Star Chamber artefacts that have no place in a democratic country, are entering a critical phase in their more than two-month-long hunger strike. These men have not been charged with a crime, have not been permitted to see any evidence against them, have not even been allowed the routine access to their families that convicted murderers and rapists receive. They have been badly mistreated in prison--hell, let's call a spade a spade, tortured--denied medical care, and are now at the point of death.

All this is happening under the noses of the regular media, but not a whimper of outrage can be heard, except for the strong views of a couple of guests on CBC's The Current this morning. The fearless Globe & Mail, "Canada's National Newspaper," is against a security certificate when the person held under it is named Ernst Zundel, but stoutly defends them in the case of people called, well, Almrei, or Jaballah, or Mahjoub. Meanwhile, the starboard side of the blogosphere has already tried and convicted these guys--but it hasn't uttered a word about Posada Carriles.

And so the war on terrorism continues. Sleep tight.

Memorandum

To: Margaret Wente, Rex Murphy
From: The Phraser Institute
Subject: IPCC Report

The just-released IPCC report on "global warming" could not have come at a worse time. Just when our Intelligent Design department is making serious headway in reforming school curricula, and our Planar Earth department is revving up to start demanding equal time with the "globe" partisans, this happens:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of hundreds of scientists from 113 countries, said that based on new research over the last six years, it is 90 percent certain that human-generated greenhouse gases account for most of the global rise in temperatures over the past half-century.

Even Stephen Harper and George W. Bush are bending in this wind. We need to get busy on this one right away, and we're counting on your assistance.

The language of the debate is, as always, of paramount importance. The other side has managed to sideline us by using terms like "enviro-sceptics" and, more damagingly, "global warming deniers." The first makes no sense, of course--we all know there's an environment, we've never questioned that. This is just another socialist smear. The second carries echoes of Holocaust-denial, as you, Mr. Murphy, have already astutely pointed out. We have to promote our own vocabulary, or turn theirs around--remember what we were able to do with "politically correct." So we respectfully make the following suggestions, which we hope you will take up in future columns.

1. The word "enviro-nuts" is gaining currency. Find a couple of extreme statements or actions that you can point to and repeat often to justify the label, and use the word frequently. It works well adjectivally, too: "Are you enviro-nuts?" accompanied by raised eyebrows is worth a thousand IPCC reports. "Warmers" is good shorthand as well, suggesting that the enviro-nuts might even be the cause of their own imaginary crisis.
   
   
2. We need to brand ourselves: we suggest "Ten Percenters." Note that the scientists, or politicians, or whoever authored that wretched propaganda document, admit that they are only "90 percent certain" that people have anything to do with so-called "global warming." We can quote their own leftist gurus in our support: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." That's Margaret Mead, another socialist. It's time to reclaim the word "change."
   
   
3. What change are we after? A change back. We want to change back to common sense, change back to getting around in our SUVs without feeling under attack all the time. We're sick of trying to figure out if this week it's bottles or cardboard in those stupid recycling boxes. People are tired of being lectured by "green" types all the time. They just want to get on with their lives. Invite them to join the "Ten Percenters."
   
   
4. We need to sound neutral, not antagonistic. We should describe ourselves as "weather-watchers," for example. That doesn't define us as blindly partisan in any way, but the very opposite: observant.
   
   
5. And what are we observing? Take the Everyman approach. "It's just a little unusual weather, no biggie. There used to be palm trees in Greenland. What caused that? Mastodon farts?"
   
   
6. Keep plugging away at the "socialist" thing. The word gets people upset, because it means "bad." Attach it to any comment from the "warming" crowd. It's great word-paint. "Eco-terrorism" works too. Explain that the warmers are causing far more damage than any isolated acts of log-spiking or other sabotage. The costs of the latter add up to a piddling $42.8 million. Contrast that with the costs of one year of Kyoto and you're home free.
   
   
7. Mr. Murphy, we know you are fond of Shakespeare. So use this quotation:
   
   Since I was man,
   Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
   Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never
   Remember to have heard; man's nature cannot carry
   The affliction nor the fear....
   
   These alarmists have always been with us.
   
   
8. There has to be some connection with Islam that you can make. They claim to be in favour of "balance," and are full of the usual green nonsense. They sound, in fact, just like more environ-nuts. Make a joke or two about their green deserts. Refer to the Middle East and Afghanistan and 9/11 and terrorism and anti-Semitism. By this time you'll have the warmers on the ropes.

We wish you well, and look forward with some anticipation to your next articles. In the meantime, stay cool, as the kids say.

When in Hérouxville...

Ayoye!

