New Media

Thoughts While Headed to the Holy Land

jnarvey — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:34:14 +0000

I’ll be touring around Israel all week and plan to provide regular dispatches on my experiences and some mostly sober thoughts inspired by what I see. A few essays I whipped up on the flight from Toronto to Tel Aviv:

From the Promised Land to the New World and Back Again

I Am A Bacon-Flavored Kind of Kosher

A Country Where You Can Not Get Away from Politics

I’m dead tired and a bit flustered at not being on my home turf for what will be a game-changing event when it comes to Canada’s role in Afghanistan. Must retire for a bit.

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Canadian Government Partners with Secret Society of Super Villains

jnarvey — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 02:53:22 +0000

Come quick, CBC! I have access to top-secret documents proving that the Canadian government officials at the highest levels deliberately handed over enemy combatants in Afghanistan to Lex Luthor and Gorrila Grod for super-villain style interrogation. My research shows that the prisoners were probably subjected to unhealthy doses of Kryptonite and freeze rays.

I can’t actually show you the documents, of course. In fact, I can’t offer any proof to substantiate my claim due to legal technicalities. But I assure you, my evidence is 100 per cent verifiable and I have no motivation beyond the desire to share the truth with my fellow Canadians.

That should be good enough for the CBC, right? I mean, you’ve set a precedent.

Further reading for those interested in the background on this bizarre saga:
Maybe some former Liberal ministers should be worrying about their asses

Facts: The previous Liberal government and Afghan detainees

“Torture in Afghanistan: The Liberals knew” redux

Afghan detainees and the former Liberal government/Human rights Update

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Size Doesn’t Matter. It’s All About the Angle

jnarvey — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:05:25 +0000

The Size Doesn’t Matter campaign is a brilliant counter to the Israel Apartheid Week. When debate is rendered meaningless, but turning the other cheek isn’t your bag, satire and counter-culture jamming makes a lot of sense.

Instead of images of Palestinians at checkpoints, we get a shot of a nearly-naked supermodel. Forget Gaza — look at this Mediterranean beach! What happened to the kids throwing stones at a Merkava tank? They must be hiding behind the stage at that rock concert. Forget for a moment the statistics on the number of Palestinians living below the poverty line. Let’s have a look at some facts about Israel’s achievements in the fields of science, medicine and the protection of civil rights (for both Israeli Jews and Arabs in equal measure, naturally).

Cynics will look at this social media campaign and its publicized events at campuses across Canada as an offensive distraction to the grim IAW movement. But that’s the point. It’s meant to be.

IAW is itself a distraction and a decisively unhelpful one when it comes to actually solving the horrendous challenge of Middle East peace. Putting out Size Doesn’t Matter as a distraction to the distraction is exactly the strategy to use.

We live in a culture where political correctness has dulled the ability of both students and their teachers to distinguish between a liberal democracy and a lawless tyranny. In that context, sowing confusion among the holier-than-thou fundamentalists and proto-fascists with a campaign of big boobs, bright lights and some reminders about the gay-friendly, women-friendly and eco-friendly nature of the Jewish state just plain works.

“It may be small, but it has brought the driest places to life!”

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It Is Not Possible For Us To Make It Alone

jnarvey — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:22:25 +0000

They need our help now more than ever. Will Canada stand by the people of Afghanistan post-2011? Will we support our ally or turn our backs? It’s not too late to change course from where our foreign policy seems to be headed in the absence of strong moral and political leadership from all parties.

I hope the people of Canada are not going to leave us alone and they are going to support us after 2011 as well. Afghans cannot make their lives stable without the support of other international friends, especially Canadians.

Especially after spending lots of time and lots of energy, and we together have spilled a lot of our blood in support of Afghans. If Afghanistan is not stable, then stability of all countries around us in this global village will be at risk. It’s very important to remember that Afghans are also human beings. They also wish to have a better future for their families and their children and it’s not possible for us to make it alone. We need the support of friends, especially Canadian friends.

If you’re going to be in Ottawa on March 9 and want to learn more about the future of Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan, you have to attend this. It’s about keeping our promises.

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Canada’s Boring Budget Priorities Not So Terrible

jnarvey — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:26:44 +0000

The federal government’s conservative-minded (surprise!) budget aims merely to avoid spending more than last year on programs without any deep cuts to try to tame the deficit. There will be those who criticize this sleep-walking sort of economic policy for lack of courage or ideas. Then again, “stay the course” is not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to an economy that outperformed almost every other developed nation last year. We could have done a worse — a lot worse.

