It is time that police are held to the  same standards as the rest of us.  Were I to attack a child with a potentially lethal weapon I would be behind bars right now.  Not walking free with public money being used to justify my actions.  What I fear is that as time passes and a series of Potemkin investigations carry us farther from the truth, people will begin to forget and be inclined to accept the official (police) version of events.  But no version can justify this action.  Only the complacency of the Canadian public will provide a faux justification.  Don’t give them a victory.  Demand the immediate arrest of the officer involved.  The charge should be attempted murder.

Canadians need to keep their eye on the ball here.  It doesn’t matter if the child was armed.  It doesn’t matter if he approached in a threatening manner.  He is still a child.  Police are trained to subdue people by a number of means.  The taser was the incorrect choice in this case.

Tasers are being used as a great big fun toy by police forces across Canada.  Deaths have already occurred.  It is fortunate that this child is alive.  Next time we may not be so fortunate.  Will it take one of these over sized goons killing a child before Canadians see the light?  The police are no longer the servants of the people in this country.  They are just one more street gang and they need to be brought under control.

Our passivity will only send the message that this behaviour is acceptable in our communities.  It is not in mine.  It is not in the Canada I grew up to know and love.  But I wonder if that place even exists today.

I know that many out there will think my little choo-choo has finally gone around the bend.  Have I slipped into madness?  To think that the government staged burning police cars and smashing windows is just insane, right?  And that is exactly why governments get away with it.  It is insane.  But let’s look at the most important evidence:  the motive.

The first measure of the veracity of a conspiracy theory is motive.  This is where most conspiracy theories fall apart.  If their is no compelling reason to conspire to do something why go to all the trouble and risk?  Take the Kennedy assassination for instance.  This conspiracy has been around for 47 years now but the problem with every scenario is the why.  Kennedy was in trouble politically.  Why waste a bullet and drawing all that attention on a president that was about to become another one term wonder.  But in the case of the G20 the motives are strong, compelling and multiple.

First there was the enormous cost of the security operation.  While it certainly is the least important of the motives it is still compelling.  An election is almost certain within the next 5 to 12 months.  Having spent over a billion dollars on security how could the Conservative party face the electorate if nothing very notable had happened?  This is a variation on the old saying ‘What if they threw a war and nobody showed up?’ In this case what if they spend all this money and the protesters don’t cause enough damage.  With Canadians suffering economically the Conservatives could not afford to be seen to be spending money frivolously.  Especially not after FakeLakeGate.  The only way to be sure that the protest would get out of hand and frighten Canadians was for police agents to physically start the process.  After all you can’t trust a bunch of tree-hugging, hippie, leftist peaceniks to start a decent riot now can you.

This brings us to the second motive:  frightening Canadians.  In the pages of this blog and billions of others around the globe people like me have been warning of the impending security, financial and environmental reckoning.  Even the Pentagon report to the Bush administration stated clearly that this planet will not be able to sustain a population of more than 3 billion people by 2100.  That is less than half of today’s global population and less than a third of the 9.1 billion projected for 2050.  The Pentagon estimate I should add is the most generous of all I have encountered.  Most others estimate a maximum sustainable population of around one billion and a few even less.  The lowest estimated sustainable population for 2100 that I have come across was approximately 100 million.  Today there are a few hundred thousand climate refugees.  Within a few short years there will be millions and then billions.  James Lovelock suggests we built barricades and heighten security if we happen to be among the fortunate to live in a part of the globe that will still support human life.  To do this we must end this dalliance with democracy.  But we may not have to worry about that.  The financial and security reckonings may preempt the ecological.  Spillover from Iraq or Afghanistan or more likely both has the potential to draw in major powers resulting in large fast population reduction with the added turmoil, dislocation, lingering deaths of such a war destabilizing much of what survives.  And the financial meltdown has only begun.  It will play a role in the timing and ferocity of planetary ecological degradation and destabilization of global security.  The unwavering faith of our leaders in the American economic model shows their intellectual inability to conceptualize anything else thanks to a battered and bankrupt education system rather than the strength of the system.  Laissez-faire capitalism is a chimera.  It has failed every time it has been attempted.  But this time it has been pushed farther and the very institutions that society had created over the centuries to protect itself from the worst consequences have been systematically dismantled or undermined by the priesthood of the New Right.