The town fathers of Hérouxville, Québec, have issued a fatw...er, un avis public, to prospective immigrants, following a perfectly gender-balanced survey of residents that garnered 98 female and 98 male respondents. It's obviously a tolerant and progressive little place, where only two of the respondents defined themselves as "racist" (two others weren't sure), and only four wanted to take away women's right to vote. A larger number (10) did not know that the Québécois were une nation, so Stephen Harper has a little work to do in that respect; but only three were opposed to female police officers arresting male suspects.

This consultation having satisfied the requirements of a democratic town council, the Mayor, one Martin Périgny, fired off letters to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Peter MacKay, to the Secretary of State, Helena Guergis, and to the Immigration Minister, Diane Finley, not to mention a gaggle of Quebec Cabinet ministers as well. His purpose was to announce, based upon his sondage, the town norms, here Babelfished into English for your delectation. Immigrants, he said, would be expected to conform to them. No stoning of women. No clitoredectomies. Mixed swimming pools. The whole nine yards, as they say in Baghdad.

Now, one can understand how those who feel that their culture is under siege can become self-conscious about it, and reify it into texts and images. One thinks of the Maori haka performed in front of legions of pakeha, having lost much of its original significance but having gained a different significance, or the Inuit values of survival now codified as Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. Those artefacts, changing their meaning with the times, are created to prevent erasure. But the good burghers of Hérouxville are not the bearers of a threatened culture at all. They represent the dominant culture, in fact, and are engaging in a bit of good old-fashioned triumphalism.

One can see abundant evidence of this in the norms that they are now promulgating, and in the way in which those norms are expressed. As noted in the Montreal Gazette, it's rather like those resolutions passed by little Ontario towns a while back declaring that they were officially English-only--Sault Ste. Marie, for example, St. Mary's Falls, that is (with "Ojibwa Kitche Gumeeng Odena" on the town crest, just to make things really interesting).

The norms are explicitly confrontational, for one thing, the town council wagging a collective finger at people unlikely ever to settle there, caricaturing other cultures, demolishing stereotypical strawmen, gratuitously forbidding behaviour unlikely ever to occur. Those who applaud, like Brigitte Pellerin, ("A small town defends its local customs") or the egregiously stupid writer of the hed in the National Post ("Herouxville wants immigrants that fit in with its citizens") are missing something fundamental: this is not a defence of local culture at all, which is not remotely under threat. It's a cartoonish attack on others. And such attacks resonate, unfortunately, with the ranks of les Québécois pure laine--not that other parts of Canada are by any means immune from that sort of nonsense.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, a police officer from Montreal is in a bit of trouble over a cheerfully xenophobic song making its way around the Internet, Ça commence à faire là.

"Si tu n'es pas content de ton sort, il existe un endroit qui est l'aéroport" he sings, to a fairly catchy beat. It turns out that he was particularly exercised by a recent incident where Hasidic Jews demanded that a YWCA frost its windows so as not to tempt young Hasids at an Orthodox synagogue across the street who might chance to see spandex-clad women working out on the premises. And an internal police magazine suggested at about the same time, pouring oil on the flames, that female officers step aside to allow their male colleagues to deal with Hasidic men--getting the police union all upset and causing some puzzlement in the Hasidic community, which had never suggested such a thing.

Of course, the Hasids have been established in Montreal for generations, so that telling them to head to the airport has no doubt earned the tuneful flic a few puzzled looks. But other accomodements have also caused offence recently: men being banned from pre-natal classes because Muslim women were present, for example. A Sikh schoolkid carrying a tiny knife sewn into his clothing. A Filipino child eating with a spoon. If that keeps up, Québec will be just a province comme les autres before you know it. It's a slippery slope, câlisse.

Anyway, his song was soon all the rage, and his bosses found out. "Le policier dans l'eau chaude," says the headline.


Not in Hérouxville, mon chum.

UPDATE: (February 2) A parody has appeared. Some knowledge of la parlure required. (h/t Marc-Alain Mercier).

UPDATE: (February 10) The Globe & Mail has an excellent editorial on the subject today. "This statement [the avis public] only purports to be about shared values. It is an insult and a provocation...."

Barracking Obama

The knives are out for Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama--not because of his wishy-washy, centrist politics, but because...well, he's a closet Muslim, sources close to Hillary Clinton are muttering. (h/t Cynapse)

Or maybe he's just an uppity Black man who doesn't know his place. The discussion has certainly become heavily racialized on the Right. As one Canadian conservative commentator puts it, "Black, stupid or both: that's your only excuse for getting excited about Barack Obama." She continues, referring to Obama's mixed-race background, [T]here is nothing 'compelling' about a black man impregnating a white woman. In more than one Toronto neighbourhood, that's what they call 'Saturday night.'"

