Happy International Women's Day

In Brazil, a nine-year old girl is "allegedly" raped, according to this mainstream news source in Australia (where the sexual assault of children as young as four isn't, in fact, taken very seriously). The word "raped" is placed in shudder-quotes too. The BBC chimes in, referring to "alleged" abuse. No doubt these newseditors thought the little girl was asking for it. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, is punishing the people who helped her.

In Canada, the clock is being turned back thirty years by the Conservative government. In the United States, a woman can be jailed for delivering a stillborn baby.

Women are targeted by virtue police in India. Girls in Afghanistan have acid thrown in their faces for going to school. Travelling on buses with men warrants having your bus stoned in Israel.

A 13-year old girl was raped in Somalia and then, by order of the court, stoned to death for adultery. Her rapists were never charged with anything. Authorities claim that she lied about her age--she was actually 23. Oh, that's OK, then.

Looking around, it's hard to recall without some bitterness that infamous commercial slogan You've come a long way, baby. Miles to go before we sleep.

Let's get back to work.

No, not that work.

Toy government

Everyone's playing. Here's how it works.

Don't Toews me, bro

Harper old-timer and current President of the Treasury Board Vic Toews has a piece in today's Ottawa Citizen on the subject of pay equity, about to be gutted in the Conservatives' omnibus budget bill.

Conservatives, he said, respect the principle of equal pay for work of equal value. (Take that, base!) Except that he prefers foghorns on this occasion to dog-whistles. Once the bill passes, that respected principle is dead, and his folks know it.

Pay equity, rather than being enshrined as a right, will now be subject to negotiation. And guess what? Both parties at the table will be held responsible for achieving pay equity--and subject to heavy fines if they fail to do so.

This places the federal public service unions in a completely untenable position, which, come to think of it, is just what any righteous Conservative employer dreams of doing. In outline, here's what the labour side is up against:

1) It must negotiate a right. Pay equity will become just another tabled bargaining demand.
2) If the employer takes a hard-nosed stance, the unions may not be able to achieve pay equity.
3) It is then subject to fines.
4) An employee may go straight to the Public Service Labour Relations Board to complain.
5) Her union will be forbidden by law to assist her (see [3]).
6) The legal duty of a union to provide fair representation for a member cannot, in this respect, be discharged (see [3]).

Toews witters on about the length of time it takes to resolve complaints under the current system, and he's absolutely right: successive governments' intransigeance on the issue have ensured that complaints before the Canadian Human Rights Commission have proceeded at a glacial pace.

The preference is obviously for a faster system: legislation that obliges the employer to review its pay practices, identify equity gaps and develop a remedy. In 2004 a joint Pay Equity Task Force recommended just such a law, with a commission and a tribunal to enforce it. There is nothing new here: similar pro-active legislation already exists in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

But the Harper government has declined to implement the recommendations. Better to hit both the equity principle and the unions with one legislative blow.

Here is how the new law will work against women:

• The new legislation doesn't even mention "pay equity," but introduces the term "equitable compensation," whose meaning in law is uncertain. This is no accident.
  

• It adds "market forces" to the equation--the very forces that helped to create pay inequity in the first place.
  
  
• Rather than permitting the comparison of jobs within the entire public service, the new law will restrict job comparisons to specific job classes* and "job groups," the latter to be defined by regulation. The government can, by regulation once again, restrict the comparator jobs upon which compensation assessment can be based (s.4[5] d). In other words--it's a fixed race.
  
  
• A "female predominant" group will now have to be comprised of at least 70% women. Under the current rules, there are ten "female predominant" groups in the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest federal public sector union. This would cut that number down to five at a stroke. Of the 2,963 information services workers, for example, 2039 are women--68.8% of the group. With the passage of this law, they would have no right to claim pay equity.
  
  
• Prior to collective bargaining, the employer will only be required to provide the unions with information about the gender composition of job groups. This is hobbling the unions, who need complete job information on male and female dominated groups to make a case.
  
  
• As if all this weren't bad enough, the legislation also permits delays in implementing pay equity, assuming all of the hurdles outlined above are somehow surmounted.
  
  
• As noted, employees are legally on their own in pursuing a complaint to the Public Service Labour Relations Board, and facing down a phalanx of government lawyers. Few employees, of course, have the means to undertake such a struggle.
  

The problems with the legislation--its dire consequences for women--are obvious. Female workers are being deprived of a fundamental human right guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms: namely, equality. The bill is now currently working its way through Parliament. The NDP and the Bloc have been vocal in their opposition to this piece of throwback legislation. No word so far, though, from former human rights advocate Michael Ignatieff.

____________________
*A "job class" is defined in the legislation as "two or more positions in the same job group that have similar duties and responsibilities, require similar qualifications, are part of the same compensation plan and are within the same range of salary rates."

From Warsaw Ghetto to Gaza Ghetto

A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life; but as he was falling he hit a person standing down below and broke that person’s legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune. If both behaved rationally, they would not become enemies. The man who escaped from the blazing house, having recovered, would have tried to help and console the other sufferer; and the latter might have realized that he was the victim of circumstances over which neither of them had control. But look what happens when these people behave irrationally. The injured man blames the other for his misery and swears to make him pay for it. The other, afraid of the crippled man’s revenge, insults him, kicks him, and beats him up whenever they meet. The kicked man again swears revenge and is again punched and punished. The bitter enmity, so fortuitous at first, hardens and comes to overshadow the whole existence of both men and to poison their minds.

You will, I am sure, recognize yourselves (I said to my Israeli audience), the remnants of European Jewry in Israel, in the man who jumped from the blazing house. The other character represents, of course, the Palestine Arabs, more than a million of them, who have lost their lands and their homes. They are resentful; they gaze from across the frontiers on their old native places; they raid you stealthily and swear revenge. You punch and kick them mercilessly; you have shown that you know how to do it. But what is the sense of it? And what is the prospect? --Isaac Deutscher


Israeli Apartheid Week wrapped up at Carleton University this evening with a two-person panel discussion under the heading of this post. The speakers were Suzanne Weiss, a Holocaust survivor, and Samah Sabawi, a Palestinian Canadian born in Gaza. Marie Ève and I were in attendance.

