New Media

As our forces move North to reassert Canuckistan’s iron grip on the True North, Heart of Oak may be the more appropriate tune, but Zep seems appropriate in this instance as well:

We come from the land of the ice and snow,
From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.
The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands,
To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!

Canadian Forces Operation Nanook 09. Soldier on.

Talk about a guy who can’t take a joke. It is now against the law to make a joke about Pakistani President Asif Zardari in an email, blog or text message. We may laugh about this in Canada, but due to Canadian law, we’re not so far from this kind of stupidity and infringement on freedom of speech as you might think.

Getting back to Pakistan’s new law for the moment, violations can get you a 14-year stint in the clink. Since I don’t live in Pakistan and have no plans to visit, I figure it’s safe for me to at least repeat my favorite zinger first reported in the Digital Journal:

“Robber: “Give me all your money!” Zardari: “Don’t you know who I am? I am Asif Ali Zardari.” Robber: “OK. Give me all my money!”

Seriously, a country that six weeks ago looked to be on the verge of being hijacked by the Taliban and remains a hotbed of terrorism and violence doesn’t have better priorities for police resources?

But Canadians can’t get smug over this. Fact is, we’ve got our own gag laws already in place when it comes to poking fun at our political leaders. Canadian defamation legislation hasn’t changed that much since, well, before Confederation. That’s why there are no Canadian versions of John Stewart or Stephen Colbert. Rebecca Addelman explained in the Walrus in The Last Laugh:

When This Hour Has 22 Minutes comedian Mary Walsh told Preston Manning that his speech was “more edifying in the original German,” the Reform Party threatened to sue. Had they followed through, it would have been up to Walsh and her producers to prove what they implied was true—that Preston Manning was a fascist. Of course, we all know it was a joke and not all jokes are true. But when a joke damages someone’s reputation, then it’s no longer funny—it’s libellous.

Since TV producers are generally working with smaller budgets than their American counterparts, even the hint of a lawsuit is to be avoided at all costs. So the script writers for Canadian comedies take the easy road: self-censorship.

Pakistan’s new law would be beyond the pale here, so we can laugh at it. But as is often the case, the joke just isn’t as funny in Canada.

You want to help inform Canadian students about what Islam is really about and create the leaders of the future, so you bring in “the shrewdest Hamas propagandist in the English-speaking world”. What could possibly go wrong?

An Islamic history and culture course at Toronto’s Ryerson University launches this week, July 24-27. This is the chosen vehicle for the Al-Fauz Institute for Islamic Thought’s endeavors to educate Muslim youth about Islamic values and provide context for the “issues experienced in the daily lives of Muslims in the pluralistic Canadian society”. But intrepid investigative journalist Terry Glavin has the scoop in the National Post on why the person delivering these lectures, Azzam Tamimi, seems particularly ill-suited to this organization’s stated mission:

Tamimi has loudly renounced democracy, explicitly praises suicide bombers, and he’s said he’d even be happy to blow himself up in Israel: “It’s the straight way to pleasing my God and I would do it if I had the opportunity.” Tamimi distinguishes good Muslims from their adversaries this way: “We love death. They love life.”

Tamimi recently proclaimed: “I don’t believe in democracy anymore,” and it was at an anti-Israel rally in Dublin only three months ago that Tamimi declared: “With regard to their attitudes to liberation, I say ‘Long Live the Taliban’.”

And we’re just getting started. An excerpt from MEMRI’s report on Tamimi in regard to September 11 and the Taliban Regime:

In an interview with the Spanish daily La Vanguardia titled ‘I Admire the Taliban, They Are Courageous’ in late 2001, Al-Tamimi claimed that the September 11 attacks brought joy to the Arab world. He begins by assuring the interviewer that “everyone” in the Arab world cheered upon seeing the Twin Towers fall. “Excuse me,” says the interviewer, “did you understand my question?” Al-Tamimi: “In the Arab and Muslim countries, everyone jumped for joy. That’s what you asked me, isn’t it?”

Not interested in international relations? Here are Tamimi’s ideas on attaining domestic bliss, spoken at a Cambridge University event, as captured in the MEMRI report:

Dr. Al-Tamimi firstly said that beating was the last in a series of three steps that husbands could use to ‘discipline’ errant wives (a ripple of concern swept the audience at this point), so to concentrate on beating alone was to miss that. But Dr. Al-Tamimi also said that he was regularly surprised why this verse was such a concern to Westerners since he knew of many Arab women who regularly asked their husbands to beat them…

This is the guy that Al-Fauz want to help them to “prepare Muslim advisors and scholars to serve the needs of their communities and generations to come” — here in Canada?

Surely there are more suitable candidates out there somewhere. Perhaps someone who isn’t pulling for the Taliban while our troops are going toe-to-toe with these thugs on the battlefield? Could be a good start.

But that’s the thing: The Al-Fauz Institute knew who Tamimi was when they hired him for this gig. This gives us some pretty clear insight into the kind of values they hold and would like to instill in Canadian society.

I’m guessing the history course at Ryerson won’t actually teach anything all that contentious. The curriculum covers topics like Islamic history, language studies and “personal development”. They’re not going to teach how to make a bomb and blow yourself up in Tel Aviv (or Toronto, for that matter). But that doesn’t matter.

