Jerusalem takes Obama

Remember the idyllic days of June in Cairo? President Barack Obama laid out his vision for reconciliation with the Muslim world and a sustained Middle Eastern peace at a university in Cairo. Part of that vision called for a freeze to Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank. Later this month, Obama is tentatively scheduled to make another major address on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the United Nations. At this early stage of Obama’s presidency, such an address can only be a milestone of failure.

To those Obama true believers who assumed flowers would bloom along the Jordan with Obama’s election, as the redoubtable Mr. Soprano once said….fahgeddaboutit! In recent days, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, confirmed his administration’s plans to build hundreds of additional homes in the occupied territories. At the same time, Israeli courts overlook venerable Ottoman, British mandate and Jordanian property law  in invalidating the title of Palestinians owning homes in East Jerusalem. The ‘facts on the ground’ a term widely used by the Israeli right and its North American supporters, are clear: the current Israeli government has no intention to share sovereignty in Jerusalem or to pull back from the West Bank. Most analysts would agree such policies are essential to a peace based on the existence of two viable states.

In the days ahead, following the next regional visit by Obama’s Middle Eastern special envoy former Senator George Mitchell, the mainstream  press may well vaunt Obama’s apparent success in temporarily slowing Israeli settlement plans. It is, after all, high time for the sophisticated Israeli government to throw a crumb Obama’s way. Such success is a chimera. Despite the new president’s soaring rhetoric, despite shuttle diplomacy, the Israeli government  continues to do as it pleases. Only now, in an even more brazen fashion than when its kissing cousin Bush Republicans were in power.

In May, “Bibi” visited Washington. It would appear that Netanyahu took the measure of Barack Obama and thought, ‘A charming young man, but a dweeb.’ Israel feels unchecked in strengthening its garrison state and putting the necessary conditions in place – a stranglehold on Jerusalem plus half a million settlers in the West Bank – to make a contiguous Palestinian entity there a pipe dream. Such efforts, despite the delusions of Obama acolytes, are still bankrolled by American investment and steeled with American military hardware. Netanyahu and his ilk are succeeding in their quest to ensure that the Palestinian Territories are never more than impotent, economically dependent cantons of the Jewish state.

Obama takes Kabul Pt.II

Wow. The straight press (see Page 1 The Globe and Mail 24.08.09) reports that Messiah Obama will be urged by his military commanders to send an additional 20,000 troops to Afghanistan. Listen up kids – that’s on top of the 21,000 grunts who have been sent to Afghanistan since Barack was inaugurated!

Imagine my surprise. I’ve been in journalism for more than 25 years. Never in my career have I witnessed a collective suspension of judgment to rival the euphoric, oceanic embrace the mass media bestowed on Obama in the 2008 Democratic leadership campaign and the subsequent non-contest against John McCain and Ms. Sarah Palin. All the while, Obama declared his intention to expand the war in Afghanistan – a policy TO THE RIGHT OF BUSH!

In 2008-9, I observed grown journalistic adults write laudatory poetry about Obama; another colleague, also a journalist, told me that he habitually drove around Toronto listening to a download of Obama’s inaugural address.

Predictably enough, in practice, Obama’s foreign policies are just more simple-minded American imperialism.  Don’t even get me started about the wall between the USofA and Mexico which Obama has not lifted a finger to arrest. In Afghanistan, Obama – like the British, like the Soviets – believes his will can be imposed on the people of Afghanistan. Democrats must prove they have cojones, so they expand wars. Forget the Camelot myth and look at what JFK actually did in Viet Nam!

I predict tough, tough sledding ahead. The same knee-jerk mainstream media that created Messiah Obama soon might turn on him, declaring Afghanistan a symbol of failed promise. In fact, he’s only being true to the convictions he campaigned on that the same media failed to challenge. Of course, that was because Barack was so cool…hell, supporting him was almost as hip, trendy and cool as being embedded in a Humvee racing towards the ‘liberation’ of Baghdad in 2003!

The Next Ballard: Ricciardi or Burke?

It’s tough to be a sports fan in Toronto.

After an explosively successful start to the 2009 season, the Blue Jays collapsed into mediocrity or worse. The principal reason for the swoon is that two very highly paid players Vernon Wells and Alex Rios failed to provide the performance or leadership that fans in Boston and New York have come to expect of their stars.