Government officials may deny the inevitability of these events.  They may assist their lackeys in the main stream media to foster confusion.  But at the highest levels they know as well as I do that these events will take place.  Their plan or assumption is that they will be among the survivors and the rest of us be damned.  To do that they must heed Lovelock and end democracy.  To seize power arbitrarily would trigger a backlash.  Too messy and uncertain.  Much more effective to convince Canadians to surrender their rights and freedoms in the name of security.  A quick survey of the letters to the editor in support of the police actions in Toronto should prove beyond a doubt that the tactic is working.  Canadians seem more than willing to surrender everything they say they fought for in the world wars and are supposedly fighting for in Afghanistan.  What irony to send troops half way around the world to fight for a value we do not prize at home.  The G20 events in Toronto had a powerful effect on the unsophisticated and uninformed.  We will see the anti-terrorism laws renewed expanded when they next come up for review and we will see a general and substantial increase in police powers over the next five years.  The G20 protests will be as powerful a symbol in the hands of Canadian elites as 9/11 was to American elites as they stripped the liberty from Land of Liberty.  They needed it and they got it because they did it.  As simple as that.  Any who question rising authoritarianism will be shown pictures of burning police cars as Americans who question are shown the images of 9/11 and in an earlier generation on another continent those who questioned were reminded of the Reichstag fire until the die was cast and they could be silenced more effectively.

The final motive is chaos.  In chaos it is a human tendency to cling to the known rather than fly to things we know not of as Shakespeare might say.  New economic ideas, new ecological initiatives and new diplomatic peace initiatives all take a leap of faith.  It always seems risky to move in a new direction.  And it is risky but better risk swimming for shore than cling to a sinking lifeboat.  Is it a surprise to anyone that those who benefit most from the status quo should want to disparage alternatives.  By painting the protesters as the lunatic fringe, the current elites can assure the support of the timid which is most Canadians who face the challenges of day to day living.  As Otto von Bismarck said  so eloquently ‘A man who relies upon the state for his pension is not likely to rebel against that state.’ By the time most Canadians realize that their comfort is no longer exists it will be too late.  In this way the political and economic elites of this country smear their opponents and solidify their support.  It is a bold stroke.

So there you have it.  The motives for the government to commit insanity.  I suspect that many remain unconvinced.  They will say that this is too Machiavellian.  After all these are good people, good Canadians.  We just don’t do these kind of things or have these kinds of motivations.  To those I say this.  To deny that the above is plausible is to deny:

• that there were no Residential Schools;
• that there have been concentration camps in Canada (1914-18, 1930-36, 1940-46);
• that Canadian POW camps at the end of World War Two allowed Nazi officers to hold courts martial and execute German prisoners under our protection with guns and bullets supplied by the camp administration;
• that over a million Canadians were spied on and blacklisted by the RCMP during the Cold War.  The information gathered shared with the United States.  Many had their lives and / or careers destroyed.   Several committed suicide or died prematurely from stress.  Their crimes included subscription to the wrong journals, activity in their trade union, support for the United Nations, support for peace, etc.;
• that there was no Maher Arar;
• there is no Omar Khadr.

The list could go on but I think you get the picture.  So before you judge me mad you must first explain why our government should be trusted given the track record.

So what is an illegal alien?  I suppose Martians who fail to check in at Area 51 in neighbouring Nevada would qualify.  And I hope all those evangelicals have gotten the papers in order for that second coming they keep going on about.  How they are going to do a background check with the Roman administration for that guy I have no idea.  Tiberius was known for keeping track of his pornography not citizenship records.  Of course I am just being silly.  They mean citizens of other states who are in the United States without having jumped through the appropriate bureaucratic hoops so that the unemployable relatives of senators and congressmen can keep getting a paycheck.  Police across the state will be on the lookout for those nefariously beautiful tall Nordic types and stake out any bar and they are sure to find an Irishman, Scotsman and Englishman not to mention the proverbial priest, rabbi and minister.  Germans can be found in the back of bakeries reading Clausewitz and the French are strolling the streets insulting everyone they meet.  No racial profiling here.

