Orwellian, isn't it?

In 1949, George Orwell published his masterwork of fiction - Nineteen Eighty-Four, portraying a dystopian future in which every aspect of public - and private - life is controlled by the government, to the point where dangerous thoughts are considered a crime punishable by death, dishonour, exile, or at the least a lengthy prison sentence. Often viewed as an allegory for ultrafascism, the "thought police" of Orwell have always been viewed as a metaphor.
Today, that changed; in Israel.

Supposedly the "shining democracy" of the Middle East, three bills before the Israeli Knesset aim to change all of that. It was hoped that the inclusion of the ultra-right Fascist - Avigdor Lieberman - would blunt the edge of his extremist party. It appears that those hopes were short-sighted and naive.

The first bill, which was approved by the Knesset ministerial committee on legislation this week, would make the marking of Naqba punishable by 3 years in prison.
What exactly is Naqba? Falling on the same day as Israeli Independence Day, it is a day of mourning among Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, as a means of honouring the some 700,000 Palestinians driven from their homes in the Arab-Israeli War by groups such as Irgun and the Stern Gang (both of which are now considered terrorist organizations by the United States, Britain, and Israel).
At this point, I feel it necessary to dispel certain myths surrounding the Israeli War of Independence
Myth: Israel declared independence, and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria attacked for no reason other than they hated Jews
Fact: Egypt, Jordan, and Syria came to the aid of the Palestinians, who were - in the words of Israeli historian Benny Morris - "ethnically cleansed" from much of the mandate given to them by the British. The original mandate for the state of Israel divided British Palestine into two sections - 48% Israel, 52% Palestine. By the time Israel was attacked on 1 May 1948, Morris estimates that between 200,000 and 300,000 Palestinians had been killed, with another 700,000 fleeing their homes. The day Israel declared its independence is considered a day of mourning by those Palestinians and Israeli Arabs left, and rightly so. When close to one million people are either killed or forced to leave their homes, it is indeed cause for mourning.
The bill, put forward by none other than Lieberman, aims to make it a national crime to commemorate Naqba. To quote Tal Nahum, the party spokesman for Yisrael Beitenu, "The draft law is intended to strengthen unity in the state of Israel". Strength through unity; we've heard that one before.

You'd think, having chosen to criminalize the remembrance of the 700,000 who fled their homes, that Lieberman's party would have done enough, but it gets worse. The second bill, which went through its first reading in the Knesset this week, would make it a crime to call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel as a Jewish State. All of this, while 20% of its population is Arab Muslim and Christian. In a democracy, there is this thing called Freedom of Speech. You cannot control what people thing. Haim Oron, leader of the leftist Meretz Party, exclaimed in the Knesset last wednesday "Have you lost all faith in Israel as a Jewish and democratic state? This crazy government, what on earth are you doing? A thought police? Have you all lost it?". Roni Bar-On, the finance minister in the previous Kadima government, asked "You want to punish people for talking? Soon, will you want to punish for thoughts?" The controlling of thought and speech is something that is inherently undemocratic. If Israel wants to keep its status as the "shining democracy" in the Middle East, it cannot let this bill pass.

But it gets even worse. A third bill, which is expected to come before the ministerial legislative committee tomorrow, enforces a "loyalty oath" on those seeking Israeli citizenship. A central tenant of Lieberman's election policy, it has been condemned by the entire Arab League, as well as the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, have condemned the proposals, calling them "racist" and "fascist". The bill would also force Israeli Arabs - who are currently exempt from service - to serve in the IDF, despite the fact that they would inevitably end up taking up arms against their brethren on the other side of the the prison-wall that western journalism calls the "security barrier".

Not only have Israeli Palestinians and Arabs been excluded from their homeland, which has now been claimed and colonized by emigrants from Europe who have proclaimed it "a Jewish state"; not only have they been often treated as enemies by their own state, relegated to a "second class citizen" position; but now they are forced to accept it. The natural yearning for justice that the descendants of the 700,000 feel are now criminal in the State of Israel. Express loyalty, voice no opposition, and do not mourn your loss in public; that is the message being sent.