What follows are a few impressions and observations. And by the way, not to keep anyone here in suspense, I don't approve of the Warsaw-Gaza comparison.

To begin with, it was a pretty tame affair, and my co-blogger and I agreed that we didn't learn much new information. Indeed, for all of the frantic machinations by B'nai Brith and various politicians and university officials to shut IAW down and call us all a bunch of raving anti-Semites, it was a pretty uneventful week, at least in Ottawa.

The audience was fairly large, but there was a lot of unanimity about the Palestinian cause and Israel--too much, I thought. Indeed, it was like old home week for me, which I found vaguely bothersome. I was hoping, if not for fireworks, at least for some spirited debate, given the topic at hand.

We heard from Suzanne Weiss first. The comparison of the two ghettos is, as it turns out, a bit of a set speech for her. And it did sound that way--a collection of assertions, with phrases like "the Zionist Final Solution" that frankly chilled my blood. I don't buy the refutations of the "Engage" crowd holus-bolus, but I do believe that we need to take considerable care in our political uses of analogies. David Hirsch, from whom I borrowed the Isaac Deutscher quote above, makes a few good points in response to the charge that Israel's methods are Nazi-like. And his "Engage" colleague Mira Vogel urges a different and more humane kind of engagement.

But I want to make one point in her defence. Weiss, I think, is a Jew speaking to other Jews first and foremost. I sense that she wants to awaken consciences, to say to her community: "We're better than this." Two kinds of people emerged from Auschwitz after liberation, she said: those who said "Never again!--for Jews" and those who said "Never again!--for anyone." She made reference to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands, their sequestration in open-air prisons like Gaza, and a host of other observable violations of human rights by the Israeli state, and then made a comparison between this and Nazi policies towards the Jews. The comparison is meant to be inflammatory; it is meant to say, "We must not subjugate and mistreat other peoples as was done to us. Stop! Reflect!"

Nevertheless, for me, at least, it didn't come off. Her use of the word "Zionist," for example--as though there is only one Zionism--seemed facile. The word does not always equate to "ethnic cleansing," although it can and has. There are socialist Zionists, right-wing Zionists, even fascist Zionists. The word refers, quite simply, to a kind of nationalism, in fact several kinds--from expansionist to simply communitarian.

She did offer one original thought, however. Contrary to the usual anti-Semitic notion that Harper and his ministers are controlled by Jewish organizations, she asserted that the opposite was true: Canadian Jewish organizations, she said, are being set up by the Conservatives and used as pawns in an imperial game being played out in the Middle East.

Enough.

Samah Sabawi spoke from both heart and brain. There was a humane depth in her words, as she spoke of her relatives trapped in Gaza during the bombardment, and being forced to see this night after night on the 11:00 news. She didn't spend any time on dubious comparisons between Nazis and Zionists.

Within the context of the banned IAW poster, she recounted a story about a child of hers in Grade 12 in an Ottawa school, who had composed a moving poem about her feelings during the assault on Gaza. She had received permission to read the piece aloud at a school assembly, but the school principal, at the last minute, told her that she had to excise any mention of Israel. (What would she have preferred? "The Zionist entity?") Sabawi visited this official, and found that she was utterly terrified of a backlash if the reading had gone ahead.

Such is the atmosphere in Canada today, where Opposition leader Michael Ignatieff, in an intellectually incompetent and dishonest op-ed, joins with the likes of Conservative Jason Kenney in denouncing any substantive criticism of Israel as "anti-Semitic," where universities seize posters because they supposedly might incite violations of the Human Rights Code, where organizations like B'nai Brith demand that Israeli Apartheid Week be banned, and where a schoolgirl is prevented from reading a poem aloud because it might upset somebody.

In any case, I was first up at the mic, for the simple reason that people seemed reluctant to engage to begin with. I asked the panelists if they really thought that comparing the Gaza ghetto to the Warsaw Ghetto (a holding tank for the Auschwitz death-camp, to which Roma and Jews rounded up elsewhere were added in their tens of thousands) was helpful in our fight for the Palestinian cause. Weiss and two or three people in the audience drew some comparisons--the restriction of humanitarian supplies, the extermination of Gazans with experimental weapons, even Gaza as another holding tank, being largely composed of the descendants of dispossessed Palestinians from elsewhere. One person stated that analogies didn't have to be exact, which is true--but there are good analogies, after all, and bad ones.

Yet I observed that the audience didn't really want to pursue this line of discussion, moving quickly instead to one about the use of the word "apartheid." There were some excellent interventions made, including one from a Jewish friend of mine who went on at some length and very lucidly about the core similarities between Israeli and pre-Mandela South African policies, and then stated his uncertainty about whether the use of the term, even if justified, was constructive.

For me, the apparent unwillingness of the crowd to address the ostensible theme of the evening was grounds for optimism. I wonder, in fact, if there would have been any interventions at all about the Warsaw-Gaza comparison if I hadn't raised my question, which seemed to call forth a less-than-wholehearted rebuttal.

We felt more comfortable, I think, dealing with the familiar and defensible positions regarding Jewish-Palestinian ethnic relations, oppression and the brutality of occupation and displacement. And, while this is within my own comfort zone, for what that's worth, I would have been interested in some real contestation even there. It's too bad that our opponents chose instead to try to shut us down, harass us or simply lie about us--and saddening that their slanders, rather than the future of the Middle East, became the media story of Israeli Apartheid Week.

Everyone Knows The * * * Harper Has Seen.

