Protesting the Commercial Seal Hunt

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged
by the way its animals are treated.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“I would like to see the 6 million seals, or whatever number is out there, killed and sold, or destroyed and burned. I do not care what happens to them…the more they kill the better I will love it.” – John Efford, Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Newfoundland and Labrador, 4 May 1998.

The protesters handed out buttons with the initials “S.O.S.”. Their plea was not “Save Our Souls”, but rather “Save Our Seals.”

Over 50 Kingstonian activists braved the cold and rain on Saturday, March 13 to protest the Canadian government’s support for the annual commercial seal hunt. Standing in front of City Hall at Confederation Basin, the protesters spent two hours waving their signs at passing cars. Enthusiastic shouts and hollers greeted all motorists who signalled their support with a friendly honk.

The government of Canada supports the commercial seal hunt to the tune of well over $20 million in direct and indirect subsidies. While the seal hunt’s defenders claim the brutal practice is essential to the economy – in particular, that of Newfoundland and Labrador – its opponents argue that the costs far outweigh any perceived benefits.

Indeed, in testimony before the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, some sealers have indicated that the hunt only provides 5-10% of their income, rather than the 35% claimed by the Canadian government. In 2008, the seal hunt accounted for 1.2% of the total landed value of Newfoundland fisheries, according to a 2006 Newfoundland and Labrador Statistics Agency report.

Official support for the seal hunt has also brought a wave of negative publicity to Canada internationally. With the European Union considering a ban on the trade of seal products, sealers selling their wares are increasingly looking to China and Korea. The bulk of seal pelts are used to make luxury fashion garments which have limited market appeal.

Vicky Deodato is a local activist who has been at the forefront of the local animal rights movement with her group Kingston Animal Trust. Speaking privately at Saturday’s gathering – billed as Kingston’s third annual demonstration against the commercial seal hunt – Deodato fired back at the government’s tactic of falsely portraying protesters as opponents of the unrelated Inuit seal hunt.

“The Canadian government is trying so hard to keep the seal hunt going that they’re misleading people and saying that it has to do with the Inuit seal hunt, which it does not,” she said. “This is the commercial seal hunt, and they’re doing everything they can to try to mix it up to make protesters look bad, that we’re trying to take money away from the Inuit.”

In reality, the protesters acknowledge seal meat as a necessary staple of the Inuit diet. Seal, Deodato allowed, is “what [Inuit] have to eat. I mean, they can’t grow things, they don’t have gardens, they can’t eat oranges and they can’t grow wheat.”

Furthermore, the Inuit take pride in using every part of the seal, whereas in the commercial hunt, “most of the seal meat and blubber is wasted; it’s left on the ice to rot.” This figure doesn’t even include the 26,000 seals who are “struck and lost” annually – wounded by a sealer’s blow or gunshot, but who escape or sink into water before they can be recovered.

Equating opposition to the commercial seal hunt with opposition to the Inuit hunt is a cynical ploy by pro-sealing forces to demonize and discredit those groups (Sea Shepherd, the International Fund for Animal Welfare) most active in the demonstrations. Why is the Canadian government so unanimously in favour of the seal hunt?

Predictably, it all comes down to politics. In order to win seats in Newfoundland and Labrador, all parties support the seal hunt in order to ensure that they have a chance of taking those seats. The commercial seal hunt mostly involves workers from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Quebec.

“It’s 6000 fishermen that are out of business, that aren’t working at this time of year, and the government pays for most of this through indirect ways,” said Deodato.

The government’s generous financial support for sealing is a poor match for the comparatively meager benefits earned by the sealers themselves. Deodato estimated the average sealer will receive a mere $2000 each year for participating in the hunt. The 2008 landed value of $6.9 million, divided amongst the estimated 7000 active sealers, meant that each sealer received on average only $1000.

Such paltry sums, Deodato felt, do little to justify the massive annual slaughter from either an economic or an animal rights perspective. Rather than spending tens of millions of dollars this year on promotion, subsidies, and “all the wining and dining they do to the officials,” she suggests a simpler solution – giving the money to poor communities directly.

