Propaganda needs to be fought with critical questions from open minds

Reading the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in Nomad,  about the culture of propaganda against Jews that is an integral part of the education, both formal and informal, of all Muslim children, one is struck by the success of the cultural campaign of bigotry, hatred and racism.
It reduces the Jews to mere fragments of people, individually and collectively, and even borrows from the propaganda of the Third Reich to accomplish its goals.
Of course, the truth is one important victim in this propaganda campaign, as it must be in all propaganda wars. Muslims simply do not question what they are taught, having been taught the same simple black and white "truths" from birth....Jews are the enemy, and Islam is under attack by Jews....all of it unmitigated lies!
Similarly, the Tea Party would have us believe their propaganda that Obama is not a real American, that the Democrats are purposefully destroying capitalism, and destroying America, with more taxes and more spending. These are lies; the Tea Party knows they are lies; and yet, repeated often enough, they start to carry their own weight.
Just as Ms Ali recommends a new Enlightenment to open the minds of Muslims around the world, it is time for the American people to open their minds to the full and complicated truth that reducing Democrats to demons, along with their president, is merely to shout the emptiness of their own minds, not to mention their unwillingness to ask the tough questions that would open up much more interesting adn complicated reality than the one they are selling for their own narrow political ends.

Canadian government cuts deep into Environment Canada...sadly

By Bruce Campion-Smith and Les Whittington, Toronto Star, August 5, 2011

Deep cuts at Environment Canada could put public safety at risk from freak weather events and the impacts of climate change, critics warn.
News that scientists, meteorologists and engineers are among 776 jobs on the chopping block has department officials facing tough questions about how they plan to cope.
“It’s a real shock it’s so many,” Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said, calling the cuts “wrong-headed.”
“Show us where these 800 jobs are. Show us how you think the work can still be done. What I’m asking for is some transparency and some answers,” May said in an interview.
“These are deep cuts into programs and services that are indispensable. They need to look at these programs and realize these are public safety questions,” May said, citing water monitoring and changing weather patterns as two examples.
Her complaints were echoed by the Sierra Club, which called the cuts a “blatant attack” on the environment.
“What it will do is give polluters exactly what they want — a toothless, understaffed Environment Canada with weakened scientific capacity and no enforcement capability,” said John Bennett, the organization’s executive director.
For Harper and Clement, there are only two words, "Remember Walkerton!"
The "gift" of slash-and-burn by the previous Harris government in Ontario resulted, in part, in the quality of water inspection falling and leading to the deaths of people living in that town.
One has to wonder just how the Minister of the Environment, Peter Kent, is taking these cuts to his department, and how he will defend the department when agencies like the Sierra Club start mounting their legitimate attacks.
Canadians know that purchases of the beloved "hard power" of ships and planes and prisons will cost the country deeply in "soft power" services such as those provided by the art historians in the National Gallery, and the engineers and scientists in the Ministry of the Environment. This government is little more than a piece of muscle for the advocates of "hard power" and right-wing pandering that the world neither needs nor can justify.
And any attempt to justify, is so brazenly phoney and insincere, that even the youngest school child can see right through it.

Start-Up Visas for entrepreneurial immigrants...in Canada? doubtful

By Sumitra Rajagopalan, Globe and Mail, July 31, 2011
(Sumitra Rajagopalan is an adjunct professor of biomechanics at McGill University and the founder of Bioastra Technologies, an R&D company specializing in biomedical devices.)

The notion of the “Startup Visa” is gathering steam in the United States. Foreign-born entrepreneurs are behind more than half the start-ups in Silicon Valley alone. Hence the concerted effort by American businesses and opinion makers to make the U.S. a haven for enterprising techies, to kick-start exciting new business ventures and create jobs for Americans.