What would you like to bet that the only people questioned by police under this law are olive skinned or black haired or have a Hispanic last name?  Of course Italians and other Mediterraneans will get confused in the mix.  One sheriff in Arizona claims he can tell an illegal from a legal by the shoes.  Methinks this has more to do with his foot fetish than with good policing.  How can you tell an illegal immigrant in a nation of immigrants.  You can’t.  And while there may well be undocumented Swedes in Arizona, they are not going to be the ones questioned about legal residency.  This new law shows the depths to which, not just American, but Western societies collectively have descended.  Can a yellow sombrero patch sewn onto their clothing be far behind?

Which one do think police will question?

While some police in Arizona have registered objection to the new law, the official line is trust us we will not abuse this power.  Police in the state promise to apply this law with the same professionalism that they apply all the rest.  I am sure that is what worries Latino Arizonans.  Opponents of the law are characterized as outsiders who don’t understand the state.  Probably the same outside influences that thought Blacks in the South should have rights.  How can we trust an organization to make a ‘reasonable’ judgment in an irrational situation.  We might as well say we are giving police x-ray vision or secret decoder rings to determine who to question and who not to.

The governor raises the violence of drug smuggling against the backdrop of a recent murder of a rancher by drug smugglers to justify this law.  Fear is the best way to make the public accept what they know is wrong.  Most undocumented workers in Arizona are not drug smugglers and most of the key players in the smuggling operations live in Mexico.  Drug smugglers are easy to identify.  They are the ones with 50 kilos of powder in their wheel well and an Uzi on their lap.  Undocumented immigrants who do engage in the smuggling racket are the ones with bloated bellies and super strength ex-lax in their pocket.  They are generally being forced through threats to assist the smugglers.  The vast majority of undocumented immigrants break no other laws than the ones that say they cannot live and work where they live and work.  They know that any arrest will end in deportation.  They can’t complain no matter how egregiously they are treated.  They spend their lives more sinned against than sinning.  But it is not the undocumented worker but the documented immigrant who must endure the degradation of constantly proving his right to be.  This law tells him that he is only an American on paper.  He must constantly prove his identity while his northern European neighbour does not.  All because most Latin Americans are mestizo, mixed blood.  So because his ancestors were less racist than our ancestors and chose not to exterminate the indigenous population as we did he must now suffer our bigotry.  Does no one else see the irony in this?

Probably the most interesting and ignored aspect of this story is the people who are most supportive of this law to assert the most basic right of any state as they call it, the right to assert sovereign borders, are the same people who don’t believe that applies to any other country besides the United States.  It is not the most basic right of any state but of the United States exclusively.  America as a nation and Americans as individuals seem to think that if they violate the borders of other countries it should be just accepted.  Ask Iran or North Korea.  But let hard working families cross the border and perform tasks that we would not take for wages we would not suffer, contribute to the local economy everyday by paying rent on lodgings that most often fail to achieve even the lowest standards conceivable and patronize local merchants and we will bring down our fury to wipe them from our sight.  After all America good; foreigners bad.  That is why the Republicans, the largest group in support of the law, hate the United Nations.  It is too full of foreigners.

Let’s end this nonsense before somebody gets hurt.  At what price salvation?  Security isn’t worth it if the cost is surrendering our humanity and our honour.  And this isn’t security it is security theater.  It provides only the illusion of security at the expense of human dignity.  To paraphrase Phil Ochs, “Arizona, find another country to belong to.”

Barak Obama’s health care plan, as it has thus unfolded, should be a clear and final answer to all those who believed this young man would somehow change politics and create a more inclusive, just and caring society.  The pinheads who screamed that socialism would reign and undermine the American way (greed, cynical self-interest, and lack of community) can at last rest comfortably in the certainty that President Obama is different in complexion only from his predecessors.  It is clear that his campaign document, Blueprint for Change, would have been more aptly named, Blueprint for the Appearance of Change. 