“Just give them the damn $2000 each,” she said. “I don’t even understand it. Newfoundland is capable of so much more. They could do wind power out there, eco-tourism is huge; there’s so much they could be doing out there to raise money instead of this.”

For Deodato, the immense suffering inflicted on seal populations is indefensible. Her detailed descriptions of grotesque violence minced no words.

“About 92% of these seals that are killed are 4 weeks old or younger,” she said. “These are sentient beings whose mothers are 10 feet away watching their babies – that they just gave birth to, that they’re still nursing…being clubbed and skinned. I mean, this is a horrible thing that we’re doing. 100% at this time of year, I’m embarrassed to be Canadian.

“Forgetting that it’s less than 1% of Newfoundland’s gross domestic product, forget that the government then subsidizes it; it goes right down to how inhumane this entire thing is. If this was 300,000 puppies being clubbed barely unconscious and then skinned, you would have all of Canada standing up in arms.”

Even more alarming to Deodato was the method for killing gray seals, a hunt which occurs two weeks before the culling of harp seals.

“The gray seal has such a strong skull… a really thick cranium,” said Deodato. “They have to hit them so hard they break their baseball bats, and then they skin them.”

Though there is an official quota that theoretically limits the slaughter to around 300,000 seals each year, Deodato said there is little accountability. “Who’s going to enforce it?” she asks rhetorically. “The Canadian government is totally behind this.

“They consider them fish,” said Deodato, “or they call it a harvest, like they’re a grain for cereal. It’s a sentient mammal. They nurse their babies. This is just completely wrong. It breaks my heart, literally.”

Iraq, or: The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Note: This is the first of a two-part series on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Today is my piece on why the war was wrong, and tomorrow my conservative friend Ethan Rabidoux's defense of the war will appear. Good luck, Rabidoux - you'll need it!

On March 20, 2003, the United States launched its much-hyped invasion of Iraq with the "Shock and Awe" bombing campaign. Seven years, $3 trillion, and over 1 million Iraqi and 5000 coalition deaths later, what is the result? The war has brought nothing but tragedy and human suffering to all but its powerful architects - the military-industrial complex, Big Oil, AIPAC, the neoconservatives. The war in Iraq is a festering sore on the American body politic and a stain on the consensus of international law that has prevailed since World War II. The Nuremberg Trials, it turns out, were only for show - victors' justice that had little to no bearing on the actual conduct of world military powers, as the following decades would prove. From the vantage point of 2010, the sinister motivations behind the Iraq War are more transparent than ever.


No less a figure than former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged that the much-ballyhooed "threat" of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was merely the most convenient pretext for launching a war he and his fellow neoconservatives from the Project for a New American Century had long craved. "The truth," said Wolfowitz, "is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." The spectre of WMDs falling into the hands of terrorists was an ideal weapon in the Bush administration's arsenal of rhetorical trickery. In the hysterical atmosphere of post-9/11 America, it pushed millions of people who should have known better into becoming war supporters.

I should know. The Iraq War, like 9/11, was a crucial marker on my road to becoming a journalist. The 2001 attacks were history-changing events that the media re-played over and over, pontificating on the possible ramifications. From that day onward I was glued to the television set and followed the news with unprecedented fervour and interest. However, my education in news and politics at this point was superficial and, as time would illustrate, hopelessly naive. As the Bush administration's focus (and that of its media lapdogs) turned to Iraq, I found myself swayed by contemporary voices who dangled the bogeyman of Saddam Hussein passing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. At this time I was 17 and my family subscribed to the conservative National Post, naturally a very pro-war newspaper. Despite its right-wing slant, I still maintain the Post to be well-written, if politically perverse. But at this important point in world history, I readily accepted its writers' justifications for war.

After all, if the powerful U.S. military could initiate regime change in Iraq, it might set the stage for a larger flowering of democracy in the Middle East. Yes, as embarrassed as I am to admit it now, I essentially adopted the neoconservative fantasy vision of the invasion of Iraq leading to a democratic Middle East. Perhaps it was that post-9/11 atmosphere, when 89% of Americans approved of George W. Bush's performance as president, but I was still in the mindset that the terrorist attacks had united Americans. There was a reason Bush was so popular at this time; his simplistic, black-and-white version of world events was the comfort food Americans craved. Yet their blind trust would have incredibly destructive consequences. Surely, I thought, leading politicians and the mainstream media couldn't be lying when they made such grave and substantive accusations...could they?

