Yuppers - I think this idea has been out here on the Tyee in the recent past, n'est ce pas?

But yeah, it's almost impossible to believe if I didn't see/hear/read it myself that there are supporters of these Islamist loons who themselves would simply be murdered if they lived under the rule of their "allies".

Retarded - it's an accurate word - Death to political correctness!

Thanks Terry, for smearing the anti-war movement once more. If this was 1968 you would probably be writing about how the peace movement was communist. For the facts, IS is a tiny group and its positions are held only by itself. The vast majority of us hold no such viewpoints. Furthermore, in order to understand IS's views you have to have some understanding of its ideology which is Trotskyism. Trotskyists see the main enemy as US Imperialism. Back in the 1950's the Trots supported the USSR against the US even though Trotskyists were tortured and murdered in Russia. In other words, even though they hated Stalinists, they still saw US imperialism as a greater threat. The same applies for the alleged Trot "support" for Saddam or Islamic militants. This might be too subtle a position for many, or may even well be wrong, but it is not the same as "supporting" Stalinism or Islamic Fundies. My own position, and of the anarchist movement and the rest of the peace movement, is "a plague on both their houses". And as Brain Is On Fire has pointed out, we have already seen Glavin's attacks on the peace movement before in the Tyee. Why do we have to have this crap here, when we can read similar in the Scum or the Provincial?

Dear editors of the Tyee

I'm all for dissenting opinion. But do we really need to hear from yet another frothing rightwing smearmonger? Please replace this tard with a sensible conservative who has something of value to offer your readers.

blah, blah, blah... Glavin you're a caricature of a caricature. The primary allies of islamic radicals are racist twits like you and the bush administration. You and your buddies are responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. You cheered on the Iraq war like a pack of rabid wolves, and now come up with any excuse to avoid seeing all the blood on your hands. There is no better way than wanton murder, torture and destruction to radicalize people. The semantic knots you tie and twist are interesting only as a demonstration of the lengths blind ideologues will go to delude themselves.

And to the editors of the Tyee. Thus far all Glavin has trotted out are the old cloned arguments of neoconservatives. Even the rats Frum and Perle have abandoned the sinking ship of the Iraq war, yet here we have Glavin blaming the peace movement, a tactic used by the warmongers to silence dissent at the height of the rah, rah selling of the Iraq "cakewalk". Having a conservative perspective on the Tyee is worthwhile, but only if it is one that does a passable job of acknowledging reality.

Taking in all views is fine.

Sadly this author is focussing in on a small collection of very 'loud', or very 'long-lived' parts of the anti-war movement. In my view they do not represent the majority opinion of the opposition to the current conflagration in Afghanistan, on the part of Canadians nor of Iraq on the part of US/UK opposers.

I cannot speak for all, nor would I think that a broad brush can be used for any of the 'opposition' to the wars ongoing in these places.

For myself, I was initially in favor of some action to be taken to halt the growth of the 'camps' that were blamed for training the next generation of 'terrorists'. These calls for action came in the wake of 9/11, so I was also wanting the action(s) to be more limited in nature and scope, so that we all collectively had time to come to grips with the whole action, and gather a 'proper' response to the 'correct' perpetrators.

The first actions of OP Enduring Freedom:A, consisted of a few American Ranger Battalions, UK SAS and Canadian JTF-2 troops working in concert with the 'northern alliance' to eradicate the 'camps'. This was done within 3 months.

Then 'mission creep' began.

Osama bin Laden became a 'wanted man' that the US had to catch. This still has not been done, as far as I know this 'mission' has been abandoned.

With the continuing 'mission creep' calling for us, in Canada to contribute more and more troops, tanks, planes, resources to 'prop-up' the tottering Karzei government in a sort of 'regime-change' operation is where the resistance comes from.

We, in Canada, do not have a great history of using armed force to place a government in power. The resources needed to do this in the mountainous country of Afghanistan are beyond our capacity to do alone. Now we see our 'allies' shying away from further involvement. Moreover many whom are there have so restricted their 'rules of engagement' so as to leave only Canada and US troops with the 'permission' to fight. Once again we see a Dieppe-like moment coming.

Groups, like the Senlis Council, are condemning the US-style approach to the economic actions in the region, but with no other allies we are left with no other options but to 'follow-march' to the US leadership on these issues.

With the mounting problems facing the 'creeping mission' I have become an opponent to the Afghanistan mission.

Looking closer at the military, I note that the last 'white paper' on the military was written under Cretien.

The divisive parliaments have left our armed forces somewhat without direction, they - the generals - have chosen to act in that directive vacuum.

Time for our parliament to become more assertive about the use of the military, and to take a more preservationist attitude towards them and not throw their lives away for folly.

Either get the needed public support for a 'real' Afghanistan deployment (a military force from Canada alone of over 250,000 troops from ground and air forces) or as a major contributor to such in a 'coalition', or get out right away.

Stop farting around, $#!t or get off the pot.

Glavin hits the nail on the head here people. If we want to support popular grassroots, nationalist movements that represent ordinary working people we should oppose authoritarian theocrats whether they are American, Afghani or Iraqi. Knee-jerk hatred of all things American is just silly, especially if we end up apologists for oppressive regimes that disregard human rights.

I'm not interested in defending George Galloway in tights or out or suggesting that I have any particular sympathy for the SSNP; but, would it be too much to ask Mr. Glavin to try and be a little more accurate.

As I recall, the first recorded incident of a female suicide bombing took place in Israel in 1985 - just over 20 years ago.

Without spending any time on all the other nasty things that ‘distinguish’ the SSNP, the normal understanding, and certainly the sense Mr. Glavin wants to leave in his reader is that the SSNP has been at its grisly work for a lot longer than that. Furthermore, the movements which have made the most of female suicide bombers happen to be the Tamil Tigers and the Kurdistan Workers' Party.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4436368.stm

And, while I'm hardly a supporter of Andrea Dworkin, there is a considerable body of feminist opinion and much evidence to support the contention that female bombers are not, as a class, emotionally disturbed at all.

A much better analysis of the problems and difficulties presented by extremism and terrorism as a tactic appeared in the New York Times as long ago as 1984 (before the first female bomber on record) in a long piece written by Thomas Friedman who was, at the time, moving from being the Times' bureau chief in Beirut to their bureau in Jerusalam.

It's much too long to post here, of course, but it was entitled: THE POWER OF THE FANATICS - October 7, 1984.

At that time, Friedman still felt that the best hope for peace came from Israeli democracy.

One wishes, frankly, that were still so today.

Again, Mr Glavin appears more fascinated with sniping at ephemera like Galloway than actually, and accurately, characterizing the situation on the ground. And that's too bad.

Think how much more usefully his 1650 words could have been used on something other than his personal pique with the left – especially in Canada where the left can’t form a government except in Saskatchewan and Manitoba on anything like a consistent basis.

With the mainstream media doing a pretty decent job of demonizing imaginary Islamofascists in this country right now, I can’t quite understand the reason for Terry Glavin’s continuing Quixotic attack on a non-existent enemy.

But, that appears to be his thing these days. At least, however, he might try to be a little more accurate.

The truth hurts doesn't it? Of course the Tyee regulars get upset when it appears on this website. The left is confusing to me. One one hand they support homosexuality, and yet they support the Islamists, who would cut their heads off.
The NDP on Northern Vancouver Island resolved that our Canadian Forces stationed in Afghanistan are terrorists.
The CLC is on board with the anti-war left and there support of Islamofascists.
The misguided hatred of the US and Israel by the left has exposed them for what they really are. Stupid. I am sure glad I'm not on their side.

Ron, what truth?
You wouldn't know the truth if it bit you on the thigh.

I'm really glad you're not on my side too Ron. I couldn't take the embarrassment.

First we have an article that deals with the anti-war left in Canada and with the relationship between mainstream Muslims and hard-core Islamists. And what is the first comment after the article about? Israel Israel Israel. Are you kidding me?

"Imaginary Islamofascists?" I dunno about that...I was at SFU a few semesters back and nearly every issue of The Peak had one leftist-sounding Islamist attack on western values one after the other, plus lots of rhetoric about The Faith itself; pretty much there was a Muslim monopoly on column-inches, partly because The Peak would publish nearly anything submitted to it. There were a few purely religious articles, "explaining" why Abraham's different offspring were and weren't legitimate, and why Christians (which the Muslim writers assumed all non-Muslim, non-Jewish, non-Sikh, non-Hindu students to be, as if we gave a shit anymore about the mass or theology at all) should recognize that the only true faith etc etc etc.

But there were also column after column invoking the fashionable p.c. language of academic ideologues about why it was offensive that there was a pub on campbs, how disgusting it was that women could have bare arms in class ("it's too distracting", said one otherwise very leftist columnist) and more crap along those lines. There were also demands, couched in the leftist language of cultural liberation, demanding that SFU set aside a special prayer space for Muslims, who had "different religious needs" than the Christians and others who used the basement of the pub. They stopped short of demanding the construction of a minaret so campus could hear the call to prayer five times daily. Quasi-leftist justifications for the veil and other aspects of sharia were trotted out in issue after issue. They also demanded the closure of the pub, as it was too much of a temptation for Muslim students.

Eventually enough was enough and somehow The Peak doesn't have a lot of this anymore; back in the late '70s/'80s it was all Trotskyite crap, but the tone was similar. I do remember finally there were letters telling the lefto-Muslims that if they weren't comfortable around western customs, they didn't have to have come to a western university; this after one Moslem women's lengthy tirade about the superiority of life behind the veil.

ALL couched in leftist rhetoric. Mind you, it'sworth considering (as Terry hasn't) that traditional Islamicsociety was built on social charity; the vakif system whereby wealth isdistributed by means of mosque revenues (mosques generally have large vakifs, or foundations, which consist of extensive properties that support the mosques, which also usually have free-food programs even today); in classical Islam, money-lending for profit was illegal (hence the importance of Jews in the Mid-East at one time) and there were other socialistic aspects to it.

I don't think it's just "an enemy of my enemy is my friend" stuff that's at play here, though. I think it's also fear, outright fear, of criticizing Islamism, which has made it clear that its enemies should all be exterminated.

From James Burns:

Wow!! You can just feel the useless anger.

Skookum1
I actually wish I could have posted Friedman's piece from 1984 in the Times but it runs to 6000 words. It certainly wasn't an anti-Israeli piece - despite that fact that it did remark on the Kahane gang and the mechanisms by which violence tends to begat violence.

And I don't disagree that there is an element of the (as nightbloom would put it) doctrinaire 'left' that ignores the violence of some Islamic spokesmen and attitudes...but, as both of us no doubt know and acknowledge, the campus-radical fringe is not really the audience here at Tyee. If anything, I'd say the average Tyee reader and poster is agnostic and no more friendly to extreme fundamentalist Christianist viewpoints than it is to ultra-orthodox Jewish sects who are still waiting for the Moshiach and the end of days.

And, I doubt Terry would want to be lumped in with the neocons who are actually promoting this imaginary clash of civilizations.

The attempt to enshrine Sharia Law in Ontario was misguided; but it was also defeated, as it should have been. I think it's time though to make the point - as you did at the end of your post - that there are many commonalities between western and Islamic culture. And, I still think 'Islamofascism' is more a neocon slogan than a coherent philosophical branch of Islamic thought.

I have a strong suspicion that most Islamic immigrants are more than willing to adapt to Canadian cultural norms if we can ever get together long enough to discover what the hell they are.

Students today, as they were in our student days, are never chary about sounding off and proving exactly how much they still have to learn.

In most cases - and this is something the Queen's cowboys and most politicians still don't understand - it is far better to let them have their say...

I've been following developments in the Netherlands - and they seem to be approaching the situation pretty responsibly, by the way.

Elton John hit the nail on the head. The work of god is war itself. While us non-believers are supposed to be completely tolerant of thier superstitions, the religeous bigots get to go on and on being completely intolerant of everything and everyone. It's time to put an end to the holy hoax. In both the koran and the bible, the Earth is depicted as a flat place where the Moon is a light giving source of it's own and the Sun rotates over the land. I guess the creator has never been more that ten feet off the surface of the planet, for if indeed he has been, he would have realized his so called creation was round and it orbits the Sun that the moon has no light to give, but only reflects that which it receives. I find it funny that religeons get an upsurge everytime there is a war. But on second thought, it's not very funny at all.

And, one other tiny thing I meant to say.
I've had Newsworld on in the background this morning as I toil away at my drafting board and I heard snippets of a conversation with an author/expert on the topic of organized crime.

Just a couple of points, which seem to me to be far more critical to the future of the country

1) That Canada is the Mother of the Mafia, that "no Mafiosi would dream of being headquartered in the USA as they're too scared of the U.S. government ..."

2) That the Canadian police (I'm not so sure I totally agree with this) are well able to arrest these crooks ... the critical link is the Canadian court system.

I think I'd feel more comfortable if a few more journalists here in BC were as concerned with that issue (as some of the press have been in Quebec) and a bit less concerned with "Islamofascism".

Sounds suspiciously like the blinkered concept used to justify so many wars.

"If you ain't with us, you're agin us"

Nothing good can come from that kind of thinking.

Terry Glavin's article is too long, poorly organized, unreadable, boring. What is his point? Can anyone explain?

Galloway was allegedly elected by vote-fixing. The predominently Bangladeshi residents of Bethnal and Bow were told to hand in their mail-in ballots to religious/community leaders, who then had opportunity to mark the ballots on the voters' behalf. This was supposed to be investigated and the mail-in ballot system changed, but I don't know what became of that. Probably nothing.

Glavin's point is well taken: keep religion and politics separate or suffer the consequences. And keep Galloway and his ilk out of the pockets of Saddam et al.

BTW, posters should refer to Afghanistan citizens as Afghans. "Afghani" is the currency of the realm.

I thought Glavin's point was to discredit the anti-movement. Don't mind him. He's just following his god's desires.

How many people belong to the International Socialists? Five, or six? Sure, there are some bizarre people on the far left, but to claim that they have any kind of serious influence is a red-herring to cover up for a disastrous policy in the Middle East. This is what we call "spin". How many people did the anti-war movement kill in Iraq this month, Terry? Terry?

kurt
I thought the connections between Galloway and Saddam were proved to be forgeries. Probably created by the same stooges who said there were WMD in Iraq. As to your claim about electoral fraud - I'd like to see a little evidence.

I'm not terribly fond of Galloway, but if he's the most awful avatar that the left Glavin is most interested in slamming can muster I don't think you have much to worry about.

Compared with the tattered reputations of the doctrinaire Right in the US these days I think he's fared rather well.

And I can post lots of evidence of what those guys have tried to foist on a gullible public. In their own words.

Oh, and I think you'll find the construction Afghani is in common use as a way to refer to the people as well as their currency.

Whether or not the multitude of tribes and pseudo national groupings who nominally live within the borders of the current disputed region ought to be called by any common name is quite another question.

GWest: The voter fraud scandal was well documented shortly after the last election in Britain, and wasn't limited to Bethnal & Bow — that was just the most glaring example cited by electoral officials, and Galloway won by a very narrow margin to boot. If you prefer the Left version you should be able to find it in The Guardian's archives.

Galloway became a very wealthy man following his friendship with Saddam. He didn't make that kind of cash on a Labour MP's stipend. Ergo, he was in Saddam's pockets, no?

As for the WMD/Iraq fiasco, the latest news is that the info came from a Syrian paid informant. Talk about military intelligence...

Blame Syria!?

I thought that the sermon by Glavin was something like this.

EVER'BODY KNOWS that islamofascistevildoers are threatening all civilization.

"The Left" is fully supporting islamofascistevildoers in doing evil.

Therefore "The Left"is threatening civilization.

(Y'see, all this time we've been thinking it was climate change, and corporate profits.)

Anyone familiar with German history will known that the tune to "Deutschland ueber alles" was written by Joseph Hayden in 1797. The words were written in 1841, and have nothing to do with Nazism or German domination (that's a 20th century propaganda smear) but were a revolutionary expression of the primacy of people and community over political structures. By the way, it's still the melody of the German anthem today, so let's not be soo free with ill-informed innuendo, please.

kurt
I've heard all the rumours. However, the Telegraph (with Tubby Black at the helm at the time), lost the case in the English courts, remember? I don't just read the Guardian.

I'm not saying it's not true, but it certainly hasn't been proved to my satisfaction.

Like I said, I'm not fond of the guy, he's as big a media hog as our own Attorney General is, but that doesn't mean he's guilty of anything. In addition, in a market where Bill Clinton can go from being several hundred thousand dollars in debt to his current income bracket on the basis of a book and a bunch of public appearances I think you're making a case out of whole cloth.

The anti-war movemnet is about as knowledgeable (and effective) as the anti-poverty movement - well-meaning perhaps but hopelessly naive and counter-productive. Glavin makes some good points.

More importantly, he provides some needed balance to the over-abundance of leftist viewpoint here at this labour-sponsored blogspace.

Global warming is a good thing, btw.

Back in the 1960's the anti-war marches were small, maybe 2000 people. At this time, few people other than students demonstrated, as years of authoritarian brainwashing had made the general public look with disfavor on such activities. The Glavins of the day attacked us as commies, beardy-weirdies, stop-the-world-I-want-to get off types and similar idiocies. The demos were organized by the Trotskyist LSA, which maybe had 75 members in Vancouver at the time. Thus the Trots were less than 4% of the movement, to claim the movement was Trotskyist or supported Trotskyism would have been absurd. Leninist ideology having fallen out of favor with todays radicals, there are even fewer Trots nowadays. But the anti-war demos are massive, with the numbers in the tens of thousands. Montreal saw 250,000 come out against the war in Iraq. The IS has, what 15 members in Montreal? You do the math!

anarcho
What I didn't like about the few Trot meetings I went to - apart from the oratorical nonsense - was the plainclothes guys with cameras in the car outside.

Then I met a couple of fellow students in another student organization over a few beers one night and one of them (orphaned child of a dead police officer) told us how he was paid a monthly fee to attend trot meetings.

There were never more than four or five folks at the meetings I went to so I always figured at least 2 of them were paid informers. Never much of a threat - then or now.

I always got a charge out of the idea that about a quarter of the folks they had under surveillance were also paid stooges.

neocon Haven't seen you for a while.
Where's the other member of your duo these days?

Is elliot sick or something?

Hi G West!

Yes, took a break from this time-waster. I see you're still at it.

Who's elliot?

N

A great article by Glavin as usual. It's good to see some articles looking at the left, from within, with a critical eye.

Introducing writers like Glavin and actually posting articles that aren't all cheerleader pieces brings some credibility to this site that many others of this ilk simply don't have.

I'm sure people will write scathing letters to Beers about how the tyee should only publish cheerleading articles, but this is refreshing. I hope there is more to come from Glavin.

Who's Elliot?

I'm shocked neocon.

He's the other half of your terrible twosome: The Katzenjammer Kids of disinformation and obfuscation.

I haven't read the comments, only the article, but why is the Anti-war movement automatically considered left wing? There are many christian conservatives who oppose the war, and of course many Islamists too. This is because there are no rules for "membership" except opposing war. At the last demo I was at there was a sign that said "Against indiscriminate killing, from war to abortion". Now, I wouldn't agree with this person, but I also wouldn't exclude them from an anti-war protest.

We "of the Left" all know Glavin as well as he knows that "the Left" does not, in fact, support the "theocrats" of either Islam or Judaism, and their apologists, in which Jewish "theocratic" apologist camp Glavin himself is numbered. This is merely more of his Zionist apologetic shite, in which "the Beer" appears to "guzzle" himself.

What we do support however, behind whatever ideological front it manifests itself, secular or religious, is the anti-imperialist resistance of the Arab and other Middle East peoples against Euro-Zionist and US Empire/Other Euro attempts to steal their lands and resources in the name of some bullshitt notion of either democracy, or Palestinian compensation obligations for the crimes of Europe against European Jewry.

Galvin is but one minor part of the smoke and mirrors being thrown up to justify US Empire Alliance imperialism in the Middle East, and European Jewry's attempt to thieve Palestinian lands through some long agao, pre-Christian ancient claim less credible than the much more recent North American Native claims to this continent.

So, if European Jewry's claim to Palestine is legitimate, more so even is the expectation that North Amerika's current European and Asian descendant inhabitants will concede the original sin of their ancestors and return to Europe from whence they came. Our claim is then even more illegitimate to this land, than is that of the Palestinians who were in the land of Palestine (Israel to the Jews and Euro-centric peoples)even before the brief existance of the what... seventy year existence I recall it was, hopefully correctly ... that ancient Israel actually existed as an independant state before the time of the Roman conquest of Palestine.

