Currents

Here is an excerpt from Lyle Neff’s (aka Earnest Canuck’s) recent article about a Mobilization Against War and Occupation-organized hip-hop concert. A version of this article appeared in the Fall ‘07 issue of VR.

“Drury and MAWO aren’t really for peace,” K. said worriedly. “They’re for the other side. They are fans of the jihad. And mainstream publications like 24 Hours aren’t investigating such groups – they’re funding ‘em.”

Yes, they are. Brooding on this, I recalled the hip-hop consciousness of the Mississauga MC Zakaria Amara. Speaking his grassroots truth, comparing Muslims to Canadians, Amara spat out such rhymez as this:

Our sisters are purer
Than your Jennys and your Heathers
The only good thing about you
Is your Tim Horton’s muffin fritters

– just before he and the other Toronto bomb plotters took delivery of the alleged ammonium nitrate. Allegedly. Now, the MAWO cadres may genuinely believe MC Zak to be an unjustly imprisoned casualty of the neo-colonial Islamophobic imperialist apparatus. They have a Charter right to such a belief, the same way we countrymen of Zakaria Da Bomb uphold his freedom to express his frothing, murderous contempt for us.

Did the musicians and performers at MAWO’s circus realize the radical organizers were employing them in defense of blank-eyed little bigots like Amara, though? I suspect most didn’t. That’s why the “enlightened,” political division of hip-hop is almost as dull as the gangster division. Sorry, Kia; it doesn’t matter whether you’re “conscious” or not, if in point of fact you’re oblivious.

The world is a nasty place today (as opposed to yesterday, when everything was just balmy).

Canadian opposition parties throw all their energies into defending a confessed and unrepentant double-murderer. Soon after, Conservatives begin negotiations with contractors to paint the House of Commons blue when Canadians vote them in unanimously in the coming election.

Yasser Arafat aims a laser beam at Jerusalem from beyond the grave. In related news, a new poll shows terrorist heads of thuggish kleptocracies are guaranteed a loving memory by the people they brutalize.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf imposes martial law to deal with the threat of rising Islamic extremism. No one saw that coming, right?

Olympic fever is inciting Chinese parents to use unconventional methods to prod their children into becoming superhuman overachievers. In a linked story, a father in southern China tied his 10-year-old daughter Huang Li’s hands and feet and watched her swim in a chilly river for three hours.

Vancouver residents braved near-torrential rain yesterday to rally for the dissidents in Myanmar.

“I am here today because I cannot tolerate injustice, oppression, violence and the blatant suppression of human rights,” said organizer Deanna Scott. (CNEWS)

Sadly, the junta that is in the process of shooting monks and rounding up the “ringleaders” for mass protests in that poor country probably aren’t paying attention.

If the generals actually cared what the world thought of them, they would have thrown in the towel in the 1980s.

China and Japan prop up the Myanmar regime through investment and economic aid. Until those Asian heavyweights stop lending their support, the junta is free to do what it wants.

It took a massive display of violence to get Canadians and others to wake up to the horror show going on in Myanmar. But it’s a sad truth that international protests can only ever exert real pressure on countries with at least some element of democratic government.

But perhaps this rally will do more than reassure our own guilty consciences. For Myanmar’s oppressed, let’s hope so.

A hefty majority of English-speaking Canadians want to be more fluent in French, according to a new poll from Angus Reid.

Hardly surprising, really. Who wouldn’t want to have a second language?

But Canada is a trading nation within a globalized economy, and French is just one of several international languages that will help our nation thrive. Here in Vancouver, we’ve already got a bit of a head start on the rest of the country.

We ought to be promoting bilingualism anyway. Making an intermediate level of fluency in a second language (not just French, but Mandarin, Cantonese and a bunch of other Asian and European languages) a requirement of getting a university degree might be a good start.

Let’s get the word out.

Everybody and his blog is shouting from the rooftops about the Canadian dollar’s rise to parity with the US greenback.

Frankly, I’m not all that convinced that this is a good thing, particularly for people like me that rely on foreign clients for part of my income. If our currency goes much higher, our international friends are going to go elsewhere.

But I’ve also been hearing a lot from people who are concerned that Canadians are going to undergo the same housing slump that has hit the US. I don’t see it happening, though. In particular, the housing market right here in Vancouver seems set for even more insane prices.