There's a jazz standard called ' Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen '. Yesterday Canadians were subjected to a most unpleasant variant thereof, by way of Harper's petulant and hissy performance in the House of Commons:

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said earlier this week that his party will not approve the funds unless the Conservatives provide details on precisely how the money will be spent. The Tories say they'll account for the spending after the fact.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper suggested the Liberals are hypocrites for demanding rapid stimulus but then delaying it.

“I hate to use this expression, but the Leader of the Opposition really is engaged, in this entire budgetary business, in the biggest exercise of suck and blow I have ever seen in Canadian history,” Mr. Harper told the House of Commons during Question Period.

Too. Much. Information.

ODD boy out

In his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault noted the proliferation of categories invented by Victorian-era medical scientists to describe every conceivable form of deviant sexual behaviour. This form of scientism--the use of scientific discourse, the objectification of the human personality, the taxonomies--was, as he knew, a method of controlling and disciplining populations.

Those taxonomies, however, are not confined to sexual matters. "Problem" children, for example, are currently being diagnosed, assigned new classifications, and then treated by the very people who invented them.

I'm not particularly well-versed in current theories of child psychology, except to note that a series of "disorders" has sprung up that never existed in my day. "Attention Deficit Disorder" (ADD) is the big one: when I was a child, people would say "daydreaming again" or "your mind is wandering." And then there's "Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder" (ADHD): all of the former plus "getting up to tricks." Now they're pathologies.

Of course at the extreme end of the scale any normal activity becomes, well, abnormal. Concentration is good; obsession is bad. Cleanliness is good; the Lady MacBeth complex is overdoing it a bit. A little fear keeps us alive; phobias cripple us. But it seems to me that we're defining "normal" a touch too narrowly these days.

The danger of classification became salient for me when I read an article today about an eight-year-old kid who was locked in a closet by his school for acting up (I believe the current term is "acting out"). It was supposed to be a "time-out room" but it didn't, as school officials admitted, really meet the standard for one. When I was a schoolboy, we just had to stand in the corner. I didn't know how lucky I was.

Unnervingly echoing Foucault, a child protection expert stated that time-outs should be used to discipline, not to punish. This, he thought, might be straying into punishment.

The child, it appears, may have autism and Obessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)--and something called Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD).

Oppositional Defiant Disorder, eh? Hmm. I think I have that.

I looked it up. Here's the way the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the folks who had homosexuality in there too until it was delisted in 1987--and that was a story in itself) defines the syndrome:

Diagnostic Criteria

1. A pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior lasting at least 6 months, during which four (or more) of the following are present:
   Note: Consider a criterion met only if the behavior occurs more frequently than is typically observed in individuals of comparable age and developmental level.
   1. often loses temper
   2. often argues with adults
   3. often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults' requests or rules
   4. often deliberately annoys people
   5. often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior
   6. is often touchy or easily annoyed by others
   7. is often angry and resentful
   8. is often spiteful or vindictive
2. The disturbance in behavior causes clinically significant impairment in social, academic, or occupational functioning.
3. The behaviors do not occur exclusively during the course of a Psychotic or Mood disorder.
4. Criteria are not met for Conduct Disorder, and, if the individual is age 18 years or older, criteria are not met for Antisocial personality disorder.

If the child meets at least four of these criteria, and they are interfering with the child’s ability to function, then he or she technically meets the definition of Oppositionally defiant.

The first three criteria, and criterion 6 (four criteria in all), seem to define everything I know about the blogosphere, for what it's worth--well, add 4, 7 and 8 for some bloggers--but more importantly they also define, for me, a perfectly normal child. Or maybe an intelligent one, asking a lot of questions beginning with "Why?"

When I was in kindergarten, longer ago than I care to remember, I wandered out of the big gym where we were confined during the day. The principal, Mr. Scott, strode up to me. I remember looking way up to see his face. "Go to your room," he ordered. "You go to your room," I said.

This was the 'fifties, and kids just didn't talk back to elders and authority figures. The word spread, my teachers were shocked, and my parents were told about it. They had a little talk with me, but I suspect they were secretly amused.

That was that. But now I wonder if my natural curiosity, my instinctive questioning of authority, my irritation with others for any number of reasons, and my reaction to insulting comments, smugness and stupidity (which are far too often found in combination)--all of which I had as a child--might have landed me in far more serious trouble today.

I envision someone in a white coat, checking off 1, and 2, and 3, and--yes--6. "Aha! That's four! He has Oppositional Defiant Disorder! Nurse, the Ritalin, if you please."

No doubt I was thus afflicted, and remain so in middle-age. But, fellow bloggers of the Right, Left and even the Centre, admit it--aren't we all?

A Liberal leader's political cynicism

From a slavish column in the National Post by Michael Ignatieff, a former supporter of human rights:

The CUPE Ontario resolution passed last week to boycott Israeli academics is an unacceptable violation of academic freedom....The CUPE resolution is an attack on the free exchange that is at the heart of our university system.

The Liberal Party of Canada condemns the CUPE resolution in the strongest possible terms. I salute the others who have spoken out against the resolution, including my colleagues on both sides of the aisle in the House of Commons, and CUPE’s national president, Paul Moist, who has refused to support the resolution.

The resolution, in fact, referred specifically to joint academic undertakings in weapons research. That Paul Moist would back away from such a relatively innocuous resolution by university sector CUPE members in Ontario speaks volumes about his own commitment, as CUPE National President, to social justice and equality. That Bernie Farber joins with Meir Weinstein of the Kahanist Jewish Defence League to denounce any such thing as "anti-Semitic" robs that term of any scrap of meaning it might have retained up to this point.

And now Iggy speaks, knowing that he'll gain more votes than he loses by stealing the pro-Israel card from the Conservatives. Meanwhile, Israeli weapons experiments on live human beings will no doubt continue. Should they do so with our help?

[H/t POGGE]

Quiz (no peeking)

Who said, referring to 9/11:

[M]aybe it all started in 1982, when the U.S. backed an invasion of Lebanon that involved the slaughter of more than 17,000 civilians. Or maybe September 11's barbarism lies in the decade-long American-led blockade of Iraq, which has so far resulted in the deaths of an estimated 300,000 children under the age of five.