Glavin is transparent enough. He is but merely a propagandist here, in my view, to which Beers and Co. has lent its pages.

What the Nazis and much of Europe did to European Jews in the Holocaust was wrong. The Holocaust European and North American Israeli Jewry is now attempting to bring down upon the Palestinians now is also wrong. Two wrongs do not make a right here now either.

End the "Goebellesque" Glavin propaganda apologetics now. Support the cause of Middle East/Palestinian Resistance.

It really is about that simple.

Glavin, "the left from within"!?!?

What a joke that is.

Elton John spends $3 million a month on "personal items." If he put his money where his mouth is he could be helping a lot of poor people.

He is just another Lady Di staying in $37000 per night hotel rooms while pretending to care about the poor.

More importantly, he provides some needed balance to the over-abundance of leftist viewpoint here at this labour-sponsored blogspace.

Global warming is a good thing, btw

...coming from you neocon, what a surprise your viewpoint is (tongue firmly placed in cheek). Thought provoking...not.

Bear

I have always thought it odd the so called "left" deified left wing thugs like Mao, Stalin and Castro and vilified right wing thugs like Hitler, Samosa and Saadam.

One murderous thug is much the same as the next in my opinion.

Seanor wrote" but why is the Anti-war movement automatically considered left wing?"

This is a very good point and very true, but, you see you are dealing not with reason, but with propaganda. For the neocons war is good and the left is bad. Then they amalgamate the two into evil anti-war leftists. Like one of the forefathers of the contemporary neocons pointed out, if you tell a big lie often enough people will believe it.

Skookum1 wrote:

So the evidence of the popularity of islamofascism amongst those on the left was the contents of the SFU student newspaper? Ok let me stop laughing for a moment....

Ah that's better. But ok, if the Peak was a swelling mass of islamofascist diatribe, where's the beef? You can make up all kinds of garbage about what students contributing to a campus paper may or may not have written. But without citations, and links to actual Peak source material, your blather is just that, blather. Mis-rememberings of material taken out of context is the lazy-ass way of distortion. Do at least a little homework, or is your avoidance of that the reason you're no longer on campus?

You can start here:
http://www.peak.sfu.ca/Archives.HTML

But lets not also forget that the Peak is largely volunteer written by students. There are bound to be a huge range of opinions. Hell, Rachel Marsden wrote for the Peak at one time, in fact she may even have been an editor of some sort. Nowadays she just works hard at being an Ann Coulter wannabe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Marsden

writes working man.

Just another example of how ignorant he can be by times.

Most leftists don't deify anyone, not even god.

I do like ‘samosas’ though. Does that count?

One murderous thug is much the same as the next in my opinion.

Really? Then why didn't you put bush on that list? I mean after all he's murdered vastly more people than Castro ever will.

All these comments indicate that it is now the Left who are Reactionaries spewing venomous dirges in support of their own point of view.

You can cry all you want about it, but the basic truth is that the general public - the people whom you must woo to your side or does democracy "turn you off" - sees exactly what this writer stated and these crazy=long multi-posts bring to mind the right wing loons who were reactionaries when I was a seventies kid.

And now here we and the left have become the crazy ones. Human history, ebb and flow of ideas, sects and ideas over our history are fascinating - Humans are very fluid indeed.

G. West wrote about Trotskists
"There were never more than four or five folks at the meetings I went to so I always figured at least 2 of them were paid informers. Never much of a threat - then or now"

The only thing more foolish than the Trot sects are the cops – for thinking that they are any kind of threat to the corporate state. Once a Trot group gets more than a handful of members they start fighting over the “correct line” and split apart . By their manipulation of the people they seek to organize, they piss people off. Most of them are fine people, its just that “vanguard party” BS makes them ineffective.

"I have always thought it odd the so called "left" deified left wing thugs like Mao, Stalin and Castro and vilified right wing thugs like Hitler, Samosa and Saadam."

More nonsense. The pro-Stalinist left was, and is, a minority of the left. If you actually knew something about the left and its history, rather than repeating rubbishy far-right propaganda. And this is coming from someone who from 1968-on spent many an hour in polemics and intellectual brawls with CPers, Maoists and Trots over these very issues. But these people never made up the majority of the left, then, and especially now. Marxist-Leninism is discredited, if you didn't realize it. We are creating a new politics best described as "libertarian socialism." Read about Oaxaca and Chiapas to see the new movement as it evolves.

anarcho,
Couldn't agree more. In those days I actually ran into 3 different individuals who were paid - a couple of them a monthly stipend and the other had his books and fees picked up for four years of college to attend radical campus meetings. I often wondered if they ended up telling tales on each other.

I wonder if the guys infiltrating the radical Islamic groups have worked out a similar deal?

Anybody who's planning the radical overthrow of society isn't likely to do it at public meetings where most of the haranguing is internecine.

Terry Glavin seems to me to be more interested in putting down the peace-makers and the supposed "left" than keeping our sons alive and healing the Earth.

MBIOFire: Truth is when parents are left childless, children are left parentless, and the torture of the Earth continues with NO apologies...it is impossible for myself to remain void of reaction. IMO, no reaction would define insanity...don't you think??

Peace,

Bear

One one hand they support homosexuality, and yet they support the Islamists, who would cut their heads off.

The internal contradictions of cognitive dissonance are numberless and without limit.

I recall having read a comment on this site in which someone stated that Irshad Manji was a chronic self-promoter: one can only conclude that self-promotion is fine for some but forbidden for others. Particularly those with whom we happen to disagree.

So long as he continues to garner such emphatic reader responses -- Terry Glavin is definitely doing his job.

Which is precisely the "Goebbelesque Glavin" point I was attempting to make. Now it is Israel and Amerika who seek to normalize and secure acceptance of the Big Lie. Goebbels, the Nazi, being the direct descendant forefather of the Neocons, and Glavin who has more in common with the extreme right in fact, and the current suit and tie Nazis disguised as Neoconservatives. They both come to us, weird as it seems, in all the twisted perversity within which the history of 20th and, to here, 21st Century capitalism manifests itself, in a direct if yet convoluted line of descent.

And in that convoluted line of descent, Gaza is the new Warsaw Ghetto, and Zionist Israel appears to us as the new version manifestation of Nazi Germany.

As living proof that politics does indeed make strange bedfellows, and how the "oppressed" of one time can appear back to back in another as "the oppressor". And it will continue this way until the cycle of class, race, sectarian and national chauvanist oppression and revenge is broken, by sociey finally breaking out of all the forms of class, racial, gender, and national chauvanist divided societies, through the creation of a more all pervasive democracy carried intro all the major spheres of social/gender and economic activity. In a word, real "equality", as apposed to all the bullshite variants which continue to muddy the water, as Glavin and his neocon pals attempt to do here.

"Support" homosexuality?

Another Goebbels proportion lie by the Neocon Wingnuts, of equal proportion to the lie that "the Left" supports any one's "theocracy".

What we merely do, or at least speaking for myself, for left opinion is, in fact, often very varied, is recognize that homosexuality, like the legitimacy of the Palestinian and Arab claims to the Middle East, EXIST. And recognizing that, we concede the right of both to exist unmolested, fairly and humanely treated. (Which I no less accord to persons with Downes Syndrom or Schizophrenics as well.) Which doesn't mean that I or we then follow to agree with all the ways in which they both may manifest themselves, secularly or religiously, or choose to conduct their affairs.

But folks generally, treated fairly and with elementary respect for their legitimate sovereignty, including ourselves, thee and me, generally respond over time in gradually ever more civilized ways. However, I become extremely uncivilized, maybe even failing to evolve or develop in important ways, perhaps even seeking to become an oppressor myself, the more I am wrongfully interfered with, oppressed, and stolen from, or otherwise life threatened. This is the way it worked for European Jewry, and is now in the process of working for the Arabs. The long history of their oppression and foreign invasion experiences, constantly at war with external threats, has entirely likely retarded their social evolution in many regards, as might well be expected out of such a history.

Organize your thinking Neocon dipshits, in place of merely spouting your true believer wingnut cliches and clip and paste views of the world and life.

Glavin is mired in cliched notions of the world equally with the Neocon/quasi-Fascist wolf pack with which he and his Zionist pals have chosen to run.

Bluenose wrote "One one hand they support homosexuality, and yet they support the Islamists, who would cut their heads off."

Obviously you haven't been folowing any of the posts about this. Must I repeat myself?
As I stated, "But the anti-war demos are massive, with the numbers in the tens of thousands. Montreal saw 250,000 come out against the war in Iraq. The IS has, what 15 members in Montreal? You do the math"

GWest, you lost the plot re my last post. The judgment against the Telegraph predated the 2005 general election which Galloway won an east London seat, by 800 votes, amid allegations of mail-in ballot fraud.

Moreover, the Telegraph judgment was not based on whether the documents linking Galloway to large payments from the Oil for Food program courtesy of Saddam, found by a Telegraph reporter in Iraq, were bonafide, but on a legal technicality. The bonafides of these documents were never proven one way or another, although the Socialist Worker (aligned with Galloway's Respect party) did publish a report claiming them to be fraudulent — but consider the source before accepting this as fact. Galloway also successfully sued Christian Science Monitor in 2003-04 (out of court settlement), but declined to sue an Iraq newspaper which published the same allegations.

Incidentally, the BBC (hardly a neocon news organization) also accused Galloway of accepting large payments from Bhutto and Sharif for pro-Pakistani propaganda in Galloway's "East" organ. Galloway didn't sue the Beeb but claimed that it was payment for advertising space and bulk copies of East for distribution. Sadly (for him), Galloway doesn't appear to be on Pakistan's payroll since the military coup.

The fact that neocons et al are just as bad doesn't excuse Galloway.

As for Syria I'm ashamed that the West has anything to do with their government, and deeply ashamed that Canadian and American authorities were complicit in the Maher extradition. The recent news that the Iraqi WMDs were a michievous fiction created by an American-employed paid informant from Syria shouldn't come as a surprise. Which countries have gained the most from the West's invasion of Iraq? Certainly not the US or Britain. Definitely Syria and Iran, both of which despised Saddam and covet Iraqi territory.

kurt
I don't think I lost the plot at all.

How about the fact that the current US administration appears likely to enlist the Syrians' support for reining in Iran?

Sounds pretty pragmatic to me.

Although the recent assassination in Lebanon may put paid to that for a while.

I don't think you've made the case against Galloway any more conclusively than you did this afternoon. Clearly, just as the case against Saddam was sustained on lies, so was the Telegraph's attack on Galloway.

I freely admit he's a publicity hound.
Moreover, he's no hero of mine, but much of what he's said about the neocon project in Iraq does have the ring of truth about it. And as an orator, he’d eat virtually any American politician for breakfast. Reminds me a lot of Churchill’s rhetorical gifts…but he’s probably more spontaneous than Winnie was.

As well as the preponderance of the factual evidence. It's beyond ironic that there is now a serious body of opinion in the US that supports the establishment of a strong man to resurrect the hopes of the 'west' for a new dawn of freedom in Baghdad, don't you think? Perhaps they’re looking at Syria for a model!

Galloway is the very least of it.

Far stranger bedfellows than Galloway and the left, don't you think?

Anarcho wrote:

Yes. You must repeat yourself. Again and again and again. And don't stop repeating yourself until I tell you to.

But seriously: I was responding to a post by IAMC and I ought to have wrapped his quote but forgot to do so. Mea culpa.

By the way -- the IS may be tiny in Canada but it has a large and bombastic presence in the U.K. Which may account for George Galloway.

I agree with you on this:

Exactly.

First sentence of the third to last para is awkward. I should have been more precise.
Along these lines:

'In addition to the preponderance of the factual evidence against the neocon project in the middle east, it's beyond ironic......etc'.

sorry.

Just noticed a further rich irony in tomorrow's New York Times.

IN the twilight of his presidency, Vincente Fox has finally got the wind in his sails and released what the New York times calls: "...a voluminous report that for the first time states unequivocally that past governments carried out a covert campaign of murder and torture against dissidents and guerrillas from the late 1960s through the early 1980s...."

The piece by James McKinley jr ends with these words:
"The authors of the report, which was assembled by 27 researchers, go on to state that “the battle the regime waged against these groups — organized among student movements and popular insurgencies — was outside the law” and employed “massacres, forced disappearances, systematic torture and genocide, in an attempt to destroy the part of society it considered its ideological enemy.”"

How do you think Terry Glavin will manage to spin that against the left?

left right left right left right...

The elite march us down the garden path, indoctrinating us with a horizontal view of the world in order to blind us to the vertical reality. Wittingly or not, Glavin is an elite tool, fomenting hate and warmonger ideology while diverting our attention. Will he ever write about the ultraviolent USA who with its allies has left a legacy of despair and rage across this planet? Of course not. He's an apologist, presenting pseudointellectual rationalisations, left right left right, polluting the mental environment. Thanks, Glavin and Beers. At least it got me tapping the keyboard.

G West Look at
http://www.narconews.com/Issue43/article2364.html

I have a feeling that Fox is trying to get in front of the parade by taking credit for the release of the covert war.

Yeh! Nana, some of us have been trying for the last several weeks to get somebody here in Canada to take a little more notice what's happening to our North American brothers and sisters.

That place, Mexico, has been a reactionary disaster for generations - and we in Canada and the US just wend our way down there for comfortable holidays and pretend nothing's wrong.

Might as well be on the moon as far as the media here are concerned. I can't help but believe some of the reticence is a result of the fact that advertisers airlines and travel agencies don't want anyone thinking. At all.

I agree GW, that advertising might have something to do with it, but also what is happening in Oaxaca is certainly not something our rulers would want us to think about. The new method of struggle developed there - a parallel direct democratic government - is something that could be adopted elsewhere. It is also spreading, scores of Zapotec, and other tribal villages are joining the APPO. Imagine if we started applying this idea to our own corrupt, treasonous and anti-people regime...

Here is a link on the story about the spread of the parallel government
http://www.narconews.com/Issue43/article2375.html

"behind whatever ideological front it manifests itself, secular or religious,"

I believe this is what creeps some of out a bit. Get them whichever way you can? how does that make 'us' better than 'them'?

The one thing I never did understand is: In the original story as I learned it in school, Jewish people honestly bought large tracts of land in Palestine back then. Then, when they thought they were dense enough on the ground, they declared the state of Israel. How did that make all the other Palestinians into 'refugees' overnight? As far as I know, the Jews were not planning any ethnic cleansing, so was that not just a matter of 'when we don't call the shots any more, we won't play'?

Now compare that to the situation of the Quebec people in Canada? They could have run across the border, sought support from others against the 'English imperialists', and launched a war against TROC till this day! Instead, they bided their time, and by hook or crook, they are soon going to call the shots, with a very few token exceptions, on their own turf once again, with just a handful of people down back there, where they fell into the same dumb strategies the Paleostinians swear by. This is not just a matter of 'style', but much deeper.

If the left will lay claim to being a friend to the Palestinians, and other poor sots of their ilk, how much have you done in the way of teaching them strategies that work in this day and age, instead of their boneheaded sticking to 'you obey me now, or I hurt you!'

Sorry for the typo in the previous post:
It should have been:

this is what creeps some of us out a bit.

[OFFENSIVE COMMENT REMOVED.

[OFFENSIVE COMMENT REMOVED. -MODERATOR.]

First, to understand the flight of Palestinian women, children and families from Palestine, the Palestinian diaspora now in Jordan and Lebanon etc., you really need to read up on the period of Jewish Terror, with western arms and finance assistance, reigned down upon the mostly poor Palestinians in the post WW2, already held down by the long history of British Colonial Occupation. (And an "Anglo" reign of terror such like as that of these "Zionists", might well similarly change the behaviour of Quebecers-, in ways which hopefully we will never have to see.)

As the start of your quest, perhaps check out this chronological list of main events to the history of Palestine:

http://www.palestine-net.com/history/bhist.html

And upon cursory examination, for further example of the more recent history, this appears to be a very good resource:

http://www.brianwillson.com/palest_hist.html

There are many such resources on the internet by mere google of key words.

-----------------------------------------

But it is especially this quote from anarcho I wanted to quickly comment on;

Yes. It is studying this particular aspect of the emerging civil war in Mexico, rooted in the struggle currently going on in Oaxaca, that I think holds out an extremely interesting possibility for our own struggle against this current neocon fascist period, for the preservation of the independence of our own nation, to re-secure control over our own lands and resources from US Empire military, political and corporate power, and for the further expansive evolution of a more direct and meaningful popular democracy in Canada. At some future point, perhaps not as distant as we might think, depending upon how national matters evolve here amongst ourselves, and given the emergence of sufficiently powerful popular movements amongst working people, men and women, progressive nationalists, the poor, anti-war and anti-US Imperialism sentiment and, no less Green opinion and concern about the state and security of our land, air, water and resource base health, the idea of evolving a parallel democratic governing power with that of current US Empire-Corporate Capitalism controlled state power needs to be seriously examined and considered.

We are not yet in it, I think, about which there is little point deluding ourselves. But that said, there is in the Mexican civil war scenario, in the final consequences of loss of control over our own nationhood in the ruling class press for a North Amerikan Union, and in the signs of breakdown evolving around all manner of poverty, anti-war, corrupt corporate and state governance and over population pressures in the US homeland itself, indications of an unravelling of this ruling class power, economic and political malaise and breakdown. Which stands, if my/our analysis is essentially correct to change everything here, certainly over the coming few years.

And a defeat for the US Empire in the Middle East, and all the dislocation and loss of global power position that stands to bring down upon them, is of greatest likelihood to hasten this entire process I've described above. And the need for the emergence of a parallel and challenging "popular and democratic power" capable of challenging the status quo, ruling class corporatist power.

We really do all need to pay attention, in my view, to this Oaxaca popular rising in Mexico, for there is much at work within it, that we of the entire continent may yet learn here about our own potential future.

Tyee does continue to decline into a mere People or MacLeans style status quo rag, doesn't it.

There may well be a so-called "Labour" contribution here back of things, and I would not really be surprised at anything "official Labour" might do or say in these times, or with what status quo intellectual and cultural elements it might more see itself allied, more then with the lower strata mileu of the greatest need, as it has itself declined, but it is still hard to believe.

I think these are really more "entertainment industry" serving business folks and Yuppy intelligentsia, in pursuit of a greater share of online advertising revenue, of parallel to that of say the Georgia Straight- an even more largely vacuous throw-away rag.

Eh, somebody has to keep "the left" amused, so that they don't drift off into more potentially socially challenging directions. Here, beat your head against this for awhile, while we go about our "business" interest. The Left do create controversy and attract hits-, which works for great advertising potential stats. :-)

Which is okay, because we can similarly get to use them for our own purposes as well, for the period they are of some modest use to ourselves. We just shouldn't have any illusions about what is really at work here. B-D LOL.

RE: Canadian Ziocon, Terry Glavin, Attacks George Galloway Inbox

GALLOWAY, George
to me
More options 09:54 (10 minutes ago)

Dear Ingmar,

Thank you very much for pointing this out. I’m afraid the degeneration of that part of what once might have been considered left has no limit. They are, however, a tiny minority which is looking more and more incredible with every day that passes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Best,

GG

For a more thorough history of the rise of Jewish Zionism in the prewar, its interactions with Nazism, even while the Holocaust proceeded against the Jews, Communists and others, and it's terrorist actions to forcibly secure the homeland of the Palestinians, and drive them by means of this terror from their lands, perhaps read this link below. It is this early Zionist terrorist movement which provided later Israel with many of its founding leaders, following the exit of British Colonialism from Palestine. It is also the historical record to which its current leadership, in fact, continues to genuflect and secure its state ideological underpinnings, and direct its own Holocaust against the Palestinians.

http://www.codoh.com/zionweb/zizad/zizad.html

More reading for Dorothy
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=LEN20061026&articleId=3604
James Petras' New Book: The Power of Israel in the United States

BTW,Jewish ownership of land in pre Israel Palestine amounted to only 6-8%.

dorothy wrote:

Holy crap! Not planning ethnic cleansing? Your colossal level of ignorance of the history of the region astounds me for someone so ready to trot out pithy global condemnations of islam. But then again you've made your feelings toward cultures who's origin isn't rooted in caucasian genetic ancestry clear in other threads.