As I said, I was a little naive.

Certainly now, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it's easy to say the Iraq War was a mistake and more. In that sense, it was a learning experience for me. The buildup to the war was the low point of the corporate media, in which the final break of the Fourth Estate with its supposed ideals became complete. Barely even pretending any longer to check government power, the war helped expose pampered TV pundits as the mindless sycophants they were. Rather than challenging government spin, they merely repeated it and offered the most vivid example to date of stenographic journalism. As Glenn Greenwald has eloquently written, today's mainstream media is largely composed of royal courtiers who delight in court gossip to the exclusion of substantive policy issues. If you're wondering why the American media is so dead set against accountability for Bush administration officials complicit in torture and other war crimes, the answer is obvious: most prominent media figures cheered on those same crimes. They are as guilty as the politicians.

What really caused the Iraq War? The fact that Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the world, we were always assured, was purely coincidental. Of course, it was obvious even before the invasion that the war was all about oil. The global economy runs on petroleum, and the United States is one of the largest consumers of that precious resource. From an American perspective, it is absolutely vital to maintain the country's dominance over Middle Eastern oil supplies in the face of up-and-coming competitors like China.

While the American government in 2003 was assured of oil from Saudi Arabia - based on a special relationship wherein the U.S. turns a blind eye to Saudi human rights abuses while the Saudis keep the oil flowing - Iraq was a different story. Saddam Hussein had been a key American ally during the Reagan years - symbolized by special envoy Donald Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam Hussein - but Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait changed everything. President Bush the Elder, who had substantial business relationships with the Kuwaiti ruling family, immediately changed his tune and, embracing the opportunity to display U.S. military dominance in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, launched a full-on media campaign against the "new Hitler". The American-led multinational coalition stopped short of removing the Ba'athist regime when the flow of Kuwaiti oil was again assured, but Saddam remained a gadfly to American and Israeli ambitions in the Middle East. Sanctions imposed on Iraq by the Clinton administration killed half a million Iraqi children - a price Secretary of State Madeline Albright coldly said was "worth it" - but had the effect of strengthening Saddam's power rather than diminishing it.

The prospect of military force in the service of regime change thus became an ever more attractive option to hawks in the American government. Emboldened by the United States' status as sole superpower after the end of the Cold War, the self-proclaimed "masters of the universe" glowingly spoke of America in the imperial terms of Ancient Rome. The promise of "peace dividends" and cuts in defense spending that followed the Soviet collapse quickly ran up against the institutional inertia of the military-industrial complex, which came up with new excuses to keep the tax dollars flowing - chief among them terrorists and "rogue states", targets of official propaganda even before 9/11.

So sacrosanct is the American defense budget, and so ingrained in the American psyche is the tendency to frame everything in military terms (the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror) that, following the September 11 attacks, media and politicians immediately proclaimed that America was "under attack" and "at war", with events framed in the most militaristic terms possible. The decision to invade Afghanistan, and later Iraq, was made infinitely easier by the huge scale of the U.S. military and the simple odds that, if heavily armed enough, a state will more quickly resort to violence. Protracted wars also guaranteed ever-greater sums to the Pentagon. The American military budget is now completely out of control; Barack Obama's allotted 2010 budget for defense spending is the greatest in real terms since the Second World War. With the Great Recession in full sway and the military seemingly the only government service immune from draconian spending cuts, the colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan essentially serve the role of public works projects for the military.

Political considerations cannot be underestimated in the decision to go to war. Aside from the obvious economic interests of White House oilmen George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (who guaranteed his former company Halliburton a generous supply of no-bid contracts in the reconstruction of Iraq), the Bush administration helped shore up failing domestic support by doubling down on the mythology of the heroic "war president", the resolute commander-in-chief taking the fight to the terrorists "over there, so we don't have to fight them over here." The Republicans had swept the 2002 midterms by portraying Democrats as soft on terrorism, and they capitalized on that strategy in 2004 by continuing to question Democrats' patriotism and their commitment to keeping Americans safe from terrorists (which was equated with support for the unrelated Iraq War).

