New Media

I described the protest movement against the Vancouver 2010 Olympics earlier as unable to articulate a unified protest platform to bring in the masses — despite a fairly wide groundswell of anti-Olympics feeling among the general public. This speaks not only to a lack of organization skills (they did have four years to prepare for this, after all) but also very shallow sympathy for the myriad causes stuffed into this counter-culture sausage-fest.

Having failed to win grassroots support, the vanguard has inevitably decided to resort to violence to get the attention they need just to sustain momentum among their relatively sparse membership. This desperation move is just alienating the rest of us even further, at least according to snippets from the local Twitter crowd:

@stephenfung: Olympic protesters are breaking shit downtown and scaring tourists. What’s your cause again? That’s the one I won’t be supporting. K. Thx.

@canucksgirl44: #Vancouver protesters are just a bunch of wannabe hippies anyway. Welcome to the West Coast, lol #realhippieslivedinthe60s

@MitchGarvis: @DanaEpp Yeah but the funny thing is the protesters are all white kids, and the natives are all involved with the games

@steaks: Also protestors damage cause of people they say they are helping. How NGO’s going to raise funds and lobby well when associated to douches?

It’s getting a bit uglier than I expected, given yesterday’s lackluster showing by the perpetually disaffected. But it seems a severely downgraded and ineffective version of the Battle in Seattle is the worst the IOC and the City of Vancouver has to deal with. For now, the Games go on unimpeded.

The upcoming Vancouver version of the Gaza Freedom March (which for some reason is not marching for freedom for Palestinians from Hamas thugs) appears to be organized and promoted with the help of UBC SPHR President Omar Amroosh Chaaban, formerly Omar Shaban, Vice-President of the Canadian Arab Federation.

As you’ll recall, Chaaban was called out by Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, for writing “Fuck Canada Day” on his Facebook profile. “This hateful attitude towards Canada is a direct result of how some politicians and police have refused to stand up to Islamists, either out of fear or for electoral expediency,” Fatah said at the time.

To refresh your memory, Omar says he resigned (rather than being asked to resign) shortly after the incident on July 1. CAF lost its taxpayer funding, in part for similar sorts of unwise comments, such as when Canadian Arab Federation president Khaled Mouammar called Federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney a “professional whore”. But Mr. Chaaban (or Shaban) should certainly be lauded for his contribution to a chain of events that resulted in an end to taxpayer funding for an organization that seems to be inconsistent with “Canada’s best liberal values of tolerance and mutual respect”.

You’d think that a Palestinian group assumed to be looking for deeper support in the wider community would want a leader who is a little less of a potential liability on the public relations front. But then again, that depends on the kind of PR they really want to have. After all, we know what passes for rational discussion of Israel and Palestine on Canadian campuses.

As for the real march which now seems to have been halted on the Egyptian border (by pro-Zionist Egyptians, no doubt), that farce is brought to you by George Galloway, perhaps known chiefly outside the British Isles for this sort of disgusting conduct.

As for the goals of the protest march itself, there’s a fairly straightforward way of achieving the end of the blockade of Gaza that will go far beyond sending some crates of food and medical supplies once every three years. The Palestinians in Gaza must reject (and if necessary, overthrow) the thuggish Hamas regime. Rockets, terror and bombings against Israeli targets will not end their misery. Palestinians can win their freedom if they are willing to stand up to their oppressors.

UPDATE: Nazis for Gaza Freedom March in Toronto Thanks to Your Tax Dollars. Oh, God, this is good…

And more photos of sieg-heiling freedom marchers at Lumpy, Grumpy and Frumpy.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson had barely settled into his new desk at Vancouver City Hall when he had to disclose this bit of good news to citizens already awash in buzzwords like “economic downturn” and “real-estate crash”: city taxpayers could be on the hook for $875 million because of the Olympics construction.

The all-but silenced anti-Olympics types now have all the material they need to enshroud Vancouver in a retchingly-bad stink over this. And I can’t say I’m opposing them, either. As far as I’m concerned, all of Vancouver’s political parties — NPA, Vision and COPE — dropped the ball on this. Sadly, the ball was made of a unique money-sucking element that will cover all of us when it soon hits the grond.