Take a look at some jewish authors of the region's history, particularly the ones who are willing to be honest about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein is by far the most honest of the two authors, and as such is a regular target of the Anti-Defamation League, which regularly accuses him of Holocaust denial, something which couldn't be further from the truth.

Benny Morris, on the other hand, is in fact in favor of many of the atrocities committed during the establishment of Israel, and downplays the extent of them, but at least is willing to admit that Israelis have a lot of blood on their hands. Here is an example of a Morris quote from an interview of his with Haaretz:

Here is a link to the full article:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=380986&contrassID=2

What I find so terribly sad in all this is that Israel commits many of the crimes the Nazi's did against jews prior to the industrialized genocide of the Holocaust. It is I suppose a testament to what that kind of vicious murderous trauma can do to people. Many people subjected to that kind of horror become willing to inflict a similar form of horror on others. Along with the moral imperatives, what that horror does to its targets is one of the best arguments against committing the unspeakable acts of mass murder against muslims (like the Iraq war and bombing by Israel in Lebanon), to say nothing of their continued repression and exploitation of Palestinians. Going in that direction simply generates more violence.

What astonishes me is the unwillingness of fools like Glavin to even acknowledge the overwhelming contribution that not just the historical actions, but the current actions of Israel and the US, contribute to mid-east and radical islamic terrorist violence. The only conclusion I can come to is that people of his ilk are fundamentally racist. That the lives of muslims of those regions are in his mind simply of far less value. Otherwise how can you explain the outsized outpouring of sympathy for the victims of 9/11 by just about everyone, next to the virtual silence by right-wing nutbags like Glavin over the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, to say nothing of the murder of Palestinians and Lebanese?

http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=667

Actually, I like having Glavin spue his venom here since it allows for getting the truth out about Israel.

Outstanding piece, James Burns. But then I have long been an admirer of many of your views and writings here.

And Nana no less. :-)

Though there is certainly as much spot on writing and views here, at least, as there is the neocon/zionist apologist drivel.

Well, I certainly didn't want to admit this Nana, but I was thinking it. :-) He and his neocon zionist cause are so wrong as to be such an easy hit, that it actually is, on one level, a great deal of opportunity to make these issues crystal clear. Our own eventual national salvation depends on us having a correct understanding of the forces at work here.

To say nothing of being amusing, again at a certain level. :-)

Nana:

And also re a similar comment by G West:

(Keeping it short, as my bus leaves in 5 minutes):

Fox is doing what all politicians do; trying to make up for mistakes. He's a lameduck right now, not even allowed to make a state visit to China (where his daughter is studying) and has only so much time left in office; he's trying to "make good". Until the release of this report, his main legacy as stated in the Mexican media has been the use of violent force to try to shut down APPO in Oaxaca, and also another round of violence at Lazaro Cardenas in the weeks since the Oaxaca debacle.

He's passing the ball to Calderon, who has to yet deal with resolving the mounting political crisis posed by APPO and the spread of its organization to a Mexico-wide "Popular Assembly of the Towns of Mexico" (Peoples="pueblos", which also translates as peoples; acronym is APPM); Lopez Obrador might be posturing about having a parallel regime or provisional government; APPO and APPM are openly creating them, and APPO is in for the long haul and seems to have more control over Oaxaca than the PRI or PFP (the "federal preventive force" or riot squad).

Anyways, Fox is trying to at least open the can of worms of the history of PRI rule; I'll try and update anyone interested on what the Mexican rags are saying about the report - the UNAM and Tlatelolco massacres are still hot-button topics in Mexico - but I don't have time to do the translations/links right now.

Fox is on the way out the door; I'd say this report is his attempt to atone for using violence in Oaxaca; and to prove that he's not a covert supporter of the PRI (who remain as the local regime in Oaxaca and certain other states).

The only reportage of this in our local papers has been in the business section, by the way, as it's impacted tourism revenues. Harper can posture about human rights all he wants re China; why isn't he saying anything about human rights in Mexico?

Also re the Islamist topic of this thread; the human rights case that has become the focus of Harper's attack on China involves an Islamic fundamentalist/separatist from Eastern Turkestan/Xinjiang, Celil Huseyin. While I support the idea of Eastern Turkestan finding its own way in Central Asia, and not being a colony of China; it's a bit ironic that the political movement the poster-child for Canada's human rights campaign in China is part of a movement that has shown in other countries that human rights are the least of its concerns.

Thanks Skookum1, irony has always been the food of the Gods and politics.

The primary reason for the Iraq war wasn't to secure Israel, but to secure the oil resources of the region for American business and power interests. And to use Iraqi (60 billion dollars of Iraqi money has been eaten up by US corporations) and American taxpayer money to pay back the business interests that helped get Republicans elected.

The former goal has not been realized, the latter most certainly has, as the corruption surrounding contracts to US corporations for the Iraq war have been highly profitable, yet have delivered next to nothing for Iraqis.

While Israel has a huge amount of influence in American politics, I suspect its influence is comparable to that of the Saudis. Both of those states serve American interests far more than the US serves theirs. They have influence, but the US elites always, always look to their own interests first, second and third; well before concerning themselves with the interests of Israel or Saudi Arabia.

People tend to overemphasize Israel's influence on the US. In fact, it is a view that seems subtly encouraged by many of the elites in power in the US precisely I think because it serves a useful distraction from how the US abuses its power. US governments almost always use proxies to commit the worst atrocities while indoctrinating, training, arming and economically supporting them. It gives them an out by claiming their proxies slipped the leash when they commit the worst crimes.

We here in the west are all too ready to identify others as the problem precisely because they are other. At the root of that is a mix of ignorance and denial. But what always blows me away is the knee jerk willingness on the part of so many to dehumanize and demonize entire swaths of the human population because they fit into a semantic category. It lets them then commit and justify outright mass murder against those populations.

I find that kind of behavior disgusting and unacceptable whether it be perpetrated against jews, muslims, christians, homosexuals, or any identifiable sector of the human population. I don't care who the perptrators are. If it's the American or Canadian government I'll be just as willing to call them out on their crimes as the easier "other" targets like radical islamists.

In fact, on that very point I want to emphasize that there are different types of zionism. It is a caraciture to suggest that all zionism is about is the ethnic cleansing of the "holy land" for the safe establishment of a jewish state.

Take a look for example at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Buber

It is terribly unfortunate that zionism today has largely been appropriated by fascists, including many bizarre fundamentalist American christians. That wasn't always the case.

Glavin a neocon?
I can not find time to read all comments and so I read the first and last few. Had to scroll back to top to find my way back from Mexico.

When I read the original article I was interested and impressed - mainly 'cause I had not heard of such a connection (or I had heard but not understood).
The Tyee should have writers like Glavin for readers like me:
Slow, old, uninformed but paying attention.

As far as I know there are few Saudi/American dual citizenship holders in the US government while there are many Israel1/Americans. The Democrats get 60% of their funding from the Israel Lobby
Do read the article I posted above.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=LEN20061026&articleId=3604

Committed support for Israel also comes from the "Jewish Diaspora" that comprises thousands of dedicated activists here - doctors, dentists, philanthropists, key individuals on Wall Street, the major banks and the Federal Reserve and other key segments of business, the major media, the clergy and academics and journalists given special prominence because of their willingness to corrupt their integrity in return for the handsome benefits they get for their unconditional public support and contrived rationalizations for the US -Israeli agenda. This kind of influence and support has made Israel by far the largest recipient in the world of US financial aid that amounts upfront to about $3 billion a year with more forthcoming any time as needed in added funding, weapons transfers and large low or no-interest loans that may never have to be repaid.

The problem isn't about criticizing the anti-war movement. If Glavin had said something like " Isn't it too bad that a tiny group like IS which is soft on Islamic fundies happens to play such an important role in organizing the peace movement?" few of us would have objections. But no, he smears the entire movement, maybe half a million people, with the views of a group that might have a hundred members at best. It is particularily galling for old militants like my self who have spent half a life time in ideological struggle against these sorts of sects. It is particularily galling for younger folks or people new to the movement who come from NDP, Green, PQ, Solidarite Quebec, feminist, libertarian socialist, old-time conservative, Buddhist, Quaker, Mennonite, Catholic Worker or anarchist backgrounds. It is obvious to me that Glavin does not want to help the peace movement but to help destroy it.

Another excellent piece and set of observations, James Burns. With which central observation above, though you make many other equally valid observations, I agree entirely.

I understand the case to the contrary, that Israel, or Amerika's Jewish Lobby more precisely, exercises undue, even controlling interest over US Empire policy. No doubt that influence is there, with many others in the US political system. I just don't buy into the notion that it is a full blown "controlling" interest either.

Indeed, we may soon here, as the US Empire is finally driven out of Iraq and elsewhere through the Middle East, into superpower and world hegemony breaking defeat, of how little real influence either their home grown Jews or Israel actually has over the determination of US ruling class and state policy interests. As Amerika finally and hastily retreats the region in a rooftop replay of the Fall of Saigon, hotly pursued by the regions revenge seeking resistance wolves at its heels, my bet is that the Empire will quickly throw Israel to them, to gnaw upon, forgetting the "old love" interest in the moment of covering their own exiting asses and basic self-preservation instincts upon that day. (Beside, its good old, basic, fundamental capitalist morality-, or an example of what occurs when "the brotherhood of thieves" finally fall out.)

Israel is a tool assigned to a specific Empire building and hegemony task. Of course they listen to them, but they also know who is on top, and who comes primary. When "the tool" no longer serves, in the haste of retreat and the need for a change of political course, it will be cast aside in the desert sand like the useless baggage lying in the blood soaked snow of Napoleons retreat from Russia in 1812.

Unfortunately, the Jews, desparately attempting to obliterate the final Palestians in Gaza right now, in a futile attempt to forestall the fate they can already feel breathing down their necks, are again likely destined to become a diaspora population themselves, as the Arabs fall upon them enforce at the end, to extract their revenge, sans modern day 7th Cavalry Amerika's ability to ride to their rescue.

It's sad, of course. And hopefully I am wrong and the Arabs will find the wherewithal to be merciful upon that day. I wouldn't count on it though, for it is not the way of such things and times in any real sense, anywhere. And Zionist policy from the beginning has brought it down upon themselves.

Then we shall see if Amerika and Europe have themselves the charity to embrace them back upon their shores. Or maybe even "the new" Germany.

Ya think? :-)

I truly do hope so.

On the subject of the 'next' war, SY Hersh has something in the New Yorker this week.

Here: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061127fa_fact

Here's the first 2 parars:

The White House’s concern was not that the Democrats would cut off funds for the war in Iraq but that future legislation would prohibit it from financing operations targeted at overthrowing or destabilizing the Iranian government, to keep it from getting the bomb. “They’re afraid that Congress is going to vote a binding resolution to stop a hit on Iran, Ã* la Nicaragua in the Contra war,” a former senior intelligence official told me.

The influence of the Saudis in the US is based on the wealth of oil they control. When I refer to Saudis it is to that tiny elite that controls the majority of the country's wealth. They spend an enourous amount of money to influence American politicians. They also guarantee a supply of oil that the US needs to remain economically viable. Those things give them considerable power.

Israel has no real resources on that scale. It's influence is partly related to the power of the jewish voting block concentrated in the on the east coast of the US, but this to is overemphasized by almost everyone. By far the vast majority of Israel's influence is based on its function as a proxy for American power in the region. Currently, Israel is useful to the US as a means to keep the corrupt Arab elites the US supports in line, and as a means to avoid getting American hands dirty. Americans have an obsession with pretending to be the good guys, so they outsource a lot of their murder and torture (as Maher Arar will clearly attest to). Of course there are the occasional war crimes like Vietnam and Iraq, where Americans forget the limits of their power.

Americans support their proxies as long as it is in their interests to do so. Saddam Hussein is an excellent example of what can happen to an American proxy who loses favor. Saddam thought the Americans had okayed his invasion of Kuwait. But that invasion made Saddam a threat to American interests in the stability of Saudi Arabia (especially that of the Bush family's Saudi oil interests), and so we got the first Gulf war.

Israelis and jewish American supporters of Israel will be sadly mistaken if they think they will be treated kindly by the US should their interests ever conflict diametrically with American interests.

The problem recently is that the people with the greatest influence politically in the US at the moment are spectacularly incompetent. The American elite's abuse of American power and resources has always been arrogant, exploitative and murderous, I mean after all the country's initial economic foundation was wholly dependent on the slave trade. Preceded of course by the genocide of native populations across North America by European colonists. But the actions of the idiots at the top have led to a colossal erosion of US power and influence around the world. At the same time they are responsible for an enormous amount of murder and misery. By far the greatest enemies of the American people are its current crop of leaders, and especially the Bush Administration.

"Your colossal level of ignorance of the history of the region astounds me"

Well be prepared to become yet more astounded. Like one of my ancestral heroes, I will take abuse in exchange for wisdom gained (he paid with one of his eyes for drinking out of the well of wisdom).

Thak you for the references. I understand they are laced with 'is so! is not!", and so forth, but nevertheless, they paint the scenery. Can anyone then tell me, what is the difference between those people who came out of their corner fighting, and therefore became recipients of the wrath of the Lion of Judah, and those who decided to go along for the ride and simply live, work and play inside the state of Israel as its citizens. As far as I understand, they were and are 'real Arabs'. So what gives? there seems to be more to it than ethnic baggage.

"But then again you've made your feelings toward cultures who's origin isn't rooted in caucasian genetic ancestry clear in other threads."

Now, that's getting personal, and that's not polite in politcal discussions. I don't have feelings towards 'cultures not rooted in Caucasian genetic ancestry', as I don't believe most cultures know their roots - all of them. And cultures are not rooted in genetic ancestry, anyway, but in other older cultures, back to the beginning of time, where nobody knows what the heck genetic ancestry anyone could lay claim to.
I believe what I have said is, that I value my own cultural heritage, such as it was handed down to me, mixed and all, and I do not intend to betray it for trying to please everybody, which you can't anyway. Each to his own, the problem I have is with the suffocating idea of enforced 'brotherhood' between people who are to each other like oil and water.

I am no great fan of Galloway, but he does do a good job of lambasting the neoconazis. Here is the Toronto Star article about his speech. I would like to know what is wrong with it, all you war-lovers.

"If Canada wants to be perceived as a force for peace in the world, it must withdraw troops from Afghanistan, repair ties with the Palestinians and let American war resisters seek refuge here, says British MP George Galloway. "Canada cannot be described as neutral," the maverick politician told the Toronto Star in a preview of the message he'll deliver tonight to a Toronto audience.

"Of course it's not playing as pernicious a role as Britain but neither is it seen in the theatres of conflict as benign as Canadian people like to think it is."You're killing people in Afghanistan, which is a problem in itself, and it's compounded by the fact that by you killing them in Afghanistan, you're releasing the Americans to go and kill people in Iraq," said Galloway, one of the most outspoken critics on the war in Iraq.

Galloway arrived in Toronto on Thursday evening for a whirlwind tour of speaking engagements in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Tonight, he will be the keynote speaker at an event hosted by the Canadian Syrian Cultural Association.

On Monday he will speak at an event put on by The Toronto Coalition to Stop the War.

Canada's Afghan mission, which he calls an "illegitimate military occupation," involves 2,500 troops stationed there and has killed 43 Canadians. It is an "an absolute scandalous disgrace," that Canadians are"fighting for democracy in Afghanistan while starving Palestinians because they democratically elected a government (Canada) does not like."

Galloway's comments stem from Canada's decision earlier this year to cut funding to the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority. That meant a suspension of $7.3 million, nearly one-third of the $25 million a year Canada spends on aid in the West Bank and Gaza.

And Canada's poor record on granting war resisters refugee status dispels the myth that Canada is a haven, critics say. According to the War Resisters Support Campaign in Toronto, 32 Americans have applied for refugee status in Canada. A few have been withdrawn but all that have proceeded to the Immigration and Refugee Board have been denied.

Galloway pulled no punches when discussing Britain and the United States's war on Iraq, which has grown "incomparably worse" and is sending Iraq "down the slope to total disintegration." And if the political climate in Lebanon continues to heat up it could plunge that country into another civil war, he said.

"All these flashpoints, all these powder kegs have all got fuses burning furiously towards new and bigger explosions," said Galloway, adding the war against terror is simply generating more terror. Withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq would "drain the swamp of hatred" that has fuelled terror attacks in the West. But instead, he said, "we're watering it with new blood every day."

Dorothy
Here are some maps which may help explain what has happened since partition.
http://www.krysstal.com/democracy_israel_partition.html
http://www.krysstal.com/democracy_israel_1948to1967.html
http://www.krysstal.com/democracy_israel_wbsettle.html

http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2004/24.html

U.S. aid to Israel over the course of its fifty-four years of nationhood has fueled the illegal occupation of Palestinian land superceding Palestinian rights to self-government.

Jimmy Carter raised the ire of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other Zionist pressure groups when he expressed support for a “Palestinian Homeland” and criticized Israel’s settlement policies. However, he never favored the creation of a Palestinian State and did nothing to slow the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. U.S. support of Israel was greatly increased during the Reagan era, which represented “a quantum leap in efforts to promote Israel and delegitimize the Palestinians in the United States.” Illicit arms technology transfers to Israel resulted in a greatly enhanced Israeli military.

Under the Clinton administration even while the "peace process" and the Final Status Talks were ongoing between the Palestinians and Israel U.S. economic and military aid to Israel continued to accelerate. U.S. aid to Israel (pop. 4.8 million) from 1949 to 1997 totaled over $134 billion. The total US foreign aid to Israel for the same period exceeded the total aid to all of Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean combined (pop. 486 million).

During the last 25 years U.S. aid to Israel has been about 60% military aid and 40% economic aid. There is a new plan to phase out all economic aid by 2008 in order to have all the aid going to military. Israel receives about $3 billion a year in direct aid and $3 billion a year in indirect aid in the form of special loans and grants. Under the Arms Export Control Act the U.S. can only supply weapons that are used "for legitimate self defense". The US Foreign Assistance Act prohibits military assistance to any country "which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights". The Proxmire Amendment bans military assistance to any government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities. All three of these laws are currently being broken with aid to Israel.

Since 1982 the aid to Israel has been transferred in a one lump sum at the beginning of each fiscal year. Aid to other countries is distributed in quarterly installments throughout the year and they must account for specific purchases. Israel is not required to account for the specific purchases that the aid is being used for; it can be spent on anything — including expansion of colonial settlement projects.

It is with this aid that Israel has been able to continue the comprehensive and unrelenting occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Today, Israel is bulldozing Palestinian farmers’ olive trees in order to build an encompassing 30-foot high cement wall with gun towers and electric fencing to imprison Palestinians and the entire West Bank. Israeli forces have commandeered the Western Aquifer (which constitutes 50% of the West Bank water supply) and thousands of acres of Palestinian agricultural land. The wall around Jerusalem will bring the now divided Holy City fully under Israeli control and effectively strangle West Bank economy and agriculture. The wall includes a 15-foot deep, 20-foot wide trench (Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reported it would be filled with raw sewage), a dirt path that will be a “killing zone” for Palestinians who try to access it, an electrified fence, and a two-lane Israeli patrol road.

Since Israel barred most Palestinians from working inside Israel, unemployment in the West Bank has soared to over 50 percent. Agriculture is therefore more important than ever. Square foot by square foot, olive tree by olive tree, village by village, Israel is relentlessly taking over Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza with the full support of the American taxpayer.

re Nana's talking points;

while it is the deeper history first point about the desire of Woodrow Wilson to have a 'nation' allotted to each and every ethnicity in the world.

both Israel (or 'Jewish' homeland) and the Vietminh (sp?) also came forward with homeland nationhood stars in their eyes...

look where the 'League of Nations' idea led towards?

Yeah, like I want to keep back copies of the Peak around in anticipation of citing them in a then-in-the-future Tyee forum; or would want to hunt through their archives to find the crap again.

Yeah, it's volunteer written and has hosted crap from Rachel Marsden as well as from countless Trotskyites and PLO vs Israel and Sandinista vs contra debates over the decades. My point in "remembering" these items was because it was often the self-same columnists who railed in leftie rhetoric about this-or-that policy who were also the ones railing that SFU wasn't doing enough to bend over backwards to restrict other students to help Muslims feel "more at home"; in the most strident rhetoric imaginable. Sure, it's just a bunk student newspaper, but the content in question was a demonstration of the left-meets-Salafi fusion that's definitely out there; I've seen similar in the Sun and Globe and other mainstream rags, and also remember Global BC's forum with the local minority communities where muslim leaders were complaining that the news should have more religious content, and that Canada hadn't done enough to respect Muslim traditions. And there were many responses from non-Moslem students, or from secularized Moslems (e.g. some of the North Shore Farsi) telling these same rhetoricians that if they didn't want to be educated at a western university they should have found a good madrasah where no one would bare their limbs, drink, or have illicit sex. I'm talking a three or four semesters of Peak editions here, not just one or two issues; if you don't believe me search the archives yourself.

And in the wake of Harper's motion yesterday in the Commons recognizing Quebec as a "nation within Canada" (which, as one Quebecker pointed out on the news tonight, First Nations already have, and they're on reserves and living in poverty, so who cares?) the corollary to that that we can all expect were it to be passed is that next it'll be the "nation of Islam" and, doubtless, those Chinese Canadians who want separate schools and official recognition and entrenchement of Mandarin. YES, theydo exist. So we'll become a country of "national ghettos", all too much like the old Ottoman system of milliyet, where each group lived under its own laws. And we all know where that led....

Look in particular for columns by some guy whose first name was Shaddam; a diehard leftie ideologue but also a Muslim conservative; and also on countless "Last Word" articles (the back page) where topics such as the veil, or why Muslims revere Jesus (PBUH) almost as much as Mohammed (PBUH); as if the rest of us cared.

Peace,

Bear

you are without question a fucking retard - The Children, the children, my god the children!" Only the truly bankrupt use children as shields as you have done in not addressing the insane philosophy behind the Islamists and how utterly imcompatible it is with your very existence.

Go ahead, dirge away fool, dirge away as they slit your throat, moron.

Nana:

Thank you for your valiant effort, but none of the stuff you bring up here really answers my question: What about the Israeli Arabs?? Why did they not flee, and how has their choice turned out?? I believe they must stand as a support - or the opposite, for the credibility of the necessity of becoming refugees.

The other problem I have, and which has not been answered is: these poor people, 50% employment and marginal existence, how do they keep affording the explosives and rockets and so on?? These things aren’t exactly dirt-cheap, so where are the taxpayers who support this??

Dorothy. Why, after the Nazi Holocaust, is there still now a fairly vibrant Jewish community in Germany? They did not all flee to Palestine.

The answer simply is that when the killing finally stopped, there were numbers that had yet managed to survive. And in Palestine, the Jews may from time to time wish they had killed all the Arabs, and that policy actually was advocated by the Stern Gang of Jewish terrorists in Palestine-, but state control was enough.

Your thinking is much to straight line and simplistic woman. You lack capacity for the nuance and twists and turns in policy and reality which occur in real life. And that is because you cling at all cost to your anti-Arab racist tendencies.

My God, some Palestinians actually survived their Jewish delivered Holocaust as well! See, the Zionists are reasonable. They let token numbers of them remain and live.

Geez, Coyote. There's a big difference between 0.1% of the German population and the 10 or 20 or 30% or whatever it was before the war....

It's very easy to skew perception of a community by giving a voice to its fringe elements. I wonder why Global BC would be willing to do that though hmmmm?

Religious social conservatives irrespective of their denomination make demands to have more religious content in society. But by far the greatest demands in our society come from social conservative christians.

People also tend to remember the exception to the rule rather than the more common or pedestrian. Just how common are radically left-wing religious social conservatives anyway? I don't recall the name of this psychological principle off the top of my head, but as an illustration: let's say red cars aren't as common a color as silver or blue, but people tend to notice red cars more because they are less common (and possibly because of in-built genetic mechanisms), they then tend to overestimate the percentage of red cars on the road. This certainly holds true for people's perceptions of the percentage of immigrants or visible minorities. It also applies to the demands those groups make. They are uncommon, and therefore provoke more notice, and thus what is a fringe opinion becomes in the mind of the ignorant a common opinion of a particular group.

Wow, gee the imaginary dangers of how society will disintegrate when uppity colored folk start making demands. I bet you can find similar crap brought up when people other than wealthy white men wanted to vote. Hell I recall an argument from I believe it was a Czech member of the communist government back in the '80s who complained that allowing women in government was a foolish idea, because they'd be incapable of making rational decisions one week out of every month. How much do you want to bet good ol' boys in Canada, back when women first wanted to vote, made similar cracks?

Part of being in a plural society is allowing everyone to have a voice. You don't have to agree with them. But bitching that the sky is falling because certain people are making demands you don't agree with or understand is not going to convince them or anyone else to be more reasonable. What it does demonstrate is ignorance.

There is a hell of a lot wrong with a lot of the views of radical islamists. But it is idiotic in the extreme to blame the existence of their terrorism on the fiction that the peace movement and other muslims appease radicals. Giving people a voice isn't appeasement, its the first step in creating a dialog to come to a mutual understanding and perhaps common ground. Those things are necessary to deal with others without resorting to violence, and those means should always be exhausted first.

I am not familiar with the actual stats here, and it sounds like neither are you entirely sure, but of course the Holocaust had a huge impact on the Jewish community, as is the Israeli delivered Holocaust on the Palestinian population, still being fought out. The final numbers there are simply not in yet.

That said, some European Jewry did survive their Holocaust and remain in Europe. Masses of them fled to Palestine, as the Palestinians were in turn forced flee the Jewish Terror at the founding of Israel, to Jordan and elsewhere throughout the Arab world, sowing the seeds of the current conflict. And doubtless some Arabs have and will survive this Jewish delivered Holocaust upon them as well. We just can't yet, because it is still ongoing, due to Palestinian resistance, know what the final numbers will be for Palestinian survival.

That is the point, as valid as the one attempted to be made by Dorothy.

Meanwhile, if one follows the German press and tv, as I do, it is clear that the Jewish community there yet exists and has some significant place in that society. They were not totally obliterated, which is certainly not to advocate for what was done to them or to minimize it. That is not the point here.

Another excellent piece of analysis, James Burns. I know I heard those kind of cracks from the white good ol' boys when I was a lad.

Hell, one still hears it, if more rarely, or notions to that effect.

Canada is too close to the US border [!?!] and some of the toxic seepage coming across into the Detroit area has infected Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, but I digress. Just when I think the spineless whack-jobs to the North are irredeemably twisted like former PM Chretien's mouth [and garbled gargling diction like Vermont Sen. Leahy, our Senator from Canada], a few great polemicists like Mark Steyn and this gentleman linked above give me hope that their brains are not totally Molsonized. This from Terry Glavin writing in thetyee.ca:
"My personal view is that we should crush fascism wherever it comes up," Hashmi told me, "but many people on the left don't even see it when it's there. And one of the most dangerous things that is happening is that the left and the Islamists have found common cause, and it's very frightening."

Islamist doctrine -- as opposed to Islam, the religion-- rejects modernity and the separation of church and state, and counsels theocratic government based on interpretations of Islamic law. Earlier this year, a group of well-known progressive Muslims such as the novelist Salman Rusdhdie, Toronto's Irshad Manji and the Netherlands' Hirsi Ali authored a widely-distributed summation that described Islamism as "a new totalitarian global threat...a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others."

But are Islamists really the same as fascists? Fred Halliday, the Middle East scholar and professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, says he doesn't think so, but writing in the online journal Open Democracy, Halliday argues that it hardly matters, because just like fascism, Islamism is antithetical to everything the left has ever stood for. It is the sworn enemy of the left, "that is, the left that has existed on the principles founded on and descended from classical socialism, the Enlightenment, the values of the revolutions of 1798 and 1848, and generations of experience."

But if you regard the United States as a greater enemy of the left than even Islamism, "what you end up with," says Hashmi, "is 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.'" And that brings us back to the degeneracy of the "anti-war" activism represented by Galloway and his followers in Britain and in Canada, in their alliance with Islamists.

International Socialists

"We can't try to hide this anymore, and people should know what is going on," Raza told me the other day. "All this is making it very, very hard for us to do our work. There are leaders of the Canadian Islamic Congress, too, that are just as bigoted as the rest of them. These people are idiots, and as Muslims, we need to say it. And many of these people are very dangerous."

Fred Halliday and Maxim Rodinson [RIP] are two Marxists who are not buying the Eurotrash/Canuck version of a multiculti Islam as just another patchwork part of the quilt of nationalities and religious cultures on the playing fields of western civ.

But if you read the emphasized text above, you will notice that weirdos like Galloway, who is a corrupt fool unmasked and revealed as a feckless impostor by Christopher Hitchens in NYC last year, hate the US as the repository of Western values that they wish to dissolve and eliminate so an Oprah-fied nanny-state like the passive Finlandized Euroweenie social model will prevail everywhere.

Even some Canadians can understand that consumerized zombies not reproducing themselves---as Mark Steyn points out is happening in Canada, Europe and Japan in his excellent book America Alone---is not the answer to the great questions of the future.

Even smart leftists like Halliday and Rodinson figured that out.

Dorothy The Guardian piece has numerous links which could keep you busy all day.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,616666,00.html

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2000/11/03/israeli_arabs/print.html

From this excellent Wikipedia resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

James Burns re my comment about Ottoman milliyet:

The milliyet system didn't have to do with colour or race; it had to do with religion and the establishment and maintenance of separate cultural communities, with Islam being the dominant one of course. Armenian Christians had a different milliyet than Greek Christians, Jews had another, and so on; Moslems were all the same milliyet, or whatever racial/ethnic stock, and many of those were of "white" origin, particularly Greek or any of the Balkan nationalities (Suleyman's wife Hurrem, aka Roxelana, was either Ukrainian or Polish although, as a slave and later as the Sultan's wife, she had no milliyet).

The point is the establishment of separate cultural, religious and linguistic communities is a recipe for division, NOT unity or nation-building. It is the construction of a house with multiple and asymetrical foundations (look up Kafka's parable on the Tower and the Great Wall, although he's talking about something a bit different it applies here).

Invoking cultural pluralism as if that's the same thing as political pluralism is one of the great deceits of multiculturalism, which when originally pitched to us back in the '70s was presented as meaning that people from all races and backgrounds would be welcome here; it wasn't supposed to mean that they'd establish separate social and economic communities in the country as the Chinese and Moslems and others have done and in fact are seeking to entrench. The idea was that these immigrant groups/dinviduals would become part of the Canadian fabric just as BC's original multicultural milieu had done (see the Tafler thread on Tyee Books); instead we're now being told that "if we're going to have plurality we have to accept these other groups right to be different" - BUT THIS IS RETOOLING OF THE MEANING OF "PLURALITY"; and also we're being told that we SHOULD accept this interpretation of plurality, as if it is the way things are supposed to be. Over on Wikipedia right now I've got a 1993-vintage immigratn lecturing me and other Canadians on what we "should" do, because our government has made multiculturalism a formal policy, nay, a constitutional requirement. But multiculturalism shouldn't mean ghettoization, or the importation of whole bodies of prejudice and tradition intact; it was supposed to be the development of a new, fusion-hybrid culture.

The reality is that multiculturalism is a corollary to the expanded immigration policies which are viewed in money-crunching circles as the only way to keep the economy (and the pension funds) viable; there's no higher principle involved, only the crass importation of capital, with the sop to religious and cultural cliques as a way to open the door yet wider. "Assimilate" is now a bad word; yet it was what built the notion of a new ethnicity called "Canadian", no matter if you were from India, Italy, Norway, the Volga or Ireland or wherever.

The further reality of the way multiculturalism and "plurality" is manifesting (and propagandizing itself) is that it's discriminatory to those of us of multiple stock and the shared CANADIAN ethnicity that was evolving here before Trudeau invoked the "English Canad doesn't have a culture, I'm going to give it one" thing; which is an expression of francophone bigotry towards what they saw as the anglo-Canadian monolith; a false image, and as prejudiced as anything else. Multiculturalism has turned out to be unfair to those of us who may be multiethnic, or even when monoethnic who identified as Canadian rather than British or German or Chinese or whatever; and it's clear that the attitudes of those advancing the new meaning of multiculturalism are derisive and disparaging towards those who were "assimilated" and otherwise integrated.

Multiculturalism is a social and cultural disaster; its only utility is in helping create a divided society, not a unified one.

"Pluralism" is also the term used to justify the FPTP electoral system, whereby a dominant minority can run things as if it were a majority; the same formula applies. The milliyet system entrenched the "rights" of Christians and Jews and others; it did not empower them.

Re the milliyet again: one could change milliyet by converting, although of course you couldn't convert from Islam to anything else (apostasy still being punishable by death in sharia-ruled states). And if desired, Muslims could even seek redress in Christian or Jewish courts, and Christians and Jews could take their cases to Muslim courts if desired; or necessarily had to if one of the plaintiffs in a case was Muslim.

It's also worth pointing out to J. Burns that this isn't just about colour; that Global BC forum I talked about had one woman stand up, not sure where she was from - Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, or somewhere - who pointed out that the "invisible minorities" such as the Eastern Europeans and Latin Americans weren't being represented; only the "brown" and other "coloured folks" as JB puts it, as if only their views mattered. This is the further point about multiculturalism as it's manifested itself; when originally it was about racial blindness but it's come to be about racial distinctions, as well as religious ones. Her query was grimly passed over by the next person to grab the microphone, and Global's moderators didn't bother to answer her. "White people need not apply as they already have special advantages" was the context of someone's vague follow-up. Yeah, well, the Poles, Serbs and Yugoslavs I know have just as much a right to expressing themselves multiculturally as the imams who hogged the microphone for most of that meeting; and much of it had to do with presenting the views of those religions regarding homosexuality, marital law and all the rest of the prejudicial baggage that "multiculturalism" and "pluralism" are shoving down our throats.

According to the census of June 1933, the Jewish population of Germany consisted of about 600,000 people. Jews represented less than one percent of the total German population of about 62 million people. Unlike ordinary census-taking methods, the Nazi racist criteria codified in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and subsequent ordinances identified Jews according to the religion practiced by an individual's grandparents. Consequently, the Nazis classified as Jews thousands of people who had converted from Judaism to another religion, among them even Roman Catholic priests and nuns and Protestant ministers whose grandparents were Jewish.

Eighty percent of the Jews in Germany (about 400,000 people) held German citizenship. The remainder were mostly Jews of Polish citizenship, many of whom were born in Germany and who had permanent resident status in Germany.

In all, about 70 percent of the Jews in Germany lived in urban areas. Fifty percent of all Jews lived in the 10 largest German cities: Berlin (about 160,000), Frankfurt am Main (about 26,000), Breslau (about 20,000), Hamburg (about 17,000), Cologne (about 15,000), Hannover (about 13,000), and Leipzig (about 12,000).

Above piece drawn from this resource" http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/jger33.htm

And from this Wikipedia resource I was able to secure the following post war survival figures for Jews in Germany:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany

And this from the Guardian, concerning Jews in Germany Today, where it is claimed German Jews are the fastest growing Jewish population in Europe: http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1938528,00.html

And just to be clear, I am not saying aye or nay about any aspect of this, which is merely the best information I could access on the internet re pre and post war Jewish population figures, which indicate according to my calculations, that the numbers of Jews who survived the Holocaust in Germany was but about 9.3% of their prewar numbers, or 15000 persons; Though that is some better than the 0.1% given us by Skookum 1.

My percentage figure for German Jewish, Holocaust survival, given above is wrong. Skookum 1 is more correct, given the actual 2% more accurate figure.

Ooops, that should have been "Serbs and other Yugoslavs" of course; could have mentioned Romanians, Russians and others as well, too, but you get the idea. Why Latin Americans weren't represented in the group is another question; apparently they, too, are considered white (unless they're from Costa Rica and working on RAV for "non-white wages"; or from Mexico and working in the orchards and berry farms...). Point again is that certain groups have hijacked multiculturalism to entrench their own cultural and religious ghettos. This isn't what even Trudeau's "new Canada" was supposed to be; but it definitely has undermined the idea of there being an "English nation" on the model of the "Quebecois nation" that the BQ/PQ and now the Tories are pitching.

I'm wondering. Do I get to be part of the Norwegian "nation" within Canada, the Irish "nation" within Canada, the English "nation" within Canada, and the French-from-France "nation" within Canada? Is there a "mongrel nation" I can belong to? Or am I, as someone from an assimilated/integrated background, going to be without the special rights that someone from a ghettoized nation is going to have in the new "multinational" Canada? Can't I just be Canadian? And do I have to let someone who's a "hyphenated Canadian" ("and proud of it", as my correspondent in Wikipedia just bragged about his monoethnicity) define what Canadian is, and my views on the matter don't count because I've been "assimilated"?

Bullsh*t. It is warmongers like you that are best of friends with the radical islamists. Both of your groups advocate violence. Both employ it, thus ever escalating the violence and destruction and thus ever providing yourselves with the excuse for ever more violence, which is your justification for taking power and for removing the freedoms of movement and association we used to enjoy. Habeas corpus no longer exists in the US. That was a move by the warmongers you support. They are the ones dismantling the achievements who's seeds may MAY be traced back to the Enlightenment, but whose actual achievement were bought with the blood and striving of common people, laborers, women and racial minorities advocating for their rights.

You bathe in murder and the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and you have the gall to claim some kind of moral or ethical superiority. What you are is a vile joke of bottled delusions.

Come to think of it, I don't think there were any (or many) people of African descent in that forum either. It seemed to be a very selective list of invitees....

Thoughy it does have to be remembered that yet these figures accuracy is questionable because of the numbers (not given) of Jews who fled Germany in advance of the Holocaust and during it, and thus managed to survive elsewhere in Europe and abroad.

Every once in a while there's an account about the preservation or restoration of a synagogue here and there in Germany and figures are mentioned as to the sparse and elderly nature of the congregation; I remember in Berlin's case it was something like 150 only, or less; out of a former population that would have been in the six-figure range. Likewise for other major cities, as also in Poland and places like Vienna and Prague and Budapest....yeah, there are still Jews. But only so many. And very, very few.

I have been into it before here, on a number of occassions, but for the record again, I accept that the concept of Canada as being a country of three (3) main founding nations, is an accurate one, and which survives with us over a complex history yet today; one Native, of course, another francophone dominant language, culture and territory that has evolved to be called Quebec today, though they were themselves first called les Canadiennes, and the certainly largest land mass one, with a still dominant anglophone culture which I describe as distinctly Anglo-Canada.

Which does not mean that all three nations that make up the country have not within each accepted immigrants from many parts of the world, but which to here have at least evolved and been absorbed into one or the other of the three main stream nations and cultures. Even much of Canada's current Native Nation, if you will, is not the same Native blood stream of early contact history, but is much blood mixed in fact. Yet it is still distinctly overall a Native descended, cultured, shared landscape and interest "national population". And the attempt as Skookum 1 does to muddy this essential water with the various waves of immigration that have also blended into one or the other of these, is I think, a dishonesty, in addition to being inaccurate of our country's actual history consequence. And it is this tri-national history and reality which yet complicates and creates friction within the larger country of Canada, because of our failure, largely, to recognize it and its consequences for what needs to be our overall "greater-national" political structure etc. And it carries within it, for so long as we surrender to our separate national chauvanisms, an opportunity to exploit our divisions for those foreign and quisling interests set to exploit, break up, and see the overall country absorbed by the particularly covetous US Empire ambition.

We need, for all our national immigration and other complexities to grasp this central defining reality of our three nations within one country character and history, or it will lead, is leading to friction that has the potential to destroy us, as yet for all that, a single country.

And if you want to see how that tri-national reality has the potential to work in fact, check out and make a study modern Great Britain, made up of independent "national parliaments" in England, Scotland and Wales, yet one overarching parliament for the conduct of foreign, military and other mutually agreed to affairs. And yet all three as well are home to many different immigrant populations as well. It is really not such a strange phenomena as we might imagine within our own national chauvanism.

All that said above about the tri-nation character of Canada, which I share with many other folks, I do not buy into the prevailing vague notion of "multi-culturalism"-, as it is practised in this country. I think the immigration object in all "three nations" needs to be, though I can only speak myself for Anglo-Canada, their eventual complete integration into one or the other nations which make up a united country of Canada.

If I go to Iraq, or Scotland or Greece, I expect within at least one or two generations, that my line will be completely integrated into my new homeland choice. The first "landed generatio", it should be expected, will and does have the greatest difficulty. Canada and its nations should expect no less. Otherwise it invites other "cultural and sectaria divides" into our midst-, in my view.

That said, tolerance, patience, and persuasion of all immigrant ethnicities, with their different religious and secular ways of looking at the world need to be tolerated as the integration process proceeds. That said, the one over arching "Law of the Land" which rules in the final analysis, needs to be that which has evolved here; separation of church and state, equality of the sexes etc..

On the other hand, I don't care really, who wears what over their face or to cover their ass and crotch.

This current "multi-culturalism" model is an invitation to future sectarianism.

I failed to run spell check above. My apology.

We are about to see a larger version of tri-nationalism put in place...
the North American Union with its single currency and right on track. I can't believe you guys really allowed yourselves to be ushered off into the labrinthine cul de sac
of Quebec nationalism/multiculturalism?

How convenient for all of the Liberal candidates that Ignatieff brought it up....now none of them have to discuss anything real, like our real role in Iraq .

I haven't encountered Dorothy before, but was it really neccessary to be so rude to her? Given the flimsy and slanted coverage ME problems are given in the controlled media, how would she know anything?

James Burns, with all due respect, you are terminally naive if you think the Saudi influence is equal to the Israeli in Washington. Besides the money flowing into Political Action Committees from Israeli sources, there is the organized pressure from their own constituencies in favour of policies beneficial to Israel that cannot be matched by any other group. There is also the weird and disturbing fact that unlike other foreign
lobbyists, those for Israel do not have to register as being such.

I'm listening to an interview with James Petras in which he says that The Lobby is really only supported by 10% of American Jews, but because of its organization and tactics, most American Jews are reluctant to say anything critical of either Israel
or The Lobby.
http://www.radio4all.net/pub/files/jblankfort@earthlink.net/1752-1-20061104-110106totwpetras.mp3

Coyote:

Thought you might get a kick out of this:

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7973

Maybe the UK itself isn't going to be around that much longer - as a united state.

I like Galloway...I like his bombast and his honest bluster and his outrage...he ain't purrrfect but then neither is Mr. Glavin. And I don't care if Galloway has a penchant for tights or for pink ballet tutus for that matter. When there was a duct-taped hush all over the western world as Amerika ran roughshod over Iraq, creating a killing field of what is now over 655,000 Iraqis, his single voice hit back at the right wing in the US Senate in a gutsy blow by blow that served to embarass not only Bush Amerika but the wimpy left as well. Ironically, it was what his outrage revealed about the pathetic state of the democratic opposition in the US that was the real significance and consequence of his speech.

And he has consistently over the last twenty years seen the struggle in terms of the failure of the capitalist system itself,( much like Coyote often diligently notes here) and he clearly sees the Defender of that greedy Faith and thus the real threat to the peace of this world as the US itself...as in the US oppression of the world... facilitated through a relentless, bloody, war- mongering US crusade for global economic domination.

What Glavin fails to perceive in his vacuuam sealed room are the interconnections...(eg. as between the growing consolidation between Shias and Sunnis in the mid-east...helping to facilitate a liaison between the mullahs and the Taliban in Afghanistan)... that the do-good ("meddling/tampering") persona/guise that US imperialism often dons has only served to make the state of the world much worse... creating strange and dangerous bedfellows that only serve to deepen the bonds of extremism all the more.

....Ancient freedoms, which we had for hundreds of years, are being taken away from us under the name of the war on terror, when the real big terrorists are the governments of Britain and the United States. They are the real rogue states breaking international law, invading other people's countries, killing their children in the name of anti-terrorism, when in fact, all they're achieving is to make more terrorists in the world, not less, to make the world more dangerous, rather than less. GG"

and

Which ethnic groups that have immigrated to Canada have not integrated within one or two generations? Is the concern over multiculturalism born of irrational fear over sectarianism, or are there specific examples of cultural ghettos created by multiculturalism (and not economic hardship) people can please point me to.

All I see of multiculturalism is that it has made integration for diverse communities easier because it has demanded a respect for other cultures that was not present prior to the introduction of multiculturalism. Prior we had a Brit crown and country centric notion of Canadian identity. That started to change with the Quiet Revolution, which in turn led to the development of the notion of multiculturalism. It used to be acceptable to discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, skin color, denomination, gender and sexual orientation. Creating a ground for a more pluralistic society that gives others the opportunity to have a voice, doesn't mean you have to sacrifice your values. It does mean that you have to give others a platform where you may find your values being challenged. The goal then is to articulate and defend your values so that people have the opportunity to choose.

Of all the developments that have a very Canadian aspect to them multiculturalism is one of the things I respect most, because it is a far more accurate reflection of our society, not to mention the world. Far from separating us because of our differences it has brought us together to celebrate those differences. We are always engaged in a constant dialog of evolving values.

Multiculturalism doesn't scare me in the slightest. What does scare me are those who advocate for some mythical ideal value set and then set about using violence to make damn sure everyone conforms to those values. Radical islamists are one such group of people. But by far the worst current offender is the Bush Administration.

Well the Saudi influence certainly bought them a free pass from any repercussions in the aftermath of 9/11. Most of the those involved were Saudis, but the US invaded Iraq.

The only person who appears to be naive is you if you continue to harp on the Israeli and jewish lobby without recognizing that it is primarily American elite interests, particularly energy and military sector corporations, that are being served by the actions of the state of Israel particularly on the military side, and not the other way around. Yes Israel influences a lot of US policy. There isn't just one person who makes all the decisions in the US, it is largely a agglomeration of elite interests with slightly shifting alliances. And that makes the whole process messy. But you're overemphasizing the power of the "Lobby". There is currently a very simple alignment of common interest. Should that change the "Lobby" will lose what influence it does have, in the same way the Saudis would lose what influence they have were the oil to disappear.

Great thread, y'all. I'm not sure anyone has yet addressed what I thought was Glavin's most serious allegation - that the peace movement was alienating itself from moderate Muslims.

The involvement of the IS in so many peace groups may be quite insignificant, and anyway, peace co-alitions tend to be inclusive. That's the point, isn't it? But given that the solution to avoiding a "clash of civilizations" lies with strengthening real, moderate Islam, the peace movement would seem to making a very big mistake if Glavin is correct.

It does seem passing strange that a large number of people on the left are so muted in their condemnation of Salafism. A knowledgable poster on Babble suggested Salafism as the best term to describe that brand of Islamic extremism which is inspired by al Qaeda and aimed not at any legitimate nationalist libertion cause, but rather at establishing a medieval totalitarian Caliphate around the world.

Terminology is critical here because I completely agree with and salute Coyote's defence of the Palestinian cause, and I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not including Hezbollah and other legitimate Islamic resistance organizations under the Salafist umbrella.

The Salafists have declared war on modernity and made themselves the enemy of all civilized people everywhere. They have already killed Canadians, and not just in Afghanistan. The left must not be tainted with the slightest whiff of support for Salafism. It is repugnant, morally wrong and politically disastrous. And more importantly for anyone working for the cause of a Palestinian homeland, it seems to me that association with Salafism - al Qaeda, Jamaat-e-Islami or any other group that has declared global terrorist Jihad - is the kiss of death with the Canadian public. Making this distinction is absolutely critical.

Moderate Muslims, for whatever reason, seem to be silent a lot of the time.

All the more reason why the radicals seem to be far more numerous than they actually are.

If any of the so-called Muslim terrorists arrested a few months ago in Toronto are actually convicted of indulging in anything besides a lot of talk I'll think about joining Glavin's crusade.

The fact that less patient Islamic groups happen to be the ones who are also protesting - with parts of the left - against Western hegemony in the middle east is hardly a surprise.

I do think there are problems, Shari’a law and plural marriage among them, in some of the things certain Islamic groups support and would bring to Canada. Moreover, I'm much more sympathetic with Skookum1's version of pluralism than I am with a rampant multiculturalism that seems, from time to time, to be creating pockets of culture that are decidedly NOT Canadian, as I understand it.

I don't think it's wrong to point out such things. Any more than I'll suggest that it won't be long now, in my opinion, before we have a Quebec team entered in the Olympics - just as there is a Scottish and a Welsh and a Northern Ireland team in the World Cup. An unintended consequence of our Prime Minister’s oh so clever move yesterday.

That said, I can't see why much of what Galloway says and writes - but which Glavin tends to lump together with his criticism of radical Islam and therefore dismiss out of hand - isn't valuable and, as Lynn points out, very much needed. I don’t see Terry Glavin mounting the barricades over the 3,700-odd ‘mostly – Islamic’ Iraqis who died in Iraq last month. How many more of them were blown up today?

Would that be a fair point?

Occasionally the Stephen Harper government will do something good too. When it does, I'd like to think the left would be adult enough to admit it.

That kind of complexity, in my opinion, is the kind of thing Mr. Glavin seems duty bound to ignore as he tries to re-fashion the lefthe (apparently) wants to support.

The amount of evidence that Al Qaeda is a concoction of the CIA run by the ISI is overwhelming. As to drawing in my skirts lest I or anyone trying to wake people up to the massive fraud perpetrated on 9/11 or trying to blow up the neocon construct of The Clash of Civilizations be tainted by supporting Salafism when all we want is the bombing to stop, I say fiddle faddle! Islamic fundamentalism has little or no impact on our lives except as a diversion and a blinder.

Lynn Thanks for your support for Galloway. His biggest problem is he is articulate and effective! You might enjoy hearing(in 3 short parts,not a video) his interview of Israeli Jewish historian Ilan Pappe, author of "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine."
Dorothy, this would be enlightening for you too
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhfEWqBvav0&mode=related&search=

Another interview of Pappe worth a read.
http://www.labournet.net/world/0209/pappe1.html

Good show Lynn! While I have issues with Galloway (NOT about war, capitalism or imperialism, by the way) I can certainly sympathize with your views.

"I like Galloway...I like his bombast and his honest bluster and his outrage...he ain't purrrfect but then neither is Mr. Glavin. And I don't care if Galloway has a penchant for tights or for pink ballet tutus for that matter. When there was a duct-taped hush all over the western world as Amerika ran roughshod over Iraq, creating a killing field of what is now over 655,000 Iraqis, his single voice hit back at the right wing in the US Senate in a gutsy blow by blow that served to embarass not only Bush Amerika but the wimpy left as well."

I have here an article from a group for which I have a lot of admiration, the Worker-Communist Party of Iran. They condemn both imperialism and the fundies, but they DON'T smear the peace movement. Now if Glavin was on to something like what the WCPI is stating I would be all for it.
See: http://www.wpiran.org/English/WPI%20Briefing/198wpibriefing.pdf

I just cracked up when I read this.

Here's our version of The Lobby getting sued. The hate law backfires!

Jewish Prof Sues Organized Jewry

http://www.rense.com/general74/sues.htm

Has anyone watched the Omni TV interview with Allan Bennett - the Israeli Ambassador to Canada?

“..in Palestine, the Jews may from time to time wish they had killed all the Arabs, and that policy actually was advocated by the Stern Gang of Jewish terrorists in Palestine-, but state control was enough.”

So, you are observing here, that Jews can actually keep law and order in their own state. Maybe they have a thing or two to teach others, who appear to have difficulties.

“Your thinking is much to straight line and simplistic woman. You lack capacity for the nuance and twists and turns in policy and reality which occur in real life. And that is because you cling at all cost to your anti-Arab racist tendencies.”

Straight line I can accept, as it goes with my genetics, but ‘woman’?? My own significant other would break into ear-splitting guffaws at the idea, that women think in straight lines, or ‘simplistically’, but each to his own, I guess.

My so-called ‘anti-arab’ thoughts have not cost me anything yet, other than a bit of wear on my keyboard, and I certainly hope it stays that way, because it is a gross misnomer. Why does appreciation for Jewish accomplishment translate into ‘anti-arab’ sentiment. Some of my best friends are Arabs, but they don’t try to sell me their religion, as most of them are decent enough to be severely troubled by what ‘the religious authorities’ appear to espouse from time to time.

As far as the nuance and twist and turns go, you are right; they make me think that someone is trying to pull something fishy. Most things in ‘real life’ are pretty straight, and if they are made to appear otherwise, it is, how do you say, worthy of further inspection. Once doesn’t count; twice is coincidence, but third time, you know it’s enemy action. Some people bank on most people forgetting the first two times, and most of the time, they do, ‘course they have their lives to live. It is my curse, I suppose, that I do not forget easily, and so I am a suspicious soul. Has stood me in good stead many times. I do not lack the capacity for the nuances and twists and turns, I just consider them someone else’s soiled diapers. Hope that is womanly enough.

"Some of my best friends are Arabs,"

Not a good line to use Dorothy. I don't know how old you are, but a favorite line of 1960's Southern Segregationists was "Wha' soma mah bes' frens is nigras!", so when people use that one it tends to detract from the rest of your argument.

Dorothy If you're talking about "Jewish accomplishment" in the world at large, no problem, but if you are talking about what has been done in Israel, remember that it has been accomplished with heavy subsidy from both German and US taxpayers.....like over $100 billion over the years.

http://www.wrmea.com/html/us_aid_to_israel.htm

Here are some "Did you know?"s you should check out.
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m28523&hd=&size=1&l=e

As you said, three times is no longer coincidental.

Good piece of writing above here by Bullgoose. Which is all I really need say.

And another point to James Burns, in my view of this argument. (He has a temper, as have I :-), but he does advance many valid and thought provoking positions and possibilities.) Few things are seldom as absolutely certain as even many on the Left sometimes are wont to portray it.

What I really like about James though, is that he insists on his own analyses, and is consistently what I call' "progressive". He never falls into the "reactionary/racist Neocon traps-, at least to my knowledge of him, and James is one of those I always read.

That said, Nana is none the less. :-)

There is room in our wee community even, for divisions and disagreements amongst ourselves. There has to be.

Anarcho observed:

Not a good line to use Dorothy.

Her wingnut slip showing? :-)

Oooo, now my head is swelling out of all proportion to my body. 8-D lol. What esteemed company my friend Lynn puts me in-, with George Galloway yet!!

I suspect though, only because I am about equally flawed. :-)

It's very interesting... that Saudi connection to 9/11. How many, was it five or seven, hijackers turned out to be alive?

While there seems to be little doubt that Saudi money played a big role in 9/11, there is also the interesting tidbit of info that Prince Turqi, former head of Saudi Intel was made Ambassador to Britain and then had to get out of the country when this became news.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,905698,00.html

So now he's Ambassador to the US, which is more than passing strange, since that is where the law suits against the Saudis are filed.

Prince Turqi's daughter was married off to the son of Meyer Lansky's lawyer who is the supposed heir to the Lansky crime syndicate. Lawyer Malnik converted to Islam and so did his son. (See Alvin of Arabia's connections to Barry Seal, who had connections to Mena(the airport town for Little Rock at the time of Gov. Clinton...but that's another story.)
http://ftrsummary.blogspot.com/2005/06/ftr-512-alvin-of-arabia.html
Royal families intermarrying.

Then we have the odd coincidence of Michael Moore's literary agent being cousin to Rahm Emanuel, the Ilinois Congressman who was/is in charge of the DNC's funding of Democatic candidates in the last election and who just couldn't find any money for anti-War candidates. Another interesting thing about our idol MM, who remember pointed the first finger at the Saudi's, is that he owns his rise to infotainment prominence to a Bush cousin.

http://www.rense.com/general67/michaelmooreowes.htm

We are dealing with an international crime syndicate. US intel has been running drugs since at least the late '40s. Mob connections to the CIA andthe FBI have been known of for a very long time. NOBODY in power is clean and anybody clean doesn't get to be in power.

To get back to the while the Saudis are involved, they are by no means all
of the forces behind 9/11. They have allowed themselves to be used as a layer of cover with very little possible repercusion. The Royal family tends to spend their time abroad anyway. Remember, Paraguay is open to all.

Sorry, there are at least 2 Turqi or Turkis in the Saudi Royal Family and the one who isn't Ambassador is the father in law of Alvin's son. Mea culpa.

' "Some of my best friends are Arabs,"

Not a good line to use Dorothy. I don't know how old you are, but a favorite line of 1960's Southern Segregationists was "Wha' soma mah bes' frens is nigras!", so when people use that one it tends to detract from the rest of your argument.'

Some people actually have the ability to send me into a depression! If you don't know how old I am, why don't you just assume I'm old enough, and take it from there? It's called irony, and I get depressed that some people in this column are so wrapped into the ex-cathedra mode, that they automatically assume others are to dumb to know what they're saying. Is is a sad day when that is the default value.

I don't 'use lines', and I am not trying to convince anyone to 'come over to my side', only to bring up points that I don't see covered by others, and which I believe may have a bearing on the issue. So, this detraction from the credibility of my argument - well, it would be of concern for someone in the propaganda business; but for me, I prefer to trust in people's native ability to sort the wheat from the chaff and investigate for themselves, and if they can't, too bad. You can only drag the nag to the water, and so on, you know the rest...

And - some of my best friends ARE arabs!

"If you're talking about "Jewish accomplishment" in the world at large, no problem, but if you are talking about what has been done in Israel, remember that it has been accomplished with heavy subsidy from both German and US taxpayers.....like over $100 billion over the years."

That really has no bearing. Where do you get the idea, that money can do things for you? It is only the raw material, which requires intelligent and judicious application in order to back up any accomplishment. Likewise, many great things have been done with practically no 'budget'. The Jews as a people have been careful with their resources and have accomplished something with them, which is one of the reasons they become a target for hatred. Many people have been just as lavishly subsidized and have made a hash of their situation nevertheless.
When the UN decided to subsidize Palestinian refugees, there were a lot of warning cries about what a bad idea it was to make people live on handouts with no work delivered in return, something we don't have trouble seeing as detrimental in the case of Canada's first nations. And it was equally detrimental to the Palestinians, who became a pawn in the struggle for power and turf for both Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Meanwhile, all they were left to do was multiply, which they certainly did, I understand they have shown a growth rate of 5% per year, something we Canadans might envy. They certainly have reason to be angry, but not with the Jews, who as it happens were the only ones who offered them a straight deal, at least back then, and I have time after time related to those Arab people who took that deal and who still are citizens of the State of Israel, but no one wants to talk about them; instead, people go to town over my supposed idiomatic falterings, I wonder why?? Would it interfere with some dearly held political paradigms?

Dorothy You are a lafe riot.
It is hard to accomplish anything when there is a separate and very unequal school system.
It is hard to accomplish anything when your house and land are confiscated and your olive and citrus trees destroyed as murderous, fundamentalist "settlers", whose scriptures tell them that the rest of us are cattle, move in and start terrorizing and killing you and your neighbors.

Which UN "subsidies" are you refering to...the relief given to the refugee camps?

Obviously, you didn't bother to do more than glance at the links I provided...if that, or you would know that the apartheit in Israel is worse than what was practiced in South Africa....as South Africans have attested to.

The benevolent Israeli policy was was best articulated by Moshe Dayan who told the Israeli Palestinians that the government was going to continue to make life difficult for them until they left.

And life is always better when there is a rich uncle in the background, especially if his name is Sam.

"Obviously, you didn't bother to do more than glance at the links I provided...if that, or you would know that the apartheit in Israel is worse than what was practiced in South Africa....as South Africans have attested to."

No, I certainly read them thoroughly. You assume that had I done so, I would have agreed with you. I thank you for sending me the links. But I cannot make much heads or tails of this collection of factoids, which seem to add up to a somewhat frantic dirt-digging effort just meant to support the already previously formed view, that Jews are bastards, particularly those that you could call Zionists.
I am really confused about who the people are, "whose scriptures tell them that the rest of us are cattle". Wouldn't that be the Qu'ran you are talking about here?? But I thought these were your friends??

Yes, I am referring to the relief given to the refugee camps. It has always been a bad idea to store and feed people as a long-term measure, you cannot find a more morale-destroying thing to do to them. It is vital to get them out of that situation as fast as possible. The reason it didn't happen was, as I said, that all of three powers in the area thought to make use of them for their own political ends.

As I said, we will not agree, for we are not the same kind of political animal. I can see you are very loyal to a set of political dogma, while I am not running any such program, but trying to cast light into dark corners, and this you take as hostile questioning and start calling me names. Let us at least stay civil, and call it a stalemate, which just acknowledges that we are both human and have our limitations.

You, not I said "Jews are bastards".
I don't know any Moslems, but I do know Jews...and they are bright and fun and as honest as most of us. Some have a blind spot.

There is plenty of criticism of the course taken by sucessive Israeli governments over the years by Jews .... both inside and out of Israel.

The late Israel Shahak pointed out passages from the Talmud which declared gentiles to be no more than cattle. The sects that place the commentaries on the Torah above the Torah itself are to whom I refer.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/october01/0110071.html

Coyote: see the Tafler thread in Tyee books for more on the multiculturalism issue; I'd meant to reply some here but have to go to bed and much of my reply to Dorothy was with your comments in mind; I won't have time to address anything else here until tomorrow night or more likely even Tuesday due to various commitments (gasp! - I almost have a life!).

Unsurprisingly, as is almost always the case, the question of PEACE in the Middle East boils down to a question of the relationship between Israel and Palestine.

The only thing that's surprising is how little time it took for the discussion to segue from Terry Glavin's ancilliary project of George Galloway and the Syrians - which is, in both the short and the long run, irrelevant - to the main question.

As a resource, shall we say, and a focus for further discussion, I'd like to provide some statistics - most of them current to November 9, 2006, of the relative situation on the ground vis a vis Israel and Palestine.

1. Israeli and Palestinian children killed since Sept. 29 2000:
Israeli - 122;
Palestinian - 836.
(source: http://rememberthesechildren.org/about.html

2. Israelis and Palestinians killed since Sept. 29, 2000:
Israeli - 1,084
Palestinian - 4,286
(source: Palestinian Red Crescent society - http://www.palestinercs.org/
Israeli Defence Forces - http://www1.idf.il/DOVER/site/ go to English site and find 'statistics' page.)

3. Israeli and Palestinian injured since Sept. 29 2006:
Israeli - 7,633
Palestinian - 30, 804
(source: same as above)

4. US contributions to each party:

US to Israel - $15,139,178 per day to the Israel Govt and military;
US to Palestinian NGOs - $232,290. per day.
(source: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs - http://www.wrmea.com/html/us_aid_to_israel.htm#lies
Palestine - USAID - http://www.usaid.gov/wbg/budget.htm)

5. UN resolutions targeting Israel and Palestine
Israel 65; Palestine - 0.
(source: Deliberate Deceptions: Facing the Facts about the U.S.-Israeli Relationship by Paul Findley American Educational Trust, Paperback, 1995)

6. Political Prisoners and detainees:
1 Israeli is being held by the Palestinians and 9,599 Palestinians are being held by the Israelis.

(source: The Mandela Institute for Human Rights - http://www.mandela-palestine.org/

Reuters http://www.alertnet.org/)

There is more available if anyone's interested. Data for relative unemployment rates, homes destroyed and new settlements started are also very much one-sided.

I don't think this stuff can, or should, be ignored. Anyone, Terry Glavin notwithstanding who pretends it can be - or that it doesn't play a significant role in the creation of all of this violence and terrorism is naive.

In my view.

# 35 nations meet on denying Iran technical help for building plutonium-producing reactor

According to the report, written by Seymour M. Hersh, the White House received the information but did not pass it on to the CIA.

http://tinyurl.com/ya8bwa

Yep those Iranians are just innocent victims of imperialist, Zionist (and all other "ist") aggression.

Thank you Terry. If not for you all these PC "leftists" heads would remain firmly planted in the ground (or other places.)

Excellent comment above, Alcibiades..and very revealing statistics - both as to to the actual reality of the situation... and the "one-sidedness" ingrained in the Western media's reporting of that reality as well.

It's not all useless: Terry gives an richness of meaning to the tattered term, "knee jerk". You see, if you focus your latent anger upon the alleged vandalism of a Canadian woman's home that is supposed to be in retribution of an alleged criticism of the veil as not serving the interests of Muslim women, you will momentarily forget that Terry's friend George caused the unending slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. And Terry's feeding frenzy like that of any bird brain, pecking at insignificant crumbs of left/right brain excrement, will momentarily distract you from the terrible decades of torture of palestinians by Terry's theological buddies, the other monotheists, the eretz israelites. There. I've done it. I feel better now.

Perhaps one might not be too far out of line to post this little gem from Terry Glavin; which makes just the right subtle and deeply ironic starting point for a meaningful dialogue:

Up against another sort of 'this is what it's come to' narrative - this one from General Janet Karpinski:

MADRID (Reuters) - Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison's former U.S. commander said in an interview on Saturday.

Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told Spain's El Pais newspaper she had seen a letter apparently signed by Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation.

Karpinski, who ran the prison until early 2004, said she saw a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods.

"The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: "Make sure this is accomplished"," she told Saturday's El Pais.

"The methods consisted of making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation ... playing music at full volume, having to sit in uncomfortably ... Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques."

The Geneva Convention says prisoners of war should suffer "no physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion" to secure information.

"Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind," the document states.

A spokesman for the Pentagon declined to comment on Karpinski's accusations, while U.S. army in Iraq could not immediately be reached for comment.

Karpinski was withdrawn from Iraq in early 2004, shortly after photographs showing American troops abusing detainees at the prison were flashed around the world. She was subsequently removed from active duty and then demoted to the rank of colonel on unrelated charges.

Karpinski insists she knew nothing about the abuse of prisoners until she saw the photos, as interrogation was carried out in a prison wing run by U.S. military intelligence.

Rumsfeld also authorized the army to break the Geneva Conventions by not registering all prisoners, Karpinski said, explaining how she raised the case of one unregistered inmate with an aide to former U.S. commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

"We received a message from the Pentagon, from the Defense Secretary, ordering us to hold the prisoner without registering him. I now know this happened on various occasions."

Karpinski said last week she was ready to testify against Rumsfeld, if a suit filed by civil rights groups in Germany over Abu Ghraib led to a full investigation.

President Bush announced Rumsfeld's resignation after Democrats wrested power from the Republicans in midterm elections earlier this month, partly due to public criticism over the Iraq war.

(Additional reporting by Diane Bartz in Washington)

WOULD THAT BE UNFAIR?

Of course, the Canadian anti-war left, whatever that might be in Terry Glavin's mind, is so much more satisfying as a target.

Oh, naddude, you should really read the whole article be fore posting. You missed this:

And yet, the official said, the report was being used by White House hawks within the administration to "prove the White House's theory that the Iranians are on track. And tests leave no radioactive track, which is why we can't find it." Still, he said, "The agency is standing its ground."

Sounds kind of yellow cakeish to me.

Also, nobody has ever offered a decent answer to the question of why Israel,which never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty should be treated differently than Iran...which did...and which allows inspection.

Please tell me naddude, why should we be more upset about a possibility than a reality.
http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/nuke.html

Nana:
Having read your previous posting that you believe it's just fine and dandy to question the Holocaust....why prey tell should anyone listen to anything you might have to say??? (it's a rhetorical question as I have no inclination to "dialogue" with you.)

In defence of Nana, why not question the Holocaust? Oh ya... that cardinal rule about digging in the ground for earthly treasures suggests that such an undertaking is unholy. And the preist don't like digging because digging often unearths the truth. Just have faith because history really unfolded just the way it was written and because there is not one metaphor in the bible except that of being the apple of one's eye.

Naddude:
Them's fightin words
I had to read Nana's comments since you claimed there was some problem there. then I went back to check your previous comments.

What are you trying to say?
It's ok for Isreal to nuke people but not ok for Iran to build weapons?
Hold on there

It is NOT ok for anyone to build or use nuclear weapons.
Not Me not you not Isreal not the monster
Certainly not Iran nor N Korea
None of us (you included) have any idea what a single nuclear weapon would do, let alone any exchange of such weapons. In fact the Russians posted notices regarding "EMP" (electromagntic pulse) which creates immense induced voltage on, get this: "any conductor"
50kv/m
Don't go to the tap just after a blast near you.
The "Allies" knew about it but neglected to inform us.
Could this explain why even the craziest gung hoe General has yet to push the button?

naddude How very clever of you to work the Holocost into the discussion... pointing up the the fact that the Holocotees have become the Holocosters. Unfortunately whatever my attitude is about anything matters not a whit to the question I asked and is a ridiculously transparent attempt to dodge a legitimate question.

Also,when one is not allowed to discuss or question the facts of history without risking a fine or imprisonment, there is something very odd going on.

"when one is not allowed to discuss or question the facts of history without risking a fine or imprisonment, there is something very odd going on."

Yes, there is! If you know the degree of obsession Germans in general, and certainly the Nazis, have and had, respectively, with meticulously recording every single 'item' they 'processed'., you will know that questioning the numbers is insanity, BUT I will defend people's right to be insane, as most of them can't help it. I hope we can all learn to discount these preposterous assertions; it comes back to what I said before about people's ability to sort dirt from cinnamon on their own, given the educational resources needed.
I believe guardians of the truth should become less trigger-happy and more bent on education, and it looks as if things at least in Canada are moving in that direction.

You know I feel about Holocaust celebration the way lots of people feel about Christmas..just wish it would go away because the emphasis is wrong. I could get behind the education bit ...if it were broadened to include all the holocausts of the 20th Century. Our First Nations experienced one over many centuries, so I think I'll put that aside for now.

The Communists killed all together over 108 milin Russia, China and I think that includes Cambodia. Then there's Bangladesh and Ruanda. Oh, I almost forgot the Armenian genocide. But then, the Turks say it never happened and what do you know....Israel supports Turkey's position. Isn't that something? Who could have imagined there could be such a thing as genocide one-up-manship.

To that end: I would draw people's attention to an excellent series of videos (yes, video tapes, not DVD's), which can be borrowed from the library, titled 'Russia's War'. It is about how the Russian people were fighting two wars: one against the outer enemy, the Nazis, and one against their own leadership, which seemed bent on destroying large parts of their own nation(s). There is miles of orignal footage and interviews with Russian citizens from both just after the war and later. I believe the person who pulls this huge work together is Joe Schlesinger, but you could rightfully say the artists are 'ordinary' Russians. Absolutely worth seeing. Believe there are eight or nine tapes. We borrowed them one at a time, when our kids were teenagers and spent family Sundays watching them. The kids were riveted; this was certainly not stuff they ever heard a hint of in school!

And, you're right about the holocaust being multi-faceted. Reading Rudolph Hoess's memoirs 'Kommandant in Auschwitz', he clearly points out that Russian prisoners get a treatment every bit as heinous as the Jewish people in his camp; he outlines observations of groups living with starvation, and how their interactions under these conditions are being studied, noting that those few who ultimately survive must be the meanest bastards, who know how to steal food from the others. Very instructive!

The anti-war movement, needs no better spokesman than Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a potential presidential contender in 2008:

Instead of stumbling around like a duck hit on the head, the Republican 'back bench' is starting to flex its muscles:

The dogs of war are tired, time to round them up and get them back on the leash...

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,119518,00.html?ESRC=eb.nl

I consider myself somewhat left-wing, and I agree here...the left should NOT align itself with the hard-line islamic fundamentalists that seek to impose a Religious dictatorship akin to what Afghanistan's Taliban had.
I mean, how hypocritical can we get? Here, we demand more rights for the oppressed and marginalized, but 'support' those who would oppress others in other nations? Damn...the far-left's support of the islamic far-right is downright surreal.

Could somebody point me to anything that shows "the far-left(who is that?) support for the Islamic far-right?" Who and what are we dealing with here? Otherwise there is danger of choking on Glavin's red herring.

Dorothy Did you know that the Hoess book didn't show up until he'd been dead 11 years.

"Hoess's famous "autobiography" Kommandant in Auschwitz, probably prepared in question and answer from through interrogation like a gigantic "affidavit", then written up to be copied in his handwriting, is not much better."

He was tortured you know.

http://www.cwporter.com/hoess.htm

Like the Globe's Marcus Gee, Terry Glavin long ago because a predictable shill for the Israel lobby. Marcus seems to have disappeared from the Globe, and hopefully Terry will soon follow in his footsteps, take up a sinecure at some neocon or zionist thinktank and we won't have to suffer through his propaganda any more.

A few points, Terry ...

Trotskyists - the International Socialists - have always loaded the committees of the formal anti-war movement, always passed resolutions that the great mass of anti-war militants ignored if they were aware of them at all. So what? They make great fodder for your column, and that's about it.

I enjoy bashing Trots myself, so you are welcome to it. But take them seriously as representing the Canadian anti-war movement? Come on.

Your main point is to condemn the left for adopting the attitude that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." A worthy point (although democratic politics is always about finding common ground, issue by issue). So why is it then OK for Sohail Raza of the Muslim Canadian Congress to support yet another western invasion of Afghanistan? Surely Raza too is saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Too bad the U.S. - the enemy of his enemy - used to finance the Taliban when that suited its Reaganite fundamentalist geopolitics - and will again if it needs to.

Terry, allow the anti-war movement to be what it is: "anti" "war." You, and ex-Trot Christopher Hitchens way before you, have opted to be anti-fascist, pro-war. You are criticising the anti-war movement from the other side, which is your right, but you continue to use the language of the aggrieved insider, the rejected comrade-in-arms. Why not admit that the marriage has failed and now you can just be friends.

If it is the position of the Muslim Canadian Congress that the Taliban is bad for Afghanistan, and for the rest of the world, I happen to agree. If it is their position that Afghanis ever will embrace a solution imposed militarily by the same outside imperialist powers that always have tried to colonize Afganistan then we disagree.

It is always up to all citizens of any country to agitate to end war. In Canada that means we speak from the presumption that we are implicated by the actions of a government that rules by our consent. The Canadian anti-war movement takes on its own government and that of the U.S. because that is the political sphere we live in - not necessarily because "our side" is the greater evil in this war, but because our side is a co-equal perpetuator of this war and that is what we must stop.

Very nicely put, just me. One thing you can be reasonably certain of, is that Terry will not acknowledge or engage.

After his first column here at Tyee I posted a comment - critical but not rude - on his blog and he promptly removed it. His conception of dissent and discourse are a trifle one-sided, another similarity to Hitchens and the Trots.

Thank goodness most of our Tyee bloggers saw this article for what it is.... and I don't have to say what it is.

What I find delicious is that the Supreme
Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei,who the average person would think is one of those Islamo-Fascists, supports stem cell research and therapeutic cloning and has declared a fatwa forbidding the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. The fatwa was cited in an official statement by the Iranian government at an August 2005 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.(wiki)
That would seem pretty enlightened to me.

Unfortunately he also issued a fatwah calling for the death of Gerry Falwell.
I don't remember if that was before or after Falwell called for the assasination of Chavez, but that wouldn't let the Ayatollah off the hook for insensitivity to judicial procedure.

Here is the link to the tapes I mentioned in my earlier post, about Russia’s war. Absolutely worth seeing!

http://ipac2.vpl.ca/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=116T68F163K66.206&menu=search&aspect=subtab13&npp=10&ipp=20&spp=20&profile=pac&ri=&index=ALLTITL&term=russia%27s+war&aspect=subtab13#focus

Regarding Rudolf Hoess, I can accept that the book is a highly composite work and not necessarily written by him. I read it in order to try to understand, what makes a person like him tick. In that regard, the book makes sense. You can almost get taken in by his petty bureaucratic woes about supplies and red tape he is struggling with, how you just can’t get good help any more, until you take a step back and realize what business he is actually in. The web-link you sent me is not to the point. It leads to an incredibly messy grab bag of ‘discounting’, where you can almost get the feeling that the Nazi Germans were bent on nothing more sinister than sending everybody on a nice little adventure holiday to save them from themselves. Except that is not what happened. It is immaterial how the people died in Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen or Ravensbruck, the deal is and was, that they had been unlawfully and unjustly robbed of the most fundamental property of a human being, their freedom, and this led to their death. Those who lent themselves to the scheme were guilty of crimes against humanity, at least the version of humanity I can recognize as the one I belong to, or care to belong to. Why do I not believe that it is all a fabrication? Because a number of my parents’ friends and acquaintances were members of the resistance in my old country, which was occupied by the Nazis, and they were intimately familiar with the Modus Operandi of the agents of Hitler’s regime. There is nothing off-scale, relative to their accounts, in what has been claimed about the concentration camps. Therefore, I am ready to credit the claims. Also, The Germans had some degree of grudging respect for members of the resistance, and yet they treated them atrociously. We know how they viewed the German Jewish population, by their own more than abundant statements to that effect. It is not difficult to extrapolate how they would have treated them. I am certain the claim about transgressions being punished describes the letter and spirit of the SS code of conduct. I just don’t believe it was adhered to, based on the reasons outlined above.

Rudolf Hoess comes across as a quite coherent, consistent persona. On the face of it, a dry-boned, long-suffering bureaucrat, in reality one of the individuals so masterfully described by our own Robert Hare in ‘without conscience’. The really frightening thing about Hoess is his apparent ordinariness, until he suddenly enumerates his human trophies by the million. I do not count him being ‘tortured’ as significant. A computer engineer like Maher Arar justifiably lays claim to being so unprepared for something like that hitting him, that he would ‘confess to anything to make it stop’. Not Rudolf Hoess, who had been through the drill and was a hardened and arrogant warrior. Ironic that people who would defend him would count him in this aspect as less than many of the resistance people, who were his adversaries and therefore should be the ‘lesser people’, but we all know that countless numbers of them, men as well as women, stood up to torture and never gave anything away!

The banality of evil pretty much covers it, don't you think, Dorothy?

There can be no excuses made for the Nazis nor for the way many, if not most, ordinary Germans either pretended not to know or affected to look the other way. They were mostly either anti-Semitic or indifferent to anti-Semitism.

I've never understood any of the efforts to diminish the crimes against humanity committed during and prior to the last war; especially given the fact that most Germans born since the war have found a way to comprehend 'how' their parents and grandparents did it and have, by their behavior since, seemingly learned something from it.

The Pope, unfortunately, and a lot of people living outside Germany today, seem confused and morally conflicted by the whole thing.

Almost as confused as the members of the current American administration who seem to feel they were justified to look the other way while soldiers from the west engage in activities (at their direction) as horrendous, in their own way, as anything the Nazis did. We have learned so little.

And that does not, for a single moment, mean that I excuse the way that Israel has behaved towards Palestinians. Or vice versa. It’s time for adults everywhere to stop behaving like children.

I agree with you Dorothy that depriving people of their freedom,land and worldly goods on the grounds of religion or ethnicity is a crime agaist humanity. How many people are victimized is important when reparations are being distributed. An inflated figure penalizes the innocent generations who must pay when reparations are continued over 60 years.

As Norman Finkelsteins mother put it,
"If there are so many Holcaust survivers....who died?"

May I remind you that the number of people who died in Aushwitz has been constantly revised downward from 4 mil to 1.2 mil.

Germar Rudolph (http://germarrudolf.com/)
is currently on trial in Germany.

Germar Rudolf (pictured) was asked by various defense teams to testify as an expert in chemistry at trials in Germany. Yet the judges refused to hear his testimony in open violation of German law, which does not allow the rejection of expert witnesses already present in the court room.

Rudolf’s rejected expert report was then published by a defendant who had requested it for his defense. This defendant considered it vital to draw attention to this illegal suppression of evidence, which he sought to do by adding a perfectly legitimate, though polemical, introduction and appendix to Rudolf’s report. Thanks to this publication, Rudolf was sentenced to 14 months in prison. The court argued that Rudolf's findings in combination with the defendant’s comments could arouse hostile emotions against witnesses, whose testimonies conflicted with Rudolf’s findings.

A year later, Rudolf published a large scientific book about similar issues, for which he was also indicted. Although historians testified during this trial that Rudolf's work is scientific and thus protected by Germany’s constitution, the book was nevertheless confiscated and burned by order of the court. Rudolf subsequently fled to England, where he established a small publishing firm for similar scholarly material like that he was prosecuted for in Germany. As a result, Germany requested his extradition. Therefore, Rudolf fled to America and applied for political asylum.

Rudolf continued his scholarly publishing activities in the "Land of the Free," lauded by scholars from around the world, but hated by German authorities. Rudolf defies and undermines German censorship, considered among the harshest worldwide. Hence, more than 30 criminal investigations are pending against him in Germany for his peaceful "thought crimes," each of them perfectly legal in the U.S., but punishable with up to five years in jail in Germany. German authorities have also ordered the confiscation of his property, because they claim it was all acquired with money gained from "illegal" activities.

Nana. That estimate of 4 million killed at Auschwitz was never seriously considered part of the total. More like 1.2 - 1.4 million.

For the whole Holocaust the generally accepted figures, by academics and not revisionists, are: 4.8 - 7.5 million Jews and another 5 - 6 million non-Jews during the period in question with the vast majority of the second figure being Russians.

