Bait and Hate

On March 8 2015, International Women's Day, the Harper government's Minister for Defence and Multiculturalism tweeted this:

Journalist Glen McGregor caught the mendacious tweet and investigated whether the misleading images were duplicitously used.

An article in La Presse has an interview with a scholar based at l'UQUAM, regarding the authenticity and provenance of images used in Jason Kenney's tweet. He deplored the lack of rigour shown by this tweet as well as the misrepresentation of what the images actually portray: the dramatization of a religious historical event (much like Catholic Good Friday re-enactment) and the public recitation of Coranic verses.

The press secretary to Minister Kenney, who is also responsible for Multiculturalism in the Harper government, declined to respond directly to requests for clarification regarding the choice of photos.

"This type of question obscures the real issue: [Daesh/IS] is a threat to women and minorities; it is a genocidal terrorist organization, a threat to national and international security," wrote Lauren Armstrong in an email sent to The Canadian Press.

That photo in the upper right hand corner is a still shot from a short video that Karren Brown found:

Kenney's tweet implied that the tearful girl is a terrified child bride of a Wahhadi Daesh fighter.  She isn't.

Watch the video. The girl is competing in a contest of memorization of religious text.  Her head is not covered.  Her audience is composed of supportive community members who encourage her.

Though there are other religions who do justify potential endangerment and harm to children because ... their ideology rules. Three years ago we wrote about the Dufferin-Peel Catholic School Board and how it facilitated such activities.

Yes, it's April and those three boys are exposed to the elements.  The board has now removed the photos from its Brampton school's website (child pornography?) but Andrea Houston got a screen cap which she kindly provided.

Kenney is a fundamentalist Catholic. My co-blogger is very fond of this video of a young and rabidly zealous Jason.  He didn't complete his undergraduate program.  We suspect that the Jesuits were far too liberal for his proclivities.

Need we remind our readers, as well as befuddled Harper Cons, that the Catholic Church facilitated, tolerated and enabled mental, physical and sexual violence exerted against thousands and thousands of children for centuries.  In countries like Ireland, the Philippines and El Salvador, women are still struggling to cast off the oppressive control of the Vatican's misogynist ideology.  They have uncovered great injustices and loudly demanded accountability from the Church.

Nonetheless, Harper Cons are putting all their communication eggs into one basket: systematically deploying fear mongering tactics to incite hatred and fear of Muslims as they ramp up to a fall election campaign. Also: fundraising!!!

On Monday evening, the leader of the Liberal Party

[..]accused Harper's Conservative Party government of blurring the line "between a real security threat and simple prejudice." In particular, he criticized the decision of a judge in Quebec to refuse the case of a Muslim woman who wore a hijab to court, arguing that it was a "troubling trend that Mr. Harper seems keen to accelerate and exploit" and linking it to the Conservative government's proposed ban on the wearing of Islamic face veils during the oath of citizenship. 

Trudeau told his audience. "So we should all shudder to hear the same rhetoric that led to a 'none is too many' immigration policy toward Jews in the 30s and 40s, being used to raise fears against Muslims today."

On Tuesday Harper's dog-and-pony show continued in Parliament, as his Minister for Public Safety obliquely referenced Islam during his presentation on Bill C-51 in committee.  Blaney justified this, claiming that "hate speech" sows the seeds that culminate in horrific events like the Holocaust. He rambled on, even alluding to the mass slaughter of Tutsi by Hutu.

The minister compared jihadist declarations to Nazi propaganda, saying "the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers, it began with words." 

"Violence starts with words," the minister repeated. "Hate begins with words. I can talk to you about the genocide in Rwanda that began on the radio."

He was taken to task by NDP MP Randall Garrison who suggested Blaney was trivializing the Shoah. Later, the minister's office denied that he had paraphrased verses from the Qur'an. 

Since we're on the topic of hate speech, biblical text are still used to justify violence against women. The actions demanded in Deutoronomy 22:21 that Gary Pearson partly cited above may no longer prevail in law, but they persist in the stigma attached to sex work and in the shaming of women who refuse to let their sexuality be controlled by religious ideology.