The quest to transform Israel from a Jewish democracy to a democracy is about to be criminalized. If apartheid did not already exist in Israel, it is about to. The actions of these ultranationalists are so absurd that they could have been in dystopian fiction, the Handmaid's tale to V for Vendetta to Nineteen Eighty-Four. The unfortunate part is that it is not fiction, but a sickening and horrifying reality.

Acquiris quodcumque rapis

Ken Saro-Wiwa was the founding member and president of MOSOP, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, a grassroots organization committed to recovering the rights of the Niger Delta's Ogoni People, rights continuously overlooked by the Nigerian government and foreign oil companies in the rush for the oil and gas reserves of the Niger River Delta. In 1994, Wiwa - along with eight other members of MOSOP - was arrested by the Nigerian government following a protest against an oil pipeline. By 1995, he had been sentenced to death by a government tribunal. The tribunal was one of the most corrupt the western world has ever watched unfold: "witnesses" were bribed and threatened into falsely testifying against Saro-Wiwa, his defense lawyers - before they resigned in protest of the court's erroneous breaches of justice - were denied access to Saro-Wiwa. On 10 November 1995, "The Ogoni Nine" were executed by hanging. The following day, Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations.

What had Saro-Wiwa and his activists been protesting? the construction of a colossal oil pipeline by Royal Dutch Shell across Ogoni land. In a previous protest, Nigerian forces - called in by RDS - had killed two women as they protested the destruction of their farmland by the construction groups. In another protest in January 1993 - where RDS again called in military support - 80 people were killed and 500 homes destroyed. The history of Royal Dutch Shell's involvement in the region is one of blood-soaked corruption and brutality.

For those of us who value human rights over profits, the news on Monday that Royal Dutch Shell will be brought to trial in New York for complicity in the death of Saro-Wiwa was a welcome announcement. For many, this is the final vindication of what has been a long and violent struggle to bring justice to Ken Saro-Wiwa. In his final statement before his execution, he condemned the company's actions and foretold that they would eventually be punished.

"I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial... its day will surely come and the lessons learned here may prove useful to it, for there is no doubt in my mind that the ecological war that the company has waged in the Delta will be called to question sooner than later, and the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the company's dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished."

Shell now faces charged of conspiring with the Nigerian government to kill the Ogoni Nine, of financing, arming and transporting the Nigerian military, torture, crimes against humanity, inhumane treatment, and arbitrary arrest and detention. Were these crimes being brought against a person, they would be facing an extraordinarily lengthy prison sentence in The Hague. People have died for doing less than the charges brought against Royal Dutch Shell, which is why the trial - scheduled to start within the next week - is so important.

Shell has spent hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of dollars trying to make people forget about its complicity. It has tried to run from its blood-soaked past for too long. Even now, it denies involvement in a regime that it financed, armed, economically bribed and controlled, and unleashed upon the Ogoni people - most of whom live on less than a dollar a day. You cannot deny the audacity of Shell's executives, who even now attempt to run from the justice that has been coming to them for so long. In 1997 and 2002, Saro-Wiwa's son and brother attempted to sue Royal Dutch Shell for their hand in his death. Though some minor payouts were given to his family, Shell eluded justice not once, but twice.

At long last, the dreams of so many have been realized. For decades, the multinationals that dominate our economy claimed the judicial and economic rights of individuals when it was convenient, yet fled and escaped from the justice that should have been meted upon them. This trial is important because of that, because it proves that to claim the rights of a person is to claim the responsibilities of a person. If you - individually - kill, maim, and oppress a group of people, then finance someone else to kill their activists, you would spend the rest of your life in prison. Many have thus maintained that the same should be true of multinationals like Royal Dutch Shell. This trial finally accomplishes that.