The irony, of course, is that the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq was completely bipartisan from the beginning. Throughout the decade, Democrats regularly gave left cover to the Republicans by diverting public anger from the war, continually supporting right-wing Bush administration policies and stripping away any remaining civil liberties. When Democrats finally recaptured the presidency in 2008, the fundamental flaws of the two-party system became every more apparent. Obama continued or expanded virtually every criminal policy of the Bush administration. While the President has made noises about pulling U.S. "combat troops" out of Iraq by 2011, Obama has always excelled at saying big things and doing very little. If the past is any indication, we can expect this rhetorical sleight-of-hand to portend years and years of continued war.

Iraq was more than a "mistake". Those who would use that word to refer to this crime of historical proportions reveal much about their notions of morality. Establishment figures in the 1960s such as Walter Cronkite only turned against Vietnam when it became clear the war was lost. But Iraq, like its historical predecessor Vietnam, is not wrong merely because it was an ill-advised drain on American blood and treasure. Rather, it is wrong because it is a transparent war of aggression against a nation that had not attacked the United States and had nothing to do with 9/11. Nuremberg decreed aggressive war to be the supreme international crime, because it is the overarching criminal act from which all the others (torture, rendition, etc.) originate. While the U.S. government is quick to accuse other countries of aggression - such as Russia during the 2008 South Ossetia War - it is taken for granted that America and Israel alone are permitted the use of force anywhere under any circumstances.

As much as concrete economic factors - the American lust for oil, feeding the military-industrial complex - and cynical political considerations motivated the Iraq War, it is worth considering the words of that arch-purveyor of establishment wisdom, the New York Times' own Thomas Friedman - not because his words are anything other than poorly-written claptrap, but because we can tell a lot about the view of the American elite through his inane bullshit. Friedman infamously admitted in a 2003 interview with Charlie Rose that the war's noble purpose was to make Iraqis "Suck. On. This", to show the world the United States meant business. "We could have hit Saudi Arabia," said Friedman. "Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could."

But even the war's original proponents must admit that it has failed on its own terms. Iraq is no Jeffersonian democracy, but an unstable cauldron of sectarian conflict riddled by corruption and bloody violence. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and the war has further overstretched the U.S. military. Iran is now more powerful a regional player than before; with its main rival, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, effectively eliminated, the mullahs can more easily exert their influence on neighbouring countries. And the war has destroyed America's reputation so thoroughly - compounded by atrocities such as Abu Ghraib - that the possibility of terrorist attacks on the United States has vastly increased. The war has not made America safer, it has not made the Middle East more democratic; it has only made the world a more violent, destructive place.

The human costs of the war spit in the face of any "dead-enders" who still claim to support it. Over 1 million Iraqis have died since the war began, as well as over 5000 coalition troops. The United Nations estimates that 2.2 million civilians have fled the country since 2003. According to UNHCR figures, over 4.7 million Iraqis have been displaced since the war began. The so-called "reconstruction" of Iraq is a long-running joke, a cover for the rapacious plundering of the country by American corporate interests. While doing little to help Iraqis, it has ensured gargantuan profits for politically-connected companies subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.

Seven years later, most Iraqis still cannot even depend on reliable food, water or electricity; the streets are still filled with garbage. Hundreds of civilians die every month in insurgent attacks or at the hand of coalition forces. Millions of families have been shattered, millions of children orphaned. The war continues to be a colossal drain on the U.S. treasury, diverting money from domestic needs such as health care (the lack of which actually kills 45,000 Americans per year). Anyone who defends this historical crime is either lying to themselves, profiting directly from it, or utterly incapable of empathy.

The Iraq War is, and has always been, strictly about money. Its defenders blind themselves to this simple fact - and the unimaginable suffering that greed still causes today.

Trans Day of Celebration

Hate dealing with red tape? Talk to a transgendered person and you may start to realize how good you actually have it.

Susan Gapka, LGBT representative for the New Democratic Party and a well-known transgender activist, has plenty of stories to tell. Marking the Trans Day of Celebration at Queen’s University, Gapka described her experiences last Thursday afternoon to a small but attentive audience at Wallace Hall in the John Deutsch Centre.