"then they are to take her out to the entrance of her father's house, where the men of her city are to stone her to death. She has done a shameful thing among our people by having intercourse before she was married, while she was still living in her father's house. In this way you will get rid of this evil."

None of this is happenstance. Ordinary secular political parties are not seized by urgent, totalitarian needs to foment ethnic fear and religious hatred against muslims in order to stay in power.  But a party that is in thrall to Evangelical christian religious fundamentalism and bankrolled by foreign interests, as Harper's CPC is, certainly would be. 

The last words belong to Jed Bartlet, _The West Wing_ fictional president inspired by Jimmy Carter with some daubs of JFK.

Deploying religious text to expose the ugliness of religious fundamentalism.

Of interest to those with no particular religious adherence: the word TERROR entered the political vocabulary during the French revolution as these events unfolded. A demonstration that any ideology, even anti-religious, can be used to justify violent government repression.  

UPDATE: The hoax photos that Kenney deployed misrepresent their original use. Taken from an anti-Muslim hate-inciting site. Thoroughly deconstructed here.

Conservative Does Not Think Conservatives Deserve Majority (Wait til you find out who)

Putting this here for people who do not do the Twitter thing or who may have missed it.

Connie Fournier (yes, that Connie Fournier) writes:

Canadian conservatives don't deserve to have a majority government.

There. I said it. I haven't given up on conservatism. Actually, quite the opposite. I have just come to the conclusion that it is not in the interest of conservatism (or liberty or democracy, for that matter) for the Conservative Party to remain in power.

She goes on to excoriate -- very capably but from a conservative's point of view -- this government's abuse of privacy, freedom, and democracy focussing on the Jihadis Under Every Bed Bill, aka Bill C51.

Fourth-last paragraph:

It is obvious that we, as a political movement, do not have the maturity at this time to handle the unlimited power of a majority government. When we, as citizens, are left depending on the NDP and the Green Party to try to stop the Conservatives from stripping us of our rights, it is very, very wrong.

Go read the whole thing.

So, Connie, I guess we can expect to see you at upcoming anti-C51 rallies, eh?

More Harper Lies

DAMMIT JANET! should have been doing this on a weekly, if not daily basis since Harper took power.

Since 2006, his regime has perfected the art of ideological spin to an artistic apex that surely has Goebbels clapping wildly in his grave.  Here's one wrap-up of obfuscations deployed by his thousands of communications flunkeys.

Remember Vic Toews' _line in the sand_ ...?

Boy, that sure was some hugely volatile speaking point, charged with insinuations that had previously worked momentarily for Harper in the 2005 election campaign.

Only it backfired again, this time with a MASSIVE pushback.

Here's the reality with regard to the Cons' disingenuous, desperate tactic.  It turns out that Harper's government isn't really all that committed to providing the RCMP with adequate resources to investigate, gather evidence, charge child pornographers and bring them to trial.

In fact, Harper and the RCMP dropped the ball as soon as it was evident that their regime could pursue other avenues for spying upon, harassing and destroying organizations and the lives of people who didn't agree with them, or openly opposed their policies as is allowed in a democratic country.

The CRA has been directed by Harper to audit specific organizations. The RCMP has been told to focus on First Nations, Métis and Indigenous resistance movement and its leaders, as well as environmentalists.  CSIS will be empowered to disregard constitutional rights as it spies on those identified as *terrorists* by Harper and MacKay.

And now, it appears that Harper/Kenney monstrosity, the _Monument to Victims of Communism_ might allow Nazis and Third Reich officials to be remembered, since the figures cited include these people.

[...]memory squares will be embedded in a series of ascending folded concrete rows, rising 14.5 metres at their highest point. Visitors will be able to walk among the rows and touch the memory squares to “viscerally experience the overwhelming scale of the Communist atrocities,” says the winning team’s statement of design intent.
At Thursday’s announcement, Kapusta referenced Josef Stalin’s infamous statement that “one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”

As our friend Jay Watts III notes:

He also raises these valid points.