In Canada, our government has adopted a blinkered, short-sighted strategy in which immigrants are simply hands for hire to fill labour shortages, rather than vital players in building a new knowledge-driven economy.
The new “streamlined” process involves a fast track for people in certain fields. It’s a motley of professions from cook to cardiologist, with an emphasis on health professionals, technicians and engineers.
To the prospective immigrant, this list is highly misleading as fields such as dentistry and family medicine are impossible for immigrants to break into, thanks to the professional and accrediting bodies that act as overzealous gatekeepers and multiply the hurdles for foreign-trained professionals. Hence the all too common doctor-turned-cabdriver phenomenon in our cities.
There’s an immigrant entrepreneur program at Immigration Canada that’s now indefinitely suspended. This is a real shame, because this is the very channel through which we would get the best “recruits.”
Indeed, immigrant selection in Canada in the 21st century should be carried out by headhunters, not paper-pushers. We should have our immigration agents in Bangalore, Seoul and Moscow scour campuses and companies for promising new technology entrepreneurs.
Then imagine a panel of angel investors, chief technology officers, academics and entrepreneurs back in Canada judging the entrepreneur, his technology and his business idea. Most important, they would evaluate the idea’s potential to create jobs in Canada.
But, Ms Rajagopalan, it is "paper-pushers" who are in charge in Canada. Call them bureaucrats, or civil servants, or paper-pushers....they are all the same; they fill offices, one assumes, in Ottawa and Hull, and they drive Canadian government policy, no matter the government. On the up side, that means that a complete imbecile cannot run roughshod over the country, because s/he would have to work through the barbed wire and the moat that encircles the government castle. On the downside, the word entrepreneur is recognized and respected among some academics, and some venture capitalists. There is too much risk involved for Canada to "officially" puts its stamp of approval on a program for immigrant entrepreneurs. And risk-avoidance is part of Canada's pedigree.
We are a smug country basking in the glow of petro-dollars, tree-dollars, mineral-dollars (and increasingly aqua-dollars) and we seem to think our supply of those natural resources is infinite. A little fringe of innovation, just to be able to point to that sliver of activity, perhaps we can tolerate that. Thomas Homer-Dixon has written a book entitled, The Ingenuity Gap. In it, "he shows how, in our complex world, while poor countries are particularly vulnerable to ingenuity gaps, our own rich countries are no longer immune, and we are all caught dangerously between a soaring requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly uncertain supply." (from the book jacket)
(Homer-Dixon is Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.www.ingenuitygap.com)
So, Ms. Rajagopalan, Canada is not an open door, nor is it even interested in pushing back on those professional associations that act as gate-keepers for their members, generating cab-driver-doctors and engineers. We do not really have an open mind about immigrants, and in some quarters there is even a move to lower the number of permits granted to potential immigrants.
While I agree with your recommendations, and certainly the current government would seem to be one that might eventually turn its eyes to the need to re-open the immigrant-entrepreneur file and give it a second chance (because its eyes are always focused on dollars, certainly not ingenuity, nor on cultural enrichment).
Imagine the bureaucratic nightmare that Ottawa would face if it decided to send recruiters to various world cities...Foreign Affairs would have to be involved; International Business would have to be involved; International Co-operation would have to be involved; and the program itself would have to come from Immigration and Citizenship....and those departmental firewalls would create a nightmare for which your ingenuity and the ingenuity of potential entrepreneurial immigrants in the thousands would be required just to create a "program" and a flow of both information and authority, not to mention responsibility, in order to begin such a program. Then it would require monitoring and evaluating and costing and ..... Oh, the mind sighs at the incomprehensible complexities that would have to be circumnavigated....not on my watch, says the Immigration Minister.
And not likely in our country, either, Ms Rajagopalan.

The Great Gatsby, The Movie...and questions it evokes

Had  the opportunity to watch, again, the movie based on the Scott Fitzgerald classic novel, The Great Gatsby, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. Set in the roaring twenties, and in the mansions of the very rich, I could not escape the comparison to the situation we are facing today.
Last night, while my wife and I were watching the movie, several hundred (?) people were each paying $36,000 to have dinner with the president of the United States in a birthday fundraiser for his next election campaign. Meanwhile, some twenty-five million people in the U.S., nearly the same number as all of the people in Canada (33 million) are out of work, without income and without much hope of any change in that situation.
The mechanic Charly Wilson in Fitzgerald's novel, with his gas pump and his few skills as a car handyman, as opposed to full mechanic, could easily represent those millions without work. His income dribbled in at the rate of forty cents to a dollar and some cents for a fill-up of the cars that stopped by.
Meanwhile, Gatsby, whatever the source of his "success," hosted parties of the "rich and famous" out in East Egg, at his million-dollar mansion complete with swimming pool.
The vaccuity, the utter dearth of anything resembling authenticity, among the characters who attended these parties, and especially among those starring in the movie, Daisy and Tom Buchanan along with Jordan, the professional golfer, and Myrtle Wilson desperately striving for a relationship with the "riches" of Tom Buchanan, is so effectively portrayed by Fitzgerald that watching their hollowness evokes the poetry of T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. I include it here for those who might not have read it.