This is just a first point of contact. Many students in this course may be incorporated in Tamimi and the Al-Fauz Institute’s network for a long time after these first lectures. What other lessons do they have in store? Who’s their next guest lecturer: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Look for more of this from the “leaders of the future”:

The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, arguably the greatest collective achievement in the history of the human race, has arrived. Did you remember?

July 20, 1969, ought to be a date burnt into the memory of every living human being, right up there with your birthday or national celebrations like Independence Day. Yet, if not for the fair amount of media coverage this month, this July 20 would have come and gone without any notice from myself and a good number of my fellow citizens.

Why? Is it because the moon landing is seen as an American achievement, rather than a global one? Does the rest of the world’s latent and growing anti-Americanism feed into this? Is it the result of (easily debunked) Internet conspiracy theories that the moon landings were actually filmed in a secret Hollywood studio? Is it because human beings naturally have a “been there, done that” mentality that automatically downgrades all events down to an interesting but relatively unremarkable blip on the continuum of human history?

There are those who suggest the moon landing was a mistake. Some would say it was a terrible allocation of resources we might have put towards, say, topping up our social security pension funds. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld joked that the mission’s main benefit was to annoying whiners and complainers:

We never should have landed a man on the moon. It’s a mistake. Now everything is compared to that one accomplishment. I can’t believe they could land a man on the moon . . . and taste my coffee!… They can’t make a prescription bottle top that’s easy to open?… Neil Armstrong should have said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for every complaining SOB on the face of the Earth. “

We can joke about it, but the mission to the moon really hints at the kind of accomplishments human beings can accomplish in our own societies.

Putting aside the technological advances required to send a spacecraft to an alien world 384,392 kilometers away, the countless dangers the astronauts overcame in the moon mission were literally unprecedented:

You and your brave colleagues are put into a giant tin can that might just blow up on liftoff. If it doesn’t blow up on the launching pad, it might just break up somewhere further up, spreading your ashes across the ocean. If you get that far, now you have to get through the vast and utterly lethal expanse of freezing space where unknown cosmic radiation emanates from countless stars.

You survive the flight over, and now you have to land on the moon without crashing. You know that if there’s a problem, you’re stuck. There will be no rescue mission. A quick science fiction-inspired death from alien monsters scratching at your hull might actually be preferable to succumbing slowly and hopelessly as your supplies dwindle and the oxygen runs out.

The landing works like a charm, and you want to go outside and explore, keeping in mind that a small tear in your space suit could spell certain doom. You manage that trick OK. All of humanity is celebrating your success. But now you have to complete your voyage in reverse, hoping not to burn up as your ship goes through Earth’s atmosphere.

All the while, you’re thinking, “nobody who has ever lived has ever done this before. Those NASA guys think they’ve nailed down every variable you could think of, but what if they missed just one trick?” There are a million unknowns and just one problem can ruin this mission.

A million dangers, and yet the mission was a success. Humans had achieved a feat that no previous generation had the capability to carry out (and which no subsequent generation has repeated).

When you think about what was achieve with the Apollo mission, one can’t help but wonder whether the global problems that seem so unmanageable to resolve right now are really as scary as we think. Conflict in the Middle East? Climate change and energy shocks? Terrorism and religious fanaticism? Slavery? Piracy? Corruption?

Pick a problem. Humans can solve it, if they have the will. That’s the lesson we should all take home Apollo 11.

Predictably, we’re seeing a lot of hot air from world political leaders who refuse to cooperate at the G8 summit discussing greener policies climate change targets. What’s changed now is the exact source of that hot air.

The USA’s President Obama has rightly backed targets to cut emissions by 17% by 2020 and 83% by 2050 compared to 1990 levels (Of course, in the USA, not everything a President wants gets done – we’ll see if the Senate approves). So now the world’s worst polluter per capita (except us carbon-spewing Canucks) are off eco-defenders’ hate-mail lists, at least for the moment. But developing nations, where fast population growth and gradually-rising living standards are quickly boosting carbon footprints, still aren’t buying in.

India’s rep says reaching climate change targets should not be borne on the backs of the developing world’s poor. This is shorthand for saying that since the developed world got to enjoy the benefits of high living standards from rampant resource exploitation, pretty much guilt-free before the recent green revolution, then India, China, Indonesia and all the rest of the developing world – most of the planet’s population – should be able to exploit resources and emit carbon to their heart’s content, at least for the next 100 years or so.

Bad idea. We’re already seeing evidence of climate change, and guess where the worst of it is happening? Drought in Africa, murderous heat in India, mass flooding in Bangladesh, crop failures in Asia… while developed nations have the resources to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, developing nations don’t. They’ve got huge incentives to cut back on their carbon output right now. These nations want their people’s living standards to continue to rise. But doing nothing about climate change means sitting back and watching their land turn into deserts or their cities to be reclaimed by the sea.

The excuse from developing nations previously has been that they couldn’t be expected to lower their carbon footprint when even the rich nations couldn’t afford to do so.

Now that the wealthy nations have stepped up, the rest of the world will need to do their part.

This doesn’t necessarily mean curtailing the developing world’s economies. Carbon can be reduced through better efficiency. Smarter uses of resources, better public transportation, recycling programs, better enforcement of regulations protecting nature preserves, moving away from the disastrous suburbian model we’ve largely adopted in the West… all of these will help. All that’s required is the will.