New Media

Canadian Native groups are protesting to “Make First Nations Poverty History”. I’m not certain whether protests will actually make employers across the country want to hire more Natives or give existing employees raises, or whether it will inspire Natives to start more of their own businesses to meet their objective.

It certainly isn’t likely to cause the feds to actually consider the Liberals’ scheme to just funnel $5.1 billion to Native communities without any method of accountability.

Still, it certainly is a laudable goal and the protests will raise visibility on an issue that is far too easy for most of the country to ignore. Canada is booming, government coffers are still overflowing and Natives certainly should be able to remedy some of their historic economic inequities. Best of luck.

But to the idiots led by Shawn Brant holding up Highway 2 in Ontario, remember: you don’t bring guns, masks, camouflage gear to a protest, at least not in this country. Put away the guns and play nice.

My recent blog post on the MetroBlogging Vancouver website about a recent protest in downtown Vancouver against Islamic terrorism and political Islam seems to have found a way around the laws of thermodynamics, generating much heat, but little light amongst some of its readership.

A brief excerpt of the post is as follows:

There were various groups represented outside the VAG: The Worker-Communist Party of Iran, the Third Camp and others. These people are opposed to Western militarism. They’re no Fox News propagandists.

But today, they were protesting Iran’s atrocious human rights record, persecution of women activists and the torture of political prisoners.

They weren’t doing this to argue for some kind of military response – actually, their sign specifically said no to war. But they were protesting the negative and violent consequences of political Islam – overseas, as well as right here in Canada.

Finally, some of the people who take part in Vancouver’s very active peace movement seem to be making the distinction that protesting brutal anti-Western dictatorships doesn’t make you a stooge of George W. Bush – it just means you have a conscience.

I’ve received a number of comments alternately implying I’m a propagandist for George W. Bush, an ahistorical hack and quite possibly an apologist for the Ku Klux Klan. Rather than try to confront these outrageous assertions on the MetroBlogging site and clogging up its comment space, I’m moving this stupidity over to my own site, where I can hopefully get everything out of the way at once.

Following a response to a BeyondRobson blogger Sean Orr has left the following comments:

Umm…I’m pretty sure that by demonstrating “against the evils of Western imperialism, US and Israeli militarism and Canadian participation in the the United Nations’ mission in Afghanistan” they are by proxy protesting against the political impetus that fuels Islamic Terrorism.

So, what you’re saying is that when Iranians chant “death to America”, what they’re really demonstrating against by proxy is… terrorism and human rights abuses committed in the name of political Islam? Is that right? Well, in that case, we’re all on the same side, and just didn’t know it! Hooray!

But I digress. In response to his next comment, I stated simply that not all Islamist terrorism was a reaction to Western imperialism.

Possibly, just possibly, some of the people who would like to blow up buses in London, hijack planes and fly them into buildings, or behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Allah’s name are motivated by old fashioned racial hatred, ethnic nationalism and good dose of mental illness. Indeed, since most Islamic terror is actually directed against fellow Muslims, not Westerners, at least part of it could reasonably be explained by the factors I’ve mentioned above.

Orr’s response to my comment follows:

Name one example before Western Influence in the region. Name one time there was a suicide bombing. The only one I can think of is the bombing of the Hotel Daivid by extremist Jews.

My response:

Sean, your response is exactly what I was blogging about. Thanks for making your own position clear to all, in any case.

Have a great weekend, and say hello to Osama for me.

With his last comment, Orr effectively excused every single act of terror, state or freelance, carried out in the name of political Islam. This is exactly what the protesters last week were demonstrating against. Essentially, he has supported by default the position of Al Queda: that all Western influence (not merely military, but cultural, economic and religious) is a monstrous evil that must be fought to the death, Muslims are always victims, and all types of violence against Westerners, civilian or military, is justified because it is resistance.

Orr’s response:

Oh I get it, because Israel was founded on terrorism (Stern Gang, Irgun), then I am automatically in favour of a different religion’s terrorism. Logic much?

Actually, my response had made no reference to Israel. I only pointed out the depravity of always condemning violence by Western forces and always choosing to dodge the issue of condemning violence perpetrated in Allah’s name.

My response, to clarify things:

By your words, you liken Westerners and Western thought to some kind of lethal contagion that ought to be fought violently – much as racist North Americans about one hundred years ago justified their attacks on Chinatowns or the KKK in the American South justified their own lynching of black people.

I repeated the example in a later comment. Sadly, my metaphor seems to have been misinterpreted in the worst possibly way. In addition to inspiring Orr’s next completely irrelevant spam comment (simply copying and pasting a lengthy partial historical list of Western militarism in the Middle East – tsk, tsk, my friend), another MetroBlogging author, Jeffery Simpson, has chosen to offer the following:

Okay but I’m going to have to take exemption with the example of the KKK. While clearly the KKK had their own motivation for their actions let’s not forget that the African Americans were enslaved, brought to America and were generally following the post-Civil War Constitutional Amendments when the KKK began to target them. They were nowhere near as proactive in causing the KKK to hate them as America has been in angering fanatics in the middle east.

Um, Jeffery, are you seriously suggesting that black people were “proactive” at all in causing the Ku Klux Klan to hate them? I really hope that I’m somehow misreading you. Am I?

In any case, that is certainly not my position. Indeed, senseless racial hatred was the root cause of the persectution of black people in the American South. I’m only claiming that the same sort of base racial-ethnic hatred would seem to apply a
t least partially in the case of terrorism motivated by terrorists blowing up buses for Allah.

The comments on my MetroBlogging post certainly haven’t refuted the central thesis of that post. If anything, they only seem to furnish more examples of making excuses for kidnappers, murderers and suicide bombers. So I throw down the gaunlet:

To Sean Orr, all his super-cool buddies, and anyone who has attended a rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery protesting the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, or imperialism (old fashioned, or neo-; it’s all good):

I’m perfectly willing to say that George W. Bush is a dink, the US-led invasion of Iraq has been a catastrophe and Israel’s occupation of parts of the West Bank and the Golan Heights gives Arabs heartburn, diarrheah and impotence.

Are you willing to admit that the violence and atrocities committed by Al Queda, the Taliban and affiliated psycho nut jobs is horrible and ought to be condemned in no uncertain terms?

Will you say plainly that jihadi terrorists who want to blow up Canadians are scum?

Are you able to say with a straight face that people who blow up dozens or hundreds of people in a crowded market anywhere in the world are deluded, diabolical bastards… without adding a clause starting with “but”?

I’m waiting…

>You know the hands-off approach to living alongside Aboriginal people isn’t working when the government has to call in the army to protect the band’s children from the parents.

Canadian Aboriginals held off from the predicted round of roadblocks and mass protests for a National Day of Action this week, presumably because the feds have decided to speed up treaty negotiations (since more than a century was probably seen as a little too long of a wait). It’s not just about the treaties, of course. Canadian First Nations are understandably upset over the Third-World conditions prevalent on their reserves as well as the almost-as-bad outcomes for Natives off reserve.

But as bad as things are on Canadian reserves, Australian Aborigine communities seem to taken it to the next level. The Australian government has mobilized the army to restore order on Aborigine reserves, where sexual abuse of children has pretty much become the norm.

Some Australian Aboriginal groups are complaining it smacks of racism. But from a pragmatic approach, if the Canadian government found out that virtually every family in Vancouver’s Kitsilano had started molesting their own kids as well as their neighbors, you’d expect a pretty heavy-handed response.

The reserve system hasn’t worked. Providing incentives for Aboriginals to live on poor, unproductive land, isolated from the rest of the nation, has resulted in pretty much what you’d expect of any group of people put in that kind of situation: total poverty and anarchy.

Giving the land back and evacuating the tens of millions of newcomers isn’t an option. Treaties will only go so far in alleviating the tragedy, whether in Canada or Australia. The only real option for the ones living on the worst of the reserves is for the government to pay to move them to whichever of the big cities or functioning reserves they want and tear down the ones that have already fallen apart from the inside.

You thought living in Vancouver was expensive? Try living with one million per cent inflation.

Zimbabwean President (for now) Robert Mugabe has essentially committed economic suicide for his country. Confiscating farmland and turning it over to violent but lazy cronies has turned the former bread basket into an agricultural basketcase. Infrastructure that used to be on par with some European countries is now equal to that of war zones like Afghanistan. Now diplomats are suggesting that already-nightmarish 3,700 per cent inflation in Zimbabwe could hit the million mark by the end of 2007.

When Mugabe’s thugs realize they’re going to have to push a wheelbarrow full of Zimbabwean dollars to the corner store just for a pack of smokes, they’ll turn on him.

Mugabe was likely just following the model of other dictators before him: regulate private enterprise and shrink the economy to the point where the government becomes the sole reliable source of sustenance. When the choice is to toe the government line or starve, everyone is a true believer.

The problem for Mugabe is that he did his work too well, too fast.

If anything, the situation is instructive of how fast and how far you can run a prosperous country off the rails if you’re really trying.

We may have to start rethinking that self-image of Canada as a first world nation getting its economy exploited like a third world banana republic.

Yes, our economy is still far too reliant on raw commodities exports. And, yes, virtually anytime a Canadian company gets big enough to get noticed, it gets taken over by multinational sharks.

But for the first time ever, we’re on the verge of becoming a creditor nation. Assuming we continue to ride the jetstream of petro-dollars and surplus federal budgets, our economy will be in the black by 2010.

Then we can just plug our surplus into a giant RSP for all of our citizens and we’ll be on our way to joining the ranks of Sweden and Denmark.