New York Women and the U.S. Supreme Court

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

U.S. President Barack Obama has nominated Elena Kagan to become the 112th Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, filling the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens.

Kagan currently serves as Solicitor General of the United States, the lawyer who represents the federal government in cases that come before the Supreme Court.

Kagan grew up on Manhattan’s liberal, intellectual Upper West Side, the daughter of Robert Kagan, a graduate of Yale Law School who represented tenant associations, and Gloria Kagan, who taught at Hunter College Elementary School.

She attended Ivy League Princeton University as an undergraduate and obtained her law degree from Harvard Law School. She would become dean of that law school many years later. She has also been a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Should Kagan be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, there will be three liberal women from New York City on the Supreme Court, the other two being Ruth Bader Ginsburg, born in Brooklyn, and Sonia Sotomayor, from the South Bronx.

Ginsburg also graduated from an Ivy League University, Cornell, and at first also enrolled at Harvard Law School. When her husband took a job in New York City, she transferred to Columbia Law School and became the first woman to be on both the Harvard Law Review and the Columbia Law Review.

Like Kagan, she also has taught law, at Rutgers University and Columbia, before being appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980. She was elevated to the Supreme Court in 1993.

Sotomayor, appointed to the Supreme Court last year, also graduated from Princeton and obtained her law degree from Yale, but has never taught. She practiced law in New York before becoming a federal judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1992. Six years later, she joined the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which comprises the states of Connecticut, New York, and Vermont.

While Kagan and Ginsburg are Jewish, Sotomayor is an Hispanic whose parents came from Puerto Rico. And while the latter two come from less affluent backgrounds than does Kagan, all three had parents who were committed to their children’s education.

Emily Goodman, another New York judge, has suggested that Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor advanced because of a New York dynamic that enabled each to see herself as going where others hadn’t pushed ahead.

“The New York woman – she’s a striver,” noted Ann Kirschner, dean of a branch college of the City University of New York.

They may have reached these heights because there is less discrimination against women and minorities these days, but the drive, intelligence and talent – the cultural capital – they bring with them is pure New York, of course. After all, for the past century, it’s been the centre of the world.

Irredentism: A Potent Form of Nationalism

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

The word “irredentism” comes from the mid-19th century term “Italia irredenta,” meaning Italy unredeemed. As Italian nationalists were unifying the peninsula into a single Italian state, irredentists championed the annexation by the new Italy of territories that they felt should be within its borders.

Many nations lay claim to areas they consider to be theirs because the area was once – even if many decades or centuries ago – part of their patrimony.

Irredentism becomes a particularly potent form of nationalism when the territory coveted is the very area where the nation was forged.

Two high-profile irredentist conflicts relate to Israel and Serbia.

The dispute between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs has an irredentist dimension and complicates attempts to form a Palestinian state.

Religious Jewish settlers refer to the areas west of the Jordan River by their Biblical names – Judea and Samaria. This was the heartland of the ancient Jewish kingdoms.

The cities of Jericho, Shechem (now Nablus) and Hebron are, to devout Jews, part of the land promised to the Israelites by God. Hebron, the burial site of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah, the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people, is the second holiest city in Judaism, after Jerusalem.

On the other hand, much of Israel’s coastal area along the Mediterranean, where the modern city of Tel Aviv is, was in Biblical days often in Philistine hands, and is of less nationalist significance. Hence there was less opposition in Israel to leaving Gaza.

Kosovo is the historic centre of the Serbian nation, home to many of its revered Christian Orthodox churches and monasteries. However, by the 1990s almost all of Kosovo’s population had become Albanian.

Following the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic refused to let go of Muslim-majority Kosovo, which was only detached from Belgrade’s control after the 1999 war. Kosovo is now a sovereign state, but many Serbs would love to reconquer it.

There are many other cases, even if the claims are not currently being pursued.

The heart of the German nation before World War II was Prussia, the kingdom that unified the country in 1871. Much of the land it controlled along the Baltic sea now belongs to Poland and Russia, thanks to Hitler’s defeat in 1945.

The Russian enclave of Kaliningrad was part of East Prussia before World War II, when the city was known by its German name, Königsberg. It was the home of, among others, the philosopher Immanuel Kant. No Germans remain there today.

Russia itself first developed a sense of nationhood in what is now the independent Ukraine. The Grand Duchy of Rus was a medieval state, with its capital in modern-day Kiev.

It was during this period that the Russian people accepted the Eastern Orthodox, or Byzantine, form of Christianity. Hence, even though the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, far to the north, later became the nucleus of the Russian Empire, the ethno-religious identity of the Russian people was formed in Kiev.

Many Russians – including millions living in Ukraine – would like to see the two countries reunited under Moscow’s rule.

Greece, like Italy, also emerged as a state in the 19th century, following centuries of Turkish rule, and it slowly reclaimed the Peloponnesian Peninsula and the Greek-speaking areas further north. Athens became its capital.