For the modest sum of $1000, folks who admire the work of Wilhelm Kube could have his name inscribed on one of the Memory Squares.  He is one of those "victim of Communism"... included in the statistics deployed by the Harper Cons.

The Contempt of Harper Conservative Reformists: enabling child pornographers, glorifying fascists and eventually jailing Canadians who disagree with them.

If things continue his way, Harper will be remembered for human rights abuses as egregious as those of Joseph Stalin or Robert Mugabe.

The Terrists Win

April 17, 1984, was the first full day of my first visit to London. My pal and I were near St James Square, just wandering around, pretty jet-laggedy stupid. I was finding the noise really quite jarring, then it seemed to jump up several zillion decibels. Sirens.

We didn't know at the time but the Libyan Embassy Siege had begun a couple streets from where we were.

In minutes, it seemed, helicopters were hovering and loud-speakers were telling people to get off the rooftops.

And the sirens wailed.

My pal was excited and wanted to hang around. Me, I was thinking IRA, as was no doubt just about everyone. I said: 'I'd like to go home with all my limbs. Let's get out of here.'

Later, in our B&B, we learned what had happened and what would continue over our entire visit.

People talked about it, it was covered extensively on telly and in the newspapers, but it didn't stop anything. Brits were a bit more exercised about this event because a London bobby -- a female bobby -- had been killed, but otherwise, it was business as usual.

Dumbass tourists like us continued wandering around the city, visiting museums and churches and galleries. We took a Thames River boat trip, went to a West End play. We bought tourist crap and ate the amazingly awful food. (Meals usually went like this: 'Taste this.' 'What is it?' 'Who the hell knows? That's why I want you to taste it.')

In other words, we had a totally normal London visit, except for the siege bit going on in a corner of Belgravia.

I don't mean to glamourize the British stiff upper lip, but really. This past week, USians have given terrorists and trouble-makers in general a text-book lesson on how to paralyze a city.

And isn't it telling that the Boston suspect was found after the 'shelter in place' order was lifted and a resident went out into his backyard to have a smoke and noticed blood on the outside of his boat?

Acting normally is what nabbed the guy.

But. Whatever. Carry on.

BONUS: Thoughtful piece on USians going insane over terrorism but finding 'normal' gun violence perfectly okey-dokey.

Don't give up.

On June 12 2007, the day Sonwabo Mangcongoza grabbed Nomthandazo Radebe - a girl at his school - held a knife to her throat, took her to his house, tied a scarf around her mouth and, for the next eight hours, sexually assaulted her over and over again, there were things he assumed to be true.

1) Nomthandazo would remain silent, as though the scarf were still stuck in her mouth.

2) It wasn't a crime.

3) The police wouldn't investigate.

4) Nobody cared what happened to this 18 year old girl in the Eastern Cape town of Lusikisiki, located in an impoverished rural area.

5) All the men he knew behaved this way.

Sonwabo was wrong. Things didn't turn out the way he thought. On March 25 2009, the judge gave him a 13-year prison sentence after a lengthy trial, the toughest ever imposed by a court in that region.

“Such an offence can never be tolerated by any community,” the judge said.

What happened to change what could have been another "private" tragedy among the thousands and thousands of such occurences in a country where rape is not considerered to be a public safety issue? The women of the Treatment Action Campaign vowed to make an example of Sonwabo, to set a legal precedent and an admirable benchmark of community activism. Women would no longer accept sexual assault as a banal evil rampant in South Africa, but hold the men engaged in this form of gender terrorism responsible for their crimes.

1) Nomthandazo and her family worked with the community activists to ensure that knowledge of the circumstances of her sexual assault and her legal pursuit of her assailant became visible and heard as typical of the violence to which all women in South Africa can be subjected, young or old.

2) & 3) There are laws against rape though they are not vigorously enforced by the police.

When the terrifying ordeal was over, Ms. Radebe called a friend who happened to be a TAC leader in the town. Together they went to the police station and to the hospital so that Ms. Radebe could be examined. ...

