JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

I don’t think senators have any business advising a church or other private organization about how they should act concerning an ethical/moral problem.

The only way we will see any change towards fairness and justice is pressure applied to Israel, just as pressure was applied to South Africa.

South Africa, by the way, in its heyday of apartheid, was a good partner with Israel trading strategic materials for nuclear weapon technology among other items. That is simply an unarguable truth.

We have a very peculiar problem here because the United States’ government – owing to its insane money-based campaign funding – is proven incapable of exerting any pressure for justice.

Indeed, we regularly see the opposite with people like Newt Gingrich saying that “There are no such thing as Palestinians,” an exact repetition of an old Israeli government line first uttered by Golda Meir.

Dick Armey, former Majority Leader in Congress, used to go on about how Israel should just push all the millions of Palestinians across the Jordan River.

Does anyone believe that men in important positions say such outlandish things out of any motivation other than attracting large campaign funds?

The unethical and brutal practices of Israel are apparent to all people not blinded by ideology or desperate for campaign funds: abusive occupation of millions, regular property theft through specially-made laws, regular murderous raids, imprisonment of thousands with no proper legal proceedings, contempt for international laws and treaties, contempt for UN mandates, assassinations on a large scale, torture, and deprivation of means of making a living.

Only today the story has hit some of the press that Arafat was likely poisoned with polonium (his clothing tested for it), much like the famous case in London involving a Russian émigré. Now, who in the Middle East has access to such radioactive material?

There is simply no question – that is again, unless you are an ideologue – where all this is headed: towards making people miserable enough to go away, leaving their property to Israel.

It is a genuinely appalling situation, but as soon as you try calling attention to it, you are sure to be called a “Jew hater” by the platoons of apologists who work overtime scrutinizing every publication and broadcast.

And, sadly, now Canada has a government buying into the same American system – loud and even irrational public support for one of the world’s smallest countries of almost no interest to most Canadians in return for generous campaign donations – making it harder than ever to see even scraps of justice.

Israel could make everyone happy simply by declaring peace and treating its neighbors with decency. Go back to the Green Line, stop abusing and starting wars endlessly, and gain the world’s admiration.

It could have done so at any time for decades, but it deliberately chooses not to do so.

Then only genuine pressures can possibly make a difference.
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The United Church was long known for a strong social conscience, and it participated in many worthy causes.

We unfortunately have not heard much from them lately on that score.

Likely, were they to return to those worthy roots, membership and support would increase.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JUDITH TIMSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The only part of this piece worth reading is the way Judith Timson starts it with her and the kiddies having a gay old time at a past Pride Parade, describing it the way some suburban housewife might describe the family’s being at Disney World. She only left out Granny.

“The mood was celebratory on that early summer day as we stood shoulder to shoulder with a gay elementary-school vice-principal….”

Note the use of words like “celebratory” and “early summer day” to set a mood.

And don’t you just love the “shoulder to shoulder” bit, as though Ms. Timson were describing a World War II rally for Rosie the Riveter or describing her participation in a March on Selma Alabama in the 1950s?

This is a classic technique of the propagandist: it might be called the benign, fairy dream, and its purpose is merely to serve as a prop to be knocked over by what follows.

The insincerity here almost grips one like an unwanted waft of heavy cheap cologne.

Gay Pride’s history is not like that at all.

Anything resembling Ms. Timson’s fairy story is a very recent, rather sanitized occurrence. I lived in Toronto during the days of police raids and arbitrary arrests. And anyone knows, or should know, that the Pride Parade was early on treated in Toronto as a somewhat shameful, reluctantly-permitted event.

Much like the way Toronto always had, years ago, a grim King Billy Parade instead of a joyous St. Patrick’s Parade.

The point is that gay people have a history of fighting injustice and oppression, and many of them are still at it, and those latter are the ones who insisted on the right to express themselves on Israeli apartheid.

And I’m sorry, Ms. Timson, but the word “apartheid” is absolutely accurate. We have Nelson Mandela, Bishop Tutu and Jimmy Carter as just some of our star witnesses for the state of affairs in Israel, all honourable men with an intimate understanding of injustice and abuse, Jimmy Carter, by the way, having been labelled an anti-Semite in Israel for stating the plain truth.

Once Jews very much shared that quality we see in many gays, ready to defend the downtrodden, but today it does seem a majority of them serve as apologists for abuse and injustice and killing instead, just so long as the abuse and injustice and killing are done by Israel.

This is a shameful column, written to defend the indefensible, but I’m thankful there are a lot of others, brave gay people in Toronto, ready to stand both for free speech and against oppression.

TWO POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN THE GUARDIAN BY OLIVER KAMM

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

Safer for whom, Oliver Kamm?

For the more than 600,000 murdered by Bush in Iraq?

For the tens of thousands murdered in Afghanistan, including the 3,000 prisoners who were driven out to the desert in vans to be suffocated?

For the thousands of prisoners of the CIA’s International Torture Gulag?

For the abused and tortured of Abu Ghraib?

For the abused and tortured of Guantanamo?

For the millions of lives shattered in Iraq, a place that once was on the cusp of modernity and prosperity?

This has to be the most breathtakingly dumb piece of writing I’ve seen in years
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Apart from my question of safer for whom, citing the piles of Bush victims, the world is not a safer place for many other reasons, Oliver Kamm.

First, suppression of human rights all over the Western world is no light thing. There is nothing ‘safe’ about living in a police state or a quasi-police state the U.S. has become under Bush. The Bill of Rights has virtually been suspended.

Second, people of Arabic origin or of Muslim beliefs are now routinely abused and insulted in many Western countries, especially in the United States.

Third, a wave of hatred and injustice is rippling through the Muslim world. That isn’t just going to go away. Bush’s approach has been the approach of Israel, which today remains a garrison state with no peace and defended by walls and brutality, a long-term untenable position, besides being a shining example of ethically-hollow behavior.

Fourth, Bush’s oppression and killing abroad have been closely paralleled by an almost unprecedented grant of license to Israel to behave as brutally and ruthlessly as it wishes towards Palestinians and other neighbors.

A genuinely horrible situation has grown up, and no open-minded person can possibly look at Israel’s wretched behavior in Gaza and in Lebanon and towards Syria without some revulsion. Nothing, absolutely nothing, Apartheid South Africa did has not been repeated by Israel towards its neighbors, and, of course, that includes infamous mass killings of poor blacks by South African troops and mass imprisonments with no rights or justice.

Fifth, Bush has also set aside the Geneva Conventions and other important international treaties, including that safeguarding the rights of child soldiers. No meaningful sense of safety comes from this arrogance.

He has practiced new bizarre doctrines, giving the example to other states to do the same in future, as, for example, pre-emptive strikes on suspects and high-tech assassinations. These provide another measure of the ‘Israelization’ of American policy. Imagine a world in which every state claims this philosophy?

What has happened overall in the world under Bush is a series of steps away from democratic principles. Even if America had the most vigorous and fair democracy, something that is demonstrably not the case, when its leaders decide the fates of so many others, its tiny group of electors (maybe 1% or less of the world’s people, taking into account many Americans do not even vote) effectively acts like an aristocracy vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

You cannot claim democratic values and behave this way. After all, the Communist Party of China rules more than a billion people with almost the same percentage of representation.

The United States and Israel have given democracy a bad name in much of the emerging world. After all, in the special limited sense they claim to be democratic, so was Apartheid South Africa or the American Confederacy or the Britain of George III.