A few examples of boondoggles our boring fiscal policy has managed to avoid spending on recently:

* Ninety-two upgraded T-72M1M main battle tanks for a bargain-basement price of four billion dollars. As Venezuela’s economy implodes under the rule of strongman Hugo Chavez and the people face food and power shortages, it’s nice to know that the Venezuelan people are safe from… who, again?

* Bailing out Greece for $6.5 billion. Whatever it takes to make sure sclerotic Greek unions and their olive-scented bureaucrats can keep raking in bloated salaries for serving the public with traditional incompetence. Oh, wait. Since we contribute to the IMF, taxpayers may be on the hook for this after all.

* Three gold medals for $120 million over four years. Russia may have spent more on their athletes than we did, but their return on investment was dismal. Better luck in Sochi, comrades.

* $1.5 billion for a Babel-sized skyscraper in Dubai — basically, in the middle of nowhere. It closed a month after it opened due to technical problems.

* $85 million for bomb detectors for Iraqi security forces. This sounds like an essential investment for a nation that routinely suffers mass casualties from terrorist attacks. That is, until you realize that you could get the same level of effectiveness at half the price by simply waving $42.5 million worth of stacks of cash at security checkpoints.

Of course we have our own share of stupid spending priorities. The millions spent on HRCs that seem to spend far too much time protecting such important values as the “human right” of not washing your hands before serving food to customers is just one example. That said, maybe we’re not so badly off in the big picture.

Screw You, Taxpayer!

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We Own the Podium

jnarvey — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 07:46:24 +0000

No matter what happens at the Canada-USA hockey game, there’s no question that Canada has owned the podium this Olympics.

Gold medals at the Winter Olympics in Calgary? Zero.

Montreal? Zero.

Vancouver? Thirteen.

Which goes to show that $100 million buys a lot of gold. Kudos to our athletes for showing an incredible return on investment for Canadian taxpayer dollars.

(What was the final tally on that gun registry program, anyway?)

The Winner Is

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Can a Lawyer Please Explain Why the Toronto 18 Guy Went Free?

jnarvey — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 06:41:35 +0000

Am I crazy, or did a convicted terrorist just walk free for no good reason?

Just a few days ago, we had this story about how criminals could no longer take advantage of a legal loophole to avoid hard-time behind bars:

Criminals convicted in Canada will no longer be able to receive double credit for time served before trial unless there are exceptional circumstances.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson will announce in a news conference on Parliament Hill Tuesday afternoon he is enacting the legislation which eliminates the common practice of two-for-one credit for pre-trial custody…

“It’s going to go a long way to giving people confidence in the justice system,” said Manitoba Justice Minister Andrew Swan.

And today, a man who entered a plea of guilty of involvement in a terrorist plot goes free the same day as a result of the old rules about two-for-one credit:

James, 27, pleaded guilty in Superior Court to one count of participating in a terrorist group, an offence that carries a maximum 10-year jail term. He received seven years plus a day, but with time served taken into account on the customary two-for-one basis, he was to be freed from Maplehurst prison shortly after leaving court.

I’m not a lawyer. Can someone in the know please explain this to me? Seriously.

The Toronto 18 Terror Plot

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Body Counts and Desperation Tactics

jnarvey — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:26:31 +0000

During the Vietnam war, American forces were obsessed with body counts. In a jungle war where the South Vietnamese and US forces were theoretically in control of all territory, while actual military control extended only to the nearest treeline, counting enemy deaths served as some kind of grotesque marker for military success. In the end, these metrics were utterly beside the point. The Americans bugged out under the cover of a peace deal that was promptly torn up as communist tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon.

Americans and NATO forces like our own don’t publicize body counts anymore. It’s not just because Vietnam tainted the practice. Partly, this is because they work for politicians elected by populations that have only rarely been comfortable with the scale of carnage made possible by industrial methods. Body counts may have helped certain soldiers win promotions, but this sort of information doesn’t do much to win the hearts and minds of the home front. Instead, we focus today on the more traditional metrics of success on the battlefield — territory and the support of the people who dwell within it.

These days, it is the Taliban who are obsessed with body counts — as usual, without distinguishing combatants and civilians. In the heart of Kabul, seventeen Afghans and foreigners were murdered this morning by suicide attackers. The enemy boasts of their “glorious” victory over medical doctors, a documentary film-maker, government officials and three Afghan policemen. It was a brutal act, only slightly dulled in its effect by the parade of Taliban atrocities that have come before it.

