At the rink in Outer Scarberia
(We lost.)
I was interviewed about Libya earlier today by CITY-TV. Anyone see it?
(We lost.)
I was interviewed about Libya earlier today by CITY-TV. Anyone see it?
When you are pushing for a “merger” – one which, best case, is of dubious value to all but a few very rich people – it’s usually not a good idea not to send out a silver-spoon conservative to snipe at a street-smart Liberal. Particularly a Liberal like Dwight Duncan.
This Caldwell character may have sunk the TSX deal all on his own. Congratulations, genius.
But fret not, Conservatives! Rocco Rossi can fix anything!
Just did an interview about this with NewsTalk 1010. We talked a fair bit about my 1992 book about the country.
You’re unlikely to visit the place anytime soon; you’re not even sure you could spot it on a map. Why should you care?
Summer 2011: not a good Summer to start pitching a new and improved Green Shift.
More than once in recent days, I have wondered why Paul Martin Jr., as Prime Minister, lavished so much attention on Muammar Gaddafi. Then, as now, Gaddafi was an an anti-Semite, a serial abuser of human rights, and a funder of terrorism. Incensed by Martin’s decision to travel to Libya, I wrote the column below for the Post, asking why the Hell a Canadian Prime Minister had decided to give legitimacy to a dictator (and particularly since his regime killed a Southam News reporter, and was never called to account for it).
Anyway – Martin has been gone for years, but Gaddafi remains. I don’t know what will be the outcome of current events – and, unlike a few of the current crop of instant-experts, I’ve even written a book about Libya – but one thing I do know: our collective cosying-up to Gaddafi helped him maintain his grip on power. We bear some responsibility, indirectly or otherwise, for the carnage now taking place in the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
The column:
Questions for Muammar Gaddafi
by Warren Kinsella, National Post, 16 December 2004
Sometime after midnight on April 14, 1987, the body of a young Canadian man slammed into the pavement outside the entrance to the Zanzour Tourist Village in Tripoli, Libya. When found by a member of the hotel’s night staff around 6 a.m., the man was clearly dead.
The death, Canadians would later agree, was an outrage. Many believe it was murder. The bright young man was a reporter — an employee of Southam News, the news organization that preceded CanWest. And the reporter had been asking a lot of questions about Libyan support for terrorism. His name was Christoph Halens. He was only 32 years old.
The circumstances of Halens’ demise remain unresolved despite the passage of more than 17 years. Also unresolved are questions surrounding the enthusiastic support of the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi for a plethora of terrorist and extremist organizations in the years before and after Halens’s death.
Despite all this, Prime Minister Paul Martin plans to travel to Libya this week, following the trail of a number of other world leaders, to cozy up with Gaddafi. Why?
Halens was sent to Libya in 1987 to report on a “peace conference” sponsored by Gaddafi’s rogue regime. The Southam reporter discovered that invitees included representatives from the Irish Republican Army; the PLO; Canadian, British and American neo-Nazis, such as the Nationalist Party and the National Front; virulent anti-Semitic black nationalist organizations, such as the Nation of Islam; the American Indian Movement; and, oddly, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.
Prior to the conference, the Libyan regime had more or less openly provided millions of dollars in support to an equally diverse cast of murderers, among them the Basque separatist movement, Germany’s Red Army Faction, the Abu Nidal organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Japanese Red Army and Black September. Even when a world oil glut pushed down Libya‘s annual petroleum revenues, Gaddafi boasted in November 1986: “We have increased our support … for all liberation movements throughout the world.”
According to the RCMP, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department and Southam News, which conducted a rigorous investigation into the death of their employee, Halