New Media

In light of polls that make me doubt whether many of my fellow Canadians truly understand what’s at stake in Afghanistan, I’d like to go over a few assumptions I have about my fellow citizens.

If you ask Canadians whether respect for human rights ought to be universal, everyone will agree.

If you ask them whether Canadians ought to care much about people who live beyond our borders, the vast majority will agree that we should (and the slim minority who oppose this can go rot).

If you ask them whether we should surrender to thugs who throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, shoot humanitarian workers with automatic weapons, and use children as bomb delivery units, only a few cowardly and soulless Canucks would dare to say “aye” to that.

If you ask Canadians whether we should allow hundreds of thousands of people, or even millions, to fall victim to such thugs and the violence they bring, when as a rich and developed nation we have the capacity to stop this evil, I cannot believe that most would agree to that.

If you ask under what circumstances Canadians might use their military to fight such threats far beyond our borders, certainly most would agree that it must be a multilateral, international effort given sanction by the United Nations.

When it comes to Afghanistan, I think most Canadians support this mission. The pollsters just need to start asking the right questions.

I was given the opportunity to answer some questions for CNN on the issue of Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan from the perspective of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. The essence of my remarks: “We’re for a robust involvement, and if [Afghanistan] is going to get back on its feet after decades of war, it’s only going to do so with huge international involvement. So, more, not less.”

See the full story at In Canada, Afghanistan not ‘forgotten’

Happy Earth Day, everyone! If you’re not sure how to make the Earth a greener place, here are a few ideas that you won’t find on David Suzuki’s homepage:

1. Set off massive electromagnetic pulses in major cities around the planet to render all vehicles inert. No cars, no carbon footprint.

2. Forced evacuation of cities like Calgary that seem to have been built with the exact opposite of sustainability principles in mind. Write off the loss as a giant tax credit for all Canadians.

3. Have poachers of endangered land and marine species sent to live in Sudbury, Ontario. Do the same to their friends and families.

4. Break into a lab and unleash a zombie plague to reduce the number of consumers.

5. Eat all kittens and puppies. Pets just use up more of our scarce resources.

Congratulations to a friend who has inspired me to a greater cause these past few years, acclaimed BC author and journalist Terry Glavin. He has won the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2009, for his contribution to life and letters in British Columbia and for his willingness to show us how to see our world more deeply, more fully and more truthfully.

As always, I am proud to know him. For readers who may not be familiar with his work, here is an abridged version of the official writeup from the BC Book Prizes site:

Terry Glavin is the author of six books and co-author of four, traversing a variety of subjects from anthropology to natural history. Terry is the editor of Transmontanus Books, an adjunct professor in the creative writing department at the University of British Columbia and a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines as diverse as Democratiya (UK), Lettre International (Berlin), the Vancouver Review, Seed Magazine (US) and the National Post. His most recent book, Waiting for the Macaws and Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions (Penguin Canada), has been published under separate titles in Canada, the US, the United Kingdom and Germany. His literary awards include the Hubert Evans Prize for non-fiction, and his essays have earned more than a dozen national and regional awards in a variety of categories, including travel writing, science writing and editorial innovation. He lives in Victoria.

“Terry Glavin, author and journalist, is an outspoken British Columbian, a science writer, an avocational historian and a conservationist. He is well known for his passionate commitment to the oral literature of British Columbia’s First Nations, the untold stories of the working class and the relationships between the human imagination and the diverse landscapes west of the Rocky Mountains.

Tamil protesters on Parliament Hill in Ottawa have made their position on supporting terror quite clear, even if some anyonymous CTV headline writer seems determined to delude their readership.

The quote, from protest spokesperson Senthan Nada, asked whether they support the Tamil Tiger terrorist group now getting a furious spanking from Sri Lankan forces: “Our pictures show innocent children and women who are the victims and I don’t know how people can misinterpret and say that we are only standing for the Tamil freedom fighters.”

Clearly, he doesn’t mean the innocent children and women are “freedom fighters” – the same term propagandists have used for decades when their own people engage in terrorist actions. The only plausible conclusion is that the protesters consider the Tamil Tigers fighting the army to be freedom fighters. See, they’re not just standing with the women and children, they’re ALSO standing for the people reportedly using the local Tamil population of women and children as human shields.

The headline, “Tamil protesters deny support for terrorist group” just doesn’t fly. Thanks, CTV, we have no need for a Ministry of Truth.

These are brave women.

Afghanistan needs help from outside if it’s ever going to recover from decades of predation by the Taliban and its foreign backers. But Afghanistan’s progress depends on the courage and resilience of its own people – in this case, it’s women – to hold on to their hard-won rights. Their courage will be in vain if the world washes its hands out of disgust with Karzai and turns its back on the ones under siege.

From the Times Online:
Women protesting in Kabul against a controversial new law were pelted with stones, jostled and spat on today as they held what is believed to be the first public demonstration calling for equal rights for women in recent Afghan history.

“I am not afraid. Women have always been oppressed throughout history,” Zara, an 18-year-old student from Kabul told The Times, as men in the crowd surrounding her jostled and screamed abuse. “This law is against the dignity of women and all the international community opposes it. The US President calls it abhorrent. Don’t you see that actually we are the majority?”

Meanwhile, back in Canada, Irshad Manji appears to have smoked a year’s supply of crack. Summing up Karzai’s gutless and unconstitutional political gambit, she writes:

But does violating innocents to pre-empt further violence makes sense?

Sadly, yes, and not just because the strategists say so. Culture is among the most obstinate forces anywhere…

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Karzai’s move against women’s rights doesn’t pre-empt violence. It’s a gutless, short term political tactic that will only embolden the Taliban and other extremist thugs in Afghanistan in the long term. We’ve had a harsh reminder in Swat about what happens to women, and to your society overall, when you give in to the fanatics.