As usual, CityCaucus.com has some excellent coverage on the real history of how Vancouver City Hall handed over the keys to the city, or at least the password to the bank account, to a construction company that seems to be out of control. See the Olympic Village Multiple Choice Reality Test.

If I invoiced a client for $875 million more than budgeted for the project, I imagine I’d have some difficulty getting new business. Of course, after the contract was done, I might not need any new business.

When the 2010 Olympics come to Vancouver, will VANOC embrace alternative media, or will there be it be more of a fighting withdrawal to hold on to its traditional business model, which involves partnering with the media conglomerates? These are interesting times, with one company (interestingly, NOT a citizen news company per se, although that is part what they facilitate as web developers) acting as vanguard for the blogging and tweeting crowd (as reported here previously).

Olympics business strategy consultant and OlyBLOG author Maurice Cardinal takes issue with an allegedly overly critical characterization of alt-media’s Olympic citizen journalism organizing, by Financial Post contributor Jeff Lee. Cardinal writes:

In this latest article Lee described our group as follows;

“The plotters were ordinary people, young and old. Some had piercings and others, unusual shades of hair colour. Some brandished laptops. One had a tiny video camera. Others sat on the floor and simply listened.”

I don’t want to make a big deal of semantics, but not only is Lee’s characterization of our group skewed, once again he failed to tell the whole story. For example, there were also people in casual business attire at the meeting, plus I saw at least one UBC professor, and I think even an undercover police officer. Granted, people were sitting on the floor, but only because the turnout was so great.

Raincity Studios, where the meeting was held, is a hip working environment with long tables wired to support dozens of computers.

It’s a very cool heritage building, well maintained and stylishly decorated, but Lee described the room as follows;

“… four dozen people trudged up to the fourth floor of an old Gastown building mere metres from where Vancouver was born.”

Most of the info in his article was technically correct, and I concede that maybe a few people trudged, but Lee’s snarky attitude towards indie media journos is stuck in 2003, and ironically, this is exactly why we’ve bumped heads so many times in the past.

What’s the consensus out there? Was Lee’s report really a sign that the mainstream media as a whole is going to be at loggerheads with alt-meda even more as the Olympics draw closer? Or is there still time for the two sides to actually work together?

I’m convinced, due in no small part to Dave Olson’s evangelizing, that there are a whole lot of worthy Olympic stories out there that mainstream media never gets around to covering (not necessarily because of bias, but mainly because newsrooms have been heavily depopulated over the past 10 years — they just don’t have the human resources to cover all the great stories). When the big show comes to Vancouver in 2010, I expect Indie media to do an admirable, and unprecedented, job of filling in the gaps in the Olympic story.

“If as the saying goes, all politics is local, then how come there is so little attention paid to the importance of our urban centres?” That’s the angle of CityCaucus.com, the new politics blog hoping to bring some much-deserved attention to municipal politics across Canada (although the first few days of the site going live appear to make it pretty Vancouver-centric).

Looks like an ambitious plan, and my hat’s off to the lot of them. Vancouver media maven Michael Klassen has an interesting write-up correlating Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertons’s thoughts (as advertised on Twitter) in the wake of the shake-up at city hall and the contentious firing of Vancouver city manager Judy Rogers, whose career spanned 20 years. Not sure I agree with Michael on this one, since quoting Twitter tweets may very well be the ultimate taken “out-of-context” medium, but the idea is pretty novel.

I love Vancouver’s vibrant political scene (although I’ll confess the partisan nature of it confused the heck out of me after moving here from the relatively sleepy city of Winnipeg). Frankly, this city is dealing with the big issues of the day, from homelessness and social sustainability to green urban planning and the big issues of how to host the Olympics, to name just a few. As a blogger with his pulse on the city scene, I’m happy to see such a promising new site that focuses on local politics. Looking forward to seeing what you’ve got, CityCaucus.