A screaming 12-year-old boy, Mohammad al-Durra, cowers against a wall in Gaza while his weeping father tries to shield him from a hail of bullets fired by Israeli soldiers. The bullets explode into the little boy, killing him. The father weeps and holds his dead son against his breast until a bullet tears into his own head. Moments later, a Palestinian ambulance driver arrives. He too is murdered.

Our dailies deftly avoided the grotesque certainty of those images with headlines that made oblique reference to persons caught in a crossfire. Well, here's what's certain. That 12-year-old boy's life was worth no less than the life of the president of the United States. No matter how much we cherish our friendships with Americans, their lives are worth no more than anyone else's.

Another thing is as certain today as it was more than 30 years ago, when this newspaper was founded.

War is not the answer. [emphasis added]

?

[H/t beluga2]

Conservative falsification of history [updated]

Kathy Shaidle, now bearing the impressive title of "Examiner" (*cough*) is busy exposing "liberal myths" about the Vietnam war.

One prevalent "myth," we are told, was that African Americans were overrepresented in draftee ranks during that conflict. Here's what our "examiner" has to say:

As I noted in a previous Examiner.com column, one of the most stubborn myths about the Vietnam War was that African Americans were drafted and wounded far above their numbers in the general U.S. population. But as black conservative author Larry Elder has revealed, “During the Vietnam War draft era, blacks comprised 13.5 percent of the population. Of those who died in Vietnam, 12.5 percent were black...”

Note, first of all, that Shaidle doesn't cite any draft figures at all. But in any case, Elder got things wrong. In 1960, according to US Census figures, only 10.5% of the US population was African American, that figure rising to 11.1% in 1970. What Elder might have done is to mistake the draftee figure for 1966--which happened to be 13.4%--with the population figures. But the Black population of the US hasn't come anywhere close to 13.5% to this day: the CIA World Factbook gives the total Black population in 2007 as 12.85%.

In any case, the actual draftee numbers are telling. Over the course of the war, as author James E. Westheider notes in The African American Experience in Vietnam [23], Department of Defence figures indicated that Blacks comprised 12% of the population. (In fact, according to the US Census Bureau, the population didn't rise to that percentage until 1990.) Even if one accepts this somewhat inflated figure, in 1966 13.4% of inductees were African American, and the number rose to more than 16% in 1967 and in 1970. Between 1965 and 1970, an average of 14.3% of draftees were Black.

The Black casualty rate for the Vietnam War was 12.6%. The rate for the beginning of the conflict was so high, however, that, towards the end of the war, special measures were taken to keep Black troops out of harm's way in order to get the figures down. (Talbot, Richard. "White, Black and Hispanic Casualty Rates During the Vietnam Conflict: Any Differences?" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, GA, Aug 16, 2003, p.8. Pdf can be downloaded here.)

In other words, the draft rate was considerably disproportionate, and so was the casualty rate, until the latter was addressed for political reasons. My purpose here, however, is not to delve into the issues further, but simply to point out, by way of a minor example, how some conservatives just make stuff up and/or are too lazy to fact-check, while posing as researchers, or examiners, or whatever the current glamour-term might be. All in a day's work for a "polemicist," I guess.

UPDATE: (March 5) The unemployed (and probably unemployable) Kathy responds, sort of. I think she's simply checking on whether I read her blog on occasion, which I do, of course. (Shouldn't I?) Anyway, I pass this on for a chuckle:

Ann Coulter describes Olbermann (and my apparently unemployed, hobby-less lefty critics, especially ones who call themselves "doctor") perfectly (the difference being that Olbermann at least, like, has his own tv show and is kind of a big deal...):

These small-time opportunities to show off by correcting someone else's teeny-tiny mistakes are the lifeblood of Olbermann's MSNBC show, "Countdown." (...) There is utterly no purpose to these lame "gotchas," except that Olbermann is so desperately insecure that he is willing to waste valuable airtime in order to convince other status-conscious idiots that he is, like, scary-smart. (...)

"Teeny-tiny mistakes," eh? Good grief. It's not as though I was correcting her spelling or her grammar. Now, that would just be petty.

The extraordinary rendition of Abousfian Abdelrazik

The journalistic pitbull Paul Koring is chewing again this morning, in a devastating report that implicates the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in a collaboration with the genocidal Sudanese regime to imprison and torture a Canadian citizen.

Abousfian Abdelrazik, of whom I have written many times, is a Canadian presently marooned in our embassy in Sudan. The Harper government and the Foreign Affairs department have been playing a sadistic game of cat and mouse with Abdelrazik in recent months, but the events outlined in today's Globe and Mail report took place under the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.

Abdelrazik was arrested on September 10, 2003, while he was visiting his ailing mother in Sudan. According to a document reproduced in Koring's account--a smoking gun, as NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar points out--this was done on the direct request of CSIS, which had every reason to believe that he would be tortured, as indeed he was over a lengthy period in a Sudanese jail before even the Sudanese government concluded that he was innocent of any wrong-doing and set him free.

Ministry of Justice officials, clearly embarrassed by the case, actually tried to persuade Abdelrazik to say that the torture-scars on his body were self-inflicted. Canadian diplomats were ordered to refuse him assistance while he was interrogated in a Khartoum prison by US agents. And CSIS operatives participated in the interrogations while Abdelrazik was being held.

We should be proud. Canada is all grown up now. We can do extraordinary renditions just like Uncle Sam.

After release, Abdelrazik was refused travel documents to return home. He was then promised them if he obtained an airplane reservation. He did, and the Harper government moved the goalposts, insisting that the destitute Abdelrazik produce a fully paid-up ticket to return home. At the same time, it has threatened to prosecute anyone who tries to help him pay for one.