Wells and Rios were signed to lucrative, long-term contracts by J.P. Ricciardi, Jays’ Senior Vice President, Baseball Operations and General Manager. Ricciardi believed the two together would be the big swingers on a competitive team – he believed the same thing in vain for 3-4 years. This week the Jays pulled the plug on Rios by literally giving him (and his bloated contract) to the Chicago White Sox. No such luck with Wells who is simply the highest paid failure in Major League Baseball.

As if the annual demise of the Jays wasn’t bad enough, we have another Leafs’ season just ahead of us. As August nears its end, the hockey mad Toronto media will drone on and on and on about the prospects for this season’s Toronto Maple Leaf team. The “Leaf Nation” will learn just how much the team has been improved! Don’t count your chickens, Loaf fans!

Brian Burke became President and General Manager of the team promising “proper levels of pugnacity, testosterone, truculence and belligerence” (does that means he wants a team that fights but also sleeps together?) The fact is that in Burke’s first year, the Leafs were simply terrible.

It is true that Burke has added an impressive number of defensemen this off-season. Sadly, he did so while marginalizing and insulting Tomas Kaberle his one defenseman of all-round talent. Burke has also put the team’s fate not-so-firmly in the hands of Vesa Toskala, a goaltender who has yet to deliver. More fundamentally, the Leaf roster is singularly lacking in goal scorers. So, expect low scoring, violent hockey. It says here that if the Leafs don’t find someone who can score, they will fail to make the playoffs yet again. Only they will be more boring in doing so.

Toronto fans recall the ‘bad old days’ when Harold Ballard ran the Leafs. Ricciardi, certainly, and Burke, potentially, have no reason to feel superior. In fact Loaf fans, Harold was a Maple Leaf executive when the team last won the Stanely Cup in the 1966-7 season. Rest assured that J.P. Ricciardi’s name will never be asociated with a championship baseball team in Toronto. And I would be AMAZED if Burke’s name ever gets etched on the Stanley Cup along with a Maple Leaf team.

Donald Marshall - a Mi'kmaq hero

I want to begin today with a brief tribute to Donald Marshall who died yesterday in Sydney, Nova Scotia. He was 55.

Marshall fought tirelessly for social and economic justice for aboriginal Canadians. His fishing rights case led the Supreme Court of Canada to uphold centuries’ old rights that Canadian and Nova Scotia politicians had stripped away. The struggle to reach a civil accommodation over the East Coast fishery among all groups continues, but Marshall’s activism forced a significant step in the recognition of historic collective rights and economic arrangements.

Donald Marshall achieved these political and legal successes after personally suffering a horrendous miscarriage of justice. Marshall was imprisoned for 11 year for a murder he did not commit. To emerge from prison to resume an active life in defence of his people fired with a steely determination to make a settler country grow up makes “Junior” a true hero in my eyes.

Reynolds + Gilder on Israel G&M 31.07.09

In The Toronto Globe And Mail of Friday, July 31 2009, the iconoclastic, neo-liberal Neil Reynolds wrote about a new book on Israel by George Gilder. Gilder is a contrarious analyst of trends in capitalism. His new book The Israel Test, according to Reynold, holds up Israel as a model of what can be achieved by a state dedicated to democracy, education and economic growth.

The notion that Messrs Reynolds and Gilder proffer Israel as a paragon of democracy and development troubles me. As I write, Israel continues to expropriate homes of Arab citizens of East Jerusalem. Such actions violate international laws. Similarly, despite the protestations of the Obama administration, Israel is strengthening the illegal foothold of its half million settlers in the West Bank. Israel is only a democracy in a severely mitigated way. One could argue that its bundle of democratic rights and responsibilities only belongs fully to its Jewish citizens.

I recognize that all ‘democratic’ countries have constraints. Canada, after all, has the embarrassment of an appointed Senate and suffers still the shame of the Victorian era apartheid regime constructed under the extant The Indian Act.

Israel’s exceptions to the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy are more salient. In an ample Israeli democracy. the state might have to acknowledge to the world that it has nuclear weapons. That state might then sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Finally in the ultimate test that Mr. Gilder and Mr. Reynolds would presumably vaunt, a true Israeli democracy would extend voting rights in Israeli elections to the more than 3 million Palestinian Arab citizens of the West Bank and Gaza whose lives have been controlled by Israel since 1967.