So a big hat tip today, to Candace of Waking Up on Planet X. She really says all that needs to be said.

UPDATE: (January 21) Did she or didn't she? There has been considerable debate, here, at Candace's place and elsewhere, as to whether the Hillary Dems were behind the "closet Muslim" smear. The story referenced above did appear in a right-wing magazine, using unnamed "sources within the Democratic party." Could the Repubs have indeed managed a "two-fer," slinging the mudpies at Obama and putting the blame on Clinton?

But if that were the case, why would Repub strategists do this before the Democratic nomination was secure? In answer to the following question in an ABC/Washington Times poll: "37. Do you have a favorable or unfavorable impression of (NAME)? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?" Hillary Clinton scored 56% favourable, with 27% "strongly favourable." Obama's numbers were 44% and 21%, trailing Nancy Pelosi and John Edwards. For the opposition, Rudy Giuliani racked up 67% and 49%.

Obama as Democratic presidential nominee would be a Republican asset. A Black person with a name like his, beloved of northern liberals, would fight a nearly unwinnable battle in the red states. Elementary strategy would dictate, therefore, that the Repubs hold back until Obama wins the nomination, and then swiftboat him to oblivion. Again, therefore: why now?

So I'm agnostic on the question. I was in error, though, in uncritically attributing the smear to the Clinton camp without noting the provenance of the report. Mea culpa.

UPPERDATE: (January 21) Kathy Shaidle has, predictably and no doubt to her delight, provoked tremendous outrage over here on the port side with her brazenly racist comments about Barack Obama and Blacks in general. Some of the responses, however, seem well over the top to me (and no, I shall not link to them). Commentary about her appearance, and whether or not she is getting enough, is OT as far as I am concerned, not to mention sexist. Can't we set our standards a little higher than the other side?

Is reality real? Really?

Does the name Shilpa Shetty ring a bell? It should: she's a well-known Bollywood actress presently living in the Celebrity Big Brother house, in the centre of a gathering international storm.

For those not in the know, the Big Brother schtick is to plonk people into a house, make them live together, and, with the assistance of the audience, kick them out one by one. The last remaining tenant wins. Welcome to another iteration of that well-worn oxymoron, "reality TV."

But how much reality is enough? It appears that the delectable Ms. Shetty has encountered not only the usual rudeness to be expected when people are cooped up under real artificial conditions, but some real racism, too. In England! Who'd a thunk it?

As soon as the treatment of Shetty hit the fans, as it were, and she does have her share of them, real trouble erupted in Britain and in India. 18,000 complaints were recorded by the media watchdog Ofcom--the largest number ever received--and 2,000 by Channel 4, which hosts the show. The luckless Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, found himself in India at the time, on an official visit. "I want Britain to be seen as a country of fairness and tolerance. Anything detracting from this I condemn," he said. Tony Blair and London's mayor Ken Livingstone soon followed with condemnations of their own.

During the same time, in Shetty's homeland, there have been demonstrations, effigy burnings and assorted other expressions of indignation. The Indian Finance Minister announced that India-Britain relations would not be harmed by all this, meaning that they have been, at least at the popular level. "I am confident, he said, "that the universal condemnation of the racist remarks will result in change in behavior of persons associated with the program." Meanwhile, the Celebrity Big Brother audience has swelled from 3.5 million to a staggering 4.5 million viewers. Really.

Of course, this is where it all gets interesting. As we know, well-formulated diplomatic statements are a performance; and so, for that matter, are political demonstrations. We have not moved abruptly from the "real" to the real; rather, what Jean Baudrillard calls simulation has simply been extended. We remain, as the wider audience, squarely within the realm of the hyperreal. Ironically, the only shred of reality that can be glimpsed in all of this* is the blatant racism--and that's precisely what viewers and governments want expunged.

To paraphrase Jack Nicholson: Reality? We can't handle reality. Sure, we want it real. But not really real.
_________________
* This, too, of course, is problematic, given that race and racism are modes of false representation, performed by racists and the racialized alike. But these power dynamics are anterior to the phenomenon of "reality TV."

Of Khanny Conservatives, blogroll slander, multiculturalism, Nunavut and abortion nuances

2007 is shaping up to be the usual heap of fragments out of which we construct or shore up our respective ideologies. Is there glitter amidst the dross? Issues that could spark debate but, more important, actually make those of us on the "progressive" side reflect? Well, just maybe.