However, the medieval Greek Orthodox state, known as the Byzantine Empire, encompassed a much larger area, and its capital, the great city of Constantinople, was (and still is) the seat of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch.

For centuries the Greeks tried to regain the city, which had been conquered by the Muslim Ottoman Turks in 1453 and renamed Istanbul. Some nationalists still dream of a Greater Greece incorporating Constantinople.

Another country that may harbour irredentist claims against Turkey is Armenia. The small rump area that became the independent Armenian republic following the collapse of the Soviet Union is much smaller than the historical Armenian kingdom.

In the Middle Ages, Armenia included much of present-day eastern Turkey; it was centred around Mount Ararat and Lake Van. Following Turkey’s defeat in World War I there were proposals for an Armenian state that would include much of Asia Minor. This never happened.

Mount Ararat is still revered by the Armenians as symbolizing their national identity and relations with Turkey remain tense.

Though most irredentist claims remain “dormant,” one never knows if they might flare up at some future date. We Jews are not the only ones with long historical memories.

The Perils of Predicting the Future

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

What’s the most important thing I hope students learn in any of my classes? To doubt the prevailing wisdom of the age, to be skeptics and contrarians, and not buy into whatever the zeitgeist of the moment insists is “obvious” and “self-evident truth.”

“Everything you now believe might be a joke in 50 years,” I tell them.

You don’t think so? OK then, let’s go back to Canada in 1960.

In that year, the “Dominion of Canada,” as we still called it, was a unilingual country outside Quebec, with no bill of rights, and with the Red Ensign, a version of the British flag, flying on Parliament Hill.

Prime Minister John Diefenbaker extolled the virtues of our British heritage. Anyone “dissing” the Queen would have been shunned.

The Governor General of the day, “His Excellency Major-General The Right Honourable Georges Vanier,” was a decorated former army officer.

Had someone stated that a half-century later, a Black woman who came to Canada as a refugee from Haiti would assume that role, they would have been laughed at as some sort of utopian.

Canada was seriously considering allowing nuclear weapons on its soil. And three years later, Bomarc warheads were indeed delivered to two sites, in North Bay, Ont. and La Macaza, Que. – placed there by Lester Pearson’s Liberal government.

Sounds unbelievable today, doesn’t it?

Quebec was governed by the reactionary Union Nationale, effectively an arm of the Roman Catholic Church. All schools in the province were denominational.

Advocates of abortion, contraception, no-fault divorce, and same-sex marriage would have been pariahs, considered completely beyond the pale. Women couldn’t even wear shorts at many beaches.

Today, Quebec may be the most secular province in the country.

On the left of the Canadian political spectrum, some people believed in “proletarian revolution.” Many more were certain that by the turn of the century, Canada would at the least be a socialist country.

The forward march of the New Democratic Party could not be halted and the party would inevitably displace the Liberals on the left and win elections in the future.

In 2010, the Soviet Union no longer even exists, Communism is discredited as an ideology, and who still talks about workers taking power?

In 1960, Canada had virtually no laws against ethnic, gender or racial discrimination, and immigration was tightly controlled and mostly limited to people from Europe.

Toronto, now arguably the most urbane of North American cities, was still a Protestant town, so much so that some called it the “Belfast of Canada.”

The words “human rights,” “diversity,” and “multiculturalism” were rarely, if ever, found in general discourse. And probably no more than 100 people in the entire country knew what a niqab or a kirpan was.

So what will Canada look like in 2060? The only thing we can be certain of is this: no one has any idea.

Inuit Have Become Self-Ruling Body

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

There are a number of jurisdictions in the world that are, to all intents and purposes, virtually self-governing, even when embedded in larger countries. Often these are the preserve of ethnic groups.

In the Arctic regions of the world, inhabited mainly by various Inuit peoples, there are two such entities, Nunavut and Greenland.

Nunavut, carved out of the Northwest Territories of Canada on April 1, 1999, while not technically an ethnic entity, has many features similar to such polities, as it is recognized as an Inuit homeland. The word means “Our Land” in Inuktitut.

Of the 32,000 residents in the huge territory, which has an area of 2,093,190 square kilometres, more than 90 percent are ethnically Inuit.

Inuinnaqtun and Inuktitut are official languages in Nunavut and about 70 percent of the population speak Inuktitut.

On July 9, 1993, the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act and the Nunavut Act were passed by Parliament, and led to the formation of the new territory six years later. The Land Claims Agreement was the largest Aboriginal land claim settlement in Canadian history.

The agreement gave title to the Inuit of lands measuring about 350,000 square kilometres, of which about 35,000 square kilometres include mineral rights.

It also specified that the number of Inuit employed in the public service be directly proportional to the number of Inuit in Nunavut society.

To make it clear that this is an Inuit jurisdiction, many place names have been changed – for example, Iqaluit, the capital, was once called Frobisher Bay.

Across the Davis Strait and Baffin Bay from Nunavut lies Greenland, the world’s largest island, with an area of 2,166,086 square kilometres. Of its population of 58,000 people, some 88 percent are Inuit, and their name for the country is Kalaallit Nunaat, “Land of the People.”