Well, I sent him some money a few days ago, c/o The Embassy of Canada, PO Box 10503, Khartoum, Sudan. I dare the authorities to come after me. Others have stepped up as well, but not nearly enough.

Send a message to our government, Foreign Affairs officials and our very own secret police. Join the "Help Abousfian Abdelrazik get a ticket home" Facebook group, mail him a contribution, and stand up as citizens for our shared values of fairness and common decency. This disgraceful saga must be brought to an end. Let's do our part to make it happen.

UPDATE: CSIS literally out of control?

A Montreal man stranded in Sudan after being cleared of terrorist links has lodged a formal complaint against the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

But the watchdog over the spy agency says it may not have authority to fully investigate the case.

The Braidwood Chronicles: getting a crooked story straight

I don't usually cut and paste, but this story pulls together the police testimony so far rather nicely.

From the Canadian Press:

[Don] Rosenbloom [the lawyer for the Polish government] pointed to numerous inaccuracies Millington and other officers wrote in their notebooks, recorded in internal police reports, told investigators and wrote in the days and weeks after Dziekanski's death.

Millington, for example, initially said Dziekanski was yelling when police approached and was waving a stapler "wildly" just before the first stun of the Taser.

He also said in statements and notes that Dziekanski was still standing after three jolts of the 50,000-volt weapon and continued to walk towards the officers.

Millington said on numerous occasions that the four officers had to wrestle Dziekanski to the ground.

But after being shown a bystander's video of the event, Millington conceded at the inquiry that those facts were incorrect.

Rosenbloom also noted that some of those same errors - for example, that Dziekanski had to be wrestled to the ground - were consistent among the three officers to testify so far.

He asked Millington to explain how three RCMP officers who are trained to be observant could all report seeing something that didn't happen.

"Why are there similar mistakes made by you and your fellow officers?" asked Rosenbloom.

"I don't know, we dealt with the same incident, but I don't know why," said Millington.

Millington acknowledged a day earlier that he knew his use of force would be examined after an in-custody death, and he realized the purpose of his notes, reports and statements to investigators were to justify his actions.

But he insisted the other officers never talked about what happened in the hours after the incident when they returned to the airport detachment or in the weeks they continued to work together afterwards.

Another officer, Const. Bill Bentley, said all four officers recounted their versions of what happened at a debriefing session about two weeks later, designed to help officers deal with traumatic events such as an in-custody death.

Millington said he was at the meeting, but insisted no one talked about what happened during the confrontation with Dziekanski.

[emphases added]

UPDATE: As Alison at Creekside puts it (her on-going coverage of the Inquiry is not to be missed), the officers weren't able to get their stories straight about getting their stories straight. Well said.

The Braidwood Chronicles: Robinson next--what lies ahead?

The last of the four officers to be heard with respect to the killing of Robert Dziekanski is Corporal Benjamin Montgomery Robinson. He will testify before the Braidwood Inquiry on March 23, when it resumes after a two-week break. In the video, he's the man with his knee on Dziekanski's neck.

Corporal Robinson, more recently, has been implicated in another death--that of a motorcyclist last October. I wrote about that here. Robinson was under the influence of alcohol when he struck 21-year-old Orion Hutchinson. According to witnesses, he left the scene of the accident, without attending to his injured victim.

At the time, I noted the following:

**********
It would appear that an alibi is already being prepared for him. Here is his collegial fellow officer Paul Eisenzimmer:

Delta Const. Paul Eisenzimmer said that, in general, anyone who leaves the scene could be charged under the Criminal Code.

"Leaving the scene means avoiding responsibility," Eisenzimmer said. "If someone left their identification there it is hard to say the person is avoiding responsibility.

"But if someone leaves their identification and then leaves the scene the issue is why leave and what have they done in the interim -- have they gone and drank some more?"

I am not alone, I suspect, in reading between the lines here.

**********

It turns out that I was exactly right. Robinson is presently facing charges of impaired driving causing death and exceeding the legal alcohol limit. (Well, not quite, it seems: police have recommended that those charges be formally laid, but no decision has yet been made by the BC Criminal Justice Branch. Have I seen this movie before?)

In any case, in the interim, Robinson had his licence suspended for three months for impaired driving. And, lo and behold, he did precisely what I predicted he might: he argued all the way to the BC Supreme Court that he drank himself over the limit after leaving the scene and going home.

Luckily, there are a few smart folks around courtrooms these days. His appeal has been summarily rejected. The original decision to suspend his license came from a motor vehicles adjudicator, who ruled:

The police evidence indicates you told the officer you left the scene, had two shots of vodka and then returned. In reviewing the evidence before me I do not find this credible.

This was upheld by BC Supreme Court Justice Mark McEwan in his review of the adjudicator's finding: as reported, he found that "the adjudicator's determination was within her jurisdiction and within the standard of reasonableness."

To be sure, this is more of a tangled tale than it looks. As I noted above, witnesses at the time reported that he had indeed walked away, and Robinson staked his case before the adjudicator on this. But for some reason the claim that he had left the scene was dismissed by the adjudicator, who said, "I find it unlikely that after witnessing you having a collision that the witnesses would then allow you to leave the scene of the collision."

In any case, the adjudicator took the blood alcohol readings seriously. And Justice McEwan concurred:

(The) officer noted her personal observations that the petitioner had a strong odour of liquor on his breath and on his person, that his face was pale, his eyes were bloodshot and his pupils were dilated, and his speech was slurred,” said the judgment by Justice Mark McEwan.

It said Robinson told the officer he had two beers at a party at 5:30 p.m. and then took two shots of vodka after the collision during a 10-minute period in which he left the scene, walked home, and returned.

The officer didn’t believe him, noting “symptoms far more set than two shots in that time period should indicate.”

Wheels within wheels. Whether he walked away from the scene or didn't, the blood alcohol evidence was damning in two respects: it was well over the legal limit, and it was not consistent with his going home and downing two shots of vodka.