• The saga of turncoat/convert Wajid Khan continues to unwind, as it were (h/t Zac). But, bluntly speaking, who gives a rat's ass about Wajid Khan? He's just a venal politician, grabbing the brass ring. He merely highlights the glaringly obvious fact that, if you look at the entire length of the political spectrum--in fact, if you do away with that metaphor altogether and talk instead of political possibilities--there's really not all that much difference between the Liberals and the Conservatives. No, seriously. Who is David Emerson? A former CEO of Canfor Corp. Who is Belinda Stronach? The pampered daughter of a multi-billionaire. Cross the floor one way, cross it the other way...is there really an ideological difference? Only on the surface, if even there.
  
  Cynical? Not at all. The world is simply bursting with possibilities. But why, then, do we narrow our political focus to include so little? Are wage and price controls Conservative or Liberal? Free trade? Public-sector bashing? Involvement in Afghanistan? Post-9/11 civil liberties? What position on what issue can be said to be fundamentally Liberal or Conservative? Answer: none. What's in a name? It's really one party with two faces.
  
  There is a fatal fluidity in their respective positions--even with Harper in the driver's seat, a man who actually has an ideology--that's based upon mere tactical considerations, not upon anything remotely connected to principle or vision. Some MPs change parties and make headlines, but many more, with their parties, change their minds 180° after being elected, and it's business as usual. Or had they all along intended the opposite of what they campaigned for? (Trudeau's wage and price controls leap immediately to mind.) In any case, no issue is safe with either of these corporate entities. Expediency rules.
  
  
• A prominent member of the small-c conservative community has finally spat out her poison: the Blogging Dippers, she avers, are "Canada's leading on-line anti-semitic community."
  
  Wow. Is Jack Layton's bedtime reading the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion? Have Dippers joined the ranks of the Holocaust-deniers?
  
  Well, uh, no. The International Jewish Conspiracy guys tend to be, er, conservative. Read David Duke's website, if you can stomach it, and see where that crowd stands on affirmative action or immigration. Check out the political positions of leading Holocaust-deniers and fascists like the British National Party's Nick Griffin. The vocabulary is a little more direct--these folks don't hide behind codes so much--but it's all rather familiar, isn't it?
  
  What Kate means by "anti-semitic," of course, is "critical of Israel." In other words, it's the usual cheap, drive-by smear that the new McCarthyites use routinely to try to silence opposition to Israel's policies. But better they should look within their own ranks if it's genuine anti-Semites they're interested in.
  
  
• According to a recent survey, the Globe & Mail tells us, "[v]isible-minority immigrants are slower to integrate into Canadian society than their white, European counterparts, and feel less Canadian, suggesting multiculturalism doesn't work as well for non-whites."
  
  Wrong. It's working only too well.
  
  The premise behind multiculturalism is simply wrong. It's an essentialist premise, based upon the notion that cultures can be caught, packaged and kept pure. Then the people placed lovingly within those boxes are urged to get along with the people in other boxes, and to "integrate" into the bargain. The whole thing is so flawed, so artificial, so contrived, so contradictory, that it is no wonder that the results are precisely what the survey reveals.
  
  How do progressives who harbour these misgivings find the discursive space to argue them without sounding like conservatives? A good start is to unpack the idea of "integration." One hopes, of course, that people in a community, even an "imagined community," will to some significant degree be integrated--that's rather what "community" means. But integrated doesn't mean homogenized. And it doesn't mean, "you have to learn to be like us." Rather, it means that the unique and shifting perspectives, world-views and narratives of all of those in the community are permitted to combine naturally to make something new. There is no timeless, unchangeable "us," after all.
  
  We won't get there, though, so long as we maintain our well-intentioned but paternalistic policies of cultural salvage and preservation. We build walls that way, and we're beginning to see the consequences.
  
  
• And speaking of culture, Nunavut has been in the news recently, with a multiple shooting in Cambridge Bay, a community that I have recently visited and hope to visit again. "It's just too late in Nunavut," screams the Globe & Mail headline. "Few take advantage," the sub-hed says, "of available help for chronic alcohol and drug abuse."
  
  Nothing could sum up the underlying problem of Nunavut better than that. The territory is a magnificent example of the contradictory Canadian policy towards aboriginal populations--supposed autonomy within a context of cheerless, hopeless dependency and continued colonization. Kids go to English-only classes starting from Grade Three. The Nunavut Public Service Act is cobbled together from other jurisdictions, and an Inuktitut/Innuinaqtun translation doesn't even appear to exist. Lip service is paid to traditional cultural values, Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, but governance is built upon the same model as in the South: hierarchy, power imbalances, fragmentation of the workforce, confrontation. The communities are simply put on welfare, and the symptoms of the resulting disease are then treated--not always very well. Nunavut is presently suffering from all of the consequences of our Canadian version of indirect rule.
  