First a Norwegian, and later a Danish colony, Greenland became an equal part of the Kingdom of Denmark in 1953. It was granted home rule by Denmark on May 1, 1979.

On June 21, 2009, Greenland assumed responsibility for judicial affairs, policing, and natural resources. Greenlanders were recognized as a separate people under international law, as a step towards eventual full independence. Copenhagen now controls mainly foreign affairs and defense.

Greenlandic, spoken by almost all the inhabitants of the island, is closely related to Inuktitut. The main dialect, Kalaallisut, also known as East Inuit or West Greenlandic, has been the official language since June 2009.

In these two jurisdictions, Inuit peoples have now gained self-rule and control over their own institutions. While these territories are not, and may never be, economically self-sufficient, creating Inuit homelands has provided the residents of this harsh northern region “a place of their own.”

This is something that cannot be measured by economic criteria alone – or at least half the countries in the world would have to give up their independence.

Look Around at the De Facto States by "Stealth"

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Students of political science are aware of the term de facto states. These are places that have declared themselves independent countries, usually through secession from existing states.

A number of such polities immediately comes to mind: Abkhazia, Somaliland, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, among others.

They satisfy the standard criteria for statehood set out by the Montevideo Convention of 1933: a permanent population, a defined territory, and a government that can discharge international obligations and enter into relations with other states.

Yet, for various reasons, they have not been accorded diplomatic recognition by most countries in the international community.

There are also a number of jurisdictions that are, to all intents and purposes, almost as independent, but for one reason or another, prefer not to make that position explicit and do not seek diplomatic recognition – at least not now. They are, so to speak, virtual states within larger countries. Canadians are already familiar with one: Quebec. This province has all the attributes of nationhood: a national assembly, a flag, defined borders, taxation capacity, and a major measure of control over culture, language, immigration, pensions, and many other areas of governance.

Quebec even has a presence in international bodies such as UNESCO and la Francophonie, the organization of French-speaking countries.

Though the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords failed to insert this “distinct society” status into the Constitution, even Liberal premiers of the province act as though Quebec is, to a large degree, sovereign. Indeed, the federal government has recognized the Québécois as a nation.

So why bother to separate?

The same status holds true for Canada’s aboriginal peoples. First Nation reserves have their own rules, traditions, and police forces. They also benefit from fiscal privileges granted to reserve residents.

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedom does not apply to them. Section 25 states: “The guarantee in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall not be construed so as to abrogate or derogate from any aboriginal treaty or other rights or freedoms that pertain to the aboriginal people of Canada.”

And Section 35 (1) of the Constitution makes it clear that “The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.”

The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, near Montreal, for that reason is able to evict non-Mohawks from the reserve. It is in effect a de facto polity.

There are other such entities in the world, including Tatarstan in the Russian Federation, and Flanders and Wallonia in Belgium.

The Russian Federation, successor state to much of the old Soviet Union, includes, apart from the ordinary administrative subdivisions known as provinces, 21 ethnic republics, which have inherited special rights. They maintain state symbols such as constitutions, flags, and national anthems and have the power to determine their own political institutions.

Two Muslim-majority republics, Chechnya and Tatarstan, in particular have asserted their right to full sovereignty following the dissolution of the USSR. But while the Chechens became embroiled in war with Moscow, the Tatarstan leadership gained much of what they desired without open conflict.

Oil-rich and heavily industrialized, Tatarstan in the 1990s worked out an arrangement with Moscow, formalized by treaty, in which the 3.8 million inhabitants of the republic were acknowledged as having a “special relationship” with the federal government.

“The Republic of Tatarstan,” states its constitution, “is a democratic constitutional State associated with the Russian Federation by the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the Constitution of the Republic of Tatarstan and the Treaty between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Tatarstan.”

Tatarstan’s government considers this to have been a recognition by Russia of the republic’s sovereignty in cultural and economic spheres. The official language is Tatar, though Russian is also in use.

Belgium today is largely a fiction. It really consists of two separate unilingual entities, Dutch-speaking Flanders, with six million people, and French-speaking Wallonia, comprising 3.4 million. (There is also a small German-language zone.)

The national capital, Brussels, with more than one million people, is a francophone-majority enclave within the Flemish zone.

Most political power has since the 1970s devolved to the autonomous language communities, while the central government has been almost completely “emptied” of any meaningful political power.

The Flemings and Walloons have their own identities, flags, and assemblies. Not only matters such as education and culture, but even competencies related to territory, such as economic policy, environmental concerns, public works, housing and agriculture, are now in the hands of the linguistic regions.

So Belgium no longer has any national parties: even those that operate across linguistic divisions in both parts of the country – the Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Socialists -- function as separate unilingual Dutch or French-language organizations.

Brussels may be the headquarters of the European Union, but it’s no longer really the capital of Belgium – a state that has effectively ceased to exist. So there is no need for an acrimonious breakup.