Falling outside conventional gender categories can often turn a seemingly minor matter into a major hassle. When Gapka called CIBC recently to activate her credit card, a bank employee refused to believe the card was in her name. The employee asked her a series of personal questions – what was her mother’s maiden name, how long had she had the card – until finally eliciting a blank response.

“She clearly was asking me a question I couldn’t answer,” said Gapka, “and then she turned it down…she didn’t believe that my voice was Susan Gapka’s voice.”

A self-identified trans woman, Gapka struggled in early years with her sexual identity. Born and raised as a boy but always uncomfortable in the role, she grew up on a military base at a time – the 1960s – when there were few role models for a young person questioning his or her gender identity (with the possible exception of Christine Jorgensen, the first person to have sex reassignment surgery).

As a child, she ran away from home. “I didn’t have a place to talk about not being comfortable with who I was,” said Gapka. “They didn’t have these kinds of events when I was growing up.”

She eventually graduated from York University with a degree in political science. According to a Facebook group promoting her later bid to become Ontario NDP Executive and Federal NDP LGBT Co-chair, “Susan Gapka transitioned on September 28, 1999 to fulfil her lifelong dream of living as a woman while working as a student placement at Toronto City Hall.”

Now the LGBT Director for Toronto Centre NDP Executive, Gapka has been active in issues ranging from same-sex marriage to the relisting of sex reassignment surgery for trans people in Ontario. But on Thursday her focus was putting pressure on the federal and provincial governments as they consider bills specifically banning discrimination against transgendered individuals.

At the federal level, Bill C-389 would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to include gender identity and gender expression as prohibited grounds for discrimination (hence the event slogan, “Trans Rights Are Human Rights!”). Currently, the Act only prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, disability or conviction for an offence for which a pardon has been granted.” C-389 has had one reading in Parliament but its future remains uncertain.

At the provincial level, NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo re-introduced the Trans Rights Bill in November to add “gender identity” to the Ontario Human Rights Code, which does not currently protect transgendered people. Premier Dalton McGuinty and the Liberals appear to have abandoned the issue, but Gapka refused to waver, telling her audience that “the more pressure you put on the government, the more they’ll respond.”

Also speaking at Wallace Hall Thursday was Kingston and the Islands NDP candidate Daniel Beals, who suggested that the local party organization had not done enough to address trans grievances. “It’s a responsibility we haven’t lived up to,” he admitted. While aiming to change that, Beals was pessimistic about the fate of the federal and provincial bills.

“My gut feeling is this could take forever,” he said. “There is…some cooperation going on between the federal Liberals and the federal NDP, as far as there’s some common ground there and they could maybe get that done at some point. If we had a coalition government maybe we could get that done. It bothers me on a provincial level that the provincial Liberals are not addressing it all…part of that may have to do with the fact that provincially the NDP is a lot weaker, and on a federal level the NDP is actually gathering quite a bit of strength, more strength than I think people realize.”

While Gapka said the bills were mainly symbolic, they underlined the importance of official human rights protection. Trans children, she stressed, needed the state to include them and tell landlords, employers, etc. that “it’s wrong to discriminate”.

But the clock is ticking; the provincial government recently cut funds for genital reassignment surgery. Education on Gender Issues committee member Aleta Gruenewald offered a potent summary of what was at stake.

“95% of all trans-identified students don’t feel safe at school, as opposed to one-tenth of straight students,” said Gruenewald. “Trans-identified people continue to be marginalized in all walks of life, from being unable to find a guaranteed safe washroom or walk down the street in safety at night…to being routinely discriminated at the office and in the classroom.

“These issues are…terrible because they mask the tremendous joy and satisfaction that trans-identified individuals can experience simply through expressing their own unique identities. Being trans is so often emphasized in terms of mental illness, in terms of difficulty, in terms of the obstacles that trans people face, and so little about being trans is celebrated. It’s for this reason that despite these hardships, it is nonetheless important, even essential, to dedicate this day to celebration, to joy for the many hard-won achievements of trans-identified individuals.”

