Are the Russians Still Defending the Pact that Led to the Second World War?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

We are now nearing the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War, which began when Germany attacked Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.

The invasion was preceded by the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union, better known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed a week earlier, on Aug. 23.

The Russians are uncomfortable with this upcoming anniversary. President Dmitry Medvedev recently announced the setting up of a Historical Truth Commission to counter “the falsification of history.”

Natalia Narochnitskaya, a member of the new body, is angry that western media portray the pact as “the step that led to the Second World War, and that Germany and the Soviet Union were two equal, disgusting, totalitarian monsters.”

Earlier in the year, the Russians set off a firestorm, especially in Poland, by claiming that the war began because of Poland’s refusal to satisfy Germany’s “very modest” demands, which included building transport links across the Polish Corridor separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany, and assuming control of the self-governing port city of Danzig (now Gdansk), which had a German majority.

The statement came from Colonel Sergei Kovalev, a senior researcher at the defence ministry. He also called the pact “merely a time-buying mechanism.”

Having lost its empire – the non-Russian republics of the old Soviet Union plus the east European Communist states – Russia today is a touchy country. It worries about its status in the world.

After all, most of the old Soviet bloc countries, as well as the formerly Soviet Baltic republics, are today members of the European Union and NATO.

Even states such as Georgia, which fought a war with Russia last summer, and Ukraine, once part of the Soviet heartland, are now America’s friends.

Hence Russia’s desire to defend past decisions. But such rewriting of history will go nowhere, because the pact did in fact create the conditions for the “perfect storm” that precipitated the world’s largest conflict.

The pact contained a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, including an agreement to partition Poland. So Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler invaded Poland a week later, triggering a British and French declaration of war against Germany on Sept. 3.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin then joined in the dismemberment of Poland, with Soviet troops occupying their portion of the country beginning on Sept. 17. On Sept. 21, the Soviets and Germans signed a formal agreement coordinating military movements in Poland, and Polish resistance ended soon afterwards.

Germany and the Soviet Union continued their acts of aggression in 1940-1941. During the period that the Nazis could count on Stalin as a de facto ally, Hitler conquered most of Europe, including Denmark, France, Norway, the Benelux countries, Greece and Yugoslavia; he also solidified his alliances with Italy, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

Stalin, meanwhile, annexed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in Romania; and fought a war with Finland, gaining Finnish Karelia.

So friendly had the Soviets become with Hitler that it carried into the realm of anti-Semitism. During this period, the Soviet League of the Militant Godless, a propaganda agency combating religion, paid especial attention to Judaism, almost in coordination with Nazi attacks on the “evils” of the Jewish faith.

Maybe it was more than just happenstance that it was on Aug. 21, 1940, almost on the first anniversary of the signing of the pact, that Stalin’s main rival, Leon Trotsky, who was Jewish, and had already been the object of anti-Semitic attacks, was murdered in Mexico by an agent of Moscow.

But all this currying favour with Hitler was for naught. On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, conquered huge areas of the country, and took millions of Soviet soldiers prisoner. Much of the country was laid waste.

It would take four years until the Russians defeated the invaders. Such were the fruits of political Machiavellianism.

Less Bread, More Circuses for America

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

As Americans observed the 233rd birthday of the United States, the country seems to have become a three-ring circus. And I’m not even referring to the grotesqueries surrounding Michael Jackson’s death.

Since January, three state governors have provided grist for the mill of the tabloids and gossip-mongers.

Elvis look-alike Rod Blagojevich was impeached and removed as governor of Illinois last January after being charged with corruption. In Illinois, as in most other states, the governor appoints a replacement to serve out the term when a United States Senate seat becomes vacant, and Blagojevich was accused of trying to “sell” the one formerly occupied by newly-elected president Barack Obama.

This practice – seeking money in return for political favours -- is known in Illinois as “pay to play.” Blagojevich allegedly wanted promises of campaign funds in cash; a Cabinet post or ambassadorship for himself; and to have his wife placed on paid corporate boards where she might garner as much as $150,000 a year.

A federal grand jury in Illinois returned an indictment against Blagojevich on April 2. He still awaits trial.

In June, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford mysteriously disappeared for almost a week, leaving no way for anyone – including his wife and four sons -- to reach him.

At first, his staff maintained that he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail. However, a determined reporter from a South Carolina newspaper finally tracked him down – at the Atlanta airport, where he had landed on his way back from Argentina.

It turns out that he had been visiting a lover in Buenos Aires during the Father’s Day weekend. Caught in his lie, Sanford revealed that he had been having an extramarital affair with an Argentinian woman, María Belén Chapur.

The rambling news conference in which Sanford admitted to the long-distance involvement with the woman he described as his “soul mate” was nothing if not bizarre. In response to calls for his resignation, Sanford compared himself to the biblical King David, who also committed adultery. He has refused to leave office.

Now comes the even stranger saga of Sarah Palin, who just last year ran as the Republican vice-presidential candidate. On the eve of the Independence Day holiday weekend, she announced, to the surprise of nearly everyone in the state, that she will be resigning as governor of Alaska, just two years into her first term.

Speaking from the backyard of her Wasilla home, Palin asserted that she was acting in the best interests of her family, of Alaska, and of the entire United States.

This, from a politician whose overweening ambition knows no bounds: Sarah Palin probably couldn’t pass a high school history, geography, political science, or economics test, yet assumed she could become president of the United States.

Some analysts speculate that she -- or more likely, her husband Todd, who has been her adviser and éminence grise -- has been caught doing something illicit.

There are allegations of an embezzlement scandal related to the building of the Wasilla Sports Complex constructed during her tenure as mayor of the town. Was the cost of the sports complex inflated to provide free building materials and labor for the Palin home being built nearby?

Her lawyer has denied what he called “false and defamatory allegations” that her resignation stemmed from a criminal investigation.

Both Palin and Sanford are prominent in the evangelical “family values” wing of the Republican Party. Both were touted as potential Republican candidates for president in 2012. They can forget about that now.

Given the current economic recession, there’s less bread for Americans, but at least they do have circuses.

Ignatieff the Expatriate – or Aristocrat?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

A few weeks ago, the Conservatives launched television attack ads on Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, emphasizing that he worked outside of Canada as an academic and journalist for 34 years and only returned home because he wants to be prime minister.

Ignatieff responded with his own videotape, accusing Prime Minister Stephen Harper of smearing all “new Canadians born outside this country” and “Canadians who live and work overseas.”

About two million Canadians live and work outside the country at any given time. Millions more are recent immigrants and new citizens. Are they, he asks, less Canadian because of it? “I don’t think so but the Conservatives do.”

The Conservatives were quite successful in their personal attacks on Ignatieff’s predecessor, Stéphane Dion. But the current ads won’t work. Indeed, they may even help the Liberals.

A Harris/Decima poll released at the end of May found that 30 per cent of respondents reported a negative effect on their attitude toward Ignatieff as a result of the Conservative ads. But over half of the respondents said the ads had a negative effect on their feelings about Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Tories.

According to Harris/Decima Senior Vice-President Jeff Walker; “there is evidence that these ads are having a negative affect on Mr. Ignatieff, but an even greater negative affect on Prime Minister Harper.”

Here’s why Ignatieff is winning this battle. Canada’s sense of nationhood is more cosmopolitan than that of countries like the United States. There is little of the xenophobic nationalism one sometimes finds in older, more ethnically homogenous nation-states.

Immigrants by definition won’t be upset that Ignatieff worked abroad; many Québécois don’t care about Canada as such at all, and so won’t be outraged; and as for our intelligentsia, a considerable number would drool at the prospect of being in the “big time” in America or Britain.

If the Tories really want to go “populist,” they should probably more strongly emphasize Ignatieff’s aristocratic lineage: his paternal grandfather was Count Pavel Ignatiev, Minister of Education to Russian Tsar Nicholas II; his maternal great-grandfather, George Monro Grant, was the 19th century principal of Queen’s University. He is, at least by Canadian standards, a “blueblood.”

Also, more important than the issue of his having lived outside Canada is the fact that he was associated with “elite” institutions such as Harvard University and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

What if, for instance, during those 34 years he had merely taught at a state school in Little Rock, Ark., or was a broadcaster on some television station in the English midlands city of Leeds? That probably wouldn’t “offend” the people Stephen Harper is trying to reach.

So if the Conservatives want to play this game, they should drop the expatriate line of attack and paint Ignatieff as some kind of patrician. It’s a slim reed, but it’s all they’ve got right now.

A One-State Palestine or Two Nation-States?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Why is Israel the only country in the world which some people wish to dismantle?

They use the euphemism of a so-called “one-state” solution, by which they mean recreating a supposedly intact pre-1948 Palestine.