Obama still has to announce many of the details of the plan but he has rejected categorically any form of single-payer public system.  His reason:  it would be too expensive given the current state of the economy.  What a crock.  Canadian labour costs have been and remain lower than American in great part because we have a single-payer public health care system  Current closing and downsizing of Canadian automotive plants is due to political considerations not economics.  American political debate would sound like a cacophony of scorched cats if GM were to close American plants and leave all the Canadian plants open.  It would make the company far more competitive if that were the only criteria for restructuring.  So Obama’s proclamation that cost factors prevent him from creating a health care system that would truly address the current crisis in medicine is just a lie.  A stronger argument can be made that the opposite is true.  The United States cannot afford not to create a single-payer health care system given the current state of the global economy if it wishes to remain competitive. 

Surrounded by the executives of the major American health insurance corporations, Obama painted himself as a man of integrity and said he would fix health care regardless of the state of the economy.  As I have said here before, Barack Obama is a master of image.  He spoke of a consensus between the White House and the insurance companies to do what was necessary to see that all Americans would have access to affordable health coverage generously provided by that bastion of social conscience, the health insurance industry.  The question arises what if someone still cannot afford the premiums set by these socially conscious corporations?  First you will have to prove you can’t afford it and if the government decides you could by oh I don’t know living in your car instead of paying rent or whatever, then the talk is that a fine should be imposed.  Only in the United States would anyone think that insurance at gunpoint would be an appropriate solution to assure all citizens have health insurance.  Obviously this policy is not in the interests of uninsured Americans so why even think of it.  Wait a minute.  It was conceived in conjunction with the major insurance companies.  You don’t think that the president and these leaders of American finance would scratch each other’s back and come up with a solution that benefits themselves do you?  Gee, the insurance industry gets to extort millions in profits from a new source, those who can’t afford medical insurance, and the government led by Barak ‘the enforcer’ Obama sees that they cough up the dough or else.  And Barack’s pay-off, I suspect a tidy little kickback to his re-election campaign.  Might as well just call him President Barack ‘Milhous’ Obama and the corporate executives B. B. Rebozo clones.  It is interesting on this note to

Save the cost of health care premiums and rent at the same time. Suicide: the most cost effective option under the Obama Plan.

mention that a criticism of Obama’s current nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayer, is her previous assertion that all campaign contributions are in reality bribes.  She was simply stating the obvious.  A person supports a candidate because she expects him to look after her interests and in a self-serving society like the United States that means the individual’s selfish interests not her communal interest.  A bell should have gone off back in the campaign when Obama rejected public campaign financing.  Guess we know why now.  (Actually the bell did go off but the American public was so caught up in the election of the first Black president and the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream they refused to listen to those voices.  I guess that they just forgot that King’s dream was a society where a man would be judged by the content of his character rather than the colour of his skin.)

I chose to pay the rent. Now I have a permanent home.

Health care is a human right.  Money was quickly found to fight an illegal war of aggression in Iraq.  Obama while downsizing that war is ratcheting up another unwinnable war in Afghanistan and in the process propping up a government rife with war criminals.  (While Obama continually tries to compare himself to Kennedy and Roosevelt, his behaviour increasingly resembles Nixon.  Nixon while taking credit for troop reductions in Vietnam failed to inform the public that they were just secretly being deployed to Cambodia which led finally to the rise of Pol Pot and the systematic murder of millions.  Now that’s the American way in action.)  There is no question of cost for these ill-conceived adventures.   They are being fought in the name of security while they have only succeeded in making Americans less secure and making the entire world more dangerous, and more in danger.  A secure state is one that minimizes the possibility that any of its citizens will die needlessly or preventably.  Health care then is a security issue.  Not just programs to deal with potential pandemics but prompt, quality medical assistance to every citizens who needs it when they need it.  Paying the rent or saving your life should not be a choice for a citizen of any civilized country.  Today in the United States it is.  Therefore the United States in NOT a civilized country.  It is a barbaric despotism where the wealthy and powerful spend their time cheating the weak and vulnerable.  And the ‘President of Change and Hope,’ Barack Obama has revealed his true self as the ‘President of No Change and No Hope.’

