my government

Minister of State for Tourism Diane Ablonczy is no longer responsible for the delivery of a key tourism stimulus package, and one of her caucus colleagues says it's because her office gave some of the money to a gay pride parade.

Saskatchewan MP Brad Trost, a fellow Conservative, told the anti-abortion website LifeSiteNews that Ablonczy was being punished for the decision to give $400,000 from the Marquee Tourism Events Program to Toronto's Pride Parade, which was held this year on June 28.

ETA: I don't think it's impossible that there were political reasons for this as well.

can't you get a restraining order on this guy

Obama now officially does not give a shit.

All the details of this meeting took me back to the Saddam's time staring with the speeches that were glorifying Maliki and ending with Maliki's instructions to hold celebrations all over Iraq to show happiness as if Iraqis can not experience happiness without these instructions. Yes, most Iraqis are very happy with the withdrawal of the American forces but they don’t need any instructions that remind them of dark era. Iraqis will be happy if they forget the "Miserable Days".

After six years Iraqis are still waiting for the "Achievement Day" when the successive governments provide them with the necessary services.

Hahaha give this man the ten thousand dollars.

thanks for the memo

"The most important misapprehension that people have about Iran is that it's like every other country in the region and it's not. People are better educated there, they're more sophisticated, they are more middle class, there aren't very many truly poor people and in the upper class the women are much better educated and much more active than in any other society in the region."

Hey I wish the Iranian people the best too, at least the best that they can possibly get out of the situation they're in right now(though as anyone who has even the most superficial knowledge of Iranian history knows, they have an incredible capacity to deal with crappy governments.) But why is it when so many liberals and leftists feel the need to convince the right wingers that Iranians are human beings, it's a portrait they paint as a contrast to all those "special" people that they are surrounded by? Not that I didn't already know that that was how they felt, cause believe me, this is not the first time I ran into this sentiment and it won't be the last.

This really wasn't what I wanted my first post on the aftermath of the Iranian elections to be about, but there it is. If anyone cares though I concur with this guy.

iraqi agriculture

Another (older) article on this subject here. Of course, it also hasn't helped that Turkey has been blocking the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates. I think this is just the tip of a much broader policy that was implemented post-2003, which unfortunately didn't get much attention with all the militia action and drama, though they are not unrelated. Something much deeper than simple "regime change" happened here, and more comprehensive than just about oil, or about disbanding the army, though that is a part of it.

alexei sayle is for palestine

I really get the cynicism over celebrities + politics believe me I do but I really could not resist posting this video, which is intrinsically awesome, by someone inherently awesome themselves.


Posts of substance are to come, I swear.

stolen from africville

The story of “Stolen From Africville” outlines the rise and fall of the historic Black community of Africville Nova Scotia. Africville was a peaceful and thriving community whose roots can be traced back to the mid 1700s and the historic Underground Railroad.

However, under the guise of “development”, the Nova Scotia government bulldozed the land in 1969… In 2004 the United Nations conducted an assessment of this tragic injustice and recommended reparations for the Africville community. To this day nothing has been done.

http://stolenfromafrica.com/

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what else have I been watching

The Canadian government be a total spaz. I don't really expect most people to have been following what's been going on up here the past six months or so, though perhaps you heard about Galloway being banned from the country (honestly I do not like him for a number of reasons but that is ridiculous any way you slice it), potential new Mccarthyism and the ruling party as well as the Liberals have personally been waging campaigns against Apartheid Week and visiting University campuses to pressure them to not host the event, not to mention immigration raids(yes we have those here too.) That is just scratching the surface.

On a semi-related note, a few of Muslimah Media Watch's people started a brilliant blog called Muslim Lookout, dedicated to looking at the Canadian media's discourse on Muslims, immigrants and other racialized Canadians. Check them out.

more untimely blogging: ie I am clearing out my tabs

Can you believe it's been over two months? I am still around and still reading everybody's stuff but I have just been doing more absorbing than composing. I can't really bring myself to get into twitter and facebook, at least not for posting. The format of the first one is irritating and it, like blogging, just seems like another antisocial media, more about projecting yourself onto the world than having conversations, as it seems so many people are on it for the purpose of self promotion. Personally I am still trying to figure out what I want to do with this thing after all these years. I don't really fit in with the activist or academic bloggers, and I sure as hell aren't here to try and start up a writing career(though maybe I gave some people the impression that I just really, really want an NGO job.) I'm not interested in talking about my personal life either, and you definitely will not be seeing any posting my of my family's life stories hell no.