They consider the 1947 partition plan endorsed by the United Nations, which was meant to create Arab and Jewish states in the country, to have been an error.

But why does Palestine have to become a single jurisdiction again? Why would anyone prefer a state of two nations to two nation-states?

Palestine has never been a sovereign country. In fact, as part of the Ottoman Empire, it was little more than a geographical expression, hardly distinct from adjacent areas such as Syria and Lebanon. It became a British Mandate after the First World War.

There was nothing sacrosanct about Palestine’s old boundaries, which were only fixed by the League of Nations – and which initially included all of Jordan.

I can think of any number of borders between states that might be erased more easily than the one between Israel and the present Palestinian territories in Gaza and the West Bank.

In the Balkans, Albania and Kosovo are both ethnically Albanian and territorially contiguous. Moldova and Romania, both Romanian, are another example. These states exist as distinct entities due to the vagaries of history and imperial conquests.

Elsewhere in Europe, Belgium and Holland were once a single unit, as were Scandinavian cousins Norway and Sweden and Iberian neighbours Portugal and Spain. Why not undo their separations? And why, for that matter, might Austria not be reunited with Germany into “one state?”

In fact, with the exception of Quebec, Canada and the United States, now divided mainly by an artificial boundary at the 49th parallel, have much in common with each other as well, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously. The division is the result of the American Revolution. Why not reunify the old British North America?

All these countries and peoples get along with each other much better than do Israelis and Palestinians. They certainly haven’t fought wars against each other recently. They should be candidates for single statehood ahead of Arabs and Jews.

The 1947 United Nations partition resolution divided the Palestine Mandate into Arab and Jewish states, precisely because no other solution was practical. Unfortunately, no Palestinian Arab state emerged because those territories were annexed by Egypt and Jordan.

Like Palestine, colonial India was also partitioned in 1947, for the same reason (in this case, into Muslim and Hindu-majority areas) and now comprises three states: Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. Why do we not hear calls to reunite them as well?

The proponents of a bi-national Palestinian state want to pressure two peoples who don’t get along to inhabit one country — like forcing a bitterly divorced couple to once again live under one roof. Maybe we should call this the “Kafka solution.”

Will the Problem of Piracy Only Get Worse?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Pirate activity has escalated sharply in recent months off of the Horn of Africa, drawing increasingly assertive military operations by the American, Canadian, Dutch and French navies. It took an American naval vessel to rescue one American ship from Somali buccaneers in mid-April.

For some Americans, this brings back historical memories of the first wars ever fought by their navy, against the so-called Barbary pirates, in the early 19th century.

These pirates were based on the Barbary Coast of the Mediterranean, in north African ports such as Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis. The Barbary states were at the time governed by local Muslim rulers.

The pirates mostly commandeered European ships for ransom. Soon, ships belonging to the fledgling United States were also being captured.

The European states almost always agreed to pay money to secure peace and so, at first, did the U.S. But on Thomas Jefferson's inauguration as president in 1801, the new American navy decided to put a stop to these activities and by 1805 had defeated the pirates, ending the First Barbary War.

However, the U.S. navy was preoccupied with fighting Britain during the War of 1812, and the Barbary pirate states returned to their practice of attacking American merchant vessels.

At the conclusion of the war, America could once again deal with the problem. In 1815, a force of 10 ships was dispatched under the command of Commodores Stephen Decatur, Jr. and William Bainbridge, defeating the pirates once again in the Second Barbary War. This ended, once and for all, pirate attacks on American shipping in the Mediterranean.

Is history repeating itself, this time in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean?

The recent rescues by the western navies off Somalia are unlikely to end the problem of piracy. The pirates, some analysts predict, are likely to increase their use of violence, and that could push them into the arms of Somalia’s Islamist militias for support.

Hardline Islamists in the al-Shabaab insurgent group have been gaining power in Somalia, which has been without a functioning government for 18 years. By late 2008, it was estimated that the group controlled much of southern Somalia.

In February, al-Shabaab carried out a suicide car bomb attack against an African Union military base in Mogadishu, Somalia’s nominal capital.

They also claimed responsibility for an attack targeting U.S. Congressman Donald Payne of New Jersey, who was in the country for talks with Somalis regarding the problem of piracy. His plane was departing from Mogadishu when Somali fighters fired mortars at the airport.

It came one day after Captain Richard Phillips was rescued from Somali pirates by the USS Bainbridge – named for the very William Bainbridge who fought in the Barbary wars -- after their failed hijacking of the Maersk Alabama.

Fortunately, the self-proclaimed independent Republic of Somaliland, which broke away from Somalia when the country fell apart, is off limits to both pirates and terrorists. Its security forces have arrested pirates off its coast on the Gulf of Aden.

It’s a shame that the Hargeisa government has not been officially recognized by the international community.

Meanwhile, pirates have attacked more than 80 boats so far this year. In 2008, the ransoms paid to them to release captured ships totaled about $US50 million.

Unless more is done to pacify these waters, it is probably only a matter of time before there is a major disaster and loss of life.

Will Somali Piracy Spark Further Mideast Conflict?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The Somali pirates are becoming increasingly bold. But some ships are beginning to return fire.

An Italian cruise liner with 1,500 on board fended off a pirate attack off the coast of Somalia at the end of April, when its Israeli private security forces exchanged fire with the bandits and drove them off.

Israelis possess advanced military and security skills. And they are right to be worried about what is going on in the Indian Ocean south of their country.

All Israeli shipping that leaves the port of Eilat, or that travels through the Suez Canal, must exit the Red Sea through the Bab al-Mandab, a strait located between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and Djibouti and Eritrea, north of Somalia, on the Horn of Africa.

This narrow passageway connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. It lies just north of where the pirates operate.

Somalia, a country of about eight million people, has not had a functioning national government since warlords overthrew President Siad Barre in 1991. Much of the country is now run by an Islamist movement known as al-Shabaab.

Might the pirates become allied to the Islamists on the Somali mainland, who have also allowed Somalia to become a base for al-Qaeda? Washington thinks al-Qaeda recruits are training there for terror attacks. The country has become an African Afghanistan.

In the spring of 2007, fishing boats containing armed Al-Qaeda affiliates landed at the northern Somali port of Bargal and fought a battle with local police. A U.S. navy destroyer in the Red Sea fired several cruise missiles against them but their leaders escaped.

In the southern town of Baidoa, the Islamists have ordered women to wear full body veils and businesses to close for prayers. They have also attacked westerners trying to curb the problem of piracy.

Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for a mortar attack on an American Congressman in mid-April.

"We carried out mortar attacks against the enemy of Allah who arrived to spread democracy in Somalia," Sheikh Husein Ali Fidow declared in Mogadishu, according to a BBC report.

Just as worrisome, Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki has of late developed closer economic and trade ties with Iran, and military ties followed suit. The Iranians have reportedly established a naval base overlooking the Bab al-Mandab strait.

A link between pirates and Islamists is certainly not good news. The Middle East conflict might, in consequence, spread to the horn of Africa.

Anti-Zionist Israelis would turn Jewish state into another Diaspora

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

Many people today advocate policies that would eliminate the Jewish and Zionist nature of Israel by recreating a one-state Palestine, one in which Arabs would in fact probably constitute a majority. They label Israel an “apartheid” country, since it ostensibly “privileges” Jews.

You might be surprised to learn that there are even some Israeli intellectuals who support this option. They regard the entire 1947-1949 War of Independence as a conspiracy of the Zionist leadership, which intended right from the beginning to expel the Palestinians from the country to turn it into a Jewish state.

According to this view, explained Israeli journalist and former Knesset member Uri Avnery in an article published during Passover, “the soldiers of 1948 were war criminals who implemented a vicious policy, much as the pioneers of the preceding generation were land robbers, knights of ethnic cleansing by expulsion and expropriation.”

Avnery is a longtime political activist and founder of the left-wing Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc), which was a vigorous critic of the recent Gaza operation.

Uri Davis, born in Jerusalem, who describes himself as a “Palestinian Hebrew,” is another such anti-Zionist. He is an honorary research fellow at the University of Durham’s Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and at the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies in England.

Davis’s latest book to classify Israel as an apartheid state was published in 2004, Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, which describes what Davis refers to as war criminal policies against the Palestinian Arabs: mass deportation and ethnic cleansing in 1947-1949, followed by military government, prolonged curfews, roadblocks, and economic, social, cultural, civil and political strangulation. For him, Israel is a rogue state.

The book was, not surprisingly, praised by the late Palestinian academic Hisham Sharabi, the co-founder of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington and the longtime editor of the influential Journal of Palestine Studies. Sharabi called it “a devastating critique of Israel’s internal Apartheid system and by extension the entire ideology of political Zionism.”

