Category: Canada and Empire

On Canadian foreign policy and its subordination to the needs of the Empire, including the “Five Eyes”.

Canada Colombia Free Trade Agreement: A Question/Answer

The Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (CCFTA) was withdrawn from the table while being debated for its second reading in Canadian Parliament on May 27, 2009. Stalled for now, the CCFTA will certainly be back: it has not been defeated, and its proponents (the Conservatives and some of the Liberals) await an opportunity to bring it back.

The following set of questions and answers are intended to help those in Canada trying to stop the CCFTA (or see to it that it stays down).

Continue reading “Canada Colombia Free Trade Agreement: A Question/Answer”

Security Certificates and the case of Adil Charkaoui

On February 20, the Federal Court of Canada dropped most of the conditions it had placed on one of the prisoners of its “security certificate” regime, Adil Charkaoui. While much of his life is still lived in the rights-free zone widened under the “war on terror”, his struggles over the years have won him back some parts of his life. (For the decision see here)

Continue reading “Security Certificates and the case of Adil Charkaoui”

Turn off the Canadian Media, Please

If national media help make a nation, then we all need to stop reading and listening to conventional Canadian media if we want to make a decent Canada. Benedict Anderson, perhaps the leading scholar of nationalism, wrote that the daily newspaper (along with other innovations like novels, maps, censuses, museums) played a key role in creating national consciousness. People in a country like Canada use their own media – public (CBC) and private (CanWest, TorStar, CTVglobemedia) – to know what is happening in their own country. Media are also an important part of forging a national identity. They are supposed to represent the broad spectrum of Canadian opinion. When they present information on the rest of the world, they do so from a Canadian perspective and have the Canadian audience in mind.

And today, if you want to have the first idea what is happening in Israel/Palestine (or most of the rest of the world), the best thing to do would be to turn them off completely.

In the face of a major ongoing crime like that of Israel’s siege and assault on Gaza, Canadians turn to the Canadian media in good faith to try to learn and understand what is happening, who is to blame, and what they might be able to do to help the victims. On each of these counts, the Canadian media fails. But the days when Canadians would be stuck listening to local radio, picking up the local print newspaper, or watching local television packaged by Canadian media corporations for their consumption are over. There is, for the time being, media choice. And given the choice, on Israel/Palestine, it would be foolish to turn to the Canadian media.

These days I actually don’t have the stomach to do an exhaustive survey of Canadian coverage of these massacres. I have done such surveys in the past (see my letter to the Toronto Star’s Mitch Potter from a few years back), and I spent a lot of time and energy thinking about how to democratize the mainstream Canadian media and pressure it to be more open. These days, though, I mainly follow my own advice. A friend of mine, Brooks Kind, spent some time going through the least biased of the Canadian media, CBC radio, over the past two weeks. He found that the CBC suppressed crucial facts, presented an unrepresentative spectrum of opinion, and falsified the historical record. The suppressions and omissions are in the service of the perspective of the US and Israeli governments (and Canadian politicians), but they are no less false for that. With the reminder that I am picking on the CBC not because it is the worst, but because it is by far the best, here are just a few examples.

First, remember that the pretext for Israel’s attack is that Hamas refused to renew the June 19/08 ceasefire and started rocket attacks in December/08. But Israel violated the ceasefire in two ways. First, by continuing to starve Gaza (as Israeli officials openly admit and have done for years), and second, by attacking Gaza on November 4/08 and killing six Hamas people. Why is this important? There is a pattern here: Israel has repeatedly broken truces, ceasefires, and peace talks with spectacular assassinations that involve killing large numbers of people. This has been a pattern for many years, and has included the assassinations of many of Hamas’s leaders (Abd-el-Aziz Rantisi, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, and many, many others). It is an explicit part of Israel’s strategy to provoke its opponents and get pretexts for further attacks. But this timeline, and the November 4/08 attack by Israel, is not part of the ‘boilerplate’ provided when the attack on Gaza is reported in the Canadian media.