I'm not quite sure why you're so fascinated with the revisionists’ efforts btw. What could it possibly prove?

My own personal feeling, accept the bad news and move on. David Irving lost his case in Britain and the evidence led at that trial should have put paid to this nonsense once and for all. Trying to diminish the horror of the Nazis is a mug's game, a game the Germans themselves, for the most part, stopped playing a generation and a half ago.

I'm fascinated because it is not allowed to be a topic of discussion or research...so it smells. I only discovered most of this stuff in the last few years, and when one gets over one's squeemishness and examines the revisionist case, it is obvious that there is a concerted effort to try to keep the lid on on something.

Cui bono?

Directly it's Israel, so the money the Germans, through reparations and the Americans, through subsidy and forgivable loans are paying for the victimization of the Palestinians.

And then:

http://germarrudolf.com/work/index.html#5

In all fairness to Glavin, he is not a "neo-conservative." Rather, he is one of a small number of centre-left liberals and right-wing social democrats who, like their hero Tony Blair, have fully embraced the "war on terror" (sic) against "Islamism" (or "Islamo-Fascism").

In previous eras, such people (though not Glavin) were busy purging "communists" from the trade union movement and collaborating with all manner of reactionaries in defence of the "free world" against "International Communism." During this time, as documented by William Blum in his seminal work "Killing Hope," the CIA was covertly funding and supporting a number of "progressive" publications, as well as organizations of students, women and workers, throughout the world.

Fast forward to the early 1980's when a mass movement of trade unionists, social democrats, church groups, women's organizations, students, socialists and yes, communists (representing various "tendencies") arose to challenge the war-mongering and dangerous sabre-rattling of the U.S. under Ronald Reagan. Though far fewer in number, there were still unrepentant cold warriors in the social democratic movement and trade unions for whom the Soviet Union and "Stalinism" remained the greatest threat to "democracy" and "freedom."

Then as now, the anti-war movement included a diversity of opinion on a variety of issues, such as Soviet involvement in, and responsibility for, the Cold War: everything from "A pox on both their houses" to "The Soviet Union is the true friend of peace-loving and oppressed people everywhere." Unlike IS involvement in the movement today, however, the pro-Soviet camp was actually a major force in the anti-war movement (and within a few of the unions which had somehow managed to survive the Cold War purges of the 1950's). This, however, did not prevent those of us not holding such views from participating in the movement. Furthermore, we were entirely aware of the positions of some of our "allies," which did not dissuade us from articulating different positions on everything from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the worker uprisings in Poland against that country's pro-Soviet dictatorship.

The people with whom I work today, opposing the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq and anywhere else that U.S. imperialism rears its ugly head, are likewise perfectly aware of the issues which Glavin raises in his rather pathetic attempt to smear and discredit the entire anti-war movement. What's more, and contrary to what Glavin may think, we do have discussions on issues such as the oppression of women and Queers in places like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Even a cursory review of the non-sectarian left-wing press, such as Znet and Left-Turn magazine, relects this. However, for Glavin, it's much easier to cherry-pick statements from selected Muslims which appear to butress his main argument that there is some kind of tacit alliance between "the psuedo-left" and "Islamo-fascism" based solely on hatred of the United States and all things Western.

Sorry, Terry, but the folk with whom I work care deeply about issues such as the oppression of women, homophobia and ALL forms of religious extremism, at least as much as you do. What's more, and unlike you, we do not use the existence of oppression in the Muslim world (as your Cold War ideological predecesors did with the Soviet Union and "communism") to gloss over, obscure and support injustice for which we bear primary responsibility, whether we're speaking of the continuing oppression of women in Afghanistan, U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Canadian involvement in the overthrow of a democratically-elected government in Haiti, or Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

“What would we think of an official who demanded that a physicist not be allowed to determine the exact value of his stress experiment, because even a small value would be bad enough?”

There is a logical problem contained in this: If we know that ‘even a small value would be bad enough’, this must be based on previous research and so, going forward and finding out ‘the exact value’ might be more than we can afford, if it actually does not add any information we need in order to address the issue in a pragmatic manner. Of course nobody can forbid anyone to research anything, which does not require participation of others, to which they may withhold consent, and which likewise does not commandeer public resources. But I am not sure that ‘pure science’ has unlimited rights to make use of society’s resources to investigate ‘whatever’.

Consequently, I might think of such an official, that he was protecting resources needed elsewhere. I believe this is in essence what we pay officials to do.

“…speaking of the continuing oppression of women in Afghanistan, U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Canadian involvement in the overthrow of a democratically-elected government in Haiti, or Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.”

This is the same old tired wallowing in the gross stuff on other people’s rap sheet, and then…nothing, that the ‘peace movement’ is so eminently capable of.

How do you propose to preserve peace better than what we’re doing now? The dream of just having a whole bunch of people worldwide shut up/drop dead/
drastically reform themselves, etc., remains as juvenile as it always was. So I’m hoping for ideas expressed in proactive terms that will contribute to making things work out better. You must be in possession of such ideas, or else what you say is just another rant – and the fact that things aren’t what they ought to be is getting irksome to have reiterated over and over, unaccompanied by any constructive proposals.

Well dorothy, first of all we have to get the Americans to keep their promises. If they're going to lead a guns and butter revolution across the world to bring democracy, human rights, jobs, trade and education they can't just remember to bring the guns and always forget the butter.

Let's not even get into Iraq. Just look at Afghanistan. It could have been saved but a factor of 40x was put into guns compared to butter and so, going into the fifth year since the overthrow of the Taliban, the guns are still getting all the attention and the butter, what little of it we provided is rancid.

Where's the mystery? Mao had a saying when asked about important principles, remember? Full stomachs, give them full stomachs and their hearts will follow.

Nana, I think the pseudo-science/history lesson is absurd and inappropriate in the extreme. Most of these characters are neither scientists nor historians.

I further doubt that many of the folks in the revisionism business don't have an agenda that's every bit as conflicted as what you constantly dump on Israel's door.

We've been through this before and I've never been convinced why you start this stuff in the first place and I'm even less sanguine about why you always come back to it.

As Truman would say, it's weird! Surely I don’t have to post the comparative Jewish census figures, do I?

Get the Americans to keep their promises?

- This one fits under the 'drastically reforming themselves' category. In order to be constructive, I am looking for how-to's. Something people can DO. The full stomachs sound good on the face of it, but isn't that what we tried with the Palestinian refugees, who then grew from 35,000 to 4.8 million?
A reverse holocaust so to speak...

Maybe even buying the guns and butter ideology is too much of a concession. That still means we are accepting their supposedly faulty premises and terms. Maybe what people need more is trust in the future, and the understanding that family planning pays off.

dorothy
I'm never quite sure where you get this family planning meme from – that you more or less consistently come back to in your posts.

All the data I've seen indicates that family size is virtually not a problem in bourgeois or petit bourgeois culture. Raise the standard of living past a certain point and folks don't have more than 2 kids any more on average probably fewer. It is a damn good thing too because those 2 kids probably use the equivalent resources and food of a couple dozen children in the third world.

There are a few fundamentalist exceptions to the rule of course.

Alcibiades:

So, do I take it that the people in China engineering the one-child-only legislation are rooted in the bourgeoisie?

The problem is, how do you get there? Are you proposing that we should raise their standard of living for them, and then they will shrink their family size? Why should they? The people in Western Europe who did so did not do it in response to handouts from anyone. It is still competition for the position of the children in society, which motivates.

China could not wait for that to work. Therefore they made their legislation.
Why can we not ask the rest of the World to do likewise?

dorothy
I'd feel a lot less disinclined to support China's one-child policy if I felt the effects of the cultural revolution and the great leap forward had actually been about promoting the interests of the whole population and not just an urban elite (and not necessarily a well-educated one).

The rural/urban, entrepreneur/capitalist clique in China is now as big a divide between its citizens as ever existed in the old bad capitalist days.

I think you'll find India is a better example of an educated and growing middle class that has chosen to limit family size as a conscious choice.

I find your philosophy - while I don't necessarily disagree with the ends you're trying to attain - seems to rest on certain amount of force and maybe a tiny bit of intollerance. I'd say that, post WWII, America did do a hell of a lot to help Europe (and Japan for that matter) regain their feet - handouts if you prefer.

Britain without lend-lease, Europe without Marshall and Japan without Macarthur would have been a very different story.

The West needs to take exactly the same kind of approach (butter and not guns) toward the developing world's 'real' problems. I don't think we have the right to ask starving people anything and of the 6 billion people in the world today, the 1 billion with all the gold shouldn't have to scratch their heads too long to figure out what the real problem is.

What gives us the right to tell people anywhere how many children they’re ‘allowed’ to have?

"I don't think we have the right to ask starving people anything.."

- Why Not? Merely being starving does not give one superior rights. They want something from us, we can ask something in return. Other than them being starving, we are all people and of equal value.

We do agree that 'the real problem' isn't hard to figure out; we just don't agree on what it is.

There is not room for an unlimited number of people on Earth, and claiming there should be is irresponsible. it may leave you feeling that you are among the righteous, but you're really just leaving a mess for the next generation to deal with. And of that I am intolerant, but I don't see where the force should be necessary, if we can agree on what kind of case we need to nake with those, who constantly run into disaster and cannot feed their population, because there are simply too many people on the land, given the way it is being utilized. My philosophy is, that one faces reality and acts in accord with it, and that it is a long and painful death to be trampled by geese.

dorothy
Sorry, as long as we in the west are setting the rules - trade, aid and finance - I can't see how we have any moral authority to tell people whose outcomes are, more than anything, a result of our colonial mentality and our selfishness and greed, that they have to behave the way WE tell them to.

In fact, the folks blowing things up and preaching terrorism are, in the final analysis, closer to following our western example than anything else. In my opinion.

Look at USAID for example and you'll find that it does virtually nothing but respond to emergencies...and does it in a way that the ultimate benefits often inure to US corporations and agriculture - while conditions on the ground often do not improve at all and, in a relative sense (especially as regards agriculture) probably get worse.

If you start out believing your fellow human beings are geese I guess it's not surprising one might feel that way.

My view.

“ Moral authority”, is it? Well, our antecedents as well as ancestors have put us in the position of having some kind of authority. The label is immaterial.

There have not been worse messes left, all the way down through history, than by heirs who did not live up to the power they had been left holding. You can be certain that if we remain paralyzed by this false modesty and endless waffling between people who none of them want to be in charge and take the flak, somebody, or somebodies, with less acumen and/or mercy and more brawn will happily step in. Nobody will thank us for getting cold feet and disappear into the mists, searching for the Garden of eternal Serenity.

Of course I do not ‘believe my fellow human beings are geese’! I used a metaphor to describe a modus operandi, which I deplore.

Well, I guess we view the same world and see a different reality. I've just been reading Drescher and Engerman's A Historical Guide to World Slavery and King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild. It tends to make me question our authority to dictate to anyone, moral or otherwise.

I also think the metaphors we use tend to say a good deal about how we feel, don't you? And, after all, you used it - I just questioned its aptness. What exactly do you deplore?

You got these thoughts from books, and here I thought they were your own ideas!

Beware of picking up stuff that other people put in books. Some of these people have big trouble rationalizing that their own nation is not one of the top guns, and so they make it a crime (or ‘sin’) to be achieving.

No, I don’t think the metaphors we use say anything about how we feel. You try to get the best pattern similarity to what you are trying to describe, but you are mistaking either parallelism or comparison for metaphor. I am not saying people behave like geese, or that I believe they are such creatures, but that geese are not effective in trampling someone to death due to their modest mass, e.g. compared to an elephant or a rhino, and therefore it makes for a slow death. Likewise, I am despairing of seeing the population situation improve, as long as we beat around the bush in advising people on the effective patterns of improvement.

Obviously, I deplore the MO I had just described in the preceding paragraph. Oh, I see where your difficulty lies in understanding! It is really not an MO, but just the opposite, my mistake!

Dorothy

I don't pick up my ideas or my thoughts from books. I use the information I garner from books to help form what I hope is a coherent and humane worldview. I have no illusions whatever that the society we've created here in the West is, or is ever likely to be, the kind of exemplar I'd like it to be. There is a tendency, inherent in all distinct societies, to see one as somehow morally, ethically and practically superior to other societies and cultures.

By the way, where do you get your ideas? I don’t find mine exclusively from books by the way; many of them come from my work and the kind of experience one gets while travelling.

I'm convinced that the societies we see as 'inferior' may well (in fact often do) hold a similar opinion of themselves relative to us. Therefore, and since the books I cited are both histories (the one more popular, the other more academic) I'd suggest my opinion about the relative culpability of the west (as a society built on a foundation of cultural imperialism, slavery and colonialism) is founded as much on historical fact as anything else.

In any case, I’m convinced that efforts on our behalf to 'force' certain kinds of behavior on the self-same cultures we have already victimized is simply more of the same bad behavior and will, as it has already done numberless times, come to a bad end.

Something I'll criticize every chance I can. In the most friendly way possible, as a rule.

As for metaphoric language, I tend to agree that it frequently gets in the way of meaning and is better left to poets and novelists.

OK, so you want to go into morality. In my opinion, it goes like this: Each people can slug out with the power-grabbers inside their own society, whether they fail to guard their turf, whether they abuse their power, whether they sell them short or down the river or whatever. What they cannot do is cast blame on the other partners in the deals their own leaders are cutting. This is what I believe your concept of ‘culpability’ would entail.

No, I don’t compare this society and its realtive value to those of others. I stick with this society and put my effort into it and defend its actions and rip up at its politicans when they overstep, because this society is mine, the one I chose to be a part of, and therefore it is, of course, more valuable to me than any other society. Whether it is ‘better’ relative to some absolute gold standard I do not care.

What I never do get an answer to from you is what, in simple practical terms, you would do in consequence of the perceived culpability. Do you think we should pay ‘these people’ in the wider sense some kind of compensation? Where would you draw the line? Is it your perception, that one is owed an existence by the World in general? By what moral code? Not the one I was brought up by, that’s for sure.

Where do I get my ideas? Gee, they just kind of crystallize out of my working with problems and learning by doing and checking out the results against my visions (Plan-do-check-act). I am not much for looking back, because I believe, that in order to understand the past, one must look to the future, and since the future is the main purpose in what we do to begin with, I tend to concentrate on the present and the future. Factual knowledge of past events can be useful, but one can get lost in academic detail, and I cannot see such knowledge as an end in itself.

I believe most of the troubles both we and others are experiencing in coming to terms with life is due to most of us never accepting that our existence is characterized by constant change. Contrary to this practical reality, most of our efforts are invested in creating some sort of sheltered position for ourselves, where we are safe from imposed change. This is why so many of us are susceptible to the evangeliums of fundamentalists.

http://www.sixsigmaspc.com/dictionary/PDCA-plan-do-check-act.html

Nothing evangelical about my approach Dorothy. We've been so focused on ourselves since the 18th century that we have no concept of how limiting that's been for the rest of the world - and in the end, how deadly for the future of the whole bloody place as the environment in which we all have to live.

All I'm saying is that it's time we look to the future, just like you say you do, but with a mind to the idea of being world citizens and not patriotic residents of individual city states. We in the west are the ones with our feet up on the table gorging ourselves at the mercy of the 4.5 billion folks who mill around on the filthy floor below scrabbling for our scraps.

It just can't continue and the idea that we can impose our values - about family size (which is where we started)- on those folks is as repellant to me as the real certainty that a good portion of the mercantile success of the US economy is built upon a past and a growth performance that wouldn't have been possible without slavery.

Any more than that its present inflated consumer and war making economy could survive without the connivance of the Chinese and a chain of East Asian sweat shops.

It's long past time for a change. I just hope we'll start before it's too late - both for ourselves - and for our victims.

I think you're trying to change the subject by looking at fundamentalist pathologies. No need to go there, in my view.

And the link - ISO-9000 and sigma 6 standards...why? Are you doing promotions for this elitist corporate garbage? Surely not?

Or are you saying it's just another fundamentalist orthodoxy - which would pretty much jive with what I believe.

I can pull a business text off my shelves here that was being taught in commerce faculties all over North America 15 years ago which is full of case studies about cutting edge corporate entities many of whose Ceos and others are now in jail.

“Nothing evangelical about my approach”.. You’re not the one to decide that, it would be the people on the receiving end of the sermonizing.

It looks a heck of a lot to me like fundamentalism and obsessive guilt-tripping, which you insist the whole of society must share, complete with doomsday threats and all. Next, you’ll be saying I should worry about my immortal soul. I don’t think I was changing the subject.

No, I am not promoting any ‘corporate garbage’, but I am illustrating the actual process of how I arrive at my perceptions, following the Deming cycle in a proactive and progressive manner. I was taught by my mother to do so, long before I knew there was a Deming cycle.

It is sad that you don’t know that in corporate circles, there are good guys and bad guys, and it’s important to know the difference. Poor excuse for clinging to outmoded paradigms. Your ideological bone sticks out a mile.

Yes, we have to manage our turf better, and one of the ways is to manage the numbers, but we won’t get it done by mixing feelings into the planning process, and we wont get it done if we fail to scrap the ideological elitist garbage.

What doomsday threats? What evangelism?

I do know the difference and I also know when someone's trying to pull the wool over my eyes.

If we're going to have a meaningful discussion you're going to have to get beyond labelling me. You'd be surprised what I know about corporate circles. It's about time we started caring about people though instead of pretending they are just numbers.

Sigh, sigh…

“simply more of the same bad behavior and will, as it has already done numberless times, come to a bad end.”

“..and in the end, how deadly for the future..”

“..I just hope we'll start before it's too late..”

This is not talk of ‘the end times’?

“..with a mind to the idea of being world citizens and not patriotic residents of individual city states..”

“The West needs to take exactly the same kind of approach (butter and not guns)”

“It's about time we started caring about people”.

Which to me reads: Patriotism is bad, we should be brothers to the entire World, even though anthropologists reckon we can ‘take in’ meaningful relations with maybe a couple hundred people.

We should pay to keep people alive in other ends of the world, so they cannot criticize or threaten us, or so we don’t have to feel guilty.

We should have feelings for people we’ve never met and will never meet, who are, in truth, just numbers to us, but we’re not allowed to see them that way.

That’s not an evangelium?

Pull wool over your eyes. That would mean I had something to sell, a vested interest in convincing you of something. I don’t. But this kind of accusation, in many of the societies you so sympathize with, would be the first step in having somebody stoned in the public square. In a tribal setting, one of the worst things you can pin on a person, particularly a woman, is that she is tricky and devious. Maybe to you, I am ‘just’ an attachment to a keyboard somewhere, so there is nothing personal in the charge.

I think what I find so tiring is, that here you have paraded 77 ways in which I am ‘wrong’. But there is nothing you have committed to, nothing you have offered in a positive, specific, constructive sense. I have no clue what you mean by behaving as a citizen of the world, as opposed to being patriotic. I do not know why you think patriotism or elitism is wrong. I think you are proposing to go against human nature instead of working with what there is. In my experience, any idea that starts with ‘if people would only…’ is already a lost cause. People will not.

Every time we talk about making the world better, we come to this same point. People wallow endlessly in what heartless, self-serving, low-lives we are in the West, how so many special interests are to blame, how we ought to hang them out to dry, how we ought to be so much better, and then….nothing. Nobody ever writes the manual.

No, it’s not evangelism, not at all. It's hopeful realism. I don't necessarily sympathize with the systems in those countries but I do recognize them as full of people with the same basic sense of hope and survival and decency that I have.

And, that anthropological observation about only having relationships with a very tight group of people - well Dorothy, all I'll say about that is that it's a poor excuse for bad behavior - in my view.

I think I've said plenty about what we could do in a positive constructive sense.

Would you like me to go over the items again:
1) aid should generally be monetary and not in the form of goods (the USAID model) so that countries - especially in Africa - can buy the things they need locally and thereby stimulate their own agriculture; (and up to at least the level which Norway gives annually – for a country as wealthy as Canada not to do this is criminal)

2) the tariff barriers that protect our industries - especially in the textile and small manufacturing sector and in terms of agricultural commodities like sugar and ethanol, to mention just two, need to be eliminated so that third world countries can actually get involved in trade that makes them less, and not more, self-sufficient;

3) I think that countries are largely artificial constructs and I truly believe that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels; (we need to get over the idea that we’re in any way special)
4) I think human nature is very supple and people can respond in positive ways;

5) I'd never give up on my neighbours the way you seem to have - if I had I wouldn't bother with this forum.