Sovereignty, in a globalized and interdependent world, is clearly no longer an all-or-nothing proposition. Quebec, many Canadian reserves, Tatarstan, Flanders, and Wallonia are, to coin a term, de facto states by stealth.

Central Asia Should Not be Ignored

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

For the past two decades, much of the world’s attention has been focused on Afghanistan. But it would be imprudent to ignore two of the countries that border it to the north, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

These two central Asian states, along with neighbours Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan, were part of the Soviet Union until that Communist multinational empire imploded in 1991.

A number of extremist groups have tried to destabilize these states. They have proven particularly dangerous to Tajikistan, where a bloody civil war raged in the 1990s, and to Uzbekistan, where bombings and sabotage have led to severe repression by those in power.

Three organizations in particular have fomented most of the violence.

While two have been more localized in their attempts to wrest power, the third advocates an ideology that transcends statehood, and, like al-Qaeda, dreams of an Islamic caliphate encompassing the Muslim world.

In Tajikistan, a small impoverished country of some 7.3 million people, the Hizbi Nahzati Islomii Tojikiston (Islamic Renaissance Party, or IRP) was formed in 1990.

The Soviet state was near collapse and nationalist ideas had begun to permeate the politics of the republic. Taking advantage of the situation, the IRP’s stated aim was to bring Islamic values back into public life.

Soon enough the country descended into a brutal civil war: while then President Rahmon Nabiyev organized pro-government militias, the IRP turned to rebels in Afghanistan for military aid.

By 1997, when a UN-brokered peace accord was signed, as many as 100,000 people may have been killed. Many others, including IRP members, had fled into Afghanistan, where some fought alongside the Taliban militants. The party was later legalized and maintains an uneasy truce with the government.

Uzbekistan, with its 27.6 million people, is the largest of the five central Asian republics in population. It has been a centre of Muslim culture for more than a thousand years, with fabled cities such as Bokhara, Samarkand and Tashkent, renowned for their architecture, literature and scholarship.

Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, has ruled the country with an iron hand since 1990 but this did not prevent the rise of militant organizations that sought the overthrow of his regime and its replacement with an Islamic state.

The O’zbekiston Islomiy Harakati (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU) was formed in 1998. In 1999 the IMU set up several military camps in northern Afghanistan.

Central Asia’s Ferghana Valley, where the Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Tajik borders converge, has been the main area for IMU operations, and the organization launched punitive campaigns there in 1999, 2000 and 2001.

In addition, the IMU was responsible for a series of bombings in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent in 1999 and 2004, as well as numerous kidnappings.

When the American-led alliance invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the IMU announced its loyalty to the Taliban. In turn it received support from them and from Osama bin Laden.

Though the IMU suffered heavy losses while fighting alongside the Taliban, it has successfully re-organized itself in the tribal areas of North and South Waziristan in Pakistan over the following years.

However, Tahir Yuldashev, one of the movement’s leaders, was killed in a strike by an unmanned American aircraft in South Waziristan in late August.

Finally, there is the Hizb-ut-Tahrir al-Islami (HTI) or the Islamic Party of Liberation, a pan-Islamist, transnational political organization whose goal is to combine all Muslim countries in a unitary Islamic state.

It was founded in then Jordanian-ruled east Jerusalem in 1953 and has members around the world, despite being banned by many governments. Its leader since 2003 is Sheik Ata Abu al-Rishta, a Palestinian scholar and writer.

Though the organization is illegal in all five central Asian Muslim republics, HTI has large followings in the region. Most of its members there are believed to be ethnic Uzbeks and President Karimov is a regular target of derision.

In May 2005, hundreds of people were killed by police in demonstrations in the Ferghana Valley city of Andijan; the president accused the HTI of responsibility for the violence.

Central Asia should not be ignored. With the collapse of Soviet power, these countries have re-entered the international political system.

Along with Afghanistan and Pakistan, they are now part of what we might term the greater Middle East.

We’ve seen the television ads for Prince Edward Island historical sites that proclaim,“this place matters!” It certainly holds true for central Asia.

Israel Pitches in With Help for Haiti

Henry Srebrnik , [Summerside PEI] Journal-Pioneer

No country in the world has had a worse press in the past year than Israel. The war against Hamas in Gaza last winter created a sense of outrage in many parts of the globe.

Particularly damaging were the findings of a UN-sponsored expert group led by Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa.

The 575-page report, released last September, concluded that Israel used disproportionate force, deliberately targeted civilians, used Palestinians as human shields, and destroyed civilian infrastructure during the war.

In its wake, arrest warrants have been issued for senior Israeli politicians and leaders, dozens of other human rights reports on Israel’s conduct in the war have been widely distributed, and there are ongoing international campaigns to launch boycotts and sanctions against the country.

So the recent earthquake in Haiti was an opportunity for Israel to demonstrate a side usually ignored by its critics: the desire, rooted in the Jewish tradition, of helping those in need.