Most of us were raised to be tolerant of people’s beliefs.  But is there no limit to tolerance?  In one of the books I reviewed on this site, American Fascists, Chris Hedges asks the question, ‘In a tolerant society do we tolerate intolerance?’  Most religious institutions are intolerant to a greater or lesser degree.  Perhaps we should be more clear.  I may be able to tolerate your intolerance if you keep it to yourself.  If it does not infringe on the lives of others then okay be as bigoted as you want to be.  Actually there is no way to stop someone from thinking intolerant thoughts anyway.  But we can, and should, stop the political menace of organized religion.  Believe in the Easter Bunny, believe in Santa Claus or believe in god but don’t translate that into the oppression of other people. 

Some people, I am sure are thinking that I am going overboard.  After all the church does a lot of good doesn’t it.  I don’t know.  Does it?  Ask the gay and lesbian community here whether they believe the church does them a lot of good.  Ask our aboriginal communities what they think of the church after the experience of residential schools.  Or ask the thousands of men and women who lost their innocence in a choir loft to a man of the cloth who told them it was what god wanted.  Maybe we should take off the blinders and lose the guilt trip and look at organized religion in the clear light of the facts. 

What has sent me off here is the recent announcement by the Pope, der Führer of the Roman Catholic Church, who has just enlightened the world that condoms do nothing to help the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  Christian Churches, particularly the mainstream Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, have been making great inroads into Africa.  Africa also happens to be where HIV/AIDS is most prevalent for a number of reasons.  These churches reinforce and promote social attitudes that contribute to this prevalence.  Lack of proper medical treatment, including the drugs necessary to keep patients alive, and lack of anything more than symbolic assistance from the wealthy industrialized world is doing enough damage on a continent struggling to overcome the legacies of colonialism and cold war.  We don’t need a bunch of holy rollers encouraging the disempowerment of women in the name of a Jewish revolutionary that DIED 2000 years ago.  As for the silly story of him coming back to life you can read a better version of it in Egyptian mythology, written another 2000 years before he supposedly showed up.  The resurrection story was common among early civilizations.  So pick your favourite but don’t use it to commit mass murder. 

The suffering caused by these institutions is in no way allayed by any positive contribution they make.  They give virtually nothing to society.  Any small assistance those in need receive is accompanied at the very least by a healthy dose of degradation.  Actually that is what the christian church is all about.  Everything human is evil and must be overcome.  We, each of us, individually are worthless.  Only by suppressing our humanity can we hope for salvation.  Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses.  It is kind of like life insurance, you have to die to win.  The more you suffer and endure during your lifetime, the more your reward in heaven is the pitch line.  You know that bit about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven.  But since there is no god there is no heaven and so I don’t think it is noble to suffer here while others enrich themselves.  Actually as I look at the suffering endured by so many people in this world, if there was a god I would personally kill the son of a bitch. 

“God being everything, the real world and man are nothing.  God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death.  God being master, man is the slave.  Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation.  ….. Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church.  ……

The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.” 

Michael Bakunin from God and the State

It is time to throw off the shackles and break the political power of religion once and for all.  If we do not, millions will continue to suffer while the religious elite continue to sanctimoniously enrich themselves.  Church leaders should be imprisoned alongside the other drug dealers.  The menacing fairy tale these pushers peddle has claimed more lives than heroine, crack cocaine and all other narcotics combined.

The sweet sound of the familiar wafts out of the new Obama administration.  Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, in her recent trip to China states that human rights must not get in the way of dealing with the economic crisis.  Although President Obama will be closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, he has decided to continue to support the policy of extraordinary rendition which is the practice of having others do your torture for you.  I have more respect for the torturer than the sanctimonious hypocrite. 

But I guess change and a new approach don’t last as long as they used to.  A nation wept with joy and expectation as the first Black man was inaugurated as president of the United States, a country with a horrific history of civil and human  rights abuses.  The hope and the promise was that this would be a new dawning of the American dream; that all humans would be treated equally and with respect and dignity.  How could it be otherwise?  How could a Black man in the United States turn his back on civil and human rights?  How could he compare himself to Abraham Lincoln and use slavery as a backdrop for the significance of his presidency while blindly ignoring slavery in those countries he interacts with?  It seems absurd but few are questioning him on it.  Those who try are pushed to the side by the ‘mainstream Left’ who are gushing like schoolgirls in the glow of the new messiah. 