The women soon discovered the police did not have any rape kits. The kits, which provide the forensic instruments and legal documents necessary for a proper rape investigation, are supposed to be stocked at every police station in the country.

“The doctor at the hospital said he couldn't do anything without the rape kit,” Ms. Gqamane said. “So it was our duty to put pressure on the police.” At the urging of TAC, the police agreed to get a supply of the kits from another town, and the kits arrived the next day. The problems, however, were just beginning.

“After six days, the TAC people came to me at home and asked if the police had visited me yet,” Ms. Radebe said. “But they hadn't come yet.” The TAC volunteers went back to the police and insisted they investigate. But after two months, the first investigator in the case was transferred to another town. The second investigator went on vacation, and then on a training course, and nobody replaced him.

The police claimed they didn't have enough resources to investigate all rape cases. Court appearances in the Radebe case were repeatedly postponed because of the investigator's absence. The TAC activists went to the police station repeatedly to look for the investigator, but he was never there. They spoke to his supervisor and warned him that they would publicize the inaction. ...

Meanwhile, the TAC activists were holding rallies – known as “mobilization days” – in the neighbourhood where Ms. Radebe and her rapist both lived. With loudspeakers, they urged the residents to break their silence and report any evidence of rape. They handed out leaflets and talked to anyone who came out to the street.

4) TAC and many other people across South Africa cared, because they had personally suffered some form of sexual assault or a sister, mother, daughter, neighbour or friend had.

5) Not all South African men are rapists or potential rapists. The ones who do sexually assault and terrorize women are repeat offenders and they have harmed thousands upon thousands of women.

South Africa's epidemic of rape, which has raged for decades with near impunity for the attackers, has finally triggered a revolt. Sexual assaults, often dismissed as a ritual of manhood, are no longer ignored so routinely.

Women's groups and other activists are breaking the code of silence and insisting on police investigations and convictions. With more than 50,000 rapes reported annually – nearly 150 every day – and many more cases that are never reported, South Africa has one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world. The incidence of rape in South Africa is the highest of any of Interpol's member states, yet only half of the rapes lead to arrests, and only 7 per cent result in convictions.

In a recent survey, 28 per cent of South African men admitted they had raped someone at least once in their lives. Almost three-quarters of them had committed their first rape before the age of 20. The study, which surveyed a representative sample of men from 1,700 households in two South African provinces, concluded that sexual assault is linked to South Africa's strongly patriarchal society and is “deeply embedded in ideas about manhood.”

The study shocked many people in this country and around the world, but it was no surprise to those who lived in Lusikisiki and similar towns across South Africa.

Years ago, Audre Lorde said:

"I have come to believe over and over again, that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood....

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.... and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken."

From The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, Sister Outsider.

Mentally Ill Man Celebrated by Anti-Choice Terrorists

Well, well, well. A famous Canadian FETUSBLOGGER (I won't link, but JJ did), among other sick and twisted anti-choicers, is celebrating the deaths of a bunch of people, including children, who were related to the owner of abortion clinics. In the comments there, there's talk of how we normal people think fetus fetishists are dangerous and violent. Because we want to think so, SHE says.

Um. No. Because of stories like this.

The Cottage Grove man who crashed his car into a St. Paul Planned Parenthood clinic on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling is being touted as a hero of the militant anti-abortion movement.

Matthew Lee Derosia, 33, is among several "prisoners of Christ" featured on the Web site of the group Army of God, which advocates violence to stop abortion providers.

Derosia pleaded guilty Wednesday in Ramsey County District Court to a felony charge of first-degree damage to property. A second charge is expected to be dropped at sentencing.
. . .
"Matthew Derosia rammed the babykilling abortion mill twice and then got out and quoted verses from the Holy Bible ... (on) the date when babykilling was made legal nationally," the Army of God Web site says.

" 'Jesus told me to do it' said Matthew (and who am I to dispute that)," said a comment apparently written by the Web site's host, anti-abortion activist the Rev. Donald Spitz.