My other issue with is with all the self promotion there tends to be a myopic approach to the presentation of the information. More: this is my prediction, my analysis turned out to be right ie look at me I am the only one clever enough to see these things. I've been getting into podcasts more lately and I like that format, and it seems to give people less room to talk past each other when they talk in real time. Though it's logistically less convenient to produce and potentially can be rill boring, but twitter isn't?

Anyways, what have I been reading. How much do you not care. Some are recent, some, not so much.

1. On Bibi's gift to Obama at their meetup.

2. Ten conceptual sins in analizing Middle East politics. Quite a lot to debate here.

3. Case study in twisting information in violence against women in the Middle East, in this case in the reporting on a UN report in Iraq. Look, domestic violence is a huge problem and Iraq definitely has its unfair share of every kind of problem in the world, especially for its women, as many of my posts attest to. Believe me, we really don't need to sensationalize this shit to tell that story, and this case is a good example of sensationalism. Outside of a few pockets, the rates of what get called honour killings in most of the Middle East don't actually differ significantly from the numbers of women murdered by their boyfriend or family in North America AFAI have read, I'm quite sorry to say. Lebanon and Jordan have about 15-20 a year, with populations of 5 and 6 million, you can do the math yourself.

4. Break.

5. Indigenous Youth Delegation to Palestine. Rad.

6. On Saudi Arabia's role in Iraq.

7. You already knew this right:
“Over half of what is described as aid goes to the global south in the form of loans for private sector consultancy, technical assistance or works projects and the five richest countries can get up to 90 per cent of the business,“ said Dr Bracking. "Poor countries, already up to their eyes in debt, are forced to pay it back at great cost to their citizens.
Just a reminder you don't have to wage a war to fuck people up, though it certainly helps.

8. Tell me this does not surprise you:
Readers will recall some spirited conversation with sometime National Post writer "Raphael Alexander" on the subject of Canadians vs. "Canadians." The latter are folks with the misfortune to have funny-sounding names, and who "will never be wholly Canadian because no person born abroad can ever fully understand what it is to be Canadian."

As it turns out, Canadian employers tend to agree with "Alexander" that names are important. It seems as though those "Canadians in law only" have been falling to the bottom of the hiring pile. UBC economics professor Philip Oreopoulos has prepared a working paper, released yesterday, showing conclusively that equally-qualified Canadians are unequally treated--based upon name discrimination. Young people entering the labour market are 40% more likely to be called to an interview, Oreopolous indicates, if their names are (say) "Brenda Martin" or "Bob Smith" instead of (say) "Abousfian Abdelrazik" or "Abdihakim Mohamed."

just saying

I will most likely be out of commission till the anniversary passes but I've been reading and watching some things on the subject I want to eventually turn into a post-with said anniversary being so close to my birthday I'm not bent about having other things to think about at that time of year for the first time in quite a while. In the meantime check this out:

Or on a different note this:
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Or read this and/or this.

I also posted in the other blog. Since tis the season I should probably mention that international women's day didn't bring much good news to the silly country I live in either-among others-but I mean what else is new. I've also been thinking alot lately about the ways in which folk pay lip service to solidarity with women around the world both on the internet and off, but that is a subject that requires more time than I have to do it justice right now.

WANTED: Bloggers on the Middle East capable of class analysis.

pride and predator?

Finally, a movie for me.

now for something completely different (because Obama bashing is getting too easy)

There is a kind of parallel in the unprecedented swell in outrage against the operation in Gaza and in the lead-up to the Iraq war despite the difference in scale. Turnouts at the demonstrations a little over a month ago were at least 10 times what I remember during the July 2006 bombing, and definitely much larger than turnouts I've seen for much less controversial wars, and others around Europe and North America I know had similar observations. That's where the similarities end though, because the outrage at Israeli actions soon materialized into concrete and specific activism with specific demands (occupation of Universities, the BBC, reenergization of boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns, and some real successes at punishing those complicit in the occupation.)