I think I, and a lot of others, already have the manual - we just can't get the cynics to read it.

OK, so the message is:

1. Throw money at the problem (other people's money).

2. Throw money at the problem (other people's money).

3. Lose your sense of home, so you can be more equal to those you have decided have a miserable life.

Maybe you bought the idea of 'deep integration', is that un-patriotic enough?

Sounds not the least bit upbeat to me, nor terribly constructive. Construction refers to building something, not to signing cheques. I think the Rover Company (some of those damned elitists) who went to Belize and helped a bunch of villagers build a typhoon shelter have grasped it better than you.

And, you're right - the cynics will not read it. I told you you can't get people to do anything! they are going to have to want to read it. You must do a better sales job. Or learn about behaviour shaping.

Where did I say throw money at the problem?
Where did I say other people's money?
Where did I say I wanted to lose my sense of home?

Meaningful discussion requires a little work on your part and I'm not the slightest in favour of deep integration so let’s get that off the table.

Now, let's look at what I actually said.

1. Aid should generally be monetary so people in need can buy locally produced products and food and there by stimulate their own economy and not the bloated and subsidized agricultural sector here and in America. Scandinavian countries have understood and done this for some time - it's no mystery. Often, the length of time it takes for food aid to get to a crisis area the people who needed the food are dead and giving them a handout - I would have thought - was the last thing you'd want to do. I reject your point totally.

2. Totally misses my point. I was talking about tariffs which protect western products and industry - has nothing to do with your response. As to other people’s money, the G8 at Edinburgh agreed to a certain level of aid for Africa - they just haven't kept their promise - which is nothing new.

3. Irrelevant - nothing to do with what I said - sorry.

I didn't realize I was involved in a sales job. I did get you to read it though, although I can't see much evidence that you tried to understand my point of view. Still, no hard feelings.

I'm not interested in behavior shaping - and I don't believe in feedback cycles as a way to model human behavior, by the way...it may work with alcoholics I guess.

“Where did I say throw money at the problem?”

Right here:

“aid should generally be monetary”

“Where did I say other people's money?”

How about:

”the tariff barriers that protect our industries…need to be eliminated…”

Like, it will cost our workers and investors, and I assume you don’t own our entire industry…

“Irrelevant…”

If we eliminate national borders, where is home for the people then, or are ‘the people’ also an artificial construct?
I also don’t understand why you are for elimination of national borders, but against deep integration. Are they not the same thing?

And you are right, I don’t like handouts – of any kind. I subscribe to the Chinese proverb, ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, and you feed him for life’. I believe what will make a difference is not material gifts, but the gift of showing them how. This we cannot do, if we won’t even take ownership of our own situation and show some self-respect. The bashing of our own culture and mores are therefore not to anyone’s benefit. People in our society are far more willing to do something progressive, when nobody shakes a moralizing finger in their face. What one needs to do is personify one’s aims and goals. When I say ‘teach’, you believe I mean ‘instruct’. I don’t, as I believe one only ever learns through example.

Sales job. You were the one to say “...already have the manual - we just can't get the cynics to read it.” That would seem to indicate you are involved in a sales effort, yes?

I was not trying to sell you on feedback cycles, as I am quite aware this is not your way. I was merely answering your question as to where I got my ideas, and I was telling you how they were being shaped. By what happens when the rubber meets the road. I don’t know what works for alcoholics. Have never been close with one. But it kind of irks me, that you seem to put their affairs in opposition to ‘human behaviour’. I would not have rated them as other than human.

The article we are supposedly writing about poses the question why this happens:

“Last month, Elmasry's Canadian Islamic Congress joined the Canadian Peace Alliance and the Canadian Labour Congress, along with some of the most reactionary Muslim clerics in Canada, in a nationwide protest against Canada's UN-authorized military engagement in Afghanistan.”

I think the close association between Canadian labor and reactionary clergy is what the author marvels at. Of course there is no need to marvel. This is nothing new, as most fascist movements at one time or another has sucked in forces on the left wing. It is my belief that this happens, because they have the very important thing in common of being dogmatic. What do you think?

But Dorothy, that's exactly what I'm saying, let the folks from the third world sell us the products they produce at a competitive advantage to what we do here in North America and Europe - classical free trade. Classical, instead of neo-classical, economics. The problem with globalization as dictated from the West is that we don't really practice what we preach. Softwood and the problems we've had with the Americans are perfect illustrations of this.

You've deliberately ignored what I said. In fact, I suspect we'd get more aid for the dollars we spent now if we didn't have stupid rules about country of origin - so I reject your assertion on that count.

Our industries aren't very competitive for a great many other reasons - not a few of them to do with our crazy tax policies and, if we have to tighten our belts a notch or two I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing.

Show me where I said we should get rid of national borders. What I did say was that many people hide behind them and pretend that 'countries' somehow equate with value.

Personally, I think my views are just as progressive, if not more so than yours...but, we're both posting anonymously to a public board - pretty meaningless.

Canadian Labour is tied to reactionary clergy - news to me. How about a little evidence other than the quote from Elmasry. The CLC says it believes in peace. I do too.

But that doesn't stop you from throwing labels like fascist around.

I'm sorry to have to come to this conclusion dorothy, but maybe James Burns wasn't far off the truth in his broadside some time ago - you just don't like immigrants of a certain kind.

As to dogmatic, I think that's a bit of the pot calling the kettle so to speak.

On Afghanistan. I supported the initial effort there in 2001-02 and changed my mind as soon as it became evident that the US Congress wasn't willing to keep its aid and infrastructure promises when the Iraqi adventure began. We all know what's happened since.

That's what I think.

Pretty easy to dismiss what I say if you ignore it.

"I'm sorry to have to come to this conclusion dorothy, but maybe James Burns wasn't far off the truth in his broadside some time ago - you just don't like immigrants of a certain kind."

Really? What kind would that be? and what do you see in my text that would support such a claim? Have I made any reference to 'immigrants'?

I'd say Islamic ones.

Hmmm...interesting.

You didn't say, just exactly where you find support in what I have written for this conclusion. I need to know, so I can see where you got lost.

From your posts:

"reactionary Muslim clerics"

"societies (you so sympathize with), (which) would be the first step in having somebody stoned in the public square. In a tribal setting, one of the worst things you can pin on a person, particularly a woman, is that she is tricky and devious"

Neither of which 'societies' I've ever said are ones I support by the way. My argument is completely different. We should help people find ways to feed themselves and create decent societies on their own - it's a long tough process - but calling them names will do nothing but encourage the bullies and Bush has proved democracy at the end of a gun doesn't work.

And by the way, check out the front page of the New York Times website this morning - there's an interesting development in Afghanistan I'd like to hear your reaction to.

I didn't have to look far for those quotes either dorothy.

OK, I get it. Yes, you misunderstood those passages.

"reactionary Muslim clerics" does not entail that I consider ALL muslim clerics, or indeed all muslims by a long shot, reactionary. But some are, and some of those, I understand, has won support, in my view totally incongruent, from labor circles in Canada. The wording, by the way, is not mine, but contained in a quote from Glavin’s article, which I queried your opinion about.

"societies (you so sympathize with), (which) would be the first step in having somebody stoned in the public square. In a tribal setting, one of the worst things you can pin on a person, particularly a woman, is that she is tricky and devious"

I do not know here, why you think I am specifically talking about Muslim communities. Stoning in the public square is certainly not exclusive to them, but has been the tradition in many tribal communities around the world. I also consider, that you did express sympathy with the poorer people on Earth, many of which are tribal, or else you would not consider that we owe them help. I did not express criticism of the custom of stoning in the public sqare, but simply said that that was what the nature of your accusations would be ultimately invoking, as mutual trust is very important in a village/tribal setting, and not being trustworthy usually carries heavy penalties. Brutal expressions of the principle of doing justice is nevertheless entailing the idea of doing justice. Stoning, flogging etc. is not a happy state of affairs, but it may represent a step up from ‘might is right’. Not recognizing this, but just uncritically condemning it may be negative behaviour shaping.

I read the article you are referring to, I think. I guess all I can say at this point is: We’ll just have to wait and see how it evolves. “the Taliban” are far from a homogenous category of people, and so predicting the behaviour of any given group is really not possible. Obviously, some of them live by the philosophy of ‘crush your enemy totally’, extending all the way even to religious statues and buildings, but I am not in a position to say every man among them is that type of mindless fanatic.

dorothy
Where did I say I sympathized with them or their attitudes? I sympathize with their condition and their plight.

I think they're human beings and they have certain human rights as such and I think that if we truly care about human rights we have to do the very best we can, as a society, to make sure that the 4 billion people who are on the bottom of the big pyramid start to share in some of the excess stuff those of us on the top have.

By the way, that’s a bit of a dodge isn’t it? After all, you picked the quotation. I think it’s a little lame at this stage of the game to put it off on Glavin.

Canada, a nation of 30 million people, uses more energy than all of the CONTINENT of Africa - the home of 800 million folks. I have a problem with anyone who thinks that's okay for either Africa or for us.

I don't agree with treating people badly - men, women or children - but if I were sure we didn't do any of that kind of thing in this country - I'd be a lot more likely to think it was a good idea to dump on (or blow up) people in societies where folks like you tell me that's going on.

I especially wonder about what you do believe when I now see you saying that the 'Taliban' are not a homogeneous group of monsters.

That certainly isn't what pee wee and Hillier have been telling us, is it?

Two things you are misquoting:

“Where did I say I sympathized with them OR THEIR ATTITUDES? I sympathize with their condition and their plight.”

- I did not mention their attitudes, but specifically their plight, just as you say, referring, as you may recall, to that you think we owe them our help.

“I especially wonder about what you do believe when I now see you saying that the 'Taliban' are not a homogeneous group of monsters.”

- I did not call anyone ‘monsters’.

You also accuse me of ‘dodging’ by referring to the fact of the wording being a quote. I had first accounted for my views, but I acknowledged that the wording was not mine, as it wasn’t.

It is interesting you refer to this as a game. I do not play games, but maybe you do.

As to what I believe, of course what any sensible person would, none of what I hear, and only half of what I see. Things have to add up to a logical coherent totality, before I will ‘believe’ them. I prefer to know rather than believe.

dorothy
I didn't use ‘game’ in the sense you imply.

I'd suggest you knew that what you wrote that bit just above – but I'll ignore the cheap shot and assume you didn’t think about it very carefully before you said it.

You're right; the term you used was "mindless fanatic".

I think you're a nominally sensible person even if you can't justify your point of view by real and logical examples - which, I'd suggest, I've tried to do.

I think you're pretty heavy on the 'belief' channel too, by the way, when you resort to the kinds of tactics you have just above.

You still haven't come to grips with any of the points I made, in my view, but you still 'know' you're right: Sounds somewhat fundamental to me.

I don't play games either, by the way.

If you think your poste here today add up to a logical and coherent totality, well, I simply don't agree and I think I've demonstrated that quite clearly.

“I also think the metaphors we use tend to say a good deal about how we feel”

BUT

“I didn't use ‘game’ in the sense you imply”. (i.e.Translating into a game).

” you still 'know' you're right”

Where does it say that?

“If you think your poste here today add up to a logical and coherent totality, well, I simply don't agree and I think I've demonstrated that quite clearly.”

Right! You’ve demonstrated very clearly that you don’t agree to something I haven’t said. I was talking about, as you queried my beliefts, what criteria I would use to form a perception, not bragging about my own coherence and logic. That is not for me to judge, but for those I try to communicate with.

Back to the original article and its question: why do YOU think it is, that, as claimed by Glavin and agreed by at least a number of other people, Canadian Labor activists and ‘reactionary Muslim clerics’ have become political bedfellows? Or, do you not agree that they have? Why or why not?

Or, if they have shared the sheets, is this a bad idea? Should the union members get themselves new topguns?

This is what you wrote dorothy:

Why is it inappropriate for me to suggest that what you believe, or as you prefer 'know', doesn't meet that standard?

You also wrote this:

It's hardly a big step to draw the logical conclusion I did from your words, wouldn't you say?

My usage of 'game' was as meant in the sense that this argument, or debate if you will, had a finite length or duration and that your introduction of the fact that a quote you freely used to emphasize your point of view was actually someone else's words (Glavin's) was done a bit late in the day. I’d happily substitute ‘day’ for ‘game’ if you like if it clarifies the meaning for you.

No one asked you to use the quote and begging off the implications that attend to it is rather, I thought, a bit of a red herring. I think you quoted Glavin because you agree with him.

Hope that clears it up for you.

Why would you want to go back to the original article now? Are you acknowledging that you do have prejudices about particular kinds of immigrants? Because that's what I've been talking about, and you’ve been trying, rather ineffectively, to show that you don’t feel that way. Is that fair?

Glavin's point about whom some labour leaders happen to make common cause with never had anything to do with what we've been discussing. However, I'm more than happy to welcome virtually anyone to the very short line of people who care about bringing peace to this world, even if they happen to have some other ideas I’m not so keen about.

There are and have always been far too many folks in the group who think that the best solution for most problems is to shoot their adversaries.

I don't agree with Islamic fundamentalists about much; on the importance of a peaceful world, I am more than happy to start a meaningful dialogue – even if it’s with someone like George Galloway who, I’d bet, has done a lot more for oppressed minorities than a thousand dissenters like Terry Glavin could ever dream of doing..

As for guys with guns - talking is pretty pointless with those characters. I'll give you an example from last weekend when a group of New York City cops pumped 50 bullets into an unarmed man outside a club where he was celebrating his upcoming marriage. He was a black man, by the way.

And I'd say that's a pretty decent place to end this. From my point of view at least.

Logical and coherent enough for you? Oh, union leadership already is a democratic matter. Is this a problem for you?

No, it is certainly not inappropriate for you to apply the same standards. What I believe I read was, that you thought I had myself laid caim to having met those standards, and I would not do that, for due to the nature of the beast, in communication only the recipient can judge whether it is effective.

I do not know whether I agree with Glavin, this is the whole point of me participating in this debate. I believe the Islamic fundamentalists, with or without guns, will not have one iota of use or consideration for other categories of people, should they win any power. Their language has been clear enough on that. My worry over this is, that the CLC has been sucked into letting itself get used.

Democracy in union leadership has certainly never been a problem for me, and I have been a union member for many years, now and then volunteering for union duties. But it is now and has always been troubling to me, when unions do not stick to what they were elected to do: represent their membership vis avis the employer. It irks me, that they manifest themselves in politics, for I consider, that I elected other people to represent me there, and by unions throwing their weight around, it is as if they are claiming an extra mandate on my behalf and using it for what they want – which may not necessarily be what I agree to.

I do not know why there is such a short way to slamming me for prejudice from me simply naming a troubling extremist group within a much larger group. Why the knee-jerk reaction claiming that I don’t ‘like’ that entire ethnic group? Can I not call out reprehensible behaviours within any other ethnic group than my own?

“Are you acknowledging that you do have prejudices about particular kinds of immigrants? Because that's what I've been talking about, and you’ve been trying, rather ineffectively, to show that you don’t feel that way.”

Of course it is ‘rather ineffective’. One cannot prove a negative. My record would prove otherwise, but it is news to me, that I was on trial here. I realize there is a prosecutory approach there on your side, in presenting the story about the black man somewhat non-sequiteur. Are you saying ‘so there! This was done by people like you!’, or what? You are probably going to answer me: You said that, not I. You see, I have read my Kafka and Čapek, and so I agree that this is defintely a place to end this.

dorothy
The point had no further import than that to say I tend to be on the side of the folks who talk first and shoot later.

Even if I disagree with Islamic fundamentalists, and I do, I will salute anyone, you, me, Terry Glavin, George Galloway or any democratically elected union representative who makes common cause with people who are talking about PEACE and not war. Who are willing to come to my table and share tea with me and explore - even if it is angrily - the kinds of things that separate us as well as the few things we agree upon.

Just as the peace deal with some ostensible 'Taliban terrorists' in one Afghanistan province is, in my view, far better than another day of death and violence in that province.

I will take heart in the small victories of humane behavior even if it is my enemy that exhibits them. That is, in my view, what peace activism is all about and it's what Terry Glavin - so certain in his condemnatory umbrage - consistently ignores.

Terrorism and extremism are the tactics of desperate people, it is not a description of their character. Gregor was the same man underneath the cockroach carapace as he was the night before - but his loved ones no longer recognized him.

We need to build on small victories.

Best regards, if I've given you any insight into the way I see the world I hope it was at least marginally positive.

And this, just as a sort of appendix to our discussion is from tomorrow's NYTimes - you'll understand why it's germane, I'm sure:

The death of Sean Bell at the hands of undercover police officers, who also wounded his two companions in their 50-shot barrage in Queens nine days ago, brought to mind a case from a few years back in which undercover cops, acting on bogus information, attacked an innocent group of young people in a car in Manhattan.

The cops in the Manhattan case assumed that the people in the car were lowlifes. They were all Ivy League graduates, and one is currently clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

The incident occurred about 11:30 p.m. on Jan. 10, 2000. Two men and two women who were running their own startup Internet company, MagicBeanStalk.com, were parked outside a subway station on East 14th Street, near Union Square. Without any warning, a plainclothes officer leaped out of a yellow cab with his gun drawn and rushed the car with the four young people in it.

Thinking he was being carjacked, the driver put the vehicle in reverse and tried to get away. He was blocked by an unmarked police car that had pulled up behind him. He ended up hitting both the unmarked car and the cab (which was also a police vehicle) in his unsuccessful effort to flee.

The driver, Jason Rowley, who was 25 at the time, had no idea that the man with the gun was a cop. “I thought he was going to shoot me,” he said in an interview last week. “I was trying to get out of there.”

The passenger in the front seat, Sheldon Gilbert, said, “We thought we were going to die, plain and simple.”

The first cop was joined by two others, also in plain clothes. The officers apparently were enraged by Mr. Rowley’s effort to get away. One smashed the window on the driver’s side of the car and dragged Mr. Rowley through it, ripping his thumb in the process. Mr. Gilbert said his door was yanked open and he was punched in the face and then dragged from the car. The two men were then beaten.

The two women, Lauren Sudeall and Marie Claire Lim, were in the back seat, completely terrified. They were taken from the car at gunpoint and handcuffed. All four occupants were arrested.

It turned out that the cops were acting on a mistaken computer report that Mr. Rowley’s car was stolen. As frightening as the incident was, the four people in the car were lucky that none of the cops opened fire. “I spent that night in jail,” said Mr. Rowley, “and a lot of the officers told me that if this had been elsewhere — for example, if this has been in the Bronx or Harlem — I’d have been dead.”

here's the rest of it:

Mr. Rowley and Mr. Gilbert are black. Ms. Sudeall is of mixed parentage, black and white, and Ms. Lim is from the Philippines. The officers who rushed their car were white.

Jonathan Abady, a lawyer who represented the four in a subsequent lawsuit (which the city settled), believes that the race of the victims in that case and in the Sean Bell case — in which some of the cops were black — was a major factor in the way the police behaved.

“Our case was a classic example of disproportionate force being used against entirely innocent civilians,” he said. “It was an example of egregiously overaggressive police conduct that I think ultimately is based on stereotypes and perceptions. This case and the shooting of Sean Bell are examples of a very ignominious history of the police taking certain liberties, essentially in communities of color. It’s hard to believe that they would have fired 50 shots into a vehicle on Park Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan.”

The four people who were in the car in the Manhattan incident have since done extremely well. Ms. Sudeall, for example, graduated from law school and is now a clerk for Justice Stevens. Mr. Gilbert has established a new Internet venture based on a program he invented that predicts people’s buying patterns online. It’s very creepy to think how easily one or more of the four could have been killed in their encounter with the police.

As Ms. Sudeall said yesterday, “It seems like it’s inviting disaster to be not in uniform, not showing identification and attacking people who may or may not have done anything wrong.”

Does it make a difference? Probably not, but it does speak to the idea that we ought not make too many assumptions based on appearances, names and reputation alone.

dorothy, if you're still reading this, here's one other troubling little item for you to consider: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/03/AR2006120301186_pf.html

It's too long to post obviously, but have a close look at the attitudes of the Nigerian Bishop these Virginia Christians think would be an appropriate new leader fot their breakaway Episcopal congregations.

Ain't intollerance wonderful?