Corporal Robinson's testimony at the Braidwood Inquiry should be...interesting. Stay tuned.

Conservative falsification of history: part deux

Actually, deux et trois.

After reading my post on alleged "liberal myths" about the Vietnam War, reader and blogger Dave (a military man who knows whereof he speaks) visited the "Examiner" site in question to post a few facts. He had read the book that our "examiner" referred to, and found that she had misstated its theme. He made mention of the infamous "Project 100000." And, in answer to one commenter who had claimed that many draftees had "cushy gigs" in the US Navy, he pointed out that the USN has always been a volunteer force.

Facts, unfortunately, have a left-wing bias.The comment was deleted.

Moving on to alleged anti-Semitism at York University. Alert reader "forgottobuytinfoil" found this gem over at Omri Ceren's Mere Rhetoric. No one, of course, could deny the blatant anti-Semitism of the sign being held. The problem is, though, that it was being held halfway around the world from the university in question--in Melbourne, Australia, to be exact.

Ceren, a student of rhetoric as it happens, explained to our assiduous commenter that his "regular readers" were familiar with the photograph in question, and would know that it wasn't depicting the event being described.

Ceren has some stroke-quotes up at his place, describing his blog as "stellar," "one of the best blogs in the known universe," etc.

Allergy to facts, meet allergy to ethics. A conservative two-fer.

The Braidwood Chronicles: Kwesi explanations

Contrary to an earlier report, the deadly stapler that Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski has been accused of "brandishing" had indeed been recovered from the scene. Constable Kwesi Millington, the Taserman who seems to have more stories in his repertoire than Sheherezade, demonstrated yesterday how Dziekanski used it "combatively," prompting so many scoffing noises and derisive snorts from the audience that Thomas Braidwood had to call for order.

The constable didn't fare much better today.

Despite admitting that he knew from his training that multiple Taserings were dangerous, Millington didn't see fit to alert arriving medical personel to his repeated shocking of Dziekanski.

He couldn't explain why he failed to give the standard warning to his victim: "Police, stop, or you'll be hit with 50,000 volts." In a perhaps telling phrase, he stated, "I didn't believe we had the time. I wanted to get to Mr. Dziekanski."

That much appears to be obvious. As I noted earlier, the video suggests (@3:42) that he came through the door with his Taser already drawn and pointed at Dziekanski.* Nine seconds later (@3:51) he blasted him while Dziekanski was stationary, with his back to a counter, his hands perhaps slightly above waist level. Contrary to his earlier testimony, there was no advance, no stapler-brandishing, nothing in the video that indicates that force was necessary.

But Kwesi Millington, in his own words, "wanted to get to Mr. Dziekanski." And indeed he did.

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*Readers are asked to check this for themselves. More than one pair of eyes is always helpful. Is what appears on the video @3:42 a hand-signal (Millington stated that he had made them to Dziekanski) or a Taser? Comments welcome.

UPDATE: Having reviewed this tape a number of times by now, I no longer believe that Millington had deployed his Taser. What we are seeing, I believe, is simply a finger being pointed.

Hawks in a tailspin

Further to my recent post about Harper on Afghanistan, consternation has broken out within the hawk-flawk. The sense of betrayal by our Prime Minister is palpable, and they're lashing out. I am denounced as a "defeatist" here, and the subject of schoolyard taunts here. (As one commenter at the latter site suggests, the primary issue for the hawks, it seems, is manly turgor. It's not defeat, it's the tumidity.)

In another comment there, "leftist" Terry Glavin, keyboard in hand, just about sums up the only mode of argument left to the war-hungry at the moment:

You realize of course that from here on in the same flaccids you excoriate will now call you a liar as they lie about you, call you a coward as they hide behind their ridiculous pseudonyms, and traduce you as a neocon, a Zionist, a warmonger and an idiot?

Well, er, no. I for one don't even know the guy. And I've never used the word "Zionist" as a pejorative. And non-neocons for one reason or another have supported our doomed incursion into Afghan affairs. And I have no evidence the blogger is an idiot. And...

Oh, heck, why bother. Folks like Glavin, in their barely-read echo-chamber blogs and in drive-by comments elsewhere, exult in building bigger and better strawmen. Armies of them, in fact. Which at least, unlike the real thing, don't bleed and die.

The Braidwood Chronicles: video vs. Kwesi Millington

The man with the stun-gun muddied the waters further today. Constable Kwesi Millington, who fired his Taser at Robert Dziekanski without warning, contrary to RCMP procedure, testified that he fired another blast at the man because the first one had had no effect.

Confronted, however, with video evidence that showed Dziekanski falling to the ground screaming after the first shot--he changed his story, admitting that the video showed what it showed. He could only remember using the Taser four times, though: twice more as Dziekanski lay writhing on the ground because he was allegedly struggling with other officers. And he claimed that the third shot hadn't worked, so he changed the setting to push-stun mode and zapped the man in the shoulder to create "localized pain."

Previous evidence showed that the Taser did in fact deliver 5 jolts, of six, five, five, nine and six seconds.

Millington claimed that he had used the words "passport" and "identification" to indicate to Dziekanski that he should produce them. But, as we know, his passport was in his luggage, and he had just been ordered away from his bags by Corporal Benjamin Robinson as soon as the officers arrived on the scene.

So now we have Dziekanski, in an exhausted state, understanding no English, given two conflicting orders by two RCMP officers. That he threw his hands up and turned away should come as no surprise. Millington agreed under questioning that Dziekanski might have turned his back to officers and moved away to locate his passport.

Millington claimed that Dziekanski "was approaching the other officers with the intent, I believe, to attack." Yet the video shows no such advance (@3:51). He was backed up against a counter when he was first jolted.