Geor

Michael Jackson - one month on

A great artist died on June 25, 2009. For many days afterward, we witnessed a media spectacle devoted to the life and work of Michael Jackson. Television, radio, the Internet, newspapers and magazines joined in an instant canonization. In Canada, the alleged weekly news magazineMaclean’s proffered an embarrassingly shallow instant ‘tribute’ edition. Overall, I found the sum of the coverage very alienating.

Some great artists die young. In popular music, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Elvis Presley and Kurt Cobain are among those that perished tragically young with drug related problems. Jackson’s life was also very troubled but uniquely so. He certainly had a terrible drug problem. More importantly, and what was under emphasized in the coverage that sang his praises as both a great artist and a great human, Jackson had extremely troubling relationships with children – he was quite possibly a pedophile. Yes, he was acquitted of a criminal charge. It is also true that he settled out of court with a significant payment to the family of a young boy who had been in his company. In an interview, he said that he enjoyed having children in his bed.

The general media silence about Jackson’s problem with children troubles me. There were a few worthy exceptions. On July 4, 2009, Bob Herbert, a columnist with the New York Times, wrote a column that featured a chilling portrait of the Jackson that he had met and some sombre thoughts about the cult of celebrity in America. As is often the case, the British magazineThe Economist in its July 2 edition outshone its print competitors with an eloquent, brief, crystalline obituary of Jackson.

In the days and weeks ahead, we will learn more details about Jackson’s autopsy. Some media reports suggest there may be manslaughter charges in the works. We will also learn the outcome of the current bidding war for rights to the video footage of Jackson rehearsals for the tour he was planning. It is safe to predict that the release of the finished production will be one of the television and/or cinematic  events of 2010. I wonder at what stage the media might engage in a responsible, thoughtful discussion and investigation into the true nature of Jackson’s relationships with children. That’s hard to do at a canonization.

Jam

The Lens shuts

Errgghhh. In a move that demonstrates a stunning incapacity to honour CBC’s putative role as public broadcaster, the geniuses at English Television have canceled The Lens. That strand, once known as Rough Cuts, was a prime showcase for emerging documentarists from all over Canada.

Before proceeding let me be clear about my bias: I belong to DOC (The Documentary Organization of Canada); and  I once produced a film forRough Cuts. 

I’m also a broadcast educator and journalist-filmmaker with a quarter century of experience. The sad fact is that the gang currently running CBC-TV are betraying a public trust.

The CBC would rather spend our tax money on drama that mimics the worst that Hollywood can offer, professional sports and the rights to Coronation Street. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a Corrie fan, but what on earth are the priorities of our CANADIAN national public broadcaster on television?

CBC Radio continues to provide some excellent programming. CBC-TV now consists largely of weak variants of American trends in both its fiction and non-fiction programming. I would hope that taxpayers would begin to have higher expectations of a service that was once a trend setter rather than a prime symptom of Canada’s colonial status.

Lawrence Martin sings Chretien's praises

In the Thursday July 16, 2009 edition of The Globe And Mail of Toronto, columnist Lawrence Martin expressed his admiration for former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien. This following the announcement that Chretien would be named to The Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth. As such, Chretien would join the likes of Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa.
Martin weighs the pros and cons for including Chretien in such prestigious company. As  for demerits, he missed a few:
1. the White Paper on Indian Policy 1969. This outrage would have capped Canada’s assimilation project for First Nations. The Nisga’a decision of 1973 proved how wrong then Indian Affairs Minister Chretien and his Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had been.
2. Chretien’s  constant shilling about business opportunities in an anti-democratic China. In his farewell address to a Liberal Party convention that selected the doomed Stephane Dion to replace him, Chretien chose to attack the ruling Conservatives for criticizing China about its human rights record. In a rare appearance in support of Dion in the 2008 federal election, Chretien weirdly chose to speak about – you guessed it- cozying up to China. Promoting China is actually part of Chretien’s job as a lawyer for Canadian businesses with interests there.

Like George W. Bush, Jean Chretien skillfully cultivated a ‘man of the people’(le p’tit’ gars de Shawinigan) persona. As a politician and in his new corporate life, Chretien has seldom been on the side of the little guy against the big shots as Martin argues.

 

Tom Friedman and the USA will save the world!