Another academic who subscribes to this perspective is Haifa-born Ilan Pappe. A professor of history, also at the University of Exeter, he previously taught at Haifa University from 1984 to 2007. In 2006 Pappe published The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which asserted that the Zionist leadership intentionally planned to evict the Arabs in the country during the War of Independence through terrorist attacks executed by the Haganah and the Irgun.

The premeditated expulsion of some 800,000 Palestinians in 1947-1949 was, he wrote, part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state.

Pappe supports academic, economic and political boycotts of Israel, and his work has been praised by anti-Zionists such as Palestinian scholar Walid Khalidi. Khalidi, who has taught at Harvard, Oxford, and Princeton, considered The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine to be “a dazzling feat of scholarly synthesis and Biblical moral clarity and humaneness.”

True, these writers represent only a small minority of Israelis, but their influence should not be discounted. The fact that they are Israeli Jews is, for opponents of Israel, a piece of good fortune. It provides cover for antisemites who can cite their books.

After all, if even Israelis acknowledge that the creation and very existence of the Jewish state is a crime, why can’t others? And do their proposed solutions not make the vision of a state where Arabs and Jews will live in harmony more than just a utopian fantasy?

But even if the destruction of the Jewish state would not lead to the eviction and mass murder of its Jewish population, it would still mean that, for Jews, the land of Israel itself will have become, politically, just another part of the Diaspora.

It would no longer be a Jewish state, but merely a place with a large Jewish population – like the pre-1914 Russian Pale of Settlement, or parts of, say, Los Angeles, New York or Toronto today.

Assuming this “post-Israel” remained a democracy (a dubious proposition), Jews could theoretically aspire to any political office – but only as individuals, even if their base of support happened to be fellow Jews.

After all, a Jew has been chancellor of Austria, premier of France, president of Guyana, and prime minister of New Zealand. Many Jews have been elected to the US Congress, the Canadian House of Commons, and other parliaments.

But no one would mistake those countries for a Jewish homeland or confuse Georgetown, Ottawa, Paris, Vienna, Washington or Wellington with Jerusalem.

Rush Limbaugh and the Party of “No”

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

While U.S. president Barack Obama is doing his best to turn the American economy around, all that his Republican opponents can come up with, in response to his various efforts, is to say “no.”

Most of them don’t like his proposed budget, are against his stimulus packages and financial bailouts, and find his attempts to reform education and health care too “socialistic.” Their mantra for what ails America is simple: just keep lowering taxes.

The Republicans, badly defeated in the presidential and congressional elections last November, seem bereft of leadership. They are such a rudderless ship that their unofficial spokesman has become, not an elected member of Congress, but a right-wing radio talk show host, a man full of sarcasm, bombast and bile.

Rush Limbaugh, a college dropout – he attended Southeast Missouri State University for two terms – in now the fount of wisdom for the Republicans. Even the chair of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, worships at his feet.

Limbaugh has been a nationally syndicated radio personality since 1988, and his millions of listeners, the so-called “dittoheads,” lap up his relentless ridicule of “liberals,” by which he means anyone to his left, including Republicans whom he finds too moderate.

In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington this past February, Limbaugh stated that he wants Barack Obama “to fail.”

He had earlier explained on his radio program that he didn't want “absorption of as much of the private sector by the U.S. government as possible, from the banking business, to the mortgage industry, the automobile business, to health care. I do not want the government in charge of all of these things. I don’t want this to work.”

Though many Republicans find this embarrassing, they fear challenging the vitriolic radio showman. Steele, the nominal leader of the party, was forced to apologize after referring to Limbaugh’s show as “incendiary” and “ugly.”

One Republican state party chairman said of Limbaugh, “he is the leader of a niche of the Republican Party that simply opposes anything a Democrat ever comes up with.”

The Democrats, of course, are enjoying this. A mobile billboard paid for by the Democratic National Committee is traveling around in south Florida, where Limbaugh lives, declaring that “Americans Didn't Vote for a Rush to Failure.”

Observing all this (as I taught two courses in American politics this past academic year), it occurred to me that there is an old song that perfectly sums up Limbaugh’s politics. “Whatever it is, I’m Against It” was performed by Groucho Marx in the movie Horse Feathers, in 1932. This would be Rush Limbaugh’s version:

I don’t care what the Dems say,
It makes no difference anyway --
Whatever it is, I’m against it!
No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I’m against it.

Obama’s proposition may be good
But let’s have one thing understood --
Whatever it is, I’m against it!
And even when he’s changed it or condensed it,
I’m against it.

I’m opposed to it --
On Republican principles I’m opposed to it!

Chorus: He’s opposed to it!
In fact, in word, in deed,
He’s opposed to it!

For months before his star was born,
I used to yell from night till morn,
Whatever he says, I’m against it!
And I’ve kept yelling since I commenced it,
I’m against it!

Maybe someone reading this article should send a copy to Rush. He’d probably love it.

The "New" Age of Piracy

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Much ink has been spilled over the last few weeks over piracy in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, off the coast of Somalia. It took a U.S. naval vessel to rescue one American ship from Somali buccaneers.

That still hasn’t stopped other pirates from capturing ships and holding them for ransom. In a lawless place like Somalia, this is one of the few ways left to make money.

Elsewhere, in place such as Afghanistan, most profitable enterprises too, are based on criminality, especially the growing of poppy seeds for the production of heroin.

We call these places failed states. They have no functioning central governments, as in the case of Somalia, or else regimes that only survive because they are propped up by western troops, as in Afghanistan.

But actually, these are not so much failed states, as fake states. They only exist because imperial powers, back in the 19th and 20th centuries, drew up maps with boundaries, and gave such places names.

By the end of the Second World War, however, imperialism had come to be considered an unmitigated evil, and colonial powers withdrew from their Asian and African colonies and protectorates.

But the states they left behind were artificial and flimsy constructs.

The boundaries and names remained, but these entities have become increasingly meaningless to most of the populations that live in them.

They may have flags and UN seats, but in reality they are fake states.

Pre-imperial political formations, based around clans and tribes, have reasserted themselves in these places. Those are the true locus of identity and loyalty. The people we refer to as “warlords” are in most cases simply the leaders of such tribes or clans.

Western powers conquered some parts of the world for the profits they could bring to the home country – think India or French Indochina – or as areas of settlement – Australia or Canada.

But others, such as Somalia, Sudan or Zanzibar, were occupied to rid the globe of evils such as piracy, the rule of fanatics or tyrants, constant warfare between enemies, and the slave trade.

Much of what we today call “peacekeeping” was part of the task. This is the lesson we are learning all over again.

Who Are the Real Criminals?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

A number of human rights organizations accused Israel of committing war crimes in its recent war against Hamas in Gaza.

A report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council made the same charge. (The Council includes such stalwarts of democracy as Angola, China, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.)

Similar allegations were made during Israel’s incursion into Lebanon in 2006, when battling the Hezbollah guerrillas. Israel denied this and after conducting its own investigation found the charges to be without merit.

But who has really been engaged in war crimes? We need look no further than Sudan. Its president, Omar al-Bashir, was indicted by the International Criminal Court in early March on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

He is accused by the court of orchestrating attacks that have involved killings, rapes and other atrocities against civilians. Hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered.

But for Israel’s opponents, including Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, crimes against humanity seem to be in the eye of the beholder. While all three have accused Israel of genocide, especially after the recent war in Gaza, they all jumped to Sudan’s defence. Sudan and its allies have called the whole campaign to stop the killings in Darfur a “Zionist plot.”

Of course, as the world discovered recently, Sudan has also been a pipeline for Iranian weapons bound for Hamas in Gaza. In March Iranian Defence Minister Mustafa Muhammad Najar visited Sudan and signed a series of military cooperation agreements. This followed a visit to Iran two months earlier by his Sudanese counterpart, Abdelrahim Mohamed Hussein.

Meanwhile, Bashir seems to have taken a “victory lap” around the Arab world to mock the ICC indictment. Qatar’s leader gave him a red-carpet welcome as he arrived to attend an Arab League summit at the end of March, and Bashir took a prominent role at the two-day meeting. The Sudanese leader had earlier visited Eritrea, Egypt and Libya.

Even before the summit began, Amr Moussa, the general-secretary of the Arab League, said the member states would “continue our efforts to halt the implementation of the warrant.” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, opened the conference by asking all Arab leaders to reject the court’s action.

“What is happening now with regards to Sudan is a new chapter in the chapters that consider the Arabs weak and disrespect the sovereignty of their countries,” he declared.

“We must also take a decisive stance of solidarity alongside fraternal Sudan and President Omar al-Bashir,” added Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. And he’s the moderate!

Arab governments also promised to increase diplomatic visits to Sudan.

“What is required from all of us is to stand with our brothers in Sudan and its leadership in order to prevent dangers that affect our collective security,” stated Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem.