Second, Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has been making very strong statements about Gaza in recent months. Falk is an acclaimed scholar and a highly credible source. He works for the United Nations, which Canadians supposedly have special respect for. When Falk traveled to Israel, he was detained, strip searched, and deported. Israel’s contempt for the United Nations could hardly have been more starkly revealed. Except, perhaps, when the Israelis killed a Canadian UN observer (Paeta Derek Hess-von Kruedener) in Lebanon in 2006, along with 3 others (Du Zhaoyu of China, Jarno Makinen of Finland, and Hans-Peter Lang of Austria). Or, perhaps, when the Israelis bombed the UNRWA school in Jabaliya on Jan 3/09, killing 43 Palestinians and wounding 100. Unlike much of the UN, whose main response to these killings might as well be to apologize for getting in the way of the bombs, Falk has provided urgent warnings to the world about the seriousness of the situation. But Falk’s story is not given any prominence in any Canadian media. An entire story on the UN aspects of the situation quotes Israel’s envoy to the UN and Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and others, but not the important and strong voice of the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories.

And then, of course, there are the cliches, the horrible cliches of this conflict. Like this story about how
"World leaders call for Mideast ceasefire as more civilians die." They just "die", these civilians. The lead reads "World leaders called for a ceasefire in the fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas as civilian casualties climbed in the Gaza Strip." The "casualties climbed", the "civilians died", of their own accord, with no help from the Israelis. Israeli officials are allowed the grace of their titles ("Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak") but Mahmoud Zahar from the elected Hamas government is called "Gaza’s Hamas strongman" (there are no Western strongmen).

Just before the current massacres, on December 8/08, Radio Canada’s ombudsman found that the CBC had erred in running a very factual documentary called "Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land" (3PL). The ombudsman Radio Canada erred in broadcasting because "militant pro-Palestinian groups were involved in researching" it. Who were these groups? FAIR (www.fair.org), or Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, whose principal activity is to act more or less as Radio Canada’s ombudsman should, pointing out inaccuracies and unfairness in US media coverage of critical topics. "Factual errors" pointed out by the ombudsman include that the film "speaks of the occupation as being illegal, but Miville-Dechene points out that this has never been clarified by the courts". This merely suggests that the ombudsman lacks the most cursory understanding of international law. And possibly, an understanding of what constitutes a factual error. In any case, the Quebec Israel Committee (QIC) said that, by changing its policies to prevent documentaries like these from being seen by Canadians, "Radio-Canada has strengthened its credibility and has become a better news organization." The more "credible" a media outlet is to an outfit like the QIC, the better off Canadians would be in turning it off altogether. What is good about this situation is that all Radio-Canada can really do is prevent Canadians from seeing 3PL on Radio-Canada. They can’t prevent Canadians from seeing it altogether (in fact, you can watch it at the Media Education Foundation site or on Google Video. The natural response is the right one: turn off Radio-Canada.

A last example. The rally against the Gaza massacres that happened in Toronto (as well as many cities in the world) on January 3, 2009. I was at the rally. I have been to a lot of rallies over the years. Many of these, I must admit, have been very small. Activists learn how to assess (and yes, unfortunately, sometimes to inflate) numbers at demonstrations. But to say that the January 3, 2009 rally had "more than 1000 people", as CBC did, is simply preposterous. They may as well have said "more than one". There were easily 10,000 people there – unless someone can show me how you can fill Yonge Street between Bloor Street and College Street in Toronto with a thousand people. And no, at no point was the march single file.

In the past, when I, and others like me, have made points like these to Canadian journalists, they reply that we are leftists and biased and merely want them to be biased the way we are. But the above are mostly matters of fact and of professionalism, not of analysis or opinion.

I am willing to declare my biases. I write for ZNet (www.zcommunications.org/znet) and work as an editor for it. I wouldn’t do either if I didn’t think people should read it, and I wouldn’t criticize the mainstream media if I thought it did a good job. ZNet is a site for analysis. It features analysts who write on other sites, like the Electronic Intifada‘s (www.electronicintifada.net) Ali Abunimah, Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies (http://www.ips-dc.org/staff/phyllis), Jonathan Cook, Ha’aretz’s own Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, other Israelis like Neve Gorden and Jeff Halper, as well as folks who write mainly for ZNet. If you’re distrustful of the "alternative media" and fear that folks from the region will be biased, try the mainstream (liberal) UK papers, whose openness to diverse analysis puts the Canadian press to shame. Guardian’s Comment is Free (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree) section has had Leila el-Haddad, Nir Rosen, Seamus Milne, and plenty of others that don’t see the light of day in the Canadian press. Reading these analysts reveals the incredible mediocrity of the Canadian punditry when it addresses international affairs.