  I wish that we could take a look at Kalaallit Nunaat, better known as Greenland, as a case-study of what is possible. Greenland's fifty-six thousand people got home rule back in 1979. More than 80% of the population is Greenlandic Inuit. Greenlandic and Danish are official languages, and the schools operate in Greenlandic. Greenlanders have a university in the capital city, Nuuk. Per capita income is the equivalent of nearly $21K US, and the unemployment rate of 10% is half that of Nunavut.
  
  Greenland is not economically self-sufficient--half of government revenues consist of grants from the Danish government--but compared to Nunavut (90%), its economy is robust, if heavily dependent, as one might expect, on the fishery and the public sector. Tourism is limited by the climate and season, and current mining possibilities will require some years to materialize. (Source: CIA World Factbook.)
  
  Suicide among young people is a major problem in both Greenland and Nunavut, although Greenland's statistics are marginally better, as they are for life expectancy. Given the Internet and television, it seems to me that young people in remote areas are presented with excruciating extremes: their probable future toiling in primary industries, or unemployed, and the lavish lifestyle showcased behind glass screens, forever out of their reach. I have often wondered why remote Northern areas do not participate in the "knowledge economy," where one's immediate geography is not a limiting factor. Investment in informatics infrastructure would, at least on the surface, offer tremendous potential and hope.
  
  While Greenland is not Utopia, then, it still offers a startling contrast to Nunavut. I suspect that its relative success is due to a self-government untrammeled by paternalism and chronic dependency, and to a people whose own values, language and traditions have pride of place in their own land.
  
  
• Chris Selley had an interesting column recently on the abortion issue. Designer children? Deliberate selection for disabilities? The comments at his blogsite raise some other questions. For those who coldly reject "nuance" as a threat to women's civil liberties, the article and commentary are worth a read.
  

Thanks for the memories

With a hat tip to my good friend Nick. Brought tears to my eyes.

OK, you read it here first...

Don't cheer so loudly, dear right-wing bloggers. Saddam is not dead.

You may remember that the man had a slew of doubles. This was one of them, the one who drew the short straw. Why is the real Saddam being kept alive, you might wonder. Better you should ask, "Did they ever have the real Saddam in custody?"

No, they did not. Don't believe a word of it. He's holed up in comfort somewhere, with his Scotch and his torture videos. There is a geopolitical game plan here, of stunning boldness, hatched in the glory days of Donald Rumsfeld and fledged by his successor. But to understand it, you first need to know about the invisible imam. To quote the linked article,

[The] Twelfth Imam, Muhammed al-Mahdi...died, or vanished, at age five in the ninth century. The Twelfth, or Invisible, Imam is prophesied to return in times of extreme ruin to lead the faithful to paradise.

Now, there's a problem. It would appear that, at least in some quarters, the ever-elusive Osama bin Laden is seen as precisely that imam. Not good news for the US State Department. Such rallying-points keep Islamofascism on the boil.

But Christianity offers a way out, or at least the history of Christianity. What do you do if someone you don't like becomes Pope? Why, if you have organizing skills and a geographic base, create--an anti-Pope. Or, more properly, create a Pope of your own, and call the other fellow the anti-Pope.

As everybody knows, Saddam was useful to the US over quite a period of time--in fact you could almost call him their made guy. Suddenly, though, he was supposedly in their bad books. Two wars twelve years apart it took to "topple" him, and in between, sanctions made him fabulously rich. Now the US is sitting on the second-largest oil reserves in the world, and Saddam has been turned into the Hanged Man, that archetypal symbol of divinity and sacrifice. As Tarot-fanciers know, the Hanged Man is not really dead. This image, residing deep in the unconscious, is being deliberately used by the US to resonate in the hearts and minds of Muslims.

We may never know what Saddam was offered to play his upcoming role of Mahdi. Perhaps he'll get Iraq back, but as the Twelfth Imam he would be far more powerful than a mere dictator in any case. And, to paraphrase a former US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, he may be a Twelfth Imam, but he's our Twelfth Imam.

When will he appear in his new guise? My bet is this year, 2007, just in time to extricate the US from the deepening Iraqi quagmire and cut Osama off at the knees at the same time, not to mention establish George W. Bush's legacy. Mind you, I'm not sure how the President is going to explain this to his fellow-citizens, but he won't have to bust a gut over it. Those people will believe anything.