Archive - Sep 2007

Burma (aka Myanmar) has been on the front page of the Globe and Mail twice this week, and has been featured by many other publications and media outlets, as monks and pro-democracy protesters are mercilessly killed on the orders of the military junta that rules the country.

This has spawned a whole outpouring of solidarity and concern in various forms, as should be expected.

But the media coverage has been truly bizarre, and it seriously compromises the aims of that solidarity. The massive coverage given to the Burmese crackdown raises two very serious questions, the premises of which are somewhat contradictory:

1. Where was the the media outrage when this was happening in Haiti?

Has anyone seen "a simple message of resistance", a video apparently (?) put out by a group called the "Islamic Jihad Army"? It has apparently been around for quite a while (Jan 06), but I'm behind the times, it would seem. There's also this, which is more recent.

I have no idea as to its authenticity, but I've never seen this kind of direct, targeted video propaganda from guerrillas before--I'm not even sure the Zapatistas did anything like this with video--at least not in English.

Regardless of its origin, that makes it interesting as an attempt to bypass the media and speak to people directly.

Update: There's this, but I haven't found much in the way of commentary.

Editor and Publisher has an interesting piece about the anti-union stance of newspapers that publish in union towns like Detroit.

As anticipated in the photo essay about Algonquin resistance to uranium mining on their land, members of the Ardoch and Shabot Obaadjiwan Algonquin Nations canoed to Ottawa to protest the planned uranium mines on Parliament Hill and demonstrate that the waters connect planned mines with downtown Ottawa.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17th, 6:30pm

A public event hosted by Tadamon! Montreal & the Quebec Public Interest Research Group (QPIRG) at McGill University within the context of the campaign to challenging Hezbollah’s listing as a ‘Terrorist’ Group in Canada…

Presentations from:

Bilal Elamine: Currently living in Beirut, originally from Southern Lebanon, the former editor of Left Turn Magazine, Elamine will outline the current and historical role of Hezbollah in Lebanon from a progressive perspective. Critical recent events in Middle East history will be addressed within the presentation, as Elamine will speak about the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon, the 2007 general strike and opposition protests within the context of Hezbollah’s role in Lebanese society.

Brian Aboud: Presenting on Tadamon!’s campaign to challenge the listing of Hezbollah as a ‘terrorist’ organization in Canada. Today, Canada is one of only three countries world-wide to designate Hezbollah as a ‘terrorist’ organization. The other two are Israel and the United States.

Film Screening:

A Summer Not to Forget: A film by Lebanese film maker, Carol Mansour. Using powerful and disturbing images, the film tells a story of yet another war on Lebanon: 1,200 killed, 4,000 injured, one million displaced, 78 bridges destroyed, 15,000 homes damaged, 15,000 tonnes of oil spilled on 80km of the Mediterranean coastline, 57 collective massacres and much more. Director Mansour takes you into the harsh realities of a nation devastated by war and a people caught under siege.

His delivery of the closing line is pretty great.

Download / Podcast the program from the Rabble Podcast Network.

Listen to an interview with Nazila Bettache of No One is Illegal Montreal on ‘Reasonable Accommodation’ in Quebec. A governmental commission began last week in Canada, on the growing racism faced in Quebec by immigrants.

Immigrants in Quebec have faced a growing political storm throughout the past year, as a Provincial debate on what is referred to as ‘reasonable accommodation’ has attracted international headlines.

* Radio Tadamon! is produced by the Tadamon! collective in Montreal, a social justice group focusing on building solidarity with movements for social / economic justice in the Middle East and Montreal, while also working within Diaspora communities in Canada.

Here's the Globe and Mail's headline for Simon Houpt's "report" today:

Iranian President gets rough welcome
Leader's speech avoids incendiary comments about Israel's destruction and denials of the Holocaust

I'd like to propose some other suitable headlines for things that were avoided today:

• Globe and Mail Correspondent Simon Houpt avoids kicking puppies during walk down Broadway
• Globe and Mail editor Edward Greenspon avoids incendiary racist tirades for one entire week
• ...and so on...

While I expressed hope that Ahmadinejad's real, on the record comments would allow reporters to move on to criticize him for things he has actually said, this move shows that a) the Globe's editors are aware that the claims are erroneous and b) have decided to keep the claims alive despite the fact that they know that they are false. Pretty grim stuff.

In other news, I emailed Margaret Wente to ask for a source for her talk of "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies the Holocaust ever happened and seems quite happy at the thought of unleashing nukes against the Jews."

She responded with an excerpt from this 2005 BBC report. Does it provide enough evidence to back up her claim? (Does it say anything relevant to her claim?) You decide.

And with that, no more Ahmadiblogging for me.

You can see videos of Ahmadinejad's speech and Colombia University President Lee Bollinger's opening remarks. Without any apparent sense of irony, Bollinger calls on the Iranian President to allow an American who is being held without trial in Iran to be allowed to leave, just to cite one example of the bizarre double standard that is, well, standard in the US right now. It's probably standard everywhere, but in any case, it's embarrassing to watch intelligent people talk like this.

Ahmadinejad was in New York today, as some of you may have noticed. I'm sure many Iranians (as well as the entire US elite) will tell you that he is pure evil. But as of the last election, they are still in the minority. This may have something to do with his blend of appealing to Islamic "values voters" and the poor ("putting the petroleum income on people's tables" was apparently one of his campaign slogans).

He's a religious nut, but not much more so than George W, as far as I can tell. There's plenty to dislike about the Islamic Revolution--violence, suppression of rights, theocracy, and so on. (That said, the revolution was a reaction to the Shah, who killed his way to power with US help, replacing a democratic, secular government that wanted control over their own oil.) To an extent, Ahmadinejad can be said to represent the results of this theocracy.

That said, let's be serious.

Maybe, just maybe we can put to rest the references to "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies the Holocaust ever happened and seems quite happy at the thought of unleashing nukes against the Jews" (as Margaret Wente put it in her absurdly high-profile Globe column on Saturday).

Hopefully the fact that Ahmadinejad repudiated claims that he said these things (not that there was a lack of evidence before) will put this line of thinking to rest.

A new study says high-income Canadians got a lot richer between 1992 and 2004, while the rest of the population made little financial progress.

The Statistics Canada study, which used tax returns to explore trends among high-income earners, found the top five per cent of the tax-filing population accounted for about 21 per cent of total income in 1992; by 2004 it accounted for 25 per cent.

The study found little improvement among the rest of the population and it says that while there were more high-income earners who were women in 2004, their share of the pie was depleted.

Three-quarters of the 1.2 million high-income Canadians were men, even though men were a minority (48 per cent) of individual income recipients in general.

--Report on Business (not, I note, the National section)

The rise in value of the Canadian dollar "is an energy story," said Busch. With crude oil futures trading at more than $83 U.S., investment capital is pouring north to help extract oil from so-called tar sands, also known as oil sands, in the province of Alberta.

--Chicago Tribune