But analysis is not news, and people do need news. Not only do they need news, but they need a variety of perspectives, and the Israeli perspective is a very important one. There is, however, a difference between what the public relations line of a state at war and the actual perspective and debates in that state. In other words, if you want the Israeli perspective, you can get it directly, in the Israeli press: read Haaretz (www.haaretz.com) and the Jerusalem Post (www.jpost.com). They are available in English, and they are much more frank about Israel’s aims and practices than the Canadian media are. Why read what the Israeli military wants Canadians to read, when you can read what they want Israelis to read?

If you want news about how Israeli destruction looks to its victims, there is nothing better than the IMEMC (www.imemc.org), which is a genuine news outlet run by Palestinians, in the Occupied Territories, with as high professional standards as you could want. These are journalistic heroes, and the first place I go.

If you want news that is actually balanced, with "supporters of Israel" and "pro-Palestinian" voices represented, as well as actual reporting from the ground, use al-Jazeera (www.aljazeera.net/en).

[Aside: I can’t use the phrase "supporters of Israel" without reminding readers of Chomsky’s note in Fateful Triangle, where he said "supporters of Israel" should more aptly be called "supporters of the moral degradation and eventual destruction of Israel". "Pro-Palestinian" is another strange term, since it seems that thinking that a group of human beings are, in fact, human beings, makes you "pro-Palestinian", rather like how agreeing with the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change makes you an "environmentalist".]

If you want to make your own decision about how many people were at a demonstration or what its message was, you might as well go directly to the people involved: they all have their own websites. The Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (www.caiaweb.org) has one, the Canadian Arab Federation (www.caf.ca) has one, and so on.

Let me rephrase my point here. Modern Western armies, like those of Israel, the US, and Canada, think of information as part of warfare. They expend tremendous time and resources mobilizing support for their violence. They do this by controlling information, disallowing independent journalists (as Israel is doing), using embedded journalists, and running a massive public relations machinery designed specifically to deliver arguments and propaganda for the foreign press and for foreign consumption. There is a special machinery just for Canadians, and a special strategy to sell war in Canada. There was one for the Iraq war, there is one for the Afghanistan war, and one for Israel’s wars as well. What is so unusual about the media environment today is that all this expense, all this media machinery, can be circumvented by anyone in its target audience by the simple click of a mouse. So click away.

The Canadian media are a biased little niche of pro-Israeli spin, and should be seen that way. There are times when the Canadian media are useful for news about Canada, if read critically. Even for Canada, there are reasonably good alternatives for analysis, commentary, and features (dominionpaper.ca, rabble.ca, briarpatchmagazine.com), and plenty of direct information from politicians (the political parties have their own sites, as do many individual polticians, activist groups, and so on). Still, read critically, the Canadian media can be a good source on goings on in the country.

But on Israel/Palestine, please, find more serious sources.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. His blog is www.killingtrain.com.

Myths for Profit

I have written a bit about Canadian foreign policy over the past few years. The big piece I wrote and built on since, I called “Canada for anti-imperialists”. That was about four years ago now. Since then, I learned two things.

1) Films can reach audiences that written articles can’t, and
2) I have absolutely no skill, ability, aptitude, or enjoyment in filmmaking

Luckily for me, others do!