The poorest country in the western hemisphere, Haiti’s own political infrastructure virtually collapsed, along with most of the buildings in the capital of Port-au-Prince, after the massive January 12 earthquake. After all, this is a country where 78 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 per day, and where half the population is illiterate.

So help from outside became an imperative. Canada and the United States have been in the forefront of relief efforts, but Israel’s contribution has also been invaluable.

Ahead of most countries, Israel sent scores of doctors and other professionals to Haiti. The Jewish state has, unfortunately, had much in the way of experience dealing with disasters.

Two planes left Israel almost immediately after the disaster struck. They contained the entire equipment of the Israel Defence Force’s airborne field hospital unit and 221 personnel, including 40 doctors, 24 nurses and 20 paramedics.

The IDF team also brought with them five search-and-rescue teams, sniffer dogs, communication experts, and a security force of soldiers from elite units. The Medical Corps drafted gynecologists, obstetricians and other specialists.

In its first week of operation, the field hospital treated thousands of victims of the earthquake, while Israeli army search teams rescued a number of Haitians from under destroyed buildings.

Remarked Army Brigadier General Shalom Ben Arieh in an interview with London’s Jewish Chronicle, “It is hard to describe the extent of the gratitude of the people here when they realize that people have come from so far away as Israel to help them.”

He said that the IDF delegation would return home only after it was confident that the wounded were receiving proper treatment.

It will take years for Haiti to recover from this calamity and much of the burden for reconstruction will fall on the shoulders of major countries such as Canada, France and the U.S. But hopefully Israel’s contribution will not be forgotten.

What’s Next For Haiti?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Haiti’s political elite has, as usual, been found sadly lacking during the terrible crisis that has enveloped the country following the massive earthquake of January 12.

As many as 200,000 people may have died and millions more have been rendered destitute, without food and shelter.

The country’s president, René Préval, has barely been noticed. No surprise – its rulers have mismanaged things for decades.

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere – per capita income is less than $400 a year. It has been victimized by corrupt dictatorial rulers for decades, in particular the father and son combination of François (“Papa Doc”) and Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier.

Francois Duvalier became president in 1957, ushering in a reign of terror and brutality harsh even by Haitian standards. In 1959, he created a rural militia, the Milice Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, commonly referred to as the Tonton Macoutes, which brutalized the population and murdered political opponents: by some accounts those killed may have numbered 30,000.

In 1964, Duvalier held a constitutional referendum making him President for Life. His repressive regime only came to an end with his death in 1971. His son, a callow 19 year old, succeeded him, until overthrown in an uprising in 1986. “Baby Doc” fled to France, taking much of the country’s cash reserves with him.

This did not end Haiti’s political turmoil. The Duvalier era was later followed by the rule of a populist priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose attempts to improve the lot of Haiti’s poor led to a coup by army elements, supported by the country’s economic elite.

More disorder followed; Aristide was eventually returned to power due to the intervention of the United States, but, following mounting violence, was again sent into exile in 2004. After another period of political confusion, Préval assumed the presidency in 2006.

If the country is to move forward, it might consider tapping into the expertise of the large and well-educated Haitian diaspora. Other countries have done the same. One Baltic state comes to mind.

Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, president of Latvia from 1999 to 2007, was born in Riga in 1937. Her parents came to Canada as refugees after World War II and she grew up in this country, eventually becoming a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal, where she taught from 1965 to 1998.

She retired that year, returned to her native land, and had a distinguished political career as the country’s head of state.

Might this serve as an example to our Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, whose parents came to Canada in 1968 as refugees from Duvalier’s brutal rule in Haiti when she was 11 years old?

Like Vike-Freiberga, Jean too was briefly an academic, before becoming a journalist. Her term as the Queen’s representative is nearing its end, and Haiti could certainly use someone with her international reputation as it tries to recover from the desperate situation it finds itself in.

Is Canada Really a Paragon of Democracy?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

One of the courses I've been teaching this term deals with the politics of post-Communist central and eastern Europe.

These countries emerged from 40 years of totalitarian rule after 1989 and had to craft new democratic constitutions from scratch.

They examined various models, including the American separation-of-powers presidential system; the British "Westminster" parliamentary variant; and the semi-presidential hybrid of Fifth Republic France, among others.

In the end, most adopted variations of either the parliamentary or semi-presidential version of government.

As for their electoral systems, most put into place either some type of proportional representation system, where the number of votes won by a party more or less equals the number of members they elect to an assembly; or a mixed-member-proportional system, one where some candidates are elected from geographic constituencies but where parties are also allocated seats based on their percentage of the overall total vote cast in the country.

Canadians often consider our country a paragon of democracy, a template that others might be wise to follow. But needless to say, none of these new democracies showed any interest in the following aspects of our system:

- A hereditary monarch who resides in a distant country (where she is a genuine head of state) and who only periodically visits one of her other realms, Canada.

- A 'stand-in' representative of this head of state, called a governor general, who is selected by the head of government of the day in a partisan manner, with little transparency or input by either the citizenry, the elected parliament, or even other members of the prime minister's ruling party.

