'What Have Those Muslim Women Got to Hide?'

"Dutch government proposes a ban on wearing burqas in public"
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1993583.ece

Some authorities want to force women to wear the burqa in public. Others want to forbid them from wearing them in public.

Why does women's clothing need to be specially regulated?

“They Don’t Deserve Us”: The Rats Desert the Sinking Ship

In his column “Here Come the Odious Excuses”, Robert Fisk addresses the recent “mea-culpas” of the neo-conservative intellectuals who supported the war in Iraq. Clearly one thing they have NOT learned from the sorry mess that is the Iraq war is humility- in fact, they are as arrogant in acknowledging the failure of that adventure as they were at promoting it in the first place.

It is good that people like Fisk are willing to spend time reading their pearls of wisdom and then report back to those of us who do not wish to subject ourselves to continuous waves of anger and depression. I believe in knowing your opponent’s arguments, but only up to a point. I don’t want to immerse myself in them to get to know their every wretched detail. I know someone who does do that, but then he seems to get a kick out of getting angry. I get angry but I don’t enjoy it. I start to move in the direction of away when he starts recounting neo-con arguments in great detail.

The problem is that however bright intellectuals may be, their intellect becomes a force for ill rather than good when it is directed through the lens of ideology. Ideology breeds arrogance because the believer identifies himself with the fundamental presuppositions of the ideology- and an ideology does not allow its fundamental presuppositions to ever be proved wrong. The important thing to keep in mind is that not only does success prove the ideology to be fundamentally right, but so does failure. For instance, when a country adopts “free market” policies and its economy collapses, free market ideologists conclude not that there is something wrong with the free market policies, but they weren’t applied strictly enough. And when the catastrophic nature of the war in Iraq becomes plain to all, those who claimed that invading Iraq would transform the Middle East in a paradise of pro-western/pro-Israel liberal democracies now say the problem is not with their ideology but with the Arabs. It’s like doing experiments on people and blaming them for dying from the experiments: “they weren’t strong enough.” The fact that this response is racist is no surprise- the idea always was that Arabs understand force, and so if enough force is applied to them they will be “reshaped” in desirable ways. Now they are saying that even violence is not enough to reform the Arabs- therefore they must be incorrigible.

Of course, ideology is an important ingredient of imperialism, and the racism that underlies imperialism (“these backward savages may yet be saved by our beneficent guidance”) is not dispelled by its failures, just turned to “these backward savages are beyond salvation, and not worthy of our beneficent guidance. Screw them. They deserve everything we have to throw at them- and more.”

Review of 'Between States'

I went to see Darren Ell’s photographic exhibition, "Between States", after weeks of procrastination. It consists mainly of photographic portraits of people who are, as the title suggests, caught in a sort of stateless limbo here in Canada. In some cases, this limbo is endured as imprisonment. Both Hassan Alurei and Mahmoud Jaballah, detained on secret evidence supposedly linking them to terrorist organisations, are shown in their orange prison jump suits, clutching black wires in their hands, against a white wall. Mohamed Harkat, now out of prison on strict bail conditions, is in civilian clothes and under a tree, yet he is clutching the same black wire.

Another form of imprisonment is sanctuary, although this is willingly endured by some as an alternative to deportation. Sanctuary is when refugees facing imminent deportation are sheltered by a church congregation, in the hope that the government will not send police into the church to arrest them. A moving depiction of this form of imprisonment is to be found in the photograph of Alvaro, Marcela and Miresa Vega, a Colombian family that lived in St. Andrew’s Norwood United Church for 567 days, until they were allowed to stay on compassionate grounds. I saw this family at a special service a couple of years ago, when they had already endured almost a year and a half of not being able to leave the church. Ell’s photograph shows them looking out from a window onto the rooftop aside the church- their only view of the outside world.

Another Colombian is also another one of those being threatened with deportation on the basis of secret evidence. Ampero Torres, whose ex-husband and brother are members of the rebel army FARC, is accused of links to this group, now classified as a "terrorist organisation" by the Canadian government. The fact that the UN High Commission for Refugees found that her life had been in danger in Columbia hasn’t prevented our government from trying to send her back there.

