This series of excellent videos, produced by the The Palestine Festival of Literature helps clarify what is happening at the International Court of Justice tomorrow afternoon.
South Africa Charges Israel with Genocide | Major Actors Read the Case File | Part 1 Extracts from South Africa’s Application Instituting Proceedings
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) has provided Canadians with an easy way to support the South African invocation of the UN’s Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). If the ICJ finds merit in the South African case against Israel, the Court could impose “provisional measures,” including an end to Israel’s military operations against Gaza. We can let our government know where we Canadians stand by telling them in a letter.
Or, if you’re like me, there is more you might want to say. My version of the letter is a quite a bit longer than CJPME’s because I am really upset and want the Canadian Government that doesn’t represent me to know that. If you’re interested in reading my version for yourself, here it is:
Mr Netanyahu and his government have claimed the right of self defense against Hamas, but retaliation is not self defense. Raining death and destruction against the Palestinian people is an ongoing act of collective punishment.
Since October 7, the IDF has not only killed thousands of innocent Palestinians, it has actively killed at least three of the Israeli hostages, and likely more as a direct result of months of indiscriminate bombing of Gaza.
During the October crisis, Canada imposed the War Measures Act, it didn’t bomb Montreal into oblivion in retaliation against the FLQ.
Even if you agree with Mr Netanyahu’s opinion that Palestinians are only “human animals,” this policy has not and will not eliminate Hamas, or even bring the perpetrators to justice.
South Africa has taken the principled step of invoking the UN’s Genocide Convention, which could mean finally putting an end to Israel’s brutal war on Palestinians if the court decides to impose provisional measures. I expect Canada to support South Africa’s effort to hold perpetrators of genocide accountable before the World Court!
How can you have listened to the South African case at the ICJ and chosen to oppose it?
South Africa’s case identifies many statements of Israeli leaders expressing genocidal intent. These dehumanizing and violent beliefs are driving Israel’s actions in Gaza, including the killing of well over 20,000 Palestinians and inflicting conditions of life intended to destroy the population.
A few years ago Mr Trudeau apologized for Canada’s craven act of turning away the MS St Louis, which consigned hundreds of innocents to death. The Prime Minister said the Liberal government of the day “was unmoved by the plight of these refugees.” How can the Liberal Government of today stand unmoved by the plight of the captive population in Gaza, particularly when more than half are children? Apologies are meaningless if we knowingly repeat the mistake.
Can you summon no empathy for the children? Close your eyes and imagine that it was your child who suffered the loss of home and family, been dehydrated, malnourished, starved, exposed to the elements,buried under rubble, maimed, infected, forced to endure amputations without anesthetic, and even consigned to death in this unprecedented humanitarian disaster?
Canada’s failure to support South Africa’s case at the ICJ goes beyond demonstration of a callous disregard for human rights, it will make the government of Canada complicit in what may very well be the death of millions.
As a signatory to the Genocide Convention, Canada has an indisputable responsibility to prevent and punish genocide wherever it occurs. I demand that Canada fully support South Africa’s case and help bring an end to the violence and death in Gaza.
If Canada wants to be seen as a “Rule of Law” country, it’s time our government began to live up to the International Treaties it has signed, and stand for International Laws, even when our friends break them.
If “never again” doesn’t apply to Palestinians, it doesn’t apply to anyone.
One of Israel’s contentions is that all the citizens of Gaza are responsible for the actions of Hamas. But they aren’t. Hamas may seem to be the Government of Gaza, but it isn’t really. The last election was in 2006. I can tell you from personal experience that it is ridiculous to blame me for what the Canadian (or Ontario) Government(s) do, because despite voting in every election, my vote has never secured me representation in Parliament or the Legisative Assembly of Ontario.
Neither Palestine or Gaza have been allowed self determination or to have a free state. The Palestinian Territories have pretty much been occupied one way or another for 75 years. Even though Israel supposedly withdrew from Gaza, it has blockaded the Palestinian Territory for years, deciding what can go in or out. Palesrtinians getting too close to the exits get shot. Blaming Palestinians for Hamas is adding insult to injury.
I haven’t watched all of the Israeli response at the ICJ, but from what I have seen, it seems the defence revolves around the ridiculous claim that Hamas is committing genocide against Israel. Online comments tend to run to Ad Hominems against South Africa for daring to get involved. When you have to resort to Ad Hominems, you aren’t winning the argument.