Ibrahim al-Faqir, the Sudanese ambassador to Qatar, told Al Jazeera: “We are very pleased at the Arab support.”

Following the summit, Bashir flew to Saudi Arabia for a short Islamic pilgrimage. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said that the ICC arrest warrant was a politicized decision that “will not lead to the stability of Sudan or solve the Darfur issue.”

So much for Arab states’ concerns regarding crimes against humanity. If it can’t be blamed on Israel, forget about it.

The Only Glimmer of Hope for an Israeli-Palestinian Peace

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/index.cfm?sid=237212&sc=104

Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military response against Hamas in Gaza this past winter, has not been without controversy. Even many of Israel's friends have accused it of using excessive force and engaging in wanton killing in that operation.

A March 23 United Nations report said that a working group had verified reports of violations "too numerous to list." It cited "targeted and indiscriminate" attacks on hospitals and clinics, water treatment facilities, government buildings, and utilities.

"There are strong and credible reports of war crimes and other violations of international norms," it declared.

Physicians for Human Rights in a March 24 report also provided allegations that Israeli soldiers had acted in violation of international law and the Israeli army's own code of ethics.

And Human Rights Watch, in its March 25 review of the Gaza fighting, found instances in which white phosphorus rounds were used under circumstances that had no clear military rationale.

Their use has been criticized because the pieces fall randomly and can set fires, especially in urban settings such as Gaza. Human Rights Watch concluded that the Israeli army did not follow proper precautions for the shells' use.

Israelis themselves have questioned what went on. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that some soldiers who fought in Gaza stated that Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property.

An internal Israeli army probe is underway, but critics deem it inadequate. The Association for Rights in Israel, together with 10 other Israeli human rights groups, have called on Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz to establish an independent investigative body to examine the military's actions during the Gaza campaign.

Of the people killed in the conflict, 1,440 were Palestinian, including 431 children and 114 women. Anywhere between one- and two-thirds of the casualties were civilians. (Since Hamas is not a regular uniformed army, the distinction between soldiers and non-combatants is a difficult one to make.)

Much of the blame for this should be placed at the feet of Hamas, which itself does not follow ethical standards or any normal military rules of engagement when fighting Israel.

Hamas intentionally utilized facilities such as universities as bases from which to attack Israeli troops, and used innocent Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Even so, I happen to think that those who claim Israel used "disproportionate" force and acted irresponsibly in Gaza are probably correct. But I draw different conclusions from these facts.

The enemies of Israel insist that the Gaza war demonstrated the aggressive nature of the country. But I'm more inclined to see this in the context of bullying or spousal abuse.

We've all read about wives, battered for years, who finally kill their husbands. Who would doubt that this is, to use the language of Israel's critics, "disproportionate?"

But these women finally take such extreme measures not because they are more powerful than their husbands but because they are in fact deathly afraid of them, and so want to put an end to the abuse once and for all.

They have been driven to distraction. The fault often lies with a justice system that does little to protect them from such assaults.

Children bullied in schoolyards, for the same reasons, sometimes end up turning on their tormentors. They finally snap - as did the Israelis when almost nobody in the world seemed to care that rockets from Gaza rained down day after day on border towns like Sderot.

Like the woman who has lost faith in restraining orders, or the student who is aware that his teachers' hands at school are tied by an uncaring bureaucracy, Israel knows that the polite expressions of concern in world capitals and the lip service paid to international law at the UN when diplomats affirm Israel's right to exist in security and peace do little to discourage foes like Hamas.

No one advocates war crimes by armies any more than one would justify murder, even against violent husbands or bullies. But we can recognize the circumstances that lead to such behaviour.

The increasing strength of militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, sponsored by an Iran that denies Israel's right to exist, make Israelis feel they are being pushed against a wall.

Being under constant siege by enemies who tell you every single day, that they intend to destroy you once they get the chance, can make anyone, to use modern slang, "lose it." And the result is something like Operation Cast Lead.

It's long past time for responsible parties such as the United States, Canada and the European Union to step in and separate the two sides by manning the borders that Gaza shares with Israel and Egypt. Only then, when neither is attacking the other, can there be even a glimmer of hope for an eventual peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Are Canadian Jews Savvy?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

We Canadian Jews consider ourselves pretty savvy. Sometimes I wonder.

The philanthropists in our community have poured millions of dollars into funding facilities at universities across the country. Such institutions have, of course, happily taken our money – but what good has it done us?

These schools are rapidly being taken over by radical ‘anti-imperialists’ and ‘anti-Zionists.’ At one particularly notorious example, York University in Toronto, Jewish students have actually come to fear for their physical safety.

Israeli Apartheid Week is now a featured event at many campuses across the country. This tells us volumes about the cowardice of university administrators, who seem unable or unwilling to challenge such demonization of the Jewish state.

Maybe our donations should go only to Israel, or in this country, only to Jewish-controlled institutions such as Hebrew schools, synagogues and social organizations. Let the allies of Hamas and Hezbollah financially support York and any other institutions that condone such anti-Jewish behaviour.

Before the 1960s, Canada was basically a union of French Canadians and of people from the British Isles. Many were xenophobes, nativists and, yes, antisemites. The governments of the day made it next to impossible for Jews even to get into the country. Those who managed to immigrate faced economic and social barriers.

So in the 1960s, starting with our overwhelming support of Pierre Trudeau – elected in Canada’s then most Jewish riding, Mount Royal in Montreal – we were in the forefront, ideologically and politically, of creating a new, more liberal Canada.

We helped dismantle the old system, which was replaced by multiculturalism and by virtually open immigration from all over the world. The result?

There are now hundreds of thousands of people in the country, especially in the largest cities, who come from places where Jew-hatred is endemic and sometimes even official policy.

A goodly number of these immigrants apparently see no reason to change their opinions about us. Many of their children, now studying at York and other colleges and universities, are turning these institutions into political bases for antisemitism.

At least the earlier generations of Judaophobes didn’t run around calling us dogs and pigs, waving the flags of genocidal Middle Eastern groups who vow to exterminate us.

Be careful what you wish for. It may come back to bite you.

The Library of Unwritten Books

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/index.cfm?sid=217703&sc=104

Across Canada and the United States, including here at the University of Prince Edward Island, tenure-track positions - that is, full-time academic jobs with a guarantee of steady employment - are fast disappearing.

Increasingly often, professors who retire are being replaced by so-called sessionals, part-time instructors who are hired to teach a limited number of courses. Sessionals have no job security nor, for that matter, any particular loyalty to the institution. They are, as it were, here today, gone tomorrow.

Our own university is particularly 'fortunate' in this regard, because we have a mandatory retirement policy that requires professors to retire at age 65. So when a professor reaches that magic number, the administration can simply eliminate the position she held.

Sessionals, like itinerant labourers, often work at more than one university, in order to make ends meet, since they are paid a pittance per course. After all, that's the whole idea: to provide education on the cheap.

Needless to say, all of this is detrimental to the departments in which sessionals teach, and to the students they serve.

Sessionals are rarely available other than the few hours per week when they appear on campus, often in the evenings.

They teach only a few courses per year. And, because they barely know the students in their classes, they find it next to impossible to write persuasive letters of recommendation for students who wish to go on to graduate school or law school.

Indeed, often by the time students require these all-important recommendations, the sessional herself is unemployed.

Bad as this is for students, it's even worse for the sessionals. People who may have spent the better part of a decade earning their doctorate, end up either working at subsistence wages or leaving academia altogether.

Either way, one thing is certain: given that sessionals find it almost impossible to obtain grants, they will probably never do any further research in their chosen field, and we will never know what contributions these people may have made to our understanding of the world, be they in the humanities, sciences, or other disciplines.

I have a fantasy of creating a 'Library of Unwritten Books'. Here we would see all the books that were never written, by people who never got the chance to become full-time academics. I know a number of people, at this university and elsewhere, who were sessionals for a long time, until they "got lucky" and finally landed a job in their discipline.

They went on to write books that have made an impact, both within their specific fields of study, and in the wider world.

Had they not become tenure-track professors, their scholarship would no doubt be found only in my fictional library. We'll never know how many other volumes sit on the shelves in that imaginary building.

A Middle Eastern Apocalypse in the Offing?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Things have been going from bad to worse in the Middle East, as Israel and its neighbours feel ever more frustrated at their inability to craft a permanent peace – or even a tolerable level of co-existence – with each other.

Most worrisome, of course, is the growing power of Iran, a state that not only funds and arms groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, but is clearly working towards acquiring nuclear weapons.

The Iranian regime makes no bones about wanting to wipe Israel off the map, nor should we assume this is hyperbole. They mean what they say.

It is very likely that, should Israel determine that Iran has developed – and intends to use – such weapons against the Jewish state, Jerusalem will launch a pre-emptive strike against the Islamic Republic.