On that note, Gruenewald segued into a PowerPoint presentation profiling famous transgendered individuals, among them:

• Jan Morris (1926-) – British historian, novelist, and Booker Prize nominee, born James Morris.
• Jin Xing (1967-) – Chinese ballerina; one of the few trans women recognized by the Chinese government.
• Billy Tipton (1914-1989) – American jazz pianist and bandleader, born Dorothy Tipton.
• Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992) – African-American drag queen. Co-founder of S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), which provided food, clothing and shelter to trans-identified young people.
• Eddie Izzard (1962-) – English stand-up comedian, actor and transvestite. He has appeared in films such as Ocean’s Eleven, Across The Universe and Valkyrie.
• Murray Hill – American comedian and pioneering drag king.
• Lynn Conway (1938-) – American computer scientist, electrical engineer and trans woman.
• Nelly Fonseca (1922-1963) – Peruvian modernist poet.
• Aya Kamikawa (1968-) – Tokyo municipal official and the first transsexual person to seek elected office in Japan.
• Jamison Green (1948-) – American transgender activist known for his documentary films and autobiographical book Becoming a Visible Man.

After the slideshow, event participants gathered their chairs in a circle for discussion period. One of the main issues raised was the relationship of trans rights groups to other social movements.

“Solidarity shouldn’t just be between ‘sis-gendered’ [feminist] and trans-gendered people,” said Gruenewald. “It should be between every group that feels as if it has been marginalized, and I just think it’s so important to have that connection to the feminist community…and also to really analyze it from an angle of race and social class as well, because you just can’t take it in a vacuum.”

Event organizer Kalanthe Khaiat agreed.

“You want any kind of social rights initiative to be as open as possible,” said Khaiat. “That’s one thing I’m so grateful to feminist thought for, for giving us this idea of intersectionality of oppression. The movements that will be benefiting the most people…are those that recognize that someone can have all these different individual and social identities that are targets of oppression.

“The classic example that gets brought up inside classrooms is the black non-able bodied lesbian woman, who could align herself with the queer movement, could align herself with the civil rights movement, but those are so limiting in their discrete functions. What is needed is a social rights movement that says, ‘okay, we’ve got able-bodiedness, sexuality, physical ethnicity, gender…all are targets of oppression.’ We’re not going to make any progress by just making one of those oppressions stop, because they all stem from a hegemonic structure that says oppression can happen based on difference.”

Gapka made the case for working within the system to effect change. But others suggested that the system itself was part of the problem.

“The whole socioeconomic structure also has to be taken into consideration,” said Gruenewald. “What does the society value? In a capitalistic society with no bottom line, what kind of society are we creating for individuals within [it]? And what sort of messages are we sending to people who we don’t believe to be ‘optimal’ in terms of their ability to produce or engage in work environments? We have this very limited idea of what will be the most beneficial for the company, and the company kind of rules. If an individual in any way deviates from the norm of what they believe will turn the biggest profit, they’re not going to want to deal with that person.

“[In] the most basic normative example, you could hire a woman or a man, but the woman’s likely to get pregnant, then she leaves, then if she’s pregnant and she leaves ‘we’re going to have to pay for maternity leave, we don’t want to deal with that.’ So it’s that kind of putting the corporate interest above the people.”

For Gapka, the struggle for trans rights comes down to very basic issues. She railed against the need to list oneself as male or female on government documents and suggested amending the Vital Statistics Act.

“There’s no reason to have sex designation on any of your legal documents,” said Gapka. “Only on certain ones…OHIP cards. That was a problem for me when people started calling me sir. Can I call you a bigot? That would be wrong for me to say something that was racist, or homophobic, so why are you calling me sir?”

Jon Elmer slams Canadian policy on Israel-Palestine

Originally posted at Kingstonist.com.

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”
– Paulo Freire

Canadian politicians have their knickers in a twist over Israeli Apartheid Week.

Ontario MPPs of all parties voted to condemn the international campus event, decrying its organizers for their so-called “hate speech”. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff released an official statement of condemnation in which he claimed that “the activities planned for the week will single out Jewish and Israeli students. They will be made to feel ostracized and even physically threatened in the very place where freedom should be paramount — on a university campus.”