Why Bin Laden won

Robert Fisk's story is a superb illustration of the point I will attempt to make in this post. On September 11, 2001, the illustrious academic and Middle-East correspondent for The London Independent was on a plane crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Before he boarded the plane, he already had heard that some sort of aircraft - at the time it was believed to be a single-engined propeller plane - had crashed into the World Trade Center. No one panicked, and he boarded the flight, which then took off for the Eastern Seaboard. As the plane crossed over Ireland, a second aircraft was suddenly involved, smashing into the side of the other World Trade Center skyscraper. By the time they reached the Irish west coast and the Cliffs of Moher, The Pentagon had been hit. At that point, Fisk went up to the crew of the flight - most of whom he knew from his numerous previous flights across the Atlantic - and informed them that the United States would likely close its airspace. At that time, they were unsure of where the planes had come from, and him and the chief purser began discussing it, saying that the planes could have come from Latin America, or the west coast...or Europe.
At that moment, the two of them looked at one another, and immediately walked through the plane, picking out passengers they didn't like. Fisk found 13 - three in business class alone - while the purser found 14. Of course, they were all Muslims, who happened to be praying, or looking suspiciously at Fisk because he was looking suspiciously at them, or reading the Q'ran, or anything else that looked remotely 'suspicious' in their eyes. It was at that moment that Fisk realized that Bin Laden - whom he interviewed three times in the 1990's, and whom he was almost certain was behind the attacks - had gotten the better of him. In a fraction of a second, he had changed the incredibly liberal, tolerant, and open-minded Robert Fisk into a racist.

Fisk's story - conveyed at a lecture on Middle East geopolitics he gave at MIT in April 2006 - represents but a part of the larger picture. Following 9/11, our entire liberal-democrat society began to collapse, replaced by the PATRIOT Act, phone and email surveillance, random extraditions of often innocent people to countries notorious for their torture practices - such as the case of Maher Arar, waterboarding and other forms of torture, the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, the deaths of nearly one million civilians between those two conflicts, military tribunals, and a host of other ills that have no place in a free and democratic society. George W. Gump told us that "they hate us for our freedom", and yet if that is the case, would it not make more sense to defy them, to carry on with our freedoms anyways? Nope, at least not to them. To them, it made more sense to begin turning America - and indeed many other western nations - into shadows of police states. In the words of Ben Franklin, we gave up a lot of freedom for a little security. In the end, we lost both, and have earned neither.

Fisk vowed - on several occasions - that he would not allow 19 murderers to change his world. I will not allow them to change mine. It is time that the rest of us did the same. Do not allow 19 murderers - for that is all they really are - to change your world. If you do, then Bin Laden wins. Looking at the headlines on Guantanamo, sorting through pages and pages of internet documents released concerning the military tribunals, reading of the extradition of innocent men to Egypt and Syria - where they were tortured for months on end, it is beginning to look as though he already has.