Oh, the housing cycle will eventually take us down. But international investors looking to park their money somewhere are probably going to keep propping up our local housing prices for a little while longer. They won’t want to put their money into the radioactive market to our south, at least until the worst of the fallout subsides. Besides, the Olympics aren’t even here yet.

Patience, first-time home buyers. The time is not yet ripe. But soon…

Doublethink is alive and well around the world.

Canadians and Europeans surveyed in a recent poll strongly support sending United Nations peacekeepers to Iraq to oversee its democratic transition. 58 per cent of Canadians supported the idea (likely a lot less if they’d bothered surveying only the west coast, but whatever)- not exactly wholehearted support, but startling, given that our strained army has its hands full just keeping southern Afghanistan somewhat free of heroin-smuggling, RPG-toting jihadis… and Canadian politicians have thus far had the good sense to keep us the heck away from Baghdad.

The European’s much stronger support is even more eyebrow-raising, given that the UK is in the process of cutting its current troop levels in Iraq, the Italians got out long ago, and the French and Germans opposed armed intervention in Iraq from the get-go.

Just where do the people who took part in the survey think these UN peacekeepers are going to come from: China? Brazil? Cobra Island?

Pollsters, next time, try asking this question: do you support sending soldiers from your country to Iraq - knowing full well that by doing so, your soldiers will become the new priority target for every trigger-happy idiot with a Koran and an AK-74?

This poll is sooooo 2003.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore…

Even the most die-hard Canadian neocons have pretty much washed their hands of George Bush Jr. and his disastrous legacy, if only to salvage their own credibility (FULL DISCLOSURE: I was on the fence when Bush beat Gore as to whether he’d make a good president. Frankly, before 9/11, it didn’t really seem to matter who got in).

Some have gone to the extent of denying Bush true political conservative status. It certainly is possible to make such an argument. But I suspect the impetus for such denials stem from a sort of a twisted counterpoint to Muslims who deny the existence of Islamic terror by simply stating that anyone who commits terrorist acts in the name of Allah cannot possibly be a true Muslim.

Any lingering sympathy by some (but by no means all) Canadian Conservatives for the current Republican administration should be pretty much dealt a death blow by the Bush-ites latest blunder: trying to list the sovereign and official military forces of the Iranian Republican Guard as a terrorist group.

Declaring a War on Terror was a big enough blunder (As BC columnist Norman Spector would say, why not declare war on armored personnel carriers? How about declaring war on flanking movements?). But to compound the error (and the English language’s misery), the Bush administration is now in the business of equating the armed forces of a major regional power with the Shining Path guerrillas or the Red Brigades.

The consequences of such idiocy are as clear as they are lethal (potentially, for the entire planet).

The world knows that Canada is America’s friend. Friends don’t let friends start world wars.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9mYVIudOY0]
Canada’s best and brightest are going where the opportunity is: right here in the true north.

The brain drain to the US is finally slowing to a trickle, Vancouver blogger and technologist David Drucker points out, with Vancouver Sun in hand. Indeed, Americans are coming Canadians in increasing numbers. Will the movement of gray matter finally reverse itself entirely?

Probably, right around the time that the Canadian dollar reaches parity with the US greenback. Right now, the USA is the number one target for bad guys all over the world, with a declining economy and increasingly unrepresentative political system.

Canada has its own set of problems, but whether it’s the economy, politics or just the ability to stay out of the firing line no matter where our foreign policy goes, the smart money seems to be on Canada these days. If anyone has a reputation for following the smart money, it’s our southern neighbors.

Just like Microsoft testing the waters in Vancouver, it’s a sign of the times.

In the latest self-inflicted blow to Canadian sovereignty, a judge has ruled that our border guards need warrants to search vehicles of people coming into this country.

In the process, the judge threw out the drug-smuggling case against Ajitpal Singh Sekhon, who had attempted to import 50 kilograms of cocaine past a Vancouver-area border crossing.

This comes after unarmed Canadian border agents in 2006 abandoned their posts en masse and literally ran for their lives at the approach of murder suspects from the USA.

Oh, well. The border’s really just an imaginary line on a map, anyway.