In the 3 months of Israel’s retaliation for October 7th, 2023, the occupying power has been targeting civilian infrastructure, destroying water and waste treatment facilities, along with more than three quarters of the housing stock, schools,mosques and churches.
They have also been targeting civilians, as well as killing record numbers of the press, humanitarian aid and health care workers, displacing millions of civilians, rendering most hospitals inactive, and leaving the few still struggling to provide care in the midst of this humanitarian crisis without lifesaving medical supplies. Without anesthesia, many of the wounded, including perhaps a thousand children, have endured amputation without any kind of pain relief at all. More than 1% of the population has been killed, untold numbers are buried under the rubble, with many more left injured. Lack of food, fuel and shelter, infection and illness will kill many more even if the bombs stop falling. This is a genocide unfolding in real time before our eyes.
Please contact your Member of Parliament as many times as it takes.
As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers tree planting; they’d come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they’d made a new forest with their own blistered hands.
I was too unathletic to follow them into the bush, but I spent my summers doing my bit, ringing doorbells for Greenpeace to get my neighbours fired up about the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, which wasn’t merely clear-cutting our old-growth forests – it was also poisoning the Great Lakes system with PCBs, threatening us all.
At the time, I thought of tree-planting as a small victory – sure, our homegrown, rapacious, extractive industry was able to pollute with impunity, but at least the government had reined them in on forests, forcing them to pay my pals to spend their summers replacing the forests they’d fed into their mills.
I was wrong. Last summer’s Canadian wildfires blanketed the whole east coast and midwest in choking smoke as millions of trees burned and millions of tons of CO2 were sent into the atmosphere. Those wildfires weren’t just an effect of the climate emergency: they were made far worse by all those trees planted by my pals in the eighties and nineties.
Writing in the New York Times, novelist Claire Cameron describes her own teen years working in the bush, planting row after row of black spruces, precisely spaced at six-foot intervals:
Cameron’s summer job was funded by the logging industry, whose self-pegulated, self-assigned “penalty” for clearcutting diverse forests of spruce, pine and aspen was to pay teenagers to create a tree farm, at nine cents per sapling (minus camp costs).
Black spruces are made to burn, filled with flammable sap and equipped with resin-filled cones that rely on fire, only opening and dropping seeds when they’re heated. They’re so flammable that firefighters call them “gas on a stick.”
“Proportional representation will ensure that a minority will never rule. It also will ensure that no considerable minority will ever be excluded from having a voice Is that not democracy?
"What have the self- appointed protagonists of democracy and majority rule in this House to say about that?
“Now to think that democracy is properly represented when you have elections under a system which gives you a majority of the members from a minority of the electorate is, of course, too absurd for further argument.”
My first musical love was folk music, and nobody told its stories better than our own Gordon Lightfoot.
Cover Art: The album was originally titled Sit Down Young Stranger, but when If You Could Read My Mind became a monster hit, they added the little pink sticker until the next pressing when they could rename the album.
As a young pup one of my first forays into the wider world was the bus trip…
My first musical love was folk music, and nobody told its stories better than our own Gordon Lightfoot.
Cover Art: The album was originally titled Sit Down Young Stranger, but when If You Could Read My Mind became a monster hit, they added the little pink sticker until the next pressing when they could rename the album.
As a young pup one of my first forays into the wider world was the bus trip I took to Toronto to see my musical idol, Gordon Lightfoot, live in concert at Massey Hall. And it was fabulous. I’ll always remember Gord’s introduction of one of my favorite songs, “Second Cup of Coffee,” self deprecatingly pointing out his folly in pairing the lyrics of despair with such an upbeat tune. The audience laughed good naturedly, but it was clear we would continue to love the song anyway.
Whether they were songs were about love or heartbreak, ballads about building the railway or laying in wet grass watching a 707 fly home, or maybe a chance to hear Don Quixote rail against injustice at an unsympathetic ocean or agonize as the Yarmouth Castle dies beneath its waves, Lightfoot’s music doesn’t just tell us his stories, he pulls us into them.
It wasn’t only the lyrical words he wove together, it was the sometimes acoustically simple, others orchestrally complex but often breathtakingly beautiful music that swept his lyrics into our minds. And very often our hearts.