The masses that enjoy the opulence and relative ease of our society have no stomach for a debate on human rights.  I guess the condition is that rights are good as long as they don’t affect our lifestyle.  For years the United States and its industrialized friends have chided China for its human rights record at Hollywood fundraising events or at galas with other progressive groups while conducting business as usual in the corridors of power.  It is a metaphor for our time.  The ultimate Potemkin Village.  While we swim in the filth of reality we see only the crystal waters of our self-induced mirage.  So who can we really blame, the politicians that encourage our delusion or ourselves for knowingly embracing it?  What is the fear?  Could it be that we know that our society is as cold and uncaring towards us, its own members, as it is toward those who suffer the indignity every day of not being considered fully human? 

I wonder.

I am glad if one day or one hour goes by without someone dying.  However I understand Hamas’ reluctance to accept the ceasefire.  Israel has seized large portions of Gaza territory.  Its troops remain entrenched and ready to resume the attack at any moment.  No plan of withdrawal or normalization accompanies this move by the Israeli government.  Nor has Israel announced any process to address these issues.  So what we have here is a territory that has been invaded and occupied being told to stop resisting the occupation in exchange for their lives.  Israel says “We will stop illegally murdering more of your citizens, if you allow us to retain the benefit we received from the ones we have already murdered.”   What is the difference between this situation and the fall of France in 1940 when the puppet government of Vichy was allowed to survive temporarily?  Frenchmen did not lay down their arms then and Palestinians have no incentive to lay down their arms now.

This is not peace.  It is not a real ceasefire.  It is just a lull in the killing.  Whether Hamas capitulates or not, the destruction of the Palestinian nation will continue until not one Palestinian is left.  That is the goal.  It has been for the past 60 years and it will continue.

The longer Gaza is under siege and more Palestinians, particularly civilians, die, the broader the effects will be felt.  George Bush asked ‘why do they hate us?’  Are we really that simple?  The entire ‘War on Terror’ has been a recruiting tool for militants and has undermined any hope of a peaceful or successful resolution of the problems.  The West, twiddling its thumbs and launching platitudes in the media about the sanctity of human life, has sent a clear message to the Muslim world and to Palestinians in particular:  ‘You are on your own.’  The United States has firmly stated in act and word that Israeli deaths matter; Palestinian deaths do not.  Well if they didn’t hate us before they damn well should now. 

What should be of great concern to us is that the support of the murders in Gaza are being done in our name.  I am murdering Palestinians through my government’s support of Israel and I don’t want to.  Like me most of you who read this know that we do not really govern ourselves.   We need to admit to ourselves that our democracy is a sham and admit to the world that what the United States and its allies, including Canada, are exporting to the developing world is not democracy but capitalist exploitation.  It is the new colonialism.  If any of you are in doubt on this you need only look to Hamas.  When elections were held in the Palestinian territories Hamas won a clear victory in a clean and fair election according to international observers.  But Hamas was not the government that the United States and Israel had chosen for the Palestinians to elect and so Hamas was immediately denounced, vilified and through the collaboration of Mahmoud Abbas prevented from governing.  Israel and the United States then created an internal Palestinian civil war backing Abbas to try to eliminate Hamas.  While the attempt did not fully succeed, it has created even greater suffering for the Palestinian people. 

 As long as peoples around the world believe the myth that we govern ourselves, they will hate us because of what they perceive as our callous brutality toward them.  Our governments by their actions and their lies about democracy are endangering each and every one of us.  Most of us who followed international affairs knew that September 11 was coming.  We didn’t know exactly when or where or how.  But we knew that a major terrorist attack on the continental United States was inevitable.  Many of us, myself included, were surprised that the kill count was not higher for we had expected a biological or chemical attack.  By our failure to understand the problems and deal with them in an effective way we are guaranteeing that it will happen again and this time perhaps it will be worse.  If we are going to murder innocent people and deny the right to exist to whole populations; if we are going to condone mass murder or even genocide by our failure to effectively confront it; if we are going to say that this person because of this identifier is more important than that person because of that identifier; then we sew the seeds of sorrow and grief for all humankind.