Disingenously, he added that “criticism of Israeli government policy is legitimate,” while “wholesale condemnation of the State of Israel and the Jewish people is not legitimate. Not now, not ever.”

Iggy’s argument would surely surprise many of the Jews who attended IAW events at Queen’s this week. Now in its sixth year, Israeli Apartheid Week is an annual series of events held in cities and campuses around the globe to educate people on the nature of Israeli apartheid and its brutal military occupation of Palestine. The use of the word “apartheid” draws deliberate parallels to the racist 20^th century South African regime, and the minds behind IAW aim to put similar pressure on the Israeli government by launching Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns worldwide.

The 2010 Israeli Apartheid Week in Kingston was organized by the group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights. Events from Monday to Wednesday at Queen’s included lectures on “Transnational Popular Resistance for Palestine”, “Israeli Apartheid: What’s in a Name”, “The Politics of Divestment: Darfur vs. Israel”, and “The Politics of Local and International Solidarity in Palestine”. On Friday, the Artel hosted the film Slingshot Hip-Hop, a documentary about Palestinian rap music.

On Thursday night, Canadian freelance journalist Jon Elmer spoke at Macintosh-Corry Hall to a diverse audience and put the spotlight on Canada’s support for Israeli apartheid with his presentation “Ghetto Palestine: Canadian Foreign Policy and the Future of the Israel/Palestine conflict.”

Elmer is a veteran reporter who has long focused on the Middle East, reporting from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the al-Aqsa Intifada (2003), after Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip (2005), and during the sanctions period and resultant internal strife (2007). His work has appeared on Al-Jazeera, and he has covered globalization summits and accompanying protests throughout North America.

Elmer held the audience’s attention well past the two and a half hour time limit. He had the refreshing veneer of an unrepentant leftist, willing to go beyond the “safe zone” of conventional wisdom in his denunciation of Canada’s imperialist foreign policy. He challenged NDP candidate Daniel Beals on his party’s lukewarm support for the Palestinian cause and its acquiescence to the Queen’s Park motion condemning Israeli Apartheid Week, as well as chastising the federal NDP for failing on more than three occasions to end Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan.

Beals, for his part, acknowledged a gulf between regional NDP supporters and party leaders, who tend to be more conservative than grassroots activists. He also said there was a constant intra-party debate on the issue of Israel-Palestine among Jewish NDP members.

Elmer’s presentation was densely-packed with information that could be divided into two broad sections. In the first part, he explained the nature of Israeli apartheid and the worldwide movement against it through the BDS strategy. In the second part, he explained Canada’s role supporting Israel in what the Goldstone Report described as possible “crimes against humanity”.

Named after UN Human Rights Council president Richard Goldstone – an internationally respected South African jurist and ardent Zionist – the report unequivocally stated that Israel committed war crimes during its 2008-9 attack on the Gaza Strip through collective punishment of Palestinian civilians and the use of white phosphorus in densely-populated areas (the report also accused Palestinian militants of war crimes for their deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians via rockets and mortars).

The Herzliya Conference, sponsored by Israeli think tank the Institute for Policy and Strategy, is the most prominent stage for the articulation of national policy by Israel’s political leaders. Its most recent report talked about the “delegitimization” of Israel on the world stage following the publication of the Goldstone Report. Israel also believes that the BDS campaign represents a “strategic threat that could become an existential threat” to the Jewish state.

The term “apartheid”, Elmer stressed, was central to simplifying the terms of the debate. The BDS tactic helped end South African apartheid after 40 years, even as many Western countries continued to support the racist government there. The terms of the debate were similar; Nelson Mandela, like Palestinians who resist the Israeli occupation, was also called a “terrorist”.

Ironically, given the controversy surrounding the term “apartheid”, the term was recently used by none other than Israel’s hawkish defence minister Ehud Barak in arguing that Israel’s security would be better served by a peace agreement with the Palestinians. “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel,” said Barak, “it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic.

“If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

Explaining the pro-Israel consensus of the Canadian political establishment, Elmer suggested that, as with Canada’s war in Afghanistan, foreign policy towards Israel was based less on tangible material resources or imperial conquest and more on the abstract idea of gaining “a seat at the table” in international discussions.