Another refugee in sanctuary in a Montreal church is Abelkader ("Kader") Belouni, a blind diabetic who sought sanctuary in St. Gabriel’s Church in Pointe-St-Charles last January 1. Seeing him in the large photograph on the wall in front of me reminded me of seeing him at the press conference held in early January to announce that he was doing this. I’ve missed all the events held there since. I really must make a point of going to one soon.

The caption mentioned that currently, ten people are in sanctuary in Canada.

The other component of the exhibition was to be found via a pair of headphones, where I heard bits of the testimonies of the refugees portrayed. One voice would be followed by another, followed by another, and so on, then we’d come back to the first one….it was put together in such a way that, after a while, you could hear an overall story being told.

Because they are "between states", it is easy for the authorities to subject refugees to treatment that would be considered scandalous when applied to a citizen. Yet refugees do not inherently pose more of a security risk than do citizens. There is no logic to the laws treating them so differently, except that they can. But if national security requires that secret evidence should be enough to tar refugees as terrorists, then it must also require that it be enough tar citizens as such too. Does it? Should we have to give up our freedoms in order to preserve them? No? Then let us respect the rights of refugees too.

What Are We Remembering?

Rememberance Day always leaves me with mixed feelings. One the one hand, I think it's very important to remember what it means to fight in a war, and what it means to die in a war. But its effectiveness on that score is undercut by the nationalistic/militaristic sentimentalism by which it seems that our soldiers who died in wars are the only casulties of war worth remembering, and that they all died for noble principles, died so that we could be free, etc. etc. It is said that they "fell" in battle; that they "laid down their lives", sacrificing themselves so that future generations might enjoy freedom and democracy, etc., etc.

I'm not a strict pacifist. I don't say that there can never be any violence, anywhere, under any circumstances. I would like to be able to say that, but I feel that it would be wrong of me to say that people are not to defend themselves from attack or from heavy oppression, especially since I'm not in a position of being attacked or oppressed. That said, the reality of war is not that it is a noble sacrifice in which people willingly lay down their lives for their country and for freedom. The reality is that war is a horrendous atrocity, which is at best a necessary evil, and most of the time isn't even necessary. The reality is that people have their lives torn from them- they rarely give them up willingly. There is a differance between risking one's life (willingly or unwillingly) and giving it up willingly for a sacrifice.

Even the Second World War, of which it can convincingly be said that Allied soldiers did preserve freedom in some parts of the world, was a catastrophe in human terms. Tens of millions of people were killed. Many others were made refugees. Most of Europe lay in ruins by the end of it. Parts of Asia were also devastated, and the war also featured the first (and so far only) nuclear bombings, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fighting the war may have been a necessary evil, but it was a great evil all the same.

As for the war from which Rememberance Day originates, World War One, it is difficult to see that those who fought in it preserved freedom and democracy in Canada. Had we sat out that particular war, how would Canadian democracy have been imperilled? Would the German Kaiser have sent his troops across the Atlantic? No, the only reason why Canadians fought in that war was because we were still part of the British Empire.

This is not mere academic quibbling about history, for the same justifications for that war are now being used to support the idea of our sending troops abroad to "promote freedom", thus securing our own freedom. You would think, then, that if we were not in Afghanistan, hordes of "jihadis" would even now be attempting to conquer western Europe and North America in order to take away our freedoms. Not so. The reason why many Muslims support "holy war" against the "West" is not because they want to rule the "West", but because they've had enough of being ruled by the "West", either directly through military occupation or indirectly through "pro-Western" tyrannies. As Robert Fisk puts it, they want to be free- of us.

Memory is important, but memory can be selective. How we choose to remember has a bearing on the choices we make that will determine our future. So let us remember, but let us also think about what we are remembering, and about what we might be forgetting.

So There!

"I don't believe this is a civil war; the Iraqi PM doesn't, and our ambassador there doesn't."- George W. Bush, speaking of the situation in Iraq

Well, there would seem to be a consensus then...

Micheal Ignatieff on Torture

I am not a fan of Micheal Ignatieff, the former academic who wishes to become our next Prime Minister. He has supported the invasion of Iraq, and U.S. hegemony generally, in the name of speading freedom and democracy worldwide.

