Here is the real road to peace

From Ha'aretz:

Author questioned for allegedly smuggling Palestinians into Israel for a day of fun

. . . Avoiding the security forces at West Bank checkpoints, they took the women out to eat in a restaurant in Jaffa, swimming in the Mediterranean, and took them home via Jerusalem where they could see the Old City walls from afar. . . Most of the Palestinians had never seen the sea or visited certain holy places. None of them had permits to enter Israel. . .

They had grown up less than an hour away, but they had never seen the sea.

The outrage of Zionism is that it proposes that a Jew who cannot trace a single ancestor to anywhere near Palestine should have a greater right - a "birthright" - to live and travel in that land than an Arab whose family has lived and worked there for generations. That is why those of us who have no other ill-feeling towards Jews or Judaism find the Zionist project to be so morally nauseating.

Peace will not come from the hollow theatrics on now display in Washington and New York. Peace will come when ordinary people resolve, as Ilana Hammerman did, to disregard the racist laws that maintain the status quo. Ordinary people have to act first, and only then will the leaders be dragged, kicking and screaming.

Spot the darkies

From this weekend's anti-mosque protest in New York.

There are, by my count, at least two clearly non-white people in the photo, one in the foreground and one in the background, and at least 2 people of ambiguous ethnicity.

I'll acknowledge that the anti-Islam movement is an open tent. It's just that only white people seem real anxious to go in.

September 11th

On September 11th, 1973, the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was ousted in a bloody coup by a military junta, led by Army General Augusto Pinochet.



As the military surrounded the presidential complex in Santiago, captured government workers were laid in front of tanks, and those remaining inside were told that if they did not surrender, the tanks would roll over their colleagues. Allende himself was found dead - according eye-witnesses he had been killed by machine-gun fire. According to the new regime, Allende had committed suicide.

The Pinochet regime went on, in partnership with other fascist South American governments and support of the CIA and US State Department under Henry Kissinger, to hunt down South American activists associated with leftist movements, in what became known as "Operation Condor."

(If you're interested in knowing more, the events of that day are presented in further detail in a documentary by the same name, subtitled "The Last Stand of Salvador Allende." It's a riveting and sometimes heartbreaking watch. The US State Department has also declassified a large volume of material which is now available online here, although large passages are redacted.)

The significance of what happened on September 11th, 2001 is not diminished by the fact that it shares a date with a massacre that happened in another country, exactly 28 years prior. It's historical significance lies in the fact that people from other countries were responsible for the deaths of thousands of people on American soil.

The reverse is usually the case.

Presumptions

An excellent piece by an inspiring man:

Muslims habitually judged before trial

. . . When we do speak up, we are expected only to assert our "Canadian-ness," rather than raise serious questions about due process and intelligence agencies with poor human rights records -- questions shared by many Canadians and sorely in need of addressing. . .

My prediction, based upon not only the content by the style of reporting that has followed this case, is that we will see essentially the same pattern that emerged in the "Toronto 18" case: most of those accused will be found to have been innocent bystanders, the danger will be found to have been exaggerated, and one or two people convicted who displayed malice not exceeding their own bumbling stupidity.

The announcement

For those of you who aren't sure what exactly it means that the Canadian government is "matching" funds donated for flood relief in Pakistan, here is the government's own announcement, through the CIDA website.

http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/acdi-cida/ACDI-CIDA.nsf/eng/NAD-82282153-GHR

Note that the funds must be donated to a registered charity in order to qualify for being matched, and must be received by September 12th.