T. S. Eliot


Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy


I


We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar


Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.


II


Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.


Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


III


This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.


Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


IV


The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms


In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river


Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


V


Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.


Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom


Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow


Life is very long


Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is


Life is


For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.


Online text © 1998-2011 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From The Hollow Men
1925

Did Washington actually fall into "death's other kingdom" over the last several months, when neither side can hear the other, when neither side can relate to the other, when neither side can see the other and when the "dialogue" (or "negotiation" as they put it) is really the dialogue of the deaf?
And is such complete disconnect, as we witnessed continually in the movie, the kind of relationships (based exclusively on "show" and "image") that we are also experiencing in Washington...after all, over ninety percent of all members of Congress are millionaires, and all of the people attending last night's fundraiser are also in the same "class"....is this the inevitable outcome of the last century?
Have we come full circle? And will it take another war to bring us to our senses?
Some 29,000 children have died in the last 30 days in Somalia, from starvation!

David (Margaret Atwood) vs Goliath (the Ford brothers) on Toronto's Libraries

From the Editorial, Globe and Mail, July 27, 2011
Put aside the question of whether or not Toronto Councillor and mayoral confidant Doug Ford knows what Margaret Atwood looks like or has read her books. What is shocking is his suggestion that a great literary icon should “go run in the next election and get democratically elected” if she is concerned about funding for libraries.

Ms. Atwood has an unquestioned right to stand for libraries. Every citizen does. As she says, “This is about what sort of city the people of Toronto want to live in.”

Presumably, they, like people in other Canadian cities, want a city that aspires to the best. And, in fact, Toronto’s public library system is among the best. Not only the best in Canada, but in North America.
Toronto’s system is the second largest, by number of branches, and the busiest by circulation, on the continent. New York City public libraries lent out 24 million volumes in 2010; Toronto’s lent out over 32 million. The system has innovated, offering music and e-book downloads, making Internet access widely available, delivering materials to local branches, and lending out cards that give free access to local museums.
Mr. Ford’s attack is ironic, because no public service puts democracy on display more than libraries. Toronto and other cities that have invested in them foster a learning and reading culture. How? By democratizing knowledge. And the value of the system is inseparable from its density. Yet Mr. Ford attacked that too, complaining about the number of libraries in his own ward.
The mayor, Rob Ford, has a brother, Doug, on city council. And the councillor commented that he would not recognize Ms Atwood if he met her on the street. That, by itself, without the additional, "go and get elected and then we will talk to her" idiocy demonstrates that the Philistines have taken over the henhouse in Toronto.
What the Globe editorial did not mention is that, while the circulation in Toronto libraries exceeds that of New York, the population using those libraries is about one third that of New York, depending on the number of boroughs or suburbs included in the calculation.
The Ford's represent an anti-intellectual, anti-arts, anti-culture slice of the demographic in Toronto that finds it both easy and politically effective (catering to their base) to trash libraries in their quest for cost-cutting in the city budget deliberations.
Or, could they even be engaged in "deliberations"? Did they not have such easy targets in mind prior to their election? Most likely.
Atwood, on the other hand, is a globally recognized author, poet and sometime social activitist (she was active in the "save the prison farms" issue in Kingston prior to the last federal election). When she quips that she is not "running for mayor yet," immediately there is a Facebook page "Atwood for Mayor" that springs up and there is more than a little legitimacy in the effort.
Whether or not she throws her hat into the ring for the next municipal election, she has both a razor-sharp mind, and a biting sarcastic wit that is evident in everything she writes, and in every interview she gives. The Ford brothers have no idea the kind of debate they would be in, should she throw her immense public reputation and even more profound intellectual and creative powers against them. Until now, this has been a mere skirmish, and no political blood has been spilled. But rest assured that if Margaret Atwood bares her knuckles and fully enters the fray to stop the pillage of Toronto libraries, it will be a national, if not an international story. And I'm betting on the libraries and Atwood at the end of the day.
There are too many reasons for Toronto to resist the scorched earth policy of the Ford's including two gigantic, world class universities with multiple campuses, a world class museum and science centre, vibrant music, opera, ballet and art gallery communities, global conventions of a variety of professional and academic associations and affiliations as well as many global issues. People from every country in the world live in Toronto, and people from every country visit Toronto. It is Canada's premier city, and its libraries are one of the many jewels in its crown.
Atwood's entry into the fray for their protection is an act of both courage and foresight, of which only a person of her stature and timbre is both capable and worthy.
This is not a class war, as the Ford's would like to make it. This is a conflict between visions of a contemporary, complex and inspiring metropolis in the twenty-first century. And the library is at the heart of the vision, on both sides of the political aisle.
Let there be no confusion as to which side of the aisle we are on. The Ford's undoubtedly have never read even one of Ms Atwood's several manuscripts, and they are not likely to start now. Pity!
Go, Ms Atwood, Go!