After all, even one or two nuclear missiles launched at Israel, a tiny country with most of its population centered in a narrow coastal strip around Tel Aviv, would destroy the state.

The one thing Israel’s leaders will do all they can to prevent, no matter what their politics, is the end of Jewish sovereignty in the land. They have all made this very clear in the country’s current election campaign.

However, even if Israel struck first, Iran might by then already have acquired second-strike capability, and still deliver a devastating blow.

It might mean the end of the Jewish state, but at that point, like the Biblical account of Samson bringing down the Philistines’ temple in Gaza, my guess is that Israel would launch what was left of its nuclear arsenal at all of the major capitals and holy sites in the region.

Such a massive conflagration might even extend eastwards, given the religious and cultural dimension, and bring in two other nuclear powers long as odds with each other, India and Pakistan.

This would truly be a modern Armageddon and we must do all we can to prevent such a cataclysm. But in the capitals of the world, people far wiser than I are perplexed and seem unable to stop this march towards catastrophe.

Where Do Israel, Jewish People Stand at This Moment? 

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

It’s always important to be realistic and not give in to wishful thinking when it comes to the security of Israel.

Though I don’t think of myself as an alarmist, I’m sorry to say that things do not look good right now.

We must take the long view and see trend lines in Israel’s strength vis-a-vis its foes.

Despite Israel’s military prowess, there has been a slow but steady shift in the balance of forces between Israel and its most implacable enemies. All we need to do is look at Gaza.

In 1956 and 1967, Israel swept through the small area with hardly any resistance, even though in both cases the Gaza battles were just part of much larger wars.

Even during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel suffered horrific initial losses, Gaza, as well as the border with Lebanon, remained quiet. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah had yet been created. Nor was Iran in the hands of a Shi’ite theocracy.

And between 1949 and 1991 – when Saddam Hussein lobbed Scud missiles at the country – Israel’s home front was safe from military attack.

Yet now, after three weeks of warfare in Gaza, Israel has been either unable to militarily vanquish Hamas, or else felt it simply couldn’t afford to do so, due to a combination of diplomatic pressure and effective Palestinian manipulation of world opinion. And this, even though Israel wasn’t involved in fighting anywhere else.

I don’t think that Israel gained much from this offensive, especially when judged against the condemnations of the operation, even by western countries. It’s little more than the status quo. I doubt that Egypt or even the US will be able to stop the smuggling of weapons into Gaza.

Something similar happened in the war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006. While Israel was unchallenged in the air, the ground war was inconclusive – and Hezbollah today has more rockets than it did back then.

It turns out the weapons suppliers – Iran and others – to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are doing a far more effective job, and providing more “bang for the buck,” than the old Communist bloc did when the Soviets were arming countries like Egypt and Syria.

Also, as one war follows another, there is another worrisome trend: more and more diaspora Jews, particularly younger people, in Canada and elsewhere, are signing anti-Israeli petitions and joining ‘anti-Zionist’ groups, with some even supporting Hamas and Hezbollah.

It’s easy for us to write them off as “self-hating Jews.” Some are. But for many others, it’s a version of the so-called Stockholm Syndrome, where people begin to identify with their tormentors – “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” – and hope to be spared.

Such Jews, usually fairly assimilated into the larger society and often with little schooling in Judaism or Jewish history, find intolerable the stress of iving and working amongst people who increasingly see Israel as an aggressor, rogue, or ‘apartheid’ state.

The relentless ideological attacks on the Jewish state – not to mention increasingly blatant antisemitic rhetoric – are taking their toll. No one wants to be ostracized by colleagues, fellow students, or co-workers.

To ease this psychological burden, such Jews are in effect ‘converting,’ to use religious terminology, from ‘Jewishness’ (except as a vestigial identity) to ‘cosmopolitan diaspora multiculturalism.’

None of this bodes well, either for Israel or for the rest of us.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact: Two Years of Infamy

Henry Srebrnik , [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

Welcome to 2009. This is a year in which Jews will remember many days of sadness, since it will be the 70th anniversary of, among other events, Hitler’s occupation of the remains of Czechoslovakia, on March 15, 1939; the British “White Paper,” which effectively ended Jewish immigration into the Palestine Mandate, issued on May 17; and, of course, the German invasion of Poland, on Sept. 1.

We’ve all heard, on old newsreels, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, referring to Dec. 7, 1941 as “a day of infamy.” All of these 1939 dates were also “days of infamy.”

And that label might just as easily be applied to another date from 70 years ago: Aug. 23, 1939, the day the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union, better known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop or Hitler-Stalin Pact, was signed. It created the conditions for the “perfect storm” that led, one week later, to the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The pact destroyed Jewish faith in the pro-Soviet left, including the Communist Parties and their various front groups in North America. From Sept. 3, 1939, when Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, until June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Communists directed much of their venom, not at Hitler’s Germany, but at Britain and France.

This caused special consternation among Jewish Communists. Those who supported the change in Moscow’s line were now forced to rationalize their defence of the treaty. Shloime Almazov, the head of the ICOR, a Communist front group, published Der Sovyetish-daytsher opmakh: vos meynt er? (The Soviet-German Pact: What Does it Mean?) immediately following the announcement of the pact.

The enemies of the USSR were displeased that the Soviet Union had thwarted a German attack against it, something its foes devoutly desired, he remarked. The Soviet-German pact was not a danger to the progressive movement, he concluded; rather, it was motivated by the Soviet desire to live in peace with its neighbours and to guard with all its strength the peace of the world.

The Soviets had already saved some two million Jews when they “liberated” eastern Poland in mid-September 1939, declared Almazov. (A secret protocol to the pact had allowed the two dictators to partition Poland.)

And the prospect for European Jews improved even more dramatically, according to the Communists, when in June, 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Romanian Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Added to the total within the pre-1939 Soviet borders, by 1941 perhaps as many as 6.5 million Jews lived under the protection of “Soviet power” – about two-thirds of European Jewry.

Moishe Katz, a writer for the New York Communist daily Morgn Frayhayt, was so certain that “a new and bright day” had dawned that in August 1940, he wrote an article entitled Der oyflebung fun dem mizrakh-europayishn yidntum (The Rejuvenation of East European Jewry).

Most Jews, however, were simply not buying the party line. And they were, unfortunately, proven correct. The Nazi attack on Russia in 1941, and the subsequent mass murder of the majority of east European and Soviet Jews, punctured the fantasy of a 6.5-million-strong Jewish community living safely and productively in a peaceful USSR, a country that had been spared the horrors of war thanks to Stalin’s wise decision to sign the pact with Hitler.

In the wake of the rationales to which they had been subjected between 1939 and 1941, even pro-Soviet Jews realized that they had been lulled into a false sense of security. Those who remained in the movement were never again as certain as they had been before 1941 that they could trust Russia to protect Jews.

The lesson most other Jews – including the many former Communists who abandoned the movement in 1939 – learned was that we needed a sovereign state of our own in the old homeland, Eretz Yisroel.

Is Our Governor General Up to the Job?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

“Since our Governor-General made her critical decision on prorogation 2½ weeks ago, there's been a sustained regal silence. Nary a word from the celestial Michaëlle Jean to explain it.”

So wrote Lawrence Martin, a columnist who can usually be relied upon to view politics through a fairly Liberal prism, in a Dec. 22 Globe and Mail commentary.

“We don't know what the PM told her, whether it was accurate, whether he torqued the separatist threat, whether he raised the possibility of legal recourse. We don't know whether her decision came with any strings attached or how she determined it was consistent with the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy,” contended Martin.

Canadians have not worried all that much about the role of our constitutional stand-in for the head of state, Queen Elizabth II. Even those who think the office archaic and a relic of colonial times have reassured themselves that, after all, it’s a job consisting mainly of ceremonial functions.

So in recent decades it became a patronage appointment, just another plum, like a seat in the Senate. Recent Governors General have been retired politicians and CBC personalities. Who really cared?

But we’ve now been reminded that in a Westminster system of parliamentary government, the Crown, in the person of the Governor General, can wield important reserve powers. It would have been within Jean’s right, legally, to have installed Stéphane Dion as prime minister, without benefit of another election.

And should Stephen Harper’s minority government fall next month, we might see a man who last October wasn’t in the running for the job – or even leader of his party – become our head of government.

Michael Ignatieff would be the beneficiary of behind-the-scenes decisions which we, the other 33 million Canadians, would not be privy to.

So Martin’s concerns are well-founded. Given that we’re in a period where minority governments are common and the Governor General’s discretionary powers are therefore large, he wants Jean to publically disclose the reasons for her action on Dec. 4.

But is it possible she herself can’t quite articulate the constitutional rationale behind her decision? Here's the real problem: our Governor General is an inexperienced former TV announcer placed in the job by a besotted former prime minister.