While the Taliban are focused on the body counts of doctors, film makers, aid workers and ordinary Afghan civilians, ISAF and the Afghan National Army are concentrating on the end-game. It’s not about counting corpses — it’s about boots on the ground and ordinary Afghans having a chance to get on with their lives without worrying about getting their throats slit by barbarians.

We’re still early into this surge, as our own soldiers and our allies have finally been given the resources they need to do the job. But the early signs are promising. Finally, we can start looking at what comes after the thugs have been routed. By 2011, we may already be a good ways along this road.

Further Reading
On This Day, The Birthday Of The Prophet: A Taliban Atrocity In The Streets of Kabul
Turning the Tide Against the Taliban

What’s in store for Canada in Afghanistan post-2011?

The Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee (CASC) will unveil its Vision for Canada’s Role in Afghanistan Post-2011 on March 9 at the National Archives Hall in Ottawa. The event, called “Canada and Afghanistan: Keeping Our Promises”, is hosted by the Free Thinking Film Society of Ottawa and is also a fundraiser for the Afghan School Project.

This Vision document will outline recommendations for how Canadians can best remain involved in Afghanistan, in terms of both civilian aid and the security that is essential for providing that aid. Abandoning Afghanistan is not an option:
“The threat of abandonment by Canada, the U.S., Britain, and other major NATO countries is not just causing fear and dismay among our Afghan friends,” says CASC senior adviser Lauryn Oates. “It is encouraging the Taliban, and it is encouraging the worst kind of corruption. It is making things worse for ordinary Afghans, whose rights our soldiers have been fighting and dying for.”

CASC’s Vision is based on unprecedented and far-ranging consultations carried out with participation from Canada’s Afghan immigrant community as well as a cross-section of the Afghanistan population. The consultation includes feedback from ordinary citizens as well as politicians, human rights workers, elders, community leaders and experienced analysts.
This event will raise funds for the Afghan School Project (ASP), a Canada-based grassroots initiative, established by the Canadian International Learning Foundation. The ASP provides financial and administrative support to an educational institution in Kandahar, Afghanistan, which provides more than 700 women and men with the opportunity to receive education, while providing members of the community with access to the Internet and online classes from Canadian and international institutions.

Speakers at this event include:

• Major-General (Ret’d) Lewis Mackenzie. Served in the Canadian Forces for 35 years, including a UN peacekeeping command in Yugoslavia in 1992. Awarded the Order of Canada in 2006
• Ehsanullah Ehsan, Director of the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre in Kandahar City
• Nasrine Gross, Afghan-American writer and human rights activist
• Dr. Nipa Banerjee, currently a professor of international development at the University of Ottawa, served as Canada’s head of aid in Kabul for three years.
• Dr. Douglas Bland, Chair of the Defence Management Studies Program at the School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University
• Lauryn Oates, Human rights and gender equity activist; CASC senior advisor
• Terry Glavin, Award-winning author and journalist. One of Canada’s leading voices in support of our Afghanistan campaign.

Event Details
March 9, 2010, 7:00 pm
National Archives/Library of Canada, 395 Wellington St., Ottawa

Tickets: $30 regular admission, $15 students
• Purchase tickets online:
Online at http://www.canilf.org/news/
• Purchase tickets in person:
Ottawa Folklore Centre (1111 Bank Street, Ottawa)
Compact Music (190 Bank; 7851 ½ Bank Street, Ottawa)

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We Are The World

jnarvey — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:10:01 +0000

Vancouver has always been one of Canada’s most photogenic cities. Public art and cool venues built for the Olympics have certainly helped top up that visual appeal. Some images of our incredible city, starting with the artistic globes put up along the seawall in False Creek.

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Amnesty International Has Lost Ability to Distinguish Right and Wrong

jnarvey — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:37:25 +0000

Salman Rushdie on Amnesty’s poisonous relationship with Islamofascists:

Amnesty International has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates. It looks very much as if Amnesty’s leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy, and has lost the ability to distinguish right from wrong. It has greatly compounded its error by suspending the redoubtable Gita Sahgal for the crime of going public with her concerns.

Read the complete statement here.

This is why I have recently ended my monthly donations to Amnesty’s organization. I will continue to write letters in support of political prisoners and human rights, but I will not fund an organization whose executive seems to have lost its way.

H/T to Harry’s Place

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