Thoughts on Radical Islam...let's not be too polite and politically correct

By Olivia Ward, Toronto Star, August 1, 2011
Todorov, a Paris-based historian, has studied the age-old practice of scapegoating minorities and says the West is locked into a cycle of demonization and violence at a time when growing international immigration has made it more urgent to find mutual understanding.

In Europe, he said, far-right parties want to distance themselves from mass killings, and convince their audiences that their arguments are strictly reasonable. They draw on the fact that in once-homogeneous countries, Muslims are much more visible as immigration increases.
“The wider problem is that it’s not even radical Islam that’s seen as a threat — it’s the idea that all of Islam or Muslims are a threat,” Ali Esbati, of Norway’s Manifest Center for Social Analysis, told al Jazeera.
Resistance to Muslim influence has gone mainstream in some European countries.
In France, laws bar the hijab from public schools. The Dutch parliament banned burqas in public places, while Switzerland adopted a referendum against building Muslim minarets.
Meanwhile, the political map of the European Union has been gradually redrawn, with conservative parties governing all but four of its 27 countries.
Some are backed by far-right parties that have moved away from violent rhetoric to gain bigger audiences, while their anti-Muslim and anti-immigration views have migrated to the mainstream.
In the U.S., where Muslims make up only 1 per cent of the population, 9/11 sparked a massive backlash.
“It’s coming from members of the Republican Party who use anti-Muslim prejudice as a tool in support of their own agenda,” says Drew Courtney of People for the American Way, a Washington-based think tank that has just published a report on the American right and anti-Muslim extremism.
“Tied in with hatred of President Obama, fear of religious diversity and hostility toward immigrants and gays, anti-Muslim rhetoric and paranoia has become a mainstream if not ubiquitous part of the conservative movement and the Republican party,” the report argued. That has led to “anti-Muslim prejudice and increased attacks on Muslim-Americans and houses of worship.”
In her autobiography, Nomad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes, in analysing the shooting incident perpetrated by Nidal Malik Hassan, the psychiatrist who killed thirteen at an army base in Texas in 2009, writes:
"Why, I asked myself, was there such a conspiracy to ignore the religious motivations for these killings? And then I began to understand. First there is a desperate need for intelligence agencies to recruit Muslim agents and sources in order to penetrate the radical Islamist networks. As all Muslims are offended by the charge that Islam is a violent religion, it is official policy not to do so. The same applies to the military: American and allied soldiers do not go into places like Iraq and Afghanistan simply to fight men in uniform whom they can easily identify as the enemy. Their mission is now a complex mixture of fighting, policing, social work, and 'nation building.' They too are in desperate need of cooperation from the locals, and that overwhelmingly means Muslims. Thus the military takes the same line as the intelligence services: It is not Islamic scripture, The Prophet, or the Quran that presents a coherent argument and activism for jihad, but a misguided few who have usurped the pure and peaceful teachings of Islam....
Diversity is a wonderful concept, I thought, and E pluribus unum, "Out of many, one," is one of the mottos proudly displayed on the Great Seal of the United States (and therefore on every dollar bill). But Americans still have a long way to go before they really understand the challenge posed to their country by radical Islam, a religion that rejects not only those core principles of the Enlightenment that so inspired the founding fathers, but also the very notion that the diverse many should become one united people. (p.144-145)
And in her discussion of the differences between Christian or Jewish schools and Muslim schools, Ms Ali writes:
It is important to remember that Muslim schools are different from so-called regular Christian or Jewish schools. By regular I mean schools that are Christian or Jewish in identity but have secular curricula. Muslim schools, by contrast, are more or less like madrassas, which emphasize religion more than any other subject. Students are taught to distance themselves from science and the values of freedom, individual responsibility and tolerance. The establishment of a Muslim school anywhere in the world, but especially in the West, gives Wahabis and other wealthy Muslim extremists an opportunity to isolate and indoctrinate vulnerable groups of children....
Veiled school girls are one very evident marker of the rise of revivalist, purist Islam, however. They are much less numerous in America than they are in most European cities, but their numbers are visible growing. And it is now a common sight to see young women in full-length dresses or robes and heavy headscarves, often pushing strollers, in the streets of American cities. The increase in the number of Muslims (whether they are tourists, American residents or citizens) determined to display their piety is both a measure of their conviction and a measure of growing attempts at social control of those Muslim women who might easily be distracted from the straight path. As more immigrants come to the United States from Muslim countries, they maintain enclaves of tradition that are far stronger than those of other, comparable immigrant groups. And as more dawa,  missionary work, is done by revivalist groups financed by Saudi Arabia, Muslims in America are becoming much more hard-line.
Probably half the mosques in America have received Saudi money, and many (perhaps most) teachers and preachers of Islam have been supported by Saudi charities such as the Muslim World League. Through the Islamic Society of North America, Muslim student associations, the Islamic Circle of North America, and the Saudi-sponsored World Muslim League, the Saudis have financed summer camps for children, institutes for training imams, the distribution of Islamic literature, mosque building, lectures and dawa work through the United States. (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nomad, p.137-138)
Clearly, there is a significant disconnect between the American official policy and practice of  "not attacking or disdaining Islam" and the Islamic radical movement to eventually impose Shari'a throughout the world.
Ms Ali points sadly to Christian leaders such as the Archbishop of Canterbury whom, she says in her book, Nomad, see the imposition of Shari'a in Great Britain as inevitable. She, like us, is appalled at such a view. However, she criticises schools and churches for being too polite to challenge the belief of Muslim children and their parents. "Textbooks gloss over the fundamentally unjust rules of Islam and present it as a peaceful religion. Institutions of reason must cast off there self-imposed blinkers and reinvest in developing the ability to think critically, no matter how impolite some people may find the results." (p.xix, Nomad)