- An upper house which, though technically mandated to represent the constituent parts of the federation, does no such thing, since its members are appointed by the central government along partisan lines, with little regard for the wishes of the citizenry or the elected assemblies of the provinces where vacancies occur.

As well, the numerical composition of this Senate makes no sense; some smaller entities (say, New Brunswick or Nova Scotia) have more members than far larger ones (like Alberta and British Columbia), based simply on their time of entry into Confederation.

- A lower house, though popularly elected, whose members need gain only a plurality of votes in their individual ridings, so that many who become members of this House of Commons, in our first-past-the-post system, win with as little as 30-35 per cent of the total vote.

Thus a party gaining about 40 per cent of the national vote may, in this winner-take-all system, capture a comfortable majority of the seats.

(The Liberals did so three times, in 1993, 1997, and 2000.)

By the same token, parties that may have polled as much as 10 per cent of the national vote may fail to gain even a single seat, leaving all of their supporters without any representation.

And given our strict party discipline and the adversarial style of politics which pits government against opposition, the party that wins a majority of seats then rules as though it has won a mandate from the entire country.

Of course all constitutions, no matter how perfectly written at the time they are promulgated, eventually need to reflect changes in the political culture of a country as the years go by.

So, as Nobel laureate Douglass North has observed, it is essential to have a way to modify political structures. The society that is willing to revise its rules through trial and error, he writes, "will be most likely to solve problems through time."

The new European democracies have taken this advice to heart; in the past two decades they have 'fine-tuned' their charters and constitutions. As political scientist Ray Taras has observed, none of them "is guilty of institutional ossification."

Yet Canada since 1982 has been saddled with a constitution that, in order to be amended, requires, when it involves the most fundamental issues of governance, unanimity on the part of Parliament and all of the provinces. (And, to make things even more complicated, a major jurisdiction, Quebec, has never even accepted the document.)

The two attempts made to amend the Constitution, the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, both ended in disaster. So since 1992, no one has dared to "open up the Constitution," lest the country head into a downward spiral of no return.

But can such a state of affairs last forever? Can a country adhere to a foundational document that is completely 'frozen'?

After all, as the eminent historian Michael Bliss remarked recently, Canada's political evolution "probably cannot be contained or controlled by old constitutional forms. The difficulties now swirling around the role of Canadian head of state are almost certain to increase until we summon the resolve to give the office the legitimacy that only comes with election."

Due to the H1N1 'swine flu' pandemic, we have all become familiar with the term 'underlying health condition'. People already weakened by other ailments may fall prey to a disease more readily than those in good health.

The same holds true for countries: those with 'underlying political conditions' may find it harder to surmount future crises than those whose institutions more adequately reflect the democratic will of the citizenry.

Wisely, none of the new democracies in Europe showed the slightest interest in following in our footsteps.

The Fall of East Germany: A Retrospective

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

For those of us of a certain age, the events of Nov. 9-10, 1989, in Germany had an air of unreality about them. People on the eastern side of the infamous Berlin Wall, dividing Communist East Berlin from the political ‘island’ of West Berlin, were simply walking through now open gates to freedom, 160 kilometres inside Communist territory.

The 45-kilometre wall, built in August 1961 and probably the most iconic symbol of the Cold War, included guard towers lining large concrete walls containing anti-vehicle trenches and other defences. Many East Germans who tried to escape were shot to death during those 28 years.

But on this day, no border guards prevented people from leaving East Berlin. What was going on?

Knowing their days in power were numbered, because Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had indicated he would not support repression in the Soviet bloc countries, East Germany’s Communist rulers had given permission for gates along the Wall to be opened after hundreds of people converged on crossing points.

They were met by jubilant West Berliners on the other side. Soon enough the wall would itself be torn down.

These events were part of a larger crisis that overwhelmed the Soviet bloc that year. Throughout Communist eastern Europe, regimes began to disintegrate, one after another, falling like dominoes.

A year later, East Germany — officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) — would disappear. Germany, the country that began the Second World War and then reaped the consequences of its crimes by being split between the Communist East and the democratic West, would again be united.

Following free elections in East Germany in March 1990, a unification treaty between the larger Federal Republic of Germany in the west and the GDR was negotiated and approved by large majorities in the legislative chambers of both countries.

On Oct. 3, 1990, East Germany joined the existing 11 federal states that comprised West Germany as five more states. Berlin was reunited as a city.

Today, the old Soviet experiment in the east is little more than a memory, recalled mainly outside Germany when films such as the 2003 comedy Good Bye, Lenin, or the more serious 2006 movie The Lives of Others, appear on our cinema screens.

When U.S. President Ronald Reagan, on a visit to West Berlin in June 1987, had called on the Communists to “tear down this wall,” few realized it would happen that quickly. But perhaps people should have been less surprised.

Let’s face it: the GDR was really a non-starter. The Soviets had imposed their brand of Communism on many nations in eastern Europe after 1945, but none of them were merely artificial entities, fragments of a larger country.