In the case of Iraq activism, after a decade-plus of work against the sanctions and then the lead-up to the war bringing about the largest demonstrations coordinated worldwide ever, with tens of millions in the streets, mostly people that had never attended a protest of any kind in their lives, only for the movement to completely die not even six months after the war started. There are many factors that contributed to that, along with an unfortunate reality that the left for the most part didn't take much of an interest in developing its position beyond 'us there=bad', and many didn't expand their post-war analysis any further than that. You might think that position might be enough, and if this were a protest against gentrification or something I might be okay with that, but the US was doing a lot more in Iraq than just being there, and had been doing a lot more since 1991, with longterm and massive implications that can never be reversed. This was left out of the narrative and instead post-war Iraq debates were dominated by discussion of whether the war was good for America or not or were entirely focused on arguing over the numbers of bodycounts. A handful of projects like Jubilee Iraq, Hands off Iraqi Oil, 3iii came about that actually were working on specific issues that were impacting Iraqis and had some concept of cooperation with Iraqis themselves but overall interest just dropped in favour of more generic arguments about the war on terror. Meanwhile the right dominated and manipulated rhetoric of faux concern for the actual population to their ends(or at least they did untill CNN discovered that there are dogs in Iraq) and the monopoly they had on that rhetoric ensured that they were never challenged on that level.

For that reason I was struck when I stumbled upon this four year old talk by Naomi Klein in which she articulated some of the same problems with the US left, a fear of complexity, and a need to take leadership from actual Iraqis, a need to take the position for justice to happen there despite the efforts of the Bush admin, that justice was something that was even desirable, not simply for the troops to come home(and no the two aren't mutually exclusive.)

I don't agree with everything said here but keep in mind that this was early 2005, what I'm interested in is the ideas, particularly about the fear of complexity among some activists. The unfortunate lazy outlook by democrats and some on the left* that a victory would mean seeing the Bush admin fail, when in fact seeing the Bush admin's projects collapse under their own weight were as much the democrat's failure as his, proof that they had just given up at countering their claims and at ever holding them accountable. That isn't enough to sustain a movement, it's enough to build political capital for the opposing party, but not enough for a movement.

There were other reasons for the left's weakness: that this was all relatively soon after September 11th and Americans were still finding the space to fight for their own rights-it was around this time that international solidarity became severely uncool(though there are a lot of other reasons for that that are a whole nother post.) Practically of course I get that it's much easier to boycott someone like Lev Leviev than it is to have an effective boycott campaign against an oil company or a security company or a corporation contracted to build infrastructure(though there have been successes of this type with respect to the Israeli occupation as well,) and I'm well aware that BDS campaigns started well before 2008.

These are all things that have been on my mind since about 2004 and have come back into focus since the 5 year anniversary. Over the past year or so I've been looking forward to the end of this war (with ground troops anyways) if only because I've been sick of hearing the same old arguments from the same people. And of course these are generalizations and don't apply to a lot of people, there have been some people working amazingly hard on various issues and last of all I don't disclude myself from this criticism, but I can't say I haven't been frustrated by conversations I've had over the last almost six years. This isn't meant to be one of those blogs whining that certain issues get more attention than others, but the last couple of months have proved how awesome activism's potential is and it got me looking back at this post that I started writing almost a year ago and wondering what the fuck happened. I don't know what the difference is, maybe it all was a matter of really bad timing, but anyways that's what I'll be pondering as the next anniversary rolls around, if anyone cares.

*ps: I don't mean to conflate the left and democrats but I will when they use each other's talking points for the sake of brevity. Either way I've had just as many issues with "radical" as "liberal" approaches to Iraq over the years.

**Did you know that oil workers are still banned from forming trade unions? The fuck?

Obama's problem is that a growing number of Americans are concerned about what the Bush administration did and are eager to press the issue. The extent of public concern has been reflected in several recent public opinion polls, including one in February by USA Today showing that nearly two-thirds of Americans support investigations of the Bush administration's use of torture and warrantless wiretapping; roughly 40 percent support criminal investigations.

Obama=meh; his supporters-I still have hope.