She herself may have had no idea what to do when Harper arrived asking her to suspend parliament, and may therefore have relied completely on unnamed “experts.” In effect, our constitutional monarchy has now become the equivalent of a regency, where a monarch too young to rule leaves governing to others.

A Letter from Jerusalem – Circa 1972

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

Recently a friend in Montreal mailed me a copy of a letter – one of those old aerogrammes -- that I had sent to him in August 1972, when I spent the summer at the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, while I was a student at Brandeis University. (No e-mail back then!)

The letter is indeed a piece of history all in itself. I was amazed, given the relatively low cultural state of students today, that I could write to him that I was reading at the time books by the Soviet novelist Mikhail Sholokov, the American writer Sinclair Lewis, and the American Communist supporter Waldo Frank, among others – and not because I “had to,” for a course, but simply out of interest. (Who today even remembers these authors?)

I spoke in the letter about going along on demonstrations with the left-wing Matzpen people, a now defunct and forgotten Israeli socialist organization. They were among those protesting an expropriation that had taken place by the Israeli government back in 1948 of two Arab Christian villages, Birim and Ikrit, whose land near the Lebanese border had later been taken over by kibbutzim.

The inhabitants had not been able to return despite repeated rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court, so in the summer of 1972 they returned to their villages, and police had to use force to remove them. On August 13, a few thousand people in Jerusalem demonstrated on their behalf.

The leftists hung out at the Cafe Ta’amon on King George Street, and I used to spend time there. I looked for it on the Internet and the place still exists, though it looks a lot fancier today.

Well, what can one say about all this? It was a different era; many of us still lived in the zeitgeist of the sixties. It’s all such ancient history now.

In 1972, I could walk by myself down from Mount Scopus through the Old City and into West Jerusalem, even late in the evening, without fear.

Who would do that today? No one had yet heard of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the host of other groups around the world who are today mortal enemies of Israel.

Between the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, we Jews lived in a fool’s paradise -- it was probably one of the few times in our history when we forgot that we are weaker, not stronger, than our enemies.

But when Yasser Arafat spoke to the UN a year later, in 1974, and then when the “Zionism is Racism” resolution was passed by the General Assembly in 1975 (on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, no less), we began to live in today’s “epoch.”

Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of Communism as an attractive ideology hasn’t really changed things all that much, in terms of the ongoing offensive against Israel.

The “anti-Zionism” these leftists advocated, we now understand, had nothing to do with “socialism,” because all the nonsense peddled by the Soviets, and by China, is history now -- except, of course, for the anti-Israel strand.

And today it’s not the Russians or Chinese who are behind it, but an amorphous worldwide “left,” which has really become little more than an anti-Semitic “Internationale.” I’m sure, for instance, that many leftists will defend the destruction of the Chabad Jewish Centre in Mumbai, India, by terrorists, because it was an “outpost of imperialism.”

So though much has changed in 36 years, even more has not. But as for that 1972 letter, I guess the Jerusalem postmark alone is worth saving it for.

Bye Bye Parliamentary Legitimacy

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

In the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, our own political system is in turmoil.

Stéphane Dion’s Liberals, Jack Layton’s New Democrats, and the separatist Bloc Québécois led by Gilles Duceppe have cooked up a deal whereby they will overthrow Stephen Harper’s newly-elected Conservative government and form a coalition to replace him.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has announced that she too supports this political troika. In fact she’d like Dion, the presumptive prime minister, to appoint her to the Senate -- so much for the Greens being “different” than the old-line parties.

No one is quite sure whether this power grab will succeed or not. Harper has managed to get the governor general to suspend parliament until the end of January.

“The highest principle of Canadian democracy is that if one wants to be prime minister, one gets one’s mandate from the Canadian people, and not from Quebec separatists,” he declared earlier in the House of Commons.

But one thing is certain. Canada is now leaving, perhaps forever, that small and happy group of countries such as France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, which have periodic elections that create stable governments.

We are now joining the Belgiums, Israels, Italys, Polands, Thailands and Ukraines, all those nations where parties come and go, where shifting coalitions create and break governments, where politicians seek power however they may seize it, and where, as a result, chaos reigns and no one quite knows who will be running the show the next week or month.

Their parliaments all look as though we were viewing them through a kaleidoscope.

Since Dion and Layton by themselves do not control enough votes in the House of Commons by themselves, Duceppe will now effectively be in the driver’s seat, making sure Quebec gets its fair share – and then some – of the goodies the coalition will soon be handing out.

No wonder former Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau has announced that he supports this deal. He called the Bloc’s inclusion in the three-party coalition agreement an “impressive victory” for separatism

“This victory sweeps aside any hesitation Quebecers might have had on the presence of the Bloc in Ottawa,” Parizeau said.

Yet Layton has remarked, with a straight face, that this deal will be good for Canada. Too bad we don’t have the equivalent of “Saturday Night Live” in this country. But then, this isn’t even funny, the way Sarah Palin was.

Can we assume, with the Bloc about to effectively become part of Canada’s government, that the Clarity Act setting out specific rules for Quebec’s departure from Canada (which I never thought was worth the paper it’s printed on anyhow) is now dead? Surely this will be understood by Dion and Layton as being one of Duceppe’s demands, even if unspoken?

I wonder what all those people on Prince Edward Island who vote Liberal, no matter what, think of Stéphane Dion embracing a party whose aim is the secession of Quebec.

Can we expect Liberal members of parliament who represent P.E.I. constituencies to break ranks with their party, as it moves forward in its unholy alliance with the separatist Bloc Québécois and the New Democrats? Or do they value power more than principle?

Is Stéphane Dion About to Become PM?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Hey, why should a little thing like losing an election stop Canada’s perennial rulers from resuming their rightful place as the government in Ottawa?

Don’t look now, but is Stéphane Dion about to become our prime minister?

This shift in power would be even more dramatic than Dion’s Green Shift, which went nowhere in October.

Apparently the Liberals have been making plans to bring down the Harper minority government by putting forward a motion of non-confidence in parliament to defeat the Conservatives and replace them with a coalition made up of themselves and the New Democrats, and perhaps even including the separatist Bloc Québécois.

And what is their flimsy excuse? Ontario MP John McCallum said they were seeking to replace Stephen Harper because the Conservatives failed to offer an economic stimulus package when the rest of the world had done so.

This Liberal ploy may be technically legal, but it almost amounts to a non-military coup d’état. No federal government has ever been replaced by a coalition of parties that lost an election (though it has happened provincially).

The Conservatives won a renewed mandate just seven weeks ago. They increased their numbers in the House of Commons by 19 seats, and in fact, with 143 seats, were just 12 short of obtaining a majority in the 308-seat House of Commons.

The Liberals, on the other hand, were not just defeated but trounced.

They lost 26 seats, and their share of the popular vote, at 26.2 percent, was their worst showing in over a century.

Yet now they are talking about a coalition with the NDP and maybe also the Bloc. “The three opposition parties agree on more things than they disagree upon,” one NDP MP has stated.

The Liberals and NDP would need the Bloc to be at least onside, because together the Liberals, with 77 seats, and the NDP, with 29 seats, don’t even come close to reaching the 155 seats needed for a working majority.

The Bloc holds 49 Quebec seats.

So, are we about to see our Liberal-appointed Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, ask Stéphane Dion, a man who has resigned the leadership of his own party, to form a government and become prime minister?

Or might it be Bob Rae or Michael Ignatieff, neither of whom was even running for the job in the recent election? Neither man has even been elected leader of his own party, much less of the country.

And if this coalition were to include the Bloc Québécois, might Gilles Duceppe perhaps get a cabinet position? How about something like minister of national unity?

The chutzpah of Canada’s “natural governing party” is boundless. They really do think they have a divine right to rule Canada, and clearly see Stephen Harper as merely a usurper who has gained a temporary hold on government through some kind of electoral sleight of hand.

So, should the three opposition parties defeat the government, Harper should ask the Governor General to dissolve parliament and call new elections – unpalatable and expensive as that will be. Under no circumstances should someone else be allowed to form a government without going to the country first.

Why? Because, while it is true that the opposition parties won more seats and votes on Oct. 14 than did the Conservatives, the electorate was not in full possession of the facts.

How many people across the country who voted for the Liberals or NDP might instead have voted for the Tories, had they known these parties planned an alliance with each other and, more particularly, with the Bloc? We don’t know.

Liberal voters, in particular, might not want to be in bed with either separatists or social democrats. So let’s do it right this time: let the Bloc, Liberals and NDP run under their true collective colours, and if they beat Harper, fine, they can then form a government.

And, should the Liberals and NDP join with the Bloc and manage to overthrow the newly-elected Conservative government of Canada, they will in effect be saying that they consider the separatists more legitimate, and better for Canada, than the Conservatives. Wonder what Alberta, in particular, will make of this.