Now, if you check @3:42, you will see that Millington appears to have already deployed his Taser and is pointing it at Dziekanski. Given that obvious threat of harm, is it any surprise that Dziekanski instinctively grabbed something near to hand and defensively held it to his chest? Officers have testified that he had his other hand in a fist in a "combative" stance. Try throwing your hands up against your chest--you will make fists naturally.

"We feared for our safety, and we felt he was going to escape," said Millington.

Escape? Good grief. More tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the diplomatic waters have gone a little turbid as well. Poland claims that Canada has unilaterally suspended a mutual cooperation treaty and is withholding information. But a spokeswoman for the Justice Department claims that no such suspension has occurred.

UPDATE: (March 3) Kelly McPartland searingly sums up the RCMP testimony so far.

Maybe a "time out," Minister?

Gary Goodyear, Minister of Science and Technology, is known to have serious anger management issues.

Fellow blogger Chrystal Ocean has more-than-adequately covered his latest meltdown at a recent meeting with representatives of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, but this alarming incident deserves maximum circulation.

CAUT was attempting a civil dialogue about the paucity of funding for research in the new Conservative budget. Alas, civility is not the Minister's style. He raised his voice almost immediately, pointed his finger at the CAUT representatives, and called them liars. Then he and an equally out-of-control staffer lost it completely:

When CAUT staff said the Conservatives have a spotty record on science and noted they abolished the office of the national science adviser, Mr. Robinson said, the minister's assistant screamed at them to shut up.

"Then the minister said, 'You've burned all your bridges with us!' and they stormed out.

"In all the meetings I've been in like this, I've never been shouted at and told to shut up," Mr. Robinson said. The civil servant who escorted them to the elevator suggested it would not even be a good idea to return to the minister's office to collect their coats, he said. Instead, she retrieved them.

And here I thought "the inmates are in charge of the asylum" was just a cant phrase. Edgar Allan Poe, meet Gary Goodyear--a man badly in need, it seems, of a "system of soothing."

Israeli apartheid: calumny or reality?

To take note of Israeli Apartheid Week, I am opening the floor to a discussion in which all are encouraged to join, under the usual rules of civil exchange.

The phrase "Israeli apartheid" is obviously an inflammatory one, evoking images of the former regime in South Africa, condemned around the world as racist and grossly cruel and exploitative. But does that make it false?

I'll sketch the affirmative position in broad strokes, and hope that the ensuing debate will provide, no doubt with the usual heat, perhaps a little light as well.

Introduction

At one time I was of the opinion that the Israeli occupation (and through settlements, the partial annexation) of the West Bank could rightly be said to have imposed "apartheid," but I did not apply the term to Israel proper (within the pre-1967 boundaries). Yet even within Israel itself, as it turns out, the non-Jewish population is not treated equally. Access to land by non-Jews is next to impossible. Even the right to remain on land that is clearly theirs, and here I am referring to the Bedouins of the South Negev, is denied them.

An equally inflammatory companion phrase, "ethnic cleansing," needs to be injected into the discussion as well. This was, in fact, a major element in South African "grand apartheid," leading to the creation of the Bantustans. Whole populations were forcibly removed from land that the whites wanted, and transported to a number of little enclaves, some set up as "independent" states within South Africa, and some as mere reserves, to provide a permanent pool of cheap labour. A case can be made, I believe, that similar policies have been, and remain, in force in Israel and the occupied territories.

What was South African apartheid? What were its main characteristics?

This is not a difficult matter to research. The word (when I use it to describe the SA regime I shall use italics) refers to separation (lit. "apartness") of "races" in South Africa, but assuredly not on a "separate-but-equal" basis. The majority Black population was condemned to be the eternal servants of the master race. Kept apart and yet essential as the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the whites, Blacks had unequal rights, unequal opportunities, unequal lives. And they were kept in their place by hyperpolicing and a myriad of regulations deployed by racial micromanagers, not to mention periodic massacres to discourage dissent.

The core nature of apartheid, then, consisted of 1) racial separation; 2) brutal rule by one "race" over another, using the apparatus of the state; 3) dispossession of land on the basis once again of "race," and the formation of so-called Bantustans, some even with toy versions of self-rule; 4) the use of Blacks as a source of cheap labour to sustain the whites in a relatively lavish lifestyle; 5) disenfranchisement.

What are the similarities and differences between the practice of South African apartheid and Israeli state policy?

Benjamin Pogrund, a former South African now resident in Israel, stresses the differences. Certainly, as he says in a poignant example, Israeli hospitals are staffed by Jews and non-Jews working side-by-side: Blacks and whites never worked together in similar fashion in apartheid South Africa. And the whites in South Africa were a minority, while Jews in Israel are a majority.

He also claims that, unlike Bantustans, the walling off of the West Bank by the Israelis is not to create a pool of cheap labour but simply to remove themselves from the Palestinians. Others disagree that accessible Palestinian labour is not a consideration in Israeli policy: but the Wall would not appear to promote the exploitation of Palestinians. The Wall was, however, a transparent land-grab: 8% of Palestinian land is now on the Israeli side of the fence.

But with the best will in the world, Pogrund stretches matters. He concedes, for example, that most land in Israel (93%) has been reserved for Jews, but is full of hope that a court action by one Arab family may be a breakthrough. Indeed, the High Court of Justice did, subsequent to Pogrund's article, rule that state-owned land must be leased without regard to ethnicity. The Jewish National Fund, however, which controls 13% of Israel's land on which live 70% of the population, wants to keep it Jews-only, and the Knesset helpfully passed a law in 2007 to make it so.

When it comes to matters of ethnic separation, we also know, for example, that Palestinians are restricted to "Palestinian" roads--450 miles of roads in the West Bank are off-limits to them. A system of road segregation is clearly in place. But in another article, that no longer seems to be on-line, "Is Israel the new Apartheid?” Pogrund argued that that this wasn't apartheid at all--because under South African apartheid all roads were shared!