East Germany, though, was simply the part of Germany that had been allocated to the Russians as a Soviet Zone in 1945 by the Allied powers that defeated Hitler.

Speaking the same language as their fellow Germans and, in many cases, watching television from across the border, East Germans were aware of how hollow Communist propaganda was. And, as time went on, they became increasingly less prosperous than their fellow Germans on the other side.

This was a country whose population of 16 million was only kept in line through force. The dreaded secret police, known as the Stasi, kept such close watch on the citizenry that even husbands and wives spied on each other, and children informed on their parents.

Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 persons. It was an Orwellian nightmare. Today, the former Stasi offices house the Stasi Museum.

But too much information about the world beyond its borders kept leaking in: the Iron Curtain had no roof and, as far as East Germany was concerned, the writing was indeed on the wall.

Its demise was indeed, to use a phrase coined by French philosopher Louis Althusser, “over-determined.”

The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

It has now been two decades since the end of Communist rule in the Soviet bloc states of eastern Europe.

Soviet tanks had installed these regimes after the Second World War, had kept them in power, and in a number of cases - in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981- had actively intervened to save them from collapse.

Only when the Kremlin decided no longer to prop them up did they get swept away - and then quite rapidly.

Except for Romania, these countries did not move immediately from hardline Communist regimes to non-Communist ones: there was a "liberal Communist" interlude of reform which played an important role in bringing communism to an end.

By the mid-1980s it was clear that eastern European states were in deep trouble: stagnant growth, declining living standards, food shortages, growing discontent, foreign indebtedness, and a degraded and poisoned environment were the fruits of four decades of mismanagement.

But only when a new leader emerged in the Soviet Union could reformers make their move.

Committed to an end to the Soviet dominance of eastern Europe, Mikhail Gorbachev foreswore any interference in the internal affairs of other states. He met with nearly every Communist leader in eastern Europe before and during 1989 and indicated his support for change.

Aware of all the defects of Soviet-style socialism, the more liberal Communists now saw their chance. They thought the system could yet be reformed from within. Younger than the entrenched apparatchiks in power, they were willing to grant autonomy to non-Communist political movements and open a dialogue with them.

But this was not to be. Trying to liberalize communism proved to be an oxymoronic task: it was, as the dissident Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski concluded, like trying to "fry snowballs."

The pattern in eastern Europe in 1989-1990 more or less followed the same sequence, though details differed:

A group of liberal Communists, usually younger and farther down the party hierarchy, met to discuss ways to get rid of the conservative leadership still in command.

Anti-Communist dissidents then stepped forward, leading strikes and protests, which resulted in crackdowns and unrest. This was the signal for the liberal Communists to call for major reforms. Gorbachev sided with them.

The old conservative and Stalinist leaders were then pressured to resign or retire, sometimes even losing their party ranks.

"Round table" negotiations, designed to open the political process and bring into the political system opposition groups, were begun. Liberal Communists envisaged a mixed system with the Communist party continuing its "leading role" while sharing some power.

The liberal Communists, now in control, then held free elections. But newly formed non-Communist parties won these and the Communists lost power.

Non-Communist governments then emerged which dismantled, relatively peacefully, the whole apparatus of Communist rule. Only in Romania was there considerable bloodshed during this period. (Yugoslavia, which dissolved into civil war, was not a Soviet satellite.)

In trying to liberalize communism, the reformers had simply hastened its demise. As the French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville had observed long ago, "The most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways."

Name Changes in Montreal Should Work Both Ways

Henry Srebrnik , [Toronto] Jewish-Tribune

Québécois nationalists in Montreal have been into “name cleansing” for decades, trying to erase street and place names that are English, in particular those associated with the British conquest of New France.

Thus, Dorchester Boulevard, a main downtown artery, was renamed Boulevard René-Lévesque following the death of Quebec’s first Parti Québécois premier. Guy Carleton, First Baron Dorchester, had served as Governor of the Province of Quebec from 1768 to 1778.

More recently, one city councillor has been lobbying to get rid of Amherst Street because it was named after an English officer, Jeffery Amherst, who was commander-in-chief of the British army in North America at the time Quebec fell to the British. Amherst also held the position of military governor of Canada from 1760 to 1763.

Many years ago, Western Avenue became Boulevard de Maisonneuve, named after the founder of Montreal, Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve.

There was a failed attempt to change the name of another major street, Park Avenue (already called Avenue du Parc) to honour former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa.

Even innocuous names such as Maplewood Avenue have been erased – it is now Boulevard Édouard-Montpetit, named for an influential Quebec nationalist scholar.

But obviously these same “cleansers” have no problem with names that remind us of the legacy of antisemitism, in Quebec and elsewhere.

Montreal’s Snowdon district, for example, has an important thoroughfare named Isabella Avenue, named for Queen Isabella of Spain. Indeed, there is a monument dedicated to her in MacDonald Park, which fronts Isabella Avenue between Clanranald and Earnscliffe Avenues. Isabella’s memorial, placed there in 1958, can be found at the southeast corner of the park.