“You can’t really underestimate a seat at the table,” said Elmer. “When important world decisions are made, if you lay your blood and treasure on the line, particularly in service of American political objectives, you’re going to have a seat at that table and you’re going to be able to participate when contracts are given out or political influence is given out. And sometimes you don’t get direct political influence over the territory upon which you are intervening.

“I think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most visible, longest-running, most politically-significant conflicts in the world. Whether that’s just or not is a different story, but it’s a reality, and for Canada to participate in that is seen as strategically important to Canadian interests.”

Canada currently has expeditionary forces deployed in 18 different countries. As Elmer pointed out, these are not all declared combat missions, but often include military “advisors” or attempts to influence elections – traditionally the preserve of CIA-style covert operations, but now openly funded by Western think tanks such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which aim to set up economically compliant pro-Western governments.

The Canadian foreign policy establishment’s cynical attitude towards “democracy” in Palestine was put on display for the world to see after U.S. President George W. Bush pushed for an election there in 2006. When the results handed a resounding victory to Hamas, rather than the pro-Western Fatah, Canada became the first country not to recognize the new government. As Defence Minister Peter MacKay said in a revealing statement, “We can’t be said to be following the Americans if we pre-empt them.”

Following the election, members of Fatah, with American and Israeli support, attempted to stage a coup by ousting members of Hamas from the government (detailed in David Rose’s Vanity Fair article “The Gaza Bombshell”). Hamas regained control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, yet this defence of a democratically-elected government was itself referred to in mainstream Western media as a “coup”.

Canada has since supported prospective Palestinian strongman Salam Fayyad as the head of an “independent” government backed by Israel and the West. With an American education in economics and a tenure at the International Monetary Fund, Fayyad is the preferred vehicle for a neoliberal transformation of Palestine. Elmer compared him unfavourably to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, in that while both are Western puppets, Karzai at least has an Afghan constituency. Fayyad receives $2 billion in funding annually from Canada, the United States and Europe, and the Canadian International Development Agency has lavishly funded a security force that may have been complicit in vast human rights abuses.

Israeli Foreign Minister and protofascist Avigdor Lieberman, who has suggested requiring Israeli Arabs to take a loyalty oath, has declared that Israel “needs more allies” like Canada. Indeed, this country’s unquestioning support of Israel may now even exceed that of the United States. Elmer posited three recent political decisions that help explain Israel’s embrace of the Great White North.

Firstly, Canada backed the postponement of a ceasefire during the 2006 war in Lebanon, allowing Israel to complete its devastation of the country. Secondly, the country has blockaded Hamas and refuses to accept the legitimacy of the 2006 Palestinian elections that swept the Islamist party to power. Finally, Canada has been “at the vanguard” in the isolation of Iran – a country which has not attacked any of its neighbours for centuries and has no nuclear weapons, while Israel regularly utilizes military force internally and externally and has an undeclared stockpile of hundreds of nuclear weapons.

Elmer warned about the consequences of Canada’s blind support for a militaristic Israel that flouts international law.

“The political implications of Canada being allied with Israel this closely are legally clear,” said Elmer. “If Canada is bragging about supporting a security force that’s carrying out widespread human rights abuses, legally in international law before the International Criminal Court, Canada is participating in war crimes.

“If people fund African rebels, the whole world thinks it’s obvious that that’s a war crime,” he continued. “But when we support Palestinian security forces or Afghan security forces carrying out human rights abuses, or Iraqi forces carrying out human rights abuses, or we’re building prisons in Haiti for a corrupt government to have thousands of political prisoners, or whether we’re arresting suspected Taliban insurgents and bagging their heads and sending them off to Bagram Air Base to be raped and tortured or off to Guantanamo, these are crimes under international law.

“So when [Junior Foreign Affairs minister] Peter Kent says…an attack on Israel is an attack on Canada, we can throw up our arms and say that’s appalling, or we can actually say that’s pretty useful political fodder for resisting these programs, because the vast majority of people don’t agree with Peter Kent’s statement. And that gives you an avenue into saying, well, where do we draw the line on our support, and where do Israel’s crimes become our crimes? Where did the Afghan government’s crimes become our crimes?

“International law is crystal clear on this.”