At this point one might wonder if other such non-essential differences (the Israeli government uses Hebrew, for example, while the apartheid South African government conducted its affairs in Afrikaans and English) are going to be advanced to make such fine--and in the case above, damaging--distinctions. We know that, towards the end, the apartheid regime in South Africa was being taken apart piece by piece, while nevertheless retaining its core character.

The profoundly humane Canadian academics Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley ultimately find the apartheid comparison problematic. But they note some key similarities: universal suffrage does not exist when the Palestinians in the occupied territories are factored in. They may vote only for their own captive parliaments (indeed, former Premier Ehud Olmert has quite openly stated that one-man-one-vote would mean the destruction of Israel). And Israel's immigration policies are clearly discriminatory: the Law of Return does not apply to displaced Palestinian refugees, only to Jews.

Current marriage laws in effect in Israel are crudely based upon ethnicity. Marriage to Palestinians does not confer Israeli citizenship--indeed, those Palestinians are banned from Israel--and the children of such marriages must leave Israel when they turn 12 years old. Politicians in the Knesset, infuriated by this law, have referred quite explicitly to Israel as an apartheid state. And they aren't the only Israeli citizens to have done so.

One stark difference, however, is that the South African government did not, as a rule, permit individual whites to shoot, rob and harass Blacks any time they felt like it--that sort of thing was left up to the police and the military (e.g., Sharpeville). On the West Bank, however, settlers are violent proxies for the Israeli state, and are permitted to run wild, shooting at shepherds, stoning children, looting, destroying and killing, and generally terrorizing the local population at will. The police say "they have better things to do" than protect the Palestinians. The IDF collaborates with the settlers--when it isn't attacking unarmed civilians itself. The settlers live large on the West Bank, often in swanky houses, using up 80% of the available water (while nearby Palestinian farmers watch their livestock die of thirst*), and sitting on vast reserves of unused land allocated to them by the Israeli state.

Palestinians are routinely humiliated at numerous checkpoints. The anti-Arab thuggery and racism demonstrated by Israeli forces at these checkpoints is manifest. This type of population control is more than a little reminiscent of the routine South African police harassment of "kaffirs," who were required to carry a passbook at all times and were subjected to frequent humiliating searches and interrogations.

In occupied East Jerusalem, 1500 Palestinians have been handed eviction notices. The comment thread here is interesting. Those who defend the move argue that the issue is building permits. But we know that building permits, like bulldozers, have been used to clear the way for Israeli Jews. In the south Negev, Bedouins who have refused to move into a ghetto provided for them by the Israeli state are under constant attack. Building permits are denied in what are called the "unrecognized villages," although even "recognized villages" are not immune. Bedouin homes are razed. Their ancestral lands have been seized. Move they must: because there are plans to resettle the area with 250,000 Israeli Jews. In these instances, I would argue that the term "ethnic cleansing" might fairly be applied.

Conclusion:

At the beginning of this article I outlined the core aspects of South African apartheid. Does Israel compare, when one substitutes "ethnicity" for race?

1) Ethnic separation. Israel's policy of apartness, as outlined above, is obvious.

2) Brutal rule by one ethnic group over another, using the apparatus of the state. Again, I believe that case has been made.

3) Dispossession of land on the basis of ethnicity. Ditto.

4) The use of Palestinians as a source of cheap labour. At least arguable. The case could be made, however, that South African apartheid was essentially rooted in the super-exploitation of the Black majority. Is this sufficient to distinguish the two?

5) Disenfranchisement. Within Israel, non-Jews do have the right to vote. But, as noted, when the occupied territories are taken into account, the matter might be seen a little differently. Just as South African "coloureds" had their own Parliament, so too do the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank--and with about as much real authority and power.

Why compare Israeli state policies with South African apartheid? Certainly one reason is simply to express moral outrage by using a term that carries its own baggage of opprobrium. But another is to point out remarkably similar structural patterns of repression and discrimination against subjugated populations. While comparisons between the Nazi Holocaust and Israel's brutal repression of the West Bank and Gaza are (at least in my opinion) wildly overblown and wrong, and the usage of words like "genocide" equally so, the case that there exists a functioning Israeli apartheid system is not so easily dismissed.

Over to you.

UPDATE: (March 4) More. [H/t Mound of Sound]
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*Paul Koring, Globe and Mail (Saturday, May 18, 2002) p. A15. No longer on-line.

Harper: We can't win in Afghanistan

Finally, the truth:

We're not going to ever defeat the insurgency. My reading of Afghanistan in history is that it's probably had an insurgency forever of some kind.

Who said that? "Taliban Jack?" Some peacenik member of the "pseudo-left," as warhawk Terry Glavin is wont to call us?

Nope. Prime Minister Stephen Harper--levelling with us at last.

At the moment, coalition and civilian deaths are at their highest since the Northern Alliance, with US support, took control of the country in 2001. So far this year, the coalition is killing more civilians than the Taliban are. The Western-backed government of Hamid Karzai is riddled with corruption, implicated in extensive human rights abuses, and dangerously unstable. The Taliban presently control 70% of the country.*

Make no mistake: the reign of the Taliban was a monstrously cruel one, and they are still at it. But the hard men of the Northern Alliance who toppled them are little better. We can't make people democratic; we can't force them to be free. Our intervention, even if undertaken with the best of motives, was doomed to fail. We are seen by too many Afghans simply as foreign occupiers: and for them, even the Taliban is preferable to that.

Bring 'em home, Steve.

*UPDATE: (March 3) Reader Mark Collins notes that this is incorrect. The Western-backed government of Hamid Karzai controls--with assistance--about 30-31% of Afghanistan, but most of the rest is controlled by tribal warlords (58-60%). The Taliban have control of about 10-11% of the country.

Whether this serves as a decisive riposte is open to readers to judge. No matter if the Karzai government is facing the Taliban or sundry regional warlords, the house that the Coalition built is on shaky ground. Here are a few thoughts about the "Afghanification" strategy endorsed by Stephen Harper.

On the buses

Be heard.