JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Canada “mulls” future with an important United Nations’ agency?

This kind of politically-motivated, special-interest blubbering casts a very dark shadow on Lester Pearson’s distinguished career and achievements in international affairs.

Our dear current foreign minister is again working hard to destroy Canada’s international reputation for fairness and decency, but of course that’s what his boss Stephen Harper has worked ceaselessly towards since holding office, and we know no one utters a word on anything in this government that hasn’t been pre-approved by the chair-throwing leader, even his almost uncontrollably angry and nasty gorilla boy, Baird.

Good God, aren’t the Palestinians to be considered as full human beings unless Israel nods to say they are?
And just consider in whose company Baird’s words place us: Just the other day, Israel’s foreign Minister Lieberman made clear public threats to murder Mr. Abbas over these matters. And those threats come after numberless others from a man who is just about as much a lowlife as you would find in any dictatorship on the planet.

But no objections are ever made by the United States, a country which actually believes it stands for human rights and democratic principles: indeed, we hear the opposite, that the United States will stop funding the agency, in effect reneging on treaties and long-standing obligations. Do it my way, or I’ll take my things and go home is the glorious response of our freedom-loving neighbour.

And why is that?

Because Obama is in political trouble, and he needs campaign funds and good press, just the things the American Israel lobby is in a position to grant or withhold.

So all sense of fairness is cast aside by Obama in pursuit of re-election, a man who has proven himself a weak and ineffective president in just about every respect, except when measured by the number of his extra-judicial killings by drone, which is now in the thousands.

And of course, running after Obama is Stephen Harper, desperately running along behind like the neighborhood’s most unpleasant brat trying to gain favour yelling “Me too!”

And there’s another aspect of Pearson’s distinguished legacy disappearing: when Lyndon Johnson demanded Canada send troops to Vietnam – he actually grabbed Pearson by the lapels – Pearson had the guts to say no.

From Harper, we get Canada volunteering for whatever stupid and demeaning job he sees before the United States even asks.

How low we’ve fallen.

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“Here are a few excerpts from the Hamas charter…”

Well, how many terrible things has Hamas actually done compared to what we know Israel has done?

When was the last time Hamas killed 400 Israeli children?

When was the last time Hamas pirated ships on the high seas, killing 9 people only trying to deliver humanitarian assistance?

When was the last time Hamas or any other organization dropped a million horrible cluster bombs inside Israel, as Israel did in Southern Lebanon?

When was the last time Hamas held ten thousand Israelis as illegal prisoners?

When was the last time Hamas removed hundreds of Israelis from their homes and just stole them?

When was the last time Hamas openly murdered scores of highly-placed Israelis?

And have you ever read the bloody horrors of the Old Testament?

Huge sections of it are packed with violence, ruthlessness, intolerance, arbitrary rules for everything, and just plain hatred of others.

And it is the Old Testament ideas governing Israel in many aspects, courtesy of the ultra-Orthodox parties who always make up the balance of power there.

Read those ghastly stories of war and murder and rape and slavery and weird laws about what cloth you may wear and what food you may eat, and, yes, how women are totally subservient to men, how a child should be sacrificed if his father believes he hears God demanding it, and you will understand why Israel respects none of its neighbors and has attacked most of them more than once.

And, oh, it could not be clearer in the Old Testament that all non-Jews are inferior beings, not to be spared any brutality – nothing Hamas or any other Arabic group has ever written and accepted is more poisonous than that.

Some basis for a state in the 21st century. A state which demands to be recognized as a one-religion state, a state which even today treats all its non-Jewish citizens as second-class at best.

And if you have a very dark sense of humor you will enjoy the bad joke of a Jews-only democracy, surely no different in concept to an Islamic state.

Of course, if Israelis find Muslims so repulsive and backward, we might ask why the founders of modern Israel insisted on creating it in a place totally inhabited with and surrounded by them?

Makes a lot of sense to me.
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“The entire UN is corrupt.”

Then why does Israel always wave the UN documents which – under pressure from foreign powers – mandated its creation?

Your expressed view is ridiculous.

The entire rest of the planet’s population is corrupt because it doesn’t do what a tiny population in Israel demands?

Of course, you also neglect the fact that Israel stands in contempt of a host of UN resolutions. Being in contempt of just one has been used as an American excuse for bombing others.