I lived on Coolbrook Avenue, which is nearby, until 1982, but for some reason never looked closely at the memorial. When I was in Montreal earlier this summer, however, I took note of it.

This is a completely inappropriate monument, particularly in a neighbourhood with many Jewish residents, as Isabella and her husband, King Ferdinand, in 1492 ordered the expulsion of all Jews in the country who refused to convert to Catholicism. Approximately 200,000 Jews left Spain.

Others converted, but often came under scrutiny by the Inquisition investigating relapsed conversos (the so-called Marranos). Many of these people were then burnt at the stake. As a result, no Jews lived in Spain until the 20th century.

Should Montreal really pay tribute to a monarch responsible for ethnic cleansing, torture, and murder? It’s long past time to remove this memorial stone and replace it with something more appropriate – perhaps in recognition of a Montreal Jewish figure from the past such as Reuben Brainin, H. M. Caiserman, Yehuda Kaufman, A.M. Klein, Ida Maze, or Yaacov Zipper?

And by the way, while we’re looking at some “name cleansing,” shouldn’t Montreal also rename the Metro station honoring the notorious antisemite Lionel Groulx? Thousands of people use this Metro transfer stop daily and probably assume this was a great man. They should be disabused of this idea.

In the 1930s, Abbé Groulx was an avowed admirer of fascist dictators António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal and Benito Mussolini of Italy. He asserted that Jews were a negative influence on French Canadian society. His impact on Quebec’s intellectual elite was immense and Quebec’s politicians in turn pressured Ottawa to deny Jews entry into Canada in the decade before the Holocaust.

It was because of people like Groulx, who created the cultural climate that kept Jewish refugees out of this country, that millions of Jews perished in Hitler’s death camps.

If Quebec is really trying to break with its “tarnished” past, then Groulx should go down the same memory hole as Amherst and Dorchester.

A Troubled America

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Earlier this summer, I travelled through eight American states, entering the United States at Detroit in Michigan and leaving at Calais, Maine.

The trip included longer stops in Columbus and Boston.

From what I observed, Americans seemed more politically polarized than ever. Many on the right of the political spectrum condemned everything President Barack Obama stood for, and indeed some questioned his very legitimacy as America’s chief executive.

The radio and television programs, and the newspaper columns, were full of anti-Obama tirades, attacking his efforts to bring some measure of sanity to the country’s private, expensive, and inadequate health-care system, one where insurance premiums have risen three times faster than wages in recent years.

Overhauling the $2.5 trillion U.S. health care system, by cutting costs and expanding coverage to the estimated 46 million Americans without health insurance, has been Obama’s top domestic initiative.

Yet the way some Republicans attacked the “socialist” attempts by “big government in Washington” to introduce a medical system that would serve the many millions of uninsured Americans, including not just the poor but those in the middle class who have recently lost their jobs, someone arriving from another planet would assume that the current federal government was a regime imposed by a foreign power, not one Americans had voted for just last November.

Backed by the private insurance companies, a massive propaganda campaign has been unleashed against Obama’s reform proposals. Boisterous “town hall” meetings held across the country over the summer turned into shouting matches. The onslaught of attacks have taken their toll on his popularity.

Opponents claimed that, with cost-conscious bureaucrats in control, medical treatments for the elderly would be curtailed by “death squads,” which would result in doctors “pulling the plug on grannny!” Some pro-life groups also objected to abortion becoming a publically-funded program. (Actually, under Obama’s plan, no federal dollars would be used to fund abortions.)

Clearly, this propaganda has been effective. Though the Democrats control both the presidency and both houses of Congress, they have been backpedaling in recent weeks.

Senate Democrats support some insurance reforms, such as protecting those with pre-existing medical conditions and preventing insurance companies from capping coverage. But many of their plans do not include the so-called “public option” – a government-run health insurance option to compete with private companies – that health care advocates insist is critical for reform to be effective.

In an address to Congress on Sept. 8, Obama tried to regain the initiative.“Our collective failure to meet this challenge – year after year, decade after decade – has led us to a breaking point,” he stated.

I have in the past criticized Canada’s own medical system, but compared to the situation in the U.S., it is something in which we can take pride.

Finally, there are extremists who deny Obama’s very right to sit in the White House. These “birthers,” as they call themselves, insist that Obama was born in Kenya, rather than in Hawaii, and is thus not even eligible to be president, since the U.S. Constitution requires that the occupant of the office be “a natural born citizen” of the United States.

Others conspiracy theorists assert that he is secretly a Muslim who has set out to ruin the country. (I heard this opinion expressed in a small town in Ohio.)

Much of this relates, of course, to the fact that Obama is an African American and hence, to such people, simply unacceptable as president.

The vicious tone of the backlash against the administration is troubling. It implies an ideological rejection of the democratic process through which Obama received a mandate to govern the country. These are clearly not easy times for Americans.

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.