I was also annoyed by his response to accusations that he`s supported torture in his writings, claiming that of course he does not support torture, because a relation of his was tortured to death by the Nazis. Would he have accepted such an argument if a student had made it in a paper during his years as an academic? Someone could be against the torture practiced by the Nazis against a relative, but be for the torture practiced by the "good guys" (us) against dastardly terrorists for noble ideals- and as we shall see in the next article, Ignatieff excuses a lot in the name of noble ideals.

However, he has a much stronger case when challenges people to actually look at what he`s written. I`ve not read everything he`s written, but I`ve read two pieces of his on the subject of torture (« Evil under Interrogation: Is Torture ever Permissible? » http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/news/opeds/2004/ignatieff_torture_ft_051504.htm) and « If Torture Works » (http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7374%60), and they do not support the allegation that he supports torture. In fact, he comes out quite clearly against it- although the way he frames the issue can be misinterpreted.

In the latter article, for example, begins with these words : « The debate over torture is not as simple as it seems. Those of us who oppose torture under any circumstances should admit that ours is an unpopular policy that may make us more vulnerable to terrorism. »

People have, I think, seized on the first sentence and the second part of the last, neglecting to note that he speaks of « those of us who oppose torture under any circumstances should admit that ours is an unpopular policy». Later on, he makes it clear : he opposes torture not because it never works or could not save lives (he thinks it probably could), but because to do so would be a betrayal of « who we are ». The worrying thing he does say here is that « If we are against torture, we are committed to arguing with our fellow citizens, not treating those who defend torture as moral monsters »- suggesting torture should be treated as a reasonable proposal that we may disagree with, but not completely abhor. To my mind, this is too weak- if torture is not monstrous, and if it can save lives, then Ignatieff`s arguments against it look very thin indeed. Thus the problem is not that he supports torture, but that his opposition to it is ineffective.

There`s also the issue of « coercive interrogation ». First of all, it seems to me that the adjective « coercive » is redundant when applied to « interrogration », since interrogation is inherently coercive. When someone is hauled off to the police station to « answer a few questions », that person is being subjected to the coercive power of the state, and as for the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, let`s just say that their whole experience is one of coercion at the hands of Uncle Sam.

Clearly, there are levels of coercion that are not forms of torture. But there are forms of coercian, that, like torture, are designed to « break down » uncooperative suspects. There is also a point at which they become torture.

One problem with breaking people down is that the innocent can be broken down as easily as the guilty. Many wrongful convictions have resulted from people confessing to things they didn`t do under dubious circumstances. You see, if the police were to believe that I`d committed a crime, once it came to interrogation the whole point of it could be to get me to confess to the crime.

We have laws to protect the rights of criminal suspects- and of prisoners of war- precisely to limit the coercive power of the state so that abuses and miscarriages of justice can be prevented. Such laws should not be simply tossed away as inexpediant when a government sees fit to declare war on an evil such as terrorism. Again, Ignatieff is right when he says that of course there is bound to be some coercian involved in interrogation, but is lamentably weak when it comes to arguing for the state`s coercive powers to be limited.

Michael Ignatieff, Noble Dreams, and Imperialism

Michaeal Ignatieff, the former academic who would be our next Prime Minister, has been accused of supporting U.S. imperialsm, and of supporting torture.

In my last article, I argued that he has not supported torture. On the contrary, he clearly states his opposition to it. Unfortunately, the arguments he makes in support of this strong stance are themselves rather wishy-washy and ineffective.

In this article, however, I show that he has supported U.S. imperialism in his writings. His argument in favour of some form of "idealistic imperialism", however noble it may sound, serves to mask the reality of empire- empires are about power, not noble ideals. Where the requirements of imperial power conflict with the ideals that supposedly motivate the imperial project, it`s the ideals that fall by the wayside. An empire is based on the idea that the imperialists must have control over the world, or over large parts of it, or all is lost. What are ideals when faced with such an imperative?