The section on Derosia has an address for the Ramsey County Jail and includes an e-mail link to Glory2Jesus@ ArmyofGod.com.

The abortion-rights group National Abortion Federation describes the Army of God as "an underground network of domestic terrorists."

He will be sentenced on May 12.

The terms of the plea agreement, assuming it is approved by Judge John Van de North, include a maximum of 100 days in jail. He is being held at the Anoka-Metro Regional Treatment Center for the mentally ill.

"I think he's doing better," said his attorney, Tom Handley. "He's on medication."

OK, the man has a history of mental illness, but dig this from his mother:

She criticized Planned Parenthood officials, saying they were "after him."

"There's just so much hate for him from these people ... there's nothing godly about them," she said. "There's no air of forgiveness. They're just hard-core, pound-of-flesh."

Who's seeing hate? These people are incredible.

Who's the terrorist?

Is Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish a terrorist? Is that why his daughters had to die?

Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, who speaks Hebrew, worked as a gynecologist in an Israeli hospital. Even as the crossings between the Gaza Strip and Israel had largely been closed in recent months, he had traveled frequently from one place to the other. But he had remained in Gaza since the Israeli offensive began 21 days ago. He gave frequent interviews to the Israeli media on living conditions in the seaside enclave. He spoke of having tanks around his house and of passing through checkpoints; he told Israelis what it was like to be Palestinian.

Minutes away from a scheduled phone interview on Israeli TV 10 with newscaster Shlomi Eldar, Aboul Aish called Eldar’s cellphone, screaming and weeping in Arabic and Hebrew. The doctor’s home had been struck by a shell:

“Oh God, oh my God, my daughters have been killed. They’ve killed my children. . . . Could somebody please come to us?”

Sitting at his news desk for one of Israel’s main evening news broadcasts, Eldar held his phone up. For three minutes and 26 seconds, Aboul Aish’s wailing was broadcast across the country.

Some more pictures of terrorists from Guerrilla Radio:






































From Da Arab Mcs: Who's the terrorist?

Terrorism and terror

Much has been said and written about the events in Gaza. I listen to Radio-Canada and I read news coverage that attempts to balance the overwhelming, initial pro-Israel bias with parsimonious information eked out from Gaza. Progressive Bloggers have been particularly diligent in seeking out alternate news sources and writing about this bloody conflict which has both sides targeting civilian populations. The side with the best weaponry is inflicting the most savage damage as the number of deaths, mutilations and crippling wounds increase every day in Gaza.

Terror: Intense, overpowering fear. Violence committed or threatened by a group to intimidate or coerce a population, as for military or political purposes.

Terrorism: The use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes. The state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization. A terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.

Terrorism, 1795, in specific sense of "government intimidation during the Reign of Terror in France" (1793-July 1794), from Fr. terrorisme (1798).

"If the basis of a popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in a time of revolution is virtue and terror - virtue, without which terror would be barbaric; and terror, without which virtue would be impotent." (Robespierre, speech in French National Convention, 1794)

General sense of "systematic use of terror as a policy" is first recorded in Eng. 1798. Terrorize "coerce or deter by terror" first recorded 1823. Terrorist in the modern sense dates to 1947, especially in reference to Jewish tactics against the British in Palestine - earlier it was used of extremist revolutionaries in Russia (1866); and Jacobins during the French Revolution (1795) - from Fr. terroriste. The tendency of one party's terrorist to be another's guerilla or freedom fighter was noted in ref. to the British action in Cyprus (1956) and the war in Rhodesia (1973).

How to end this conflict? Fighting terrorism with terrorism appears to be a losing strategy for all sides. There are alternatives, though they rarely receive the attention and the financial support that armed confrontations do. Which is not incidentally a result of the increasingly lucrative weapons industry.

Here's an overview of groups and organizations who are attempting to fight terrorism and violence with information, reason and pacifist means.

Women Against Occupation

Adalah-NY: Coalition for Justice in the Middle East

Jews Against the Occupation

Feminist Peace Network

Christian Peacemaker Teams