Thomas L. Friedman’s columns in The New York Times are thought-provoking. His concerns about the environment and social justice are laudable. However,  his analysis often suffers from an insistence of putting himself into every story and for an almost naive belief in America’s moral duty to lead the world.
Today’s column (Sun. NYT 19.07.09) on education in Afghanistan “Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.” is noteworthy for its embrace of ‘soft’ imperialism (now backed by Obama’s big guns) and its transparent Orientalism. Having swooped into a remote village school by helicopter with a top American military commander,  Friedman describes a heroic effort to educate Afghani girls. Once again, that’s a laudable goal. What’s surprising is the  lack of context and scepticism in Friedman’s argument.

Friedman’s column and American policy in Afghanistan are part of an old story that usually ends in tears – the USA, Great Britain and other NATO countries (including Canada) probably face the same prospects for success in Afghhanistan as the British and Soviet empires did.

Obama in Cairo

Quick thought: This was remarkable for many reasons. It was the first speech of Obama’s that I’ve heard that almost seemed to live up to its advance billing. He took some real risks. The Israeli government and its acolytes in the American Republican party and among the American Christian far-right will go bananas about his call to end settlements, the President’s use of the word “Palestine” and his statement that life in the occupied territories is “intolerable”. I say, ‘Well done Barack!’, but let’s see if your administration is really prepared to back up your words with action.

A few concerns:

  • Obama’s tone presumes American primacy in the world: a stature which is questionable at this point in the twenty-first century.
  • The talk of avoiding a nuclear arms race in the Middle East is largely nonsense. There already is one. Israel has nuclear weapons. It’s refreshing that Obama acknowledged the double standard at work, but he could urge Israel to admit what the world already knows: it possesses the bomb.
  • I admired Obama’s inclusion of agnostics in his inauguration address. This speech and others since seems to assume a shared religiosity among peoples of the world. It always creeps me out when politicians of supposedly secular, democratic states invoke “God” as if she/he’s on their side.C

Government Motors

I’d be amazed if this works. Obama largely gets a pass from the media because he’s Obama. His double speak of saying that he doesn’t want to run GM when the US government now owns 60% is mind-boggling.

Here in this place called Canada, Ontarians seem too numb to notice the money they’ve wasted on GM while Dalton, Steve, Paul and Jean have been in charge.

Couldn’t it have been cheaper and saved as many jobs (or better still, create more new jobs) in the long run, just to let the deal go down? Don’t Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives normally claim that’s how capitalism is supposed to work? Just asking.

Valpy on Ignatieff – The Globe And Mail 18.04.09 April 20, 2009

I want to commend Michael Valpy and Toronto’s The Globe And Mail for a fine article about Canadian Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. This major feature appeared in The Globe on Saturday, April 18, 2009. The analysis was thought provoking. The piece featured a terrific interview and the excerpt from the Ignatieff’s new book was most revealing.

I think ‘Iggy’ is largely “wrong, wrong, wrong” in his take on his Uncle George Grant’s famous book on Canadian nationalism Lament For A Nation, but it’s heartening to see an intellectual/politician taken seriously by a Canadian newspaper. In that, The Globe and Valpy committed a form of journalism that it seems newspapers still do best. Despite the joys of theblogosphere and Internet journalism of many kinds, I hope newspapers like The Globe continue to produce work of this calibre and nature. Journalism of this kind has simply disappeared from most North American television.

Perhaps Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be spurred into finishing his long promised tome on hockey. Then the next Canadian election campaign could be a battle between authors!

 

Obama takes Kabul

The coverage of the new AMERICAN president continues to baffle me. I know folks are fascinated by Michelle’s arms and the Obama family canine. Such “Gainesburgers” (in the words of former Reagan adviser Michael Deaver) routinely divert media and public alike. BUT there is this war thing happening.

Earlier this month, on the cusp of the Christian Easter holiday, Obama sought another $83 billion plus in funding for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. This on top of the more than $800 billion already dedicated to those conflicts. (source: NYT 09.04.09) Add this sum to the minimum 20,000 additional troops Obama plans to send to Afghanistan in the next year. So far this Democrat in the White House means more war, not less.

I fear this has the makings of a colassal distaster. Just as John Fitzgerald Kennedy blundered his way into Viet Nam, Obama risks ensnaring the United States in a doomed struggle in Afghanistan. This is where I think the Camelot comparison actually takes traction: an inexperienced newcomer adored by a fawning media ramps up foreign misadventures.