The masks are coming off the stooges

So says Vancouver journalist Ian King about shallow moronic apologists for anti-Western zealots. The smug jerks are hitting out blindly at the latest Tyee column from acclaimed author and deadly accurate journalist Terry Glavin.

Glavin once again rips into the significant segment of the anti-imperialist left in Canada that is mute about the struggle of Iranian dissidents against the Islamic Republic's thuggish regime.

Time and again in the comments section, the usual suspects trot out the same tired and dishonest rhetoric to defend their hero, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Once more, they gloss over the regime's failings to strike at phantom Neo-con spies.

Yet Glavin couldn't be clearer that Canadians who are upset with the totalitarian Iranian regime can condemn it without fearing to be seen as puppets of Bush:

Ottawa has taken a leading role at the UN in the focus on Iranian human rights, and after Kazemi's murder in 2003, diplomatic engagement with Tehran was confined to human-rights questions. Canadians are well placed, then, to focus on shaming the regime and exposing its tyrannical violence, simply by helping pro-democracy forces tell their stories to the outside world.

King is dead-on with his own take on condemning Iranian human rights abuses, supporting dissidents and protesting any invasion of the Islamic Republic:

It is possible to hold all three views at once, rather than simply defaulting to "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". This is not rocket science.

Exactly.

Canada, be a friend. Offer early retirement for George Bush Jr. on Vancouver Island

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.

300: freedom on the march

300 is an unrelenting Hollywood blockbuster gore-fest, but is it war-mongering political propaganda?

The film depicts a heroic coalition of Spartans and Greeks fighting against an army of Persians led by a tyrant. Based loosely on historical events, the subject matter of the film has Iran's cultural adviser, Javad Shamqadri, ranting that it is a salvo in "a cultural war against the people of Iran".

The blogosphere is flowing with opinions about how this or that scene in the film glorifies war in general or in particular against foreign barbarians. But in the film, there's more than just a suggestion that the Spartans are at least as guilty of barbarism as their enemies (killing messengers, practicing infanticide, raising their own children into savagery). The film is overwhelmingly a celebration of violence, not a political tract gushing over Western superiority.

Even if the Spartans' declaration that freedom must be fought for are to be taken at face value, there's nothing so terrible about that, either. It's quite true - though in our day and age, one should certainly be as skeptical as the Spartan senate in the film about the real motives for war.

You don't have to live like a refugee

Iranian refugee Amir Kazemian gets to stay in Canada on on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. What took so long?

This should have been a no-brainer. A man arrives in Canada from a country where they torture people who are even distantly suspected of disloyalty against the religious thugocracy. He claims, not all that surprisingly, that he has been a victim of such medieval treatment. We accept his mother as a political refugee, but we tell him that he has to go back...

So he holes up in a church in Vancouver. In a sequence of events taken from an as-yet unwritten dark comedy, he finds himself arrested... after three years of fruitless waiting. On the eve of his deportation, Canadian officials tell him he can stay. Clearly, he can't have been a security threat, since they were able to make a final decision on his status virtually on the spot when finally forced to.

Three years is a long time to spend in limbo.