Why New Labour needs to die

If you haven't been reading the British newspapers, then this bit of news likely sneaked into the back page. If you're been reading The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, or any of the other major British papers, then the British MP Expenses Scandal has been the front page every day for the last two weeks. In April, someone - they're still not sure who - leaked the files containing the government-credit-filed expenses of the Members of the British House of Commons. The outrage has been overwhelming, and this likely marks the end of Gordon Brown's labour government.
Ironically enough, I couldn't be happier with it that way. To those who know me, this will come as a shock; I shouldn't be celebrating the defeat of a social democrat party that is a member of Socialist International, and yet I am.
Quite simply, the labour party that rules Britain today is not the same one that ruled Britain before the left's nightmare that everyone else calls 'the 1980's'. In order to understand why Gordon Brown's government has to be destroyed by this scandal, we need to wind the clock back to the 1970's.
In the late 1970's, a centre-left Labour Party ruled Britain, and had almost continously since 1964. James Callaghan's government had instituted a number of socialist reforms to the country, under the matchless leadership of his Minister of Industry - Tony Benn - who pushed for social and labour reform throughout Britain.
Then, came 1979.
In 1979, not only did Iran's fanatic mullahs overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of The Shah, but an equally fanatical government came to power in Britain, under the rule of Margaret Thatcher. By the end of her first term, Thatcher had effectively demolished the Social Democracy that Britain had been, replacing it with a kleptocratic regime, in which the ultra-rich trampled over workers rights, colonial possession's rights. Britain invaded The Falkland Islands, got into bed with Pinochet (and I don't even have to go into how much I loathe the man), and introduced the dangerous position of moral absolutism.
Had this only happened in Britain, the Labour Party could have weathered this storm, reorganized, and fought back according to its principles. The difficulty was that the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party of Canada were suffering the same problem. The Big Three of Reagan, Mulroney and Thatcher ruled supreme throughout the 1980's, demolishing the state apparatus that had been established by Carter, Callaghan, and Trudeau before them.
At the same time, the Labour Party was engaged in a brutal 'civil war', between the left factions and the centre-right factions. By the time the Labour Party finally got its act together and overthrew the conservative oligarchy in 1997, "New Labour" had been born. In Thatcher's own words, it was the greatest achievement of her entire political career.
Why? Because even though Blair's Labour Party defeated the conservative government that had ruled since 1979, the Labour Party that had endorsed democratic socialism was gone; replacing it was a centre-right neoliberal party led by a man with close personal relationships to the business elite and the every horrific Rupert Murdoch. Many of the reforms started by Thatcher's government - rampant defense spending, support of American projects in Iraq, unrestricted free trade agreements, Afghanistan, or wherever - were continued under Blair.
In 2003, we saw just how far the Labour Party had fallen, when it joined the war criminal in marching to war in Iraq, ignoring the calls of the UNSC, its own people, its own former ministers, its own MPs, and its own supporters, and dragging Britain into the bloodbath of Iraq.
Though things have gotten slightly better with Gordon Brown, the difficulties remain largely the same: Workers rights are gone, the power of the Trade Unions is gone, the power of the business elite has grown tremendously.
New Labour has to die at the end of this expenses scandal. It has to because it cannot continue to claim to represent democratic socialism if it does not reform. If it even wants to consider itself socialist - or even 'labour' - it needs to reform, and it will not do so unless New Labour is first eliminated. It's time for New Labour to die, it's time for socialist Labour to return. To do that, Gordon Brown's government has to fall, and it has to fall hard.

How stupid is Ed Stelmach?

So, last week, the Alberta government finally decided to catch up with the rest of the country in its human rights legislation by passing Bill 44, the Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Amendment Act, with regards to gay rights legislation, legislation that every other province had five years ago at the latest. Now, while gay rights is always a good thing to have, there are several major drawbacks in this bill.

Firstly, there's the opt-out clause, which allows parents to opt their children out of any sexual education that they so choose. If the teachings "conflict with the child's sexuality", then they are capable of being removed from the class. Now, I'm no demographer, but it seems to me that those states with less comprehensive sex education programs...have teen pregnancy rates much higher than those of the rest of the continent (being Canada & the US).

And what's the reason? Is it because of psychological trauma that could come about? Nope, it's because of religious beliefs. Once again, we see a government caving into zealotry simply because it's too weak-kneed to put its foot down and tell the most conservative province in the country that it has to progress beyond the 1980s.

That alone was not enough to get my blood boiling over Bill 44, but the next clause is. When questioned about the bill with regards to the teaching of evolution, Premier Emperor Ed Stelmach indicated that parents could pull their children from classes that taught evolution.
Did I read this right? Did we all move to Oklahoma? With the exception of the crazies to our south, every other developed country in the world has accepted evolution as a hard-and-solid fact...EVEN VATICAN CITY has dismissed the idea that evolution is incompatible with The Roman Catholic Church. We are about to join the United States as being one of the only governments to reject evolution in the western world; putting us in illustrious company alongside...Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Tennessee (yay?).

This isn't cause for cheering, despite the improvement in gay rights legislation that accompanied it. This is cause for disgust, for public outcry. If we are so inept that we can't even accept the basic scientific teachings of evolutionary biology, and are so paranoid and insecure that we can't take a moment away from brainwashing our kids with creationism to allow them to have some cold hard science, then what's next? What happens when scientific evidence is presented for other hard and solid facts, such as global warming? Oh...wait...that explains a lot. Maybe the government could learn a bit of math while it's at it:
Government + Religion = Disaster

To the Alberta government: Get your religion out of my classroom, and your brainwashing out of my head - and those of my colleagues.