Five girls from one family were killed over the weekend when a mosque near their home was targeted.  They were sleeping together in one room.  How many Canadian families do you know that talk about five children sleeping in one room as normal?  There were actually seven but two survived, but for how long with an acute shortage of medical supplies.  The other aspect of the story that seems to be taken for granted is the fact that a mosque was a target of an Israeli air strike.  Now I know the rational Israel is using here.  They will argue that radical Imams are calling upon their followers to rise up in Jihad.  Mosques are not just religious centers but centers of resistance and terrorism.  Interesting enough the Germans used similar rationalizations for their destruction of synagogues.  The Israeli government learned a lot of lessons from the Nazis.  There I have done it.  I have stepped over the line.  Now comes the onslaught.  I am an anti-Semite.  I hate Jews.  But is that what I said just now?  No.  I said the Israeli government, not Jews, had learned lessons in repression, not only of Palestinian Arabs but of any Israeli Jew that disagrees with them.  Ask activists with B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group about the harassment they experience because they protest the human rights violations of their government.  They are attacked by official sources as self-hating Jews. 

Israel is not Judaism and Judaism is not Israel.  Judaism is a religion, Israel is a state.  Until that concept is clearly rooted in the international psyche nothing will be done to end the bloodshed until Israel has succeeded in wiping every Palestinian from the face of the earth.  Actually you might say they already have.  One argument advanced by the Israeli government is that there is no such thing as a Palestinian.  Palestine is not a nation.  Arabs in the West Bank are Jordanians.  The Nazis used this tack with certain Slavic groups to justify their murder.  Better yet the late Golda Meir, former prime minister of Israel claimed that when the Jews arrived in Palestine there were not people on the land at all.  It was unoccupied.  So if these non-existent people were to disappear no one would notice.  The path to genocide begins first with an attack on identity. 

The international community sits back and refuses to act perhaps out of some misplaced sense of collective guilt, perhaps from self-interested agendas and perhaps partly out of fear.  Remember that Israel is the sixth largest nuclear power.   Israel continues to officially deny possessing nuclear weapons but their existence is the worst kept secret in the world.  Regardless of the reason, how long can we sit back and allow this atrocity to continue before our eyes.  The mainstream news media is never more biased than with reporting on middle eastern issues.  If one relies on the major American networks or the BBC for information it would be understandable to see Israel as the victim in this.  Again a tactic used by the Nazis against Jews.  Nazi propogandists repeatedly drummed the mantra into the German people that the Jews were controlling the economy and conspiring with foreign powers to destroy Germany.  The justification for Kristallnacht was the assassination of the German ambassador in Paris by a Jew.  Goebbels disseminated the idea that this was part of a greater conspiracy to bring down the German government and cause a war rather than the act of a frustrated individual.  Anyone who blindly believes the press is courting disaster.  Media is ALWAYS controlled by the politically powerful in a society and serves whatever agenda they pursue. 

The facts:

1. In the last seven years only 17 Israelis have been killed by rocket fire.  In the first day of this new pogrom in Gaza approximately 200 Palestinians died.  The number is now around 375 mostly civilians contrary to the CNN report I watched tonight which claims that most of the dead are Hamas fighters.  So five little girls sleeping in their own home are a threat to Israel, I guess. 
2. The initial attacks on Saturday, December 27th were timed to coincidence with schools letting out.  The streets were full of children and the police stations and training facilities that were prime targets were close to schools.  This can only be interpreted as an attempt to kill children.  Again this is reminiscent of the Nazi behaviour.  The Nazis paid special attention to Jewish children in the Holocaust.  The best method to annihilate an entire race or class of people is to destroy their future. 
3. Israel was first to break the ceasefire.  Ehud Barack stating publicly that Israel is no longer interested in a ceasefire leaves me incredulous as the evidence shows they never have been interested in one.  Wanton, unjustified intrusions into Gaza occurred repeatedly without Hamas responding in defense until the murder of six Hamas leaders and the attack on a tunnel complex supplying Gaza.  Israel wanted Hamas to respond for fear if they continued to unilaterally hold to the ceasefire they would achieve a moral victory.  This would further undermine the position of Israel’s puppet, Mahmoud Abbas.  Abbas and his government are equivalent to the Jewish Councils in the Ghettos. 
4. Police stations and training facilities, water wells, mosques and public officials were the prime targets of the Israeli invasion.  Interestingly the Israelis do not seem interested in rocket sites.  But this invasion was never about rockets attacking Israel.  There are many possible reasons for the attack at this time.  One that came immediately to my mind was the Israeli elections.  Kadima, lagging in the polls behind Benyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, hopes to undermine Likud’s chief criticism that Kadima is soft on the Palestinian issue. 
5. Gaza has been subjected to an inhuman siege which have reduced it to the world’s largest concentration camp.  Everything is in short supply; food, fuel, water, medical supplies.  Those shortages now contribute to the suffering caused by this latest attack.  How many of the wounded will be able to survive is questionable and the death toll will only rise. 