Should this come to pass, the road to Canada's dismemberment will become a superhighway.

Closing Thoughts on the American Presidential Election

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Thankfully, the American election is finally over, and the good news is that Barack Obama won. But what a task he faces.

In the United States today, income for most people has stagnated while the exceptionally wealthy have been making out like bandits, some Wall Street financiers and hedge fund managers earning more than a billion dollars a year.

Forty million people are without health care, while others who get laid off from their jobs find themselves suddenly losing their health insurance. Infrastructure – roads, bridges, hospitals – is in drastic need of repair. Public education and transportation are a mess.

And Americans are fighting in a war that has taken some five thousand American lives, for no particular end – Iraq will probably be plunged into internal conflict almost as soon as they leave.

For years, Washington turned a blind eye to the shenanigans of a financial “industry” that has now led to the economy crashing down around our ears. “Deep recession” is the new euphemism for what was once called a “depression.”

Yet what we got from John McCain was hectoring about Obama’s so-called “socialism,” because he wanted to raise taxes on millionaires!

What offended many most of all was the selection of Sarah Palin for the vice-presidential position. This was an affront to anyone who values learning, education, and knowledge, and isn’t simply an anti-intellectual philistine. It was a slap in the face. She probably hasn’t read a single book since college.

African-Americans and Hispanics voted overwhelmingly for Obama, because most non-white and non-evangelical groups have begun to see the Republican Party as a “white fundamentalist” party.

McCain on November 4 won little more than the reactionary states of the old Confederacy and the thinly-populated great plains states. He lost every major state except Texas. Just about every major city and college town – the places where American industry and brainpower resides – voted for Obama.

The Republican Party has been reduced to a rabble of bigots, racists and nativists. They now resemble the so-called Know-Nothings of the 19th century.

The Know-Nothings, whose actual name was the American Party, gained traction in the United States in the 1850s. The party was organized to oppose the great wave of immigrants, mainly Catholic Irish and Italians, who had begun immigrating to the United States.

Know-Nothings claimed that the immigrants threatened to destroy the American experiment, as the new groups would be subservient to a foreign power – the Roman Catholic Church, led by the Pope in Rome.

The Know-Nothings wanted to preserve their vision of an Anglo-Saxon Protestant society. Their state and national platforms demanded that immigration be limited and that a 21-year wait be imposed before an immigrant could become a citizen and vote. They also sought to have the Protestant version of the Bible read daily in classrooms.

Since the 1980s, a once relatively secular, big-business party, centered in the northeast and Midwest, has been taken over by such small-town, rural evangelicals. People like Sarah Palin of Alaska, truly a know-nothing in every sense of the word, are the reductio ad absurdum of this politics.

In her speeches, she divided the citizens of America into “real patriotic” Americans, and others – by which she meant, like her 19th century political ancestors, non-Protestant “foreigners” and “terrorists.”

Unless the Republican Party frees itself from such people, it will be doomed to irrelevance. America becomes day by day a more diverse society. Demography is not on the side of intolerance.

Just What Does it Take to Run the Office These Days?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Most people who have actual, real jobs would find it hard to abandon their work for a couple of months, unless given an official leave of absence and being replaced temporarily by someone else.

How many teachers, lawyers, garage mechanics, barbers, insurance salespeople, and, for that matter, professors, could just take time off from work, without their disappearance having an effect on others in their workplace?

But Sarah Palin has been on the road, running as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, since August. So who’s minding the store up in Alaska? She is, after all, the governor – the chief executive officer, the CEO, of the state.

Barack Obama, John McCain and Joe Biden, are senators, members of the legislative branch, the Congress, so this question doesn’t apply to them. Indeed, Congress isn’t even in session right now.

Sure, Palin may be signing off on bills, but how different is this from Queen Elizabeth giving the royal assent to legislation passed by the British Parliament?

The fact that Palin’s absence in the state makes little difference tells us something about the dirty little secret of modern politics, especially as practiced in America today. Many political figures today are really just “fronts,” people placed on their parties’ tickets as a result of their “electability” or “persona,” and thus the recipients of large amounts of cash from donors, who in return hope for policy decisions that will favour them.

The elected officials don’t actually do the work. They are not all that different from British aristocrats who, until the practice was abolished in 1868, bought army commissions for their sons, and expected others in the military to do the actual thinking when it came to warfare.

At least Biden and Obama attended law school, while McCain was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and an officer in the Navy. Palin barely managed to obtain a BA from the University of Idaho. She seems to use the word “maverick” as a synonym for being unlettered.

It was not always this way. When Abraham Lincoln ran for president in 1860, the voters expected him to really do the job. Honest Abe didn’t have a whole staff around him for the heavy lifting.

He wrote the “Gettysburg Address” himself, and didn’t use focus groups to see if it would be well received. Today, of course, presidents have speech writers, media consultants, analysts, strategists, and hundreds of other specialists at their side.

This is why the charges of “plagiarism” levelled against a politician when someone discovers they have lifted parts of another official’s speech fall flat. After all, it’s just one ghost writer stealing from another! None of this stuff is actually written by the candidates.

Just imagine, using my own job as an example, if this were the case in other walks of life:

Competing with others for a university position, I am selected by (and only by) the “electorate,” in other words the student body, for reasons best known only to themselves. And they have absolute control of the process; none of the faculty or administrators can veto their decision.

My specialty is comparative politics, and perhaps I’m not really up to speed in my field. But that doesn’t really matter. I’ll simply hire genuine political scientists to prepare my course syllabi, write my lectures, mark exams and term papers, and do all of my scholarly research and writing, up to and including the books that I will publish. And I get all the credit.

Not a bad gig, eh? Welcome to the world of 21st century democracy, where image is all and expertise comes a distant second.

That’s why the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 on new clothes for Sarah Palin, rather than on books. Too bad -- she might have learned what the position of vice-president of the United States really entails.

Quebec Marches to Its Own Electoral Drummer

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In his column published recently in the Guardian, Richard Gwyn remarked, in commenting on the federal election, that "Quebec acted as if completely disengaged from the national political process."

The Bloc Québécois won 50 of Quebec's 75 seats last week, leaving the three major federal parties (and the Greens) in the dust. The Liberals got 13 seats, mostly around Montreal, the Conservatives 10, the NDP one, plus a single independent.

Though Stephen Harper "showered money and favours and attention on the province," Quebec's response was "to yawn." Gwyn added that, when it comes to federal politics, "Quebecers, it now seems, look exclusively at themselves."

Globe and Mail writer Jeffrey Simpson analyzed the results in the same vein. "Bloc voters obviously feel comfortable with the party," he wrote. "Some are separatists; others are not. They apparently welcome a party that wants no part of governing Canada while continuing to demand more and more from it."

The party, he observed, wants more money and jurisdictional power, plus a larger international presence, for the province. These are all "way stations to the Bloc's eventual goal of an independent Quebec."

Canada, concluded Simpson, "is no longer a country they wish to participate in governing, but one from which they wish to withdraw cash, like an automated teller machine."

Remember, the Liberal Party, which in the past had a hammerlock on Quebec, has been unable to win a majority of Quebec's 75 seats since 1980, even when led by francophone Québécois such as Jean Chrétien and Stéphane Dion. And of course the Tories have been toast since the days of Brian Mulroney.

The Bloc's strength also weakens Canada's national parties. With Gilles Duceppe winning upwards of 50 seats per election, as he did on October 14, it becomes very difficult for any other party to reach the 154 seats needed to form a majority government.

We achieved our objective, Duceppe told supporters. Without the Bloc Harper would have formed a majority government.

And this suits the Bloc just fine. It gives the party, which is in effect a Quebec nationalist lobby, more power to extract money and other goodies from those who govern in Ottawa, lest the government fall.

So guess what, mes amis. While you've all been monitoring the state of the Quebec sovereignty movement, wondering whether it remains a viable option for francophones, the game is practically over.

This is the sixth election since 1993 where the majority of francophone votes and seats in Quebec have gone to the Bloc Québécois. This can't be written off as a series of "accidents" or "sour grapes," with the Bloc simply taking advantage of miscues by the leaders of the other parties.

Quebec is already a "nation within a state." Even the provincial government of Jean Charest, nominally Liberal, acts like a national government, making demands on Ottawa little different from those of the separatist Parti Québécois.

Becoming independent one day will for Quebec be little more than a formality. Most people, either there or in the rest of Canada, will hardly notice the difference.

McCain Carrying a Load of Ethical Baggage

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

If Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin can spout silly nonsense about Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, it’s only fair that Obama in return should hammer away at another piece of history, the ‘Keating Five’ scandal of the late 1980s.

