a w a k e : t o : d r e a m

I just love the new(ish) “webclip” feature in gmail which adds a link to the top of the inbox featuring a headline from a recently updated website for news, entertainment, blogging, etc. I’m sure it’s just another fee-per-click advertising ploy, but I’ve read some really interesting articles I would never have seen otherwise through this feature.

Case in point: When Terrorists Go Mainstream, by Monica Duffy Toft, published in the Boston Globe and reprinted in the International Herald Tribune.
This is a really interesting article (somewhat) free from the usual rhetoric around patriotic buzzwords, dealing with the surprise Americans seem to be feeling that Hamas swept the recent democratic elections in Palestine. The real point of the article is bringing to light the fallacy that most Americans believe - that as far as “rogue nations” go, democracy = peace.

I hate it when I read an article that makes me feel like I have to defend brothers and sisters in the faith to myself. I find it so offensive when I read about the “religious right” in the US “targeting” another group of people as somehow unclean and punishing those who have any affiliation with them. In the 70’s, it was people who were divorced or divorcing. Back in the 80’s, it was people with AIDS, no matter how they got it. And from the 90’s until now, it has been Liberals and homosexuals - and God save you if you are a Liberal homosexual! Sometimes it’s the homeless, sometimes drug addicts… sometimes even Canadians - for our “liberal” ways….

This article describes a boycott on the Ford Motor Company from a group called the American Family Association “because of Ford’s support for the homosexual agenda and homosexual marriage .” The Jaguar and Land Rover brands had been caught advertising in Gay and Lesbian media.

I’m sick of this.

Here’s my soapbox issue of the day:

Can we PLEASE, please get rid of the phrase, “the war on…” no matter what conflict it refers to? Can we just say, “the challenge to…” or “the disagreement about”? Can we please, please stop turning every hot-button issue into a slogan-machine so that more people can stick a bumper sticker on their car (or for that matter, around their wrist) and so that the backers of the issue can politicize it ever more?

The reason I rant about this is the recent release of a book, The War On Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse Than You Thought by John Gibson of FoxNews. First of all, how does Christmas have anything to do with making America hate liberals, I ask you?? Where is there room for polarized sabre-rattling like that at Christmastime? I agree that sometimes the PC machine goes too far and people try far too hard to “not offend” anybody by saying Christmas (gasp) when not everyone is a Christian, but come on.

My residents (three of whom are American) gleefully informed me of a recent news story (I can’t believe I didn’t hear of it first given my news addiction) about a local case to indict President George W Bush under the Canadian War Crimes Act for war crimes regarding his actions as the leader of a country who invaded Iraq, and more specifically, perpetrated torture against prisoners of that war, including Ontario teenager Omar Khadr.

A group of B.C. lawyers who want U.S. President George W. Bush put on trial for allegedly torturing thousands if not tens of thousands of those ghostly detainees in the war on terror was in B.C. Supreme Court Friday to argue its case. The federal government, however, argued the allegations were being made in the wrong jurisdiction and that such a prosecution must be approved by Canadian Attorney-General Irwin Cotler. The Crown says the case involves a non-citizen being accused of crimes committed outside Canada who was visiting the country as a guest of the government.

From an editorial by Ian Mulgrew, The Vancouver Sun, Nov. 27th, 2005.

I’ve always thought that a great way to make a political point is to arrest the duly (well, sort of) elected leader of a sovereign country! What are they thinking? Furthermore, Mulgrew goes on to say that Davidson, the non-practicing family lawyer who presented the brief was unprepared and inexperienced in these matters… I’m disappointed that they (Toronto legal group Lawyers Against the War (LAW)) didn’t do their homework, for starters, but also that they didn’t find a more credible person to write and present the brief - if you’re going to make a point, then make it in a way that lends credibility to your cause, not removes it!

Interestingly, if you search for it, the majority of links you will find to this issue will have to do with urban legends and internet hoaxes than actual hard news - because of an existing publication ban declared by the first judge who heard the case, Provincial Court Justice William Kitchen. It occurs to me that only in Canada could this even occur: an inexperienced lawyer from a different specialty launches an indictment as a private citizen against a world leader… and we hear nothing about it because of our tradition of publication bans on court procedings.

Beautiful. I like the way our country works sometimes.