Candidate Obama, now President-Elect Obama, said in his visit to Israel earlier this year:

“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing,” 

Well what would he do if his daughters were lying in the morgue instead of those five Palestinian girls?  Would he be so quick to condemn Hamas and blame them for the problem?  Hamas acted lawfully in defending the people of Gaza against an aggressor.  The international condemnation of Israel is muted by American support.  But the international community is a paper tiger.  It does not want to confront Israel.  If the United Nations stood for something the following should happen:

1. Israel’s membership in the UN should be immediately suspended as they have flagrantly violated the UN Charter, are currently in violation of some 80 odd Security Council resolutions (for perspective Saddam Hussein was maybe in violation of six or seven before his country was invaded and he was hanged for crimes against humanity), and also in violation of their commitments under the Geneva Conventions.
2. All trade and foreign aid coming into Israel should be immediately halted.  Israel’s assets abroad should be seized and frozen.  Israeli government officials found outside of Israel should be arrested and held for investigation by the International Criminal Court. 
3. Humanitarian aid should be injected into Gaza as quickly as possible, even if this means a military confrontation with Israel.  Along with this an international force should enter Gaza to protect civilians from genocide.
4. All of this will require the courage of the other powers of the world to stand up to the United States. 

 If this all sounds extreme it is.  But we are facing a moral choice.  If we do not act, as we did not in Germany, as we did not in Rwanda, and as we are not in Congo currently, then the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is meaningless.  The Nuremburg and Tokyo trials were a waste of time.  The tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda should be stopped.  The choice is to do something or to do nothing.  So whether I have accomplished anything in my life or not, I will probably never know but since I continue, I must continue to try.

Now maybe I am warped, okay I am, but still there seems to be an irony here.  Here is probably the most recognizable symbol of Canada, the country known around the world for peacekeeping, human rights and all that other touchy feely stuff, and it is being made in China.  It was bad enough when Disney owned the copyright to mountie paraphenalia (actually I don’t know whether they still do or not).   But China internationally stands for everything Canada is supposed to be against.  At least with Disney there was only the problem of our country being mistaken for a cartoon.  Come to think of it we do kind of have a mickey mouse prime minister at the moment. 

China uses slave labour.  China violates the right of self determination for the Tibetan people (of course many English Canadians would gladly violate that same right for French Canada if they try to leave).  China practices religious intolerance.  China has some of the worst pollution in the world.  Now China has been trying to kill our children by putting plastic in milk and lead in plastic.  

Question:  Why are we still buying anything from China at all? 

Answer:  Greed, Capitalism and all those other related things that we really stand for.  We are told that if we engage China their human rights and environmental records will improve.  That is why we awarded them the 2008 Olympics.  Remember they promised that they would clean up their record by the time of the games.  Oh yeah they cleaned up all right.  They cleaned up the streets by arresting anyone who might criticize the government or challenge the veracity of their public statements.  They cleaned up by arresting foreign journalists who dared to photograph anything not pre-approved by the Beijing government.  Environmentally they ordered wealthy government apparatcheks to refrain from driving for a few weeks until the games were over. 

Message to Western governments:  Engagement doesn’t work!  The Chinese are laughing at you.

But I guess before we remove the speck from China’s eye, we should remove the beam from our own.  This year has seen a plethora of food contamination problems in Canada and when was the last time you felt really safe driving a North American car.  And when it comes to the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, what do you want to bet they bus the homeless and street people to Alberta.  Except for the prostitutes of course.  We wouldn’t want all those foreign dignitaries to have nothing to do at night.