Continue reading “Myths for Profit”

Canadian election taboos – and possibilities

The 2008 Canadian election has some of the features of the past few elections. The majority of the population faces the quandary of how to defeat a reactionary party that just might have the largest plurality of support. Will they get a majority or just a minority? The second place party has slight differences with the ruling party but has a record of lies, destructive neoliberal economics, and destructive foreign policy. Should they be taught a lesson or have they learned it? Can they be punished without the electorate punishing itself? The electoral system is increasingly out of step with the diversity of popular opinion. And some very important questions about immigrant rights, indigenous rights, indigenous territory, corporations, and the country’s relationship to the rest of the world, are off the table. But for all that, it is still an interesting situation. In last week’s leaders’ debates, three of the five parties, who got equal time, had left-of-center views. Of course, in North America the center moves steadily to the right and is defined by it, but the debate was still refreshing. Environmentalism is popular, and the presence of the Green Party forces the NDP to run more openly to the left, since the centrist environmentalist niche is already filled by the Greens. Fighting with the Greens for this niche has also had a civilizing influence on the Liberals, who are talking about climate change seriously.

There are still too many taboo topics. Taxation, for example, was denounced by all parties in the debate, who fall over themselves and each other to insist their plans won’t increase anyone’s taxes. This is public miseducation. Like budget deficits, taxes have their role, and for politicians to eschew them is to tie the society’s hands before situations that require flexible economic responses. Making people pay more to ride public transit, or adding user fees for health care services or pharmaceuticals, or cutting funding for the arts, causes suffering just as surely as raising taxes does – it just causes suffering for different people. Letting the transportation, energy, and water infrastructure rot doesn’t make a budget deficit, but it does make an infrastructure deficit, and society ultimately will pay for either kind. This is especially true in a time when the Harper/Bush/McCain people’s economic policies have proven so spectacularly and widely disastrous and ideas of public economic management need to be quickly and sensibly resurrected and implemented.

But these simple points cannot be made in any political campaign because for a party to say they would use deficit spending or increase taxes (as opposed to “shifting” taxes) would be harmful to them politically. But allowing the society’s economic discourse to be dominated by ideological distortion also does political harm, especially to progressive forces (and parties that would use those forces to come to power).

Another example is ‘terrorism’. You would never know from politicians or the media that everything that is a crime under new ‘anti-terror’ legislation (killing people with bombs or guns, kidnapping people, destroying infrastructure) was a crime before the ‘anti-terror’ legislation. The legislation is a political tool for increasing state and police powers, and is being used in ugly ways against a group of young people in Toronto as these elections are unfolding. In his recent sentence against one of the Toronto 18, the judge argued that it did not matter that the 20-year old had committed no crime, and it didn’t matter that he may not have known. The NYT correspondent (and yes, for sensible coverage of this Canadian topic the NYT was better than the mainstream Canadian press) Ian Austen described the trial this way:

“Evidence presented in court made it clear that, at best, the man was a minor character in the group… There was no evidence offered directly linking the defendant to the bomb plot or plans to storm Parliament. Instead, most of the case focused on his attendance at two camps that the police described as terrorist training sessions but that prosecution witnesses characterized as recreational or religious retreats. Both were videotaped by a paid police informant who was part of the group and who testified that he choreographed some of the scenes.” (NYT Sept 25/08)

The informant, in question, said this about the young man found guilty: ‘“I don’t believe he was a terrorist,”… Mr. Shaikh said he did not believe that the defendant was aware of the group’s violent plans.’ (NYT Sept 26/08)

As for Judge Sproat, who rendered the verdict, he argued that “planning and working toward ultimate goals that appear unattainable or even unrealistic does not militate against a finding that this was a terrorist group… engaging in activities such as paint-balling, physical exercise and rafting is by no means inconsistent with the existence of a terrorist group” (NYT Sept 26/08)

Sproat’s verdict fits with well the Rumsfeld doctrine on the same topic: “The absence of evidence does not indicate the evidence of absence.” And it has the same shocking implications for Canada’s legal system. Or would, if anyone were paying the slightest attention. But here, too, it seems politicians have nothing to gain by suggesting that we ought not allow the state to use entrapped suburban youths to terrify us into surrendering rights to due process.

Other non-debated examples that politicians stay away from? The continuing occupation of recently hurricane-devastated Haiti, Canadian support for all of Israel’s moves against Palestinians, the neoliberal “Free Trade Agreements” with the US and other Latin American countries like Colombia, the use of force and prison terms against indigenous communities defending land and life, and so on.