In his 2005 article "Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread? (New York Times Magazine, 26 June 2005, http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/ksgnews/Features/opeds/062605_ignatieff.htm), Ignatieff supports U.S. hegemony, though not without some criticism over details. He says that "If democracy plants itself in Iraq and spreads throughout the Middle East, Bush will be remembered as a plain-speaking visionary. If Iraq fails, it will be his Vietnam, and nothing else will matter much about his time in office….The consequences are more likely to be positive if the president begins to show some concern about the gap between his words and his administration's performance. For he runs an administration with the least care for consistency between what it says and does of any administration in modern times."

But isn’t there an inconsistency between that and his claim that there has been a "democratic turn in American foreign policy"? If there`s a gap between rhetorical support for democracy and real support for democracy that`s "unprecendented in modern times", then this "democratic turn" would seem to be merely rhetorical. And the facts bear out such an assertion. Ignatieff notes that "Latin Americans remember when the American presence meant backing death squads and military juntas". He fails to note that today, it merely means supporting a military coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and threatening to cut off aid to Nicaragua should the Nicaraguans have the gall to elect Daniel Ortega as president. He does note that in the Middle East the U.S. continues to support tyrants- he fails to note how the Iraqi elections came about as a result of widespread popular demonstrations for elections (the original U.S. plan being to bring in a largely appointed "constituent assembly"), how the U.S. failed to support the democratically elected Lebanese government this past summer when their country was under assault from "the only democracy in the Middle East", and how the U.S. and other countries are punishing the Palestinians for their democratic choice early this year.

The methods may change, but the ultimate aim remains the same- control.

In this light, one can appreciate the true irony of statements like "The charge that promoting democracy is imperialism by another name is baffling to many Americans. How can it be imperialist to help people throw off the shackles of tyranny?"

Ignatieff claims that Eastern Europeans supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq because they remember how "when the chips were down, in the dying years of Soviet tyranny, American presidents were there, and Western European politicians looked the other way."

True, Eastern European governments supported the invasion, for some very practical reasons (which Ignatieff does mention in passing). This is not the same as saying that people in those countries supported it. In fact, polls taken in those countries suggested that there was little popular support for the invasion of Iraq. I guess those East Europeans need to learn a thing or two about gratitude, eh?

Ignatieff takes the claims of "American idealism" just a little too seriously. For instance, he says that John Kerry's presidential campaign "could not overcome liberal America's fatal incapacity to connect to the common faith of the American electorate in the Jeffersonian ideal….the American electorate seemed to know only too well how high the price was in Iraq, and it still chose the gambler over the realist. In 2004, the Jefferson dream won decisively over American prudence"

No, what won the 2004 election for Bush was fear, and his proffered antidote to fear, "security"- including measures that run counter to the "Jeffersonian ideal". Even "exporting freedom and democracy" was supposed to be good for security. Most Americans, I suspect, are not interested in sending troops to die in some foreign country just so that foreigners can vote for their rulers. The same goes for Canadians. Bush also claimed that "taking the fight to them" (Who? The Arabs? The Muslims?), prevented "them" from taking the fight to "us". Better Baghdad than Washington D.C., in other words. Although many Americans weren’t totally convinced that Bush was on the right track, there seemed to be a risk in changing horses in midstream, as well as a risk that Kerry would just be "weak" on security, since his ideas on the subject seemed to shift just a little too often.

But Ignatieff, that super-intellectual, prefers the level of high-flown ideas and ideals to dealing with the nitty-gritty of political reality. He even seems to believe that ideas, if we believe in them, can themselves make a war worthwhile. Apparently, we can therefore ignore the reality of the power politics behind the war. In reality, no war is ever simply about ideals. Even the Second World War, commonly cited as a "good" war, was not an "idealistic" war. It was fought against a real threat to security (German expansionism motivated by Nazi ideology) and was fought alongside the brutal Soviet Union, which ended up occupying Eastern Europe and subjecting it to its form of tyranny.

By the end of the article we see Ignatieff appealing to an almost religious mysticism, looking to "Jefferson’s dream" that must "somehow do its work": "Its ultimate task in American life is to redeem loss, to rescue sacrifice from oblivion and futility and to give it shining purpose. The real truth about Iraq is that we just don't know -- yet -- whether the dream will do its work this time."