Take note of the fingerpicking as Gordon Lightfoot performs his timeless classic, “If You Could Read My Mind.”
Gordon Lightfoot became the soul of the Canadian folk era, but he didn’t just fade away when folk music was relegated to the back pages of the music world. Instead he spread his creativity and passion into whatever genre was appropriate to the work, continuing to craft meticulous lyrics and wrap them in unforgettable melodies.
In the end he forged a musical legacy that became an integral part of the shared culture underpinning the Canadian Identity.
Thank you for sharing your gifts with us, Gordon Lightfoot. Rest well, dear minstrel. You’ve earned it.
Over the past several years I’ve been more involved in Canadian politics because we are facing challenges we can no longer afford to ignore— from the existential threat of climate change to Canada’s human rights violations at home and abroad, festering social justice issues of colonization, systemic racism and the need to defund the police, our entrenched inequities, Victorian attitudes toward…
Over the past several years I’ve been more involved in Canadian politics because we are facing challenges we can no longer afford to ignore— from the existential threat of climate change to Canada’s human rights violations at home and abroad, festering social justice issues of colonization, systemic racism and the need to defund the police, our entrenched inequities, Victorian attitudes toward work, economic inequities and presumed “worthiness” for survival, the rape culture spotlighted by the #metoo movement, the ever expanding incursions into our cultural freedom being made by the voracious “intellectual property” regime (which prompted my creation of this blog), and our government’s abject failure to put aside partisanship and deal with the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent failure to even try to “build back better”— all of these things highlight our desperate need for real real change (not the phony real change Mr Trudeau promised in 2015) more than ever before.
The thing that sucked me into politics was my belief in democracy, and my realization that the reason everything has been getting worse throughout my entire adulthood because we don’t actually have the representative democracy they tell us we have.
When a lifetime of voting in every election without ever electing a representative almost made me give up hope of things ever getting better, I discovered it didn’t have to be this way. There is a means to transform this country into an actual Representative Democracy.
The way to upend the status quo so we can actually start fixing the things that are so badly wrong so we can work toward the future we need is by changing the way we elect our gover ments. Much to my surprise I discovered there have been Canadians trying to make this happen pretty much for all of Canadian History.
Andrew Ross McMaster, 1923 Liberal MP, Brome
Now is the time to stop trying. As Yoda would tell us, we must do.
And what we must do is implement Proportional Representation.
At this point I understand that I am only one person, and it’s time to realize I only have the time to write one blog. And this is it.
And right now my focus has to be on Proportional Representation.
“The present situation [First Past the Post Plurality voting] appears to me to be one which does not appeal to logical or righteous minds, it does not give us proper representation of the thought and the political sympathies of the people; therefore, we should strive to find out something that will.” — Andrew Ross McMaster
A Toronto Star Opinion Piece by Martin Reg Conn desperately tries to justify the Ontario election result in “Get Over It: Doug Ford’s Victory was an example of how democracy is supposed to work.”
But is it really?
The purpose of Democracy is to give people a say in our own governance. In a Direct Democracy that would mean citizens themselves directly make laws and government policies. As in a referendum.
But ours is a Representative Democracy, which means citizens choose representatives to represent us when making laws and policies in Parliament.
ALT
![Remembering Gordon Lightfoot Collage [Text] Gordon Lightfoot November 17, 1938 - May 1, 2023 [Photo] Gordon Lightfoot at Interlochen [Pictured] Album Covers • Lightfoot! (1966) • Two Tones at the Village Corner (1962) • The Way I Feel (1967) • Did She Mention My Name? (1968) • Back Here on Earth (1968) • Sunday Concert (1969) • Sit Down Young Stranger (1970) • Summer Side of Life (1971) • Don Quixote (1972) • Old Dan's Records (1972) • Sundown (1974) • Cold On The Shoulder (1975) • Gord's Gold (compilation 1975) • Summertime Dream (1976) • Endless Wire (1978) • Dream Street Rose (1980) • Shadows (1982) • Salute (1983) • Solo (2020) • All Live (2012) • Harmony (2004) • A Painter Passing Through (1998) • East of Midnight 1986) • Waiting For You (1993)](https://laurelrusswurm.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/gordonlightfoot-banner.jpg)