And yet there is the occasional glimmer of a genuine discussion. When an Afghan-Canadian argued that Canada should remain with NATO in occupying that country, Jack Layton argued that Canada should not have been there in the first place and should withdraw as soon as possible. When Harper tried to offer the usual deceptions about reducing ‘emissions intensity’ as opposed to carbon emissions, Giles Duceppe used his time to explain exactly why this was a deception: the example he gave was – you would reduce emissions by 10% per barrel, but then you would produce 5,000 barrels instead of 1,000. These are glimpses of what one could actually hope for from a political debate: people not letting sham arguments pass unexposed.

The most intriguing possibility has more to do with the voting pattern than with the outcome. As much as I like what they are doing at voteforenvironment.ca in spite of critiques like this one, I don’t like the final outcome sought by voteforenvironment.ca (75 Con, 123 Lib, 52 NDP, 1 Green, 55 Bloc, 2 IND). I would prefer it to be even closer between the Liberals and the Conservatives. The latest national poll has Con 33%, Lib 26%, NDP 19%, Green 12%, and Bloc 10%. It is certainly true that it is worth putting thought and effort into averting a conservative majority. But a split of 35-25-20-20 in Anglo-Canada and the Bloc taking most of Quebec, for example, that resulted in a Conservative minority (or even a majority) would create strong pressure for change in the electoral system: in such a system the Liberals would have much more to gain from insisting on such a change than trying to keep a two-party system and hope they can win in it. Proportional representation would create other possibilities for progressive forces during elections, and reasons for politicians to have to pay attention.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer.

Naomi Klein in Toronto

Last night I saw Naomi Klein speak to a packed house at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto. She captured a lot of what I’ve been feeling these days and managed to explain to me why I have been unable to write anything for the past two weeks. I’ve felt there was so much going on that all I could do was some kind of roundup of all the things that would treat them all superficially, or delve into one or two and not mention some huge things that were going on, neither of which appealed to me. Not that silence in these times is better. But Naomi helped me solve my problem with a strategy of her own: try to explain the situation and get help with what to do from people you respect.

It was strange, she said, to be on a platform speaking to a room full of people trying to analyze events that seem to be going too quickly to make sense of. But she proceeded to do as good a job, it seems to me, as anyone could, of offering something that could help people make sense of things.

I would summarize her talk as follows. She started from the basic premise of her book, the Shock Doctrine: that elites use the shock of natural disasters or military violence to impose economic policies that redistribute wealth from the people to the wealthy. She also used a quote from Friedman from the book, that the key was what ideas were “lying around” when a crisis hits. Friedman and the Chicago School and their counterparts around the world ensured that their privization/deregulation/monetarism were lying everywhere, and also helped to motivate and justify the violence that imposed the ideas.

What did that have to do with this moment? Several things. First, the financial collapse of the US banks and mortgage institutions were a direct outcome of these ideas. Second, that the solution to such a crash, the last time there was one of such magnitude (and with similar causes, in the 1920s), was the entry of the government into the economy in a massive way – the regulation, nationalization, taxation, and public investment of the New Deal in the US. At that time, though, there was more grassroots organizing locally (though, like the organizations that exist today, those were demonized and made invisible as much as possible at the time and in historical accounts) and there was more international rivalry (from the Soviet Union and 3rd world nationalism). Today US elites see themselves as victors enjoying the spoils of the world and, like a neglectful partner in a romantic relationship, see no ideological or institutional competition to give them an incentive to behave better.

And yet, Naomi said, this was ours (progressives’) moment to lose. We ought not to defeat ourselves by believing their propaganda about us, that our project failed because our ideas failed. That is not true. And they are proving it for us – by socializing the debt that the banks incurred, they are showing what progressives know and always have said – that government always plays the major role, the only question is whether that role will be on behalf of the wealthy or whether there will be some component of looking after the public. We should not be deceived by their arguments of inevitability, especially now that they have demonstrated their incompetence and their inability to handle the situation. Nor should we be deceived by their declarations of our weakness. We, she concluded, are much stronger than we think.