Dreams don’t work. People do. Plans can work, or not- but to plan effectively one must deal with reality. Dreams motivate people, of course, but we cannot rely on them to do anything for us. Yet a mystical belief in the power of noble dreams to somehow make horrible, sordid realities shine with purpose is in the end all that "idealistic" supporters of the war have left to hang on to.

The Art of War?

Iraq a 'work of art in progress' says US general after 49 dieJulian Borger in WashingtonFriday November 3, 2006The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1938419,00.html

"On a day in which 49 people were killed or found dead around the country, Major General William Caldwell, the chief military spokesman, argued that Iraq was in transition, a process that was "not always a pleasant thing to watch.

"Every great work of art goes through messy phases while it is in transition. A lump of clay can become a sculpture. Blobs of paint become paintings which inspire," Maj Gen Caldwell told journalists in Baghdad's fortified green zone."

I don't know much about art, but I know what I don't like.

I Love Vermont!

Vermont poised to elect America's first socialist senator
Midterms 2006: Cantankerous campaigner strikes chord with voters.

Don't Blame Us...What Can WE Do? (Shrug)

In the National Post, Bruce Pardy ("WWF report wrong about Canada's 'print'") claims that the recent World Wildlife Fund “Living Planet” report is wrong to say that Canada’s “ecological footprint” (negative impact on the environment) is among the worst (4th highest) in the world. This ranking, he says, reflects the “prevailing world view of the international environmental intelligentsia that the world's environmental problems are the fault of Western industrialized countries, each of which owes a debt to developing nations.”

“But it isn’t true”, says Pardy. He makes the following argument: True, on a per capita basis we consume far more in the way of national resources and exude far more in the way of harmful byproducts (including greenhouse gases) than do people in India and China, let alone people in sub-Saharan Africa. But in fact we are “living within our biological capacity”, and so are other “high-footprint” but low population density countries such as Finland, Australia, Sweden, New Zealand and Norway. For you see, what all these countries have in common with us is this: low population densities and plenty of natural resources. Thus, “even given the large amount of environmental resources consumed by each of their citizens, the total ecological load in these countries is still smaller than what their natural resources are able to provide. These are not the nations imposing massive environmental externalities on the rest of the world.”

Who then are the burdensome nations of the world? “The United States is in ecological deficit, but so are China, India and the oil-producing countries of the Middle East. These nations create significant environmental burdens upon the globe because their impacts exceed the capacity of their own ecosystems.”

Pardy does acknowledge that our being in “ecological credit” has nothing to do with any virtuous behaviour on our part: Canada is in this position "(not due to) superior environmental governance or resource management skills, but because it has a small population in a large, resource-rich territory. That's an accident of history.” Yet he still concludes that “Canada and these other developed countries are not the main culprits for global environmental problems.”

In other words, we have plenty of resources to waste, so our wasting of resources is not a problem. The problem is not that the world’s rich consume too many resources- the problem is either that the poor consume too many resources, or that there are too many poor. Perhaps we should consume the poor, as Jonathan Swift once suggested. The implication is that China and India, for example, are major culprits for environmental problems because unlike us they have high population densities and comparatively few natural resources. What are they supposed to do about that? Is there anything we should be doing about that? Pardy doesn’t say.

Pardy then goes on to suggest that there is little point in our trying to reduce our impact on the environment, because, you see, we are such a small country (in terms of population), and so our contribution to solving the problem will necessarily be slight. By the same reasoning, no one should ever vote because no single vote ever makes a decisive difference, and no one should give to charity unless one is rich enough to make a major contribution to the budget of the fundraising organization.

He also asks whether the growth in human impact on the planet can be halted “while maintaining democratic systems and fundamental freedoms.”

Well, look at it this way: the longer we put off making adjustments to our profligate lifestyles, the harder it will be to avoid draconian measures further down the line. When the crunch comes, people will likely choose survival over more abstract notions such as democracy and freedom, especially if our democratic institutions are seen as having been ineffective at averting catastrophe. Since I am partial to human rights, freedom and democracy (and survival too) I would prefer it if we could avoid that dilemna altogether. We’ll have to quickly overcome attitudes like Pardy’s if we’re to have a hope of doing so.