In recent campaign speeches, Palin has criticized Obama’s association with Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground, a 1960s radical offshoot of the New Left student movement that engaged in a number of bombings at the time.

Palin said that Obama sees America as so imperfect “that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

But Obama, who was all of eight years old when these crimes were committed, barely knows Ayers, who is today a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Both have been involved with school reform in Chicago and were members of the board of an anti-poverty group, the Woods Fund, between 1999 and 2002.

In fact, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has declared that he, too, has worked with Ayers. “I don’t condone what he did 40 years ago but I remember that period well. It was a difficult time, but those days are long over.”

Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democratic Congressman, warned that “If we are going to go down this road,” he would remind voters that, two decades ago, “John McCain was associating with Charles Keating.”

During the 1980s, Senator McCain received $112,000, and free vacations for his family, from Charles Keating, the head of Lincoln Savings & Loan. Such savings and loan banks had been deregulated in the early 1980s, allowing them to make highly risky investments with their depositors’ money. Keating took advantage of this change.

McCain, a personal friend of Keating’s, voted repeatedly against congressional efforts to tighten regulation of savings and loans, and in 1987, when he learned that Keating’s bank was the target of a federal investigation, McCain met with regulators in an effort to get them to back off.

Keating ended up defrauding his customers and when his bank collapsed in 1989, some 23,000 people were victimized and many lost their life savings, largely because they now held securities issued by another Keating-owned company, American Continental Corporation, which had declared bankruptcy, rather than federally insured bank deposits.

Keating went to prison, and the Senate Ethics Committee reprimanded McCain for “poor judgment.” (Four other U.S. senators were also involved; they became known collectively as the “Keating Five.”)

William Black, who was a deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation at the time, indicated that McCain’s chief error was in underestimating the importance of regulation and relying too heavily on slanted advice from bankers and lobbyists.

Black, now an associate professor of law and economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, added that McCain’s campaign still remains heavily influenced by lobbyists working in his campaign.

When it comes to the economy, the so-called maverick John McCain, who bragged until recently that he was fundamentally a deregulator, is part of the problem, not the solution.

The Economic Chickens Come Home to Roost

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

U.S. President George Bush last week appealed to the nation to support a US$700 billion rescue for the nation’s financial system in order to avert a credit market collapse.

After much wrangling, Congress has acceded to his demand, lest the economy fail.

The bill authorizes government intervention to buy distressed debt – mortgage-based securities and other assets – from private firms currently stuck with them, with the tab picked up mainly by the taxpayers.

Legislators did put in place some safeguards, including close supervision of the program by an oversight board and the creation of a privately funded insurance program for mortgage-backed securities. They also limited compensation to executives of corporations that would be covered by the rescue plan and allowed for more help to homeowners facing foreclosure.

A part of me hoped the U.S. Congress would refuse to bail out the fat cats on Wall Street and let them go under. I realize that, unfortunately, many innocent victims of their greed would go down with them, but it’s the price Americans would have to pay for allowing their leaders to condone such legalized robbery.

To use an expression beloved by some, “short term pain for long term gain.”

America has been living beyond its means for years. George Bush went to war and – incredibly – lowered taxes on the rich. He told Americans they could show their patriotism by “going shopping.”

Don’t blame only Bush. The Clinton administration was just as culpable.

Since the late 1990s, the personal savings rate in the U.S. has plunged to almost zero from 3 per cent of income, according to research by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors Inc. Credit card debt is up 80 per cent.

In 1999, mortgage giant Fannie Mae came under increasing pressure from Bill Clinton to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people, and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits. And so the so-called sub-prime mortgage market, now at the root of the financial crisis, grew until it became a giant house of cards.

The current crisis was not caused by greedy executives breaking laws.

What they did was perfectly legal. It resulted from increasingly lax government regulation.

In 2004, for instance, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency with primary responsibility for regulating the securities industry and stock market, loosened the rules governing the amount of debt major investment banks could assume in their trading activities.

The Wall Street financiers have been allowed to in effect “print” money at a pace counterfeiters can only dream of. Read this and weep:

*In 2007, the CEO of a Standard & Poor’s 500 company received, on average, $14.2 million in total compensation, according to the Corporate Library, a corporate governance research firm.

*Lehman Brothers chairman Richard Fuld Jr. made $34 million in 2007; the firm went bankrupt a few weeks ago.

*Insurance giant American International Group’s Martin Sullivan got a $14 million compensation package in 2007; the insolvent company has now received $85 billion in a federal bailout.

*Stock brokerage Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain was paid $17 million in salary, bonuses and stock options in 2007; his company too has ceased to exist.

*Washington Mutual, the country’s largest savings and loan bank, nearing collapse, was seized by federal regulators last week. Its new chief executive, Alan H. Fishman, who has been on the job for less than three weeks, is eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep his $7.5 million signing bonus, according to an analysis by James F. Reda and Associates.

There are many more such stories; these figures come from the filings made by these companies to the SEC. No one could possibly be worth the obscene amounts paid to these people – even if they hadn’t run their companies into the ground.

Since there really is a finite national economic pie, this left less on the plate for others, including minimum wage workers who can’t afford a doctor for their sick children.

And more than a million people have lost their homes through foreclosure in the last two years, among the other consequences of this debacle.

A financial crash, like a lost war would have provided a salutary lesson, a form of “tough love.” Now, within a few years we’ll just be back to business as usual as people forget the lessons learned from this mess.

Americans failed to elect the kind of politicians who might have prevented this. They will now have to learn to live with the consequences

Crisis in the American Financial System

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Since the Reagan years of the 1980s, the American financial system has been allowed to operate virtually unchecked by elected officials.

“Government” and “bureaucrats” became the objects of derision, especially on the part of Republicans, while the “Masters of the Universe,” Wall Street investment bankers and financiers, went about their business: the business, not of producing things, but of making money, and tons of it.

During the same period, the economic condition of middle and working class Americans deteriorated, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Unions were weakened, more and more full-time manufacturing jobs were “outsourced” to low-wage countries overseas, and replaced by minimum-wage service jobs.

The gap between the very rich and everyone else grew. Three decades ago, notes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, heads of major American corporations typically earned between 30 and 40 times the income of ordinary workers. Last year such CEOs averaged 344 times the average pay of workers.

The now disgraced head of Lehman Brothers, the venerable 158-year-old Wall Street firm that went bankrupt last week, took home nearly half a billion dollars in total compensation between 1993 and 2007. That’s not a typo – half a billion!

Both political parties allowed, indeed even encouraged this. You think Bill Clinton provided more oversight than George W. Bush has? Think again. His daughter Chelsea works, not for a company that produces something with use value – say, cars, or paper clips, or shoes – but for a hedge fund.

(Here’s Wikipedia’s very simple definition of a hedge fund: “a private investment fund, having a largely unregulated pool of capital, whose managers can buy or sell any assets, make speculative trades on falling as well as rising assets, and participate substantially in profits from money invested.”) Because a hedge fund markets to accredited investors only, it is free from direct regulation. These are, so to speak, exclusive clubs.

So the fact that Chelsea Clinton was hired as an “analyst” at Avenue Capital Group, a US$12 billion hedge fund, rather than as an executive at, say, Acme Widget or the Jones Shoe Manufacturing Corp., should tell you something. In fact, Wall Street traders were among the biggest donors to Bill Clinton’s campaigns, and to his wife Hillary’s, as well.

Don’t place all the blame on Bush.

Hedge funds, derivatives, leveraged buying and selling, sub-prime mortgages – all forms of financial sleight of hand, really – grew by leaps and bounds, until they all became part of a giant house of cards, in effect pyramid schemes destined, as sure as down follows up, to eventually collapse.

Now has come the reckoning. The U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve are now pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial system to rescue companies such as insurance giant AIG from insolvency.

Many more dominoes may fall. The administration is preparing a massive intervention to revive the financial system, including a plan to sweep away the unpaid loans that are choking banks and blocking the flow of money to borrowers. It involves using hundreds of billions of dollars in government funding to buy up bad loans.

And who will, in the end pay for all this? Not the CEOs who walked away with billions of dollars. It’ll be the taxpayers, including people making US$16,000 a year at gas stations or supermarkets, who typically don’t even have any health insurance. They will in effect be bailing out the multi-millionaires.

This has been “Hurricane Wall Street,” and it will have as detrimental an effect on John McCain’s presidential campaign as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005 on George Bush’s legacy, which has never recovered from the disaster in New Orleans.

These economic woes should certainly help Barack Obama to victory in November. Rightly or otherwise, the Wall Street mess is blamed squarely on the Republicans.

And since this economic crisis isn’t going away anytime soon, no one wants the 72 year old McCain in office lest he moves on to the hereafter and Americans wake up to find themselves governed by the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin – who got her first passport in 2006 and had never been overseas until last year.