There were more details, including some very interesting ones, but that was the basic argument she presented. What followed was almost as good as the talk itself though, as Naomi switched from being a speaker to being a host for some of the best activist organizations in the city to talk about a huge number of things that are happening now. It is going to take a lot of people to try to make sense of these times, and the structure of the event was consistent with that message. The activists that spoke were also excellent and at their best. People always ask me what to do, Naomi said, so I am going to get some help answering that question.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty talked about an ongoing campaign for public housing in Toronto. Public housing used to be one way to house people affordably. The alternative, Naomi pointed out, was the open ended speculative mortgage bonanza that culminated in first the foreclosure crisis last year and the collapse of banks this year. Any US crisis will eventually be a Canadian crisis, since Canada’s elites have made the country so dependent on the US. And any US economic doctrines become Canadian doctrines – at least the elite ones. In Toronto the City’s strategy is to become the biggest slumlord in the city, refusing to do the necessary repairs and keeping the people in the public housing system in squalor, so that the argument can eventually be made that the buildings should be condemned and replaced with condos, privatized. OCAP is part of a campaign to fight this through witholding rent and pooling it for repairs themselves. It is a simple and brilliant strategy that will work if enough people take it up. Another fight is against the invisibilization of homeless people on the streets – once invisible, they lose any protection from the state’s depredations. There’s a street takeover on Saturday October 4th. If you’re in Toronto, be there. This was a moment of extraordinary opportunities and dangers, but the biggest mistake would be to accept the inevitability of capitalism.

More fighting words came from the Tyendinaga support committee, who gave us the latest on Shawn Brant’s case and on a successful fight against a $2 million police station in a community that doesn’t have drinkable water.

Two speakers from No One is Illegal talked the fight against deportations, the exploitation of insecure labor, and the ongoing theft of land and resources from indigenous people, the deeper elements of the whole system. They both talked about what solidarity means – fighting along with the oppressed.

Someone from the Stop the War Coalition pointed out that in all the talk of present and future fiscal crisis that is going to preclude needed investment in social and environmental areas, no one is questioning the need for trillions (in the US) and hundreds of billions (in Canada) of dollars to go to the military. Also, that if Canadian mobilization helped stop Canada’s elites from joining the war in Iraq, it could do the same to end Canada’s participation in the occupation of Afghanistan (and future wars).

The Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid talked about how the Palestinians are the experimental subjects for innovation of the Shock Doctrine – surveillance, control, torture, imprisonment, destruction of the basis of survival. CAIA argued for the campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli regime and Canada’s support for it, until Israel complies with international law.

Discussion then turned to the Canadian election that will take place on October 14. An activist from a very clever website, voteforenvironment.ca pointed out that on October 14, Canadians would have their choice of 4 parties with progressive environmental policies and one dinosaur (the Tories). The Tories do not have a majority of the public by any means but they could win a majority because of our electoral system. Unless voters subvert the electoral system by voting strategically (which is NOT the same as voting liberal!). The site gives riding-by-riding information on who the favourites are and who the best candidate to defeat the tories is in each riding. It is non-partisan, other than being anti-Tory, which agrees very well with my position on this election. Please take a look at their site and pass it along. Canadians are some of the most wired people in the world per capita, which means a campaign like this could work. (Another motivation to oust the Tories, related to the high per-capita internet use of Canadians, is the Tories’ appalling digital copyright bills, the subject of some very interesting campaigning: see Russell McCormand’s blog, for a place to start). Activists from a new group called the Department of Culture also announced their campaign and upcoming events (that will be appealing since they’re artists) to try to stop the Harper people.

The whole event was really special for two reasons. One, because it tried to respond to a great deal of what was going on very seriously and sincerely, and managed to present so many campaigns and ideas and still seem politically coherent (at least to me). Two, because the relationship between the activist groups and event organizers and the speaker was just the right one: one of dialogue and mutual support.

The best line of the night was when she was talking about the job of progressives being to move the center. Let the liberals in power make the compromises – movements should push them. And in times like these, the more pushing, the better the eventual compromise. If, for example, they said the green economy couldn’t be afforded after socializing the public debt, then the way forward is clearly to nationalize the oil companies as well as the banks, since oil companies were still very profitable. In short, Naomi advised, ‘get out there and say some crazy stuff’.

I agree.

PS: This is not an unbiased article, nearly all the groups and people I mentioned are friends, groups I belong to, people I admire, etc.

PPS: I am going to try to write something about the economic crisis in the coming days. People have been asking and I have been researching…

A brutal week

Natural disasters are always exacerbated by social ones. On the one hand, there is what Naomi Klein argues in “The Shock Doctrine”, that elites exploit disasters of any kind to reorganize society in their own interests. On the other, there is what Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for: revealing that undemocratic regimes with unfree presses have disaster-level famines, where democratic regimes with free presses (still capitalist) can only get away with chronic hunger deaths (this last is certainly not his wording!) The regime in Myanmar is one of the worst in a world of terrible regimes, and the people’s suffering is so much worse for it. And then there is the global regime that is destabilizing the climate to make the natural part of such disasters more and more likely for more and more people. Like so much out there, it feels beyond inadequate to write something about this.

Another topic where writing in a little blog can’t begin to make sense of things: yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the day Israel became a state, and while some “supporters of Israel” were “partying like it was 1948”, Palestinians saw “no cause for celebration”. My friend Rafeef explained as much for those who came to a press conference last week and the demonstration in Toronto yesterday. Another friend, Dan Freeman-Maloy, prepared a long piece about Canada’s role in the creation of Israel, drawing from work by Israeli scholars like Benny Morris and Canadian scholars like David Bercuson and bringing different values to bear (which is to say, Dan does not have the contempt for Palestinians that both Morris and Bercuson, and Canada’s Prime Minister Harper, show). 60 years is too long for a people to be denied the right to return to their homes, too long for a people to be occupied and colonized and subjected to intensifying genocidal policies. It is generations of people growing up in refugee camps that are themselves being starved and bombed.

And in a week of massive disasters and 60-year occupations, there are under-reported injustices in this part of the world (Canada) as well. Mohawk activist Shawn Brant was re-arrested (I’ll republish the statement by his wife Sue Collis below, but it’s linked here) on charges that will probably fall apart again, like the previous sets of charges. But by arresting him again and again, they not only punish him de facto by putting him in jail for months at a time, but also help create the image of him and the Mohawks they are trying to put forth.

And in another jail, one of the Toronto 18, Steven Chand, was beaten up in jail by guards, according to his lawyer (the CBC report):

Michael Moon said his client, Stephen Chand, was taking a shower at Maplehurst provincial jail in Milton west of Toronto. When he tried to rinse soap from his hair, Moon said, a guard smashed Chand’s face into a wall, then dragged him naked along a hallway by his hair and threw him into a bare cell smeared with feces and smelling of urine.

The lawyer is demanding that surveillance videos of the incident be released by the Ontario government, though internal investigations at the facility found no wrongdoing by guards.

“These videos capture everything that goes on on the range,” Moon said, “If he [Chand] did anything wrong, it will be shown on the video. If what he says is accurate, that will be shown.”

Moon also says that when another inmate complained about the treatment of Chand, he too was thrown into the bare cell, known as the hole.

A spokesman for the Ontario government had no comment because the case is before the court. But he added that provincial corrections officials were committed to the just and humane treatment of inmates.

Below is Sue Collis’s statement:

Shawn Brant’s Arrest – Statement by Sue Collis, Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory

(May 4th, 2008) Eight days ago, on Friday, April 25th, 2008, my husband, Shawn Brant, was arrested and detained on assault and weapons charges. Since that time, Commissioner Julian Fantino and the Ontario Provincial Police have issued public statements that have, it seems, misstated the events leading to my husband’s arrest.

I believe it is important to the public good for people to understand the circumstances that have lead to Shawn’s incarceration at this time. Those circumstances are as follows:

On Sunday, April 20th, 2008, the community of Tyendinaga responded to threats from a Kingston developer to bring “a crew of 25 to 30 guys”, in order to begin development on a property which falls within in the Culbertson Tract land claim. Mohawks from Tyendinaga did peaceful road closures on Highway 2, adjacent to this proposed development site on Mohawk land.

My husband Shawn has been living and complied with very strict conditions imposed when he was charged in relation to community rail and highway blockades on the June 2007 Aboriginal Day of Action. One of his conditions is not to attend protests. During the evening of Monday, April 21st, 2008, my husband was some distance away from the road closures erected in response to the Kingston developer, talking to a Tyendinaga community member, while he also checked a nearby creek for fish.

During this conversation, Shawn became aware of some commotion down the road, and made his way towards the commotion, parking his car some 50 feet away from where a small group of people was gathered on one side of the road. The first thing Shawn saw a 10-year-old girl shaking and crying uncontrollably. He had no idea what was going on. As he approached the scene, someone yelled “Shawn help us!” The little girl screamed, “They hurt my Mommy! They’re gonna hurt my Mommy.” Someone else yelled, “He has a ball bat!” At this time, Shawn noticed two trucks were parked facing the people who were in obvious distress. Shawn returned to his car and retrieved his fishing spear. By the time Shawn returned to where the people were gathered, the occupants of the trucks were back inside their vehicles. Shawn shouted at the occupants of the trucks to leave. The windows were so tinted that he could not make out their faces. The drivers of the trucks sped away with such force that one of their truck tires was raised in the air, spraying much gravel and stone at the women and the child, some of which they later discovered was imbedded in their skin.

Shawn turned his head to avoid catching stones in the face, and held out his spear in an effort to create some distance between the group of Mohawks and the trucks, out of concern that those in the vehicles would strike those on the road with their vehicles. The trucks then sped away. That is the extent of Shawn’s interaction with the individuals he is now charged with assaulting. To be clear, he is charged with assaulting the men in the trucks.

A 911 call was made during this incident on April 21st, 2008, in which the trucks’ licence plates were recorded. Shortly thereafter, the women made statements to the police, identifying the men driving the trucks as known Deseronto inhabitants, subsequently identified as Jamie Lalonde and Mike Lalonde. The women also testified in police statements that one of the men swung a club at them, drove one of the trucks into them, and threatened further violence. The women also described being injured by flying stones, and described the trauma endured by the young girl. No one but Shawn has been charged.

The men from Deseronto sought out this group of people, deliberately caused them injury and issued threats of further violence. They were targeted for assault and abuse for no other reason than that they are Native. The actions taken by the men from Deseronto were driven by bigotry and racial hatred. By definition, these were hate crimes. Again, no one but Shawn has been charged.

The men are presumed to have filed a complaint against my husband, resulting in a police search of his car on Friday, April 25th, when his fishing spear was taken from his car, and charges of assault and possession of a weapon – the spear – were laid. My husband remains in prison, in maximum security, as a result.

It is our understanding that the prosecution is seeking yet another publication ban on all future court proceedings in this matter. A pattern has emerged with respect to my husband, Shawn Brant. The police and prosecution make sensational and vilifying statements about Shawn in the media, and then seek a publication ban during court proceedings, when the actual evidence is introduced. The starkly different narrative of events that emerges in court is withheld and the public forbidden from hearing it. The version of events I have just presented will all but disappear.

Less than a month ago, my husband was acquitted of charges he carried for more than 18 months. When issuing the ruling in this acquittal, the judge described the investigative practice and evidence employed and presented by the cops and the Crown as “problematic” and “troubling,” as they related to Shawn. During this same period, CBC Radio aired a documentary in which several Mohawk people recounted conversations with OPP Commissioner Fantino that occurred during the 2007 Aboriginal Day of Action, in which they say he threatened to “ruin” Shawn. During Shawn’s detention at the Napanee OPP detachment last week, several different police officers threatened to “slit his throat” and “cut off his head.”

As I deal with the tears of young children who have been robbed of their father once again, Commissioner Fantino claims the OPP is an apolitical and professional organization, dedicated to upholding the rule of law. The events of the past week indicate it is anything but.

– Sue Collis
Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory

My ugly city, and Christie Blatchford’s contribution to it

I was still reeling from the way the media handled the recent TTC strike when I was subjected to a truly inane article by Christie Blatchford in the Globe and Mail. Comparing the Toronto 18, who I’ve written about before, to the gangsters in the Wire (which I haven’t written about though I did spend 60 hours over the past month or so watching it like the addiction that it is, and I suppose mentioned it during a talk I gave last month), Blatchford showed a spectacular ability to miss the point on both sides of the comparison.

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