Debt Deal hurts Obama in short run, and Tea Party in long run

The talking heads are all over the debt-deficit reduction deal announced by President Obama, earlier this morning. Both houses of Congress have still to vote on it so we will have to wait to see if it makes it to the president's desk for his signature by tomorrow, the so-called deadline to avoid default.
There are no tax increases in the deal, no closed loop-holes, and only $1.7 trillion in cuts. The heavy lifting is apparently being left to a bi-partisan committee of 12 Democrats and Senators, to find another $3 trillion in cuts, prior to a date in November, in order to prevent even more significant cuts to the military and to medicare.
Has Obama caved to the Tea Party? In the short run, perhaps.
However, in the long run, it will be relatively easy for the White House to demonstrate that it was the Tea Party who held the possibility of a deal hostage to their "principles", a more appropriate word would be "pig-headedness." No group of elected representatives can be permitted to host the congress hostage to their single, non-negotiable, self-righteous, immature demand that they will only vote for a hike in the debt ceiling if a similar amount of cuts are removed from federal government spending.
These bills have already been contracted by the U.S. government, and no one expects to go to the credit card companies after the purchases have been made and say, "I'm not going to pay for those items that I purchased!"
That is effectively what the Tea Party is expecting the Congress and the President to do, retroactively, at a time when government spending is the only potential path to a jobs recovery, given that thousands of corporations are sitting on billions of undeployed cash, because they believe there is too much uncertainty in the marketplace.
And, it is those very Tea Party congressmen and women who have created all this uncertainty. Over seventy times the debt ceiling has been raised since John Kennedy was president, and never was there such a melodrama as this.
Let's hope that, come 2012, the election campaign is filled with truth-telling and finger-pointing to these political gun-slingers whose capacity to walk and chew gum at the same time is questionable.
It is the Republican party that harbours these air-heads, and it the Republican party that must be held accountable for their victories, and for their unabashed irresponsbility.
And the president is very likely to lose a big chunk of his party's left wing for what they will see as caving to that irresponsibility and immaturity.
The New York Times today calls Obama a "diminished" president; we will be watching to see if he can and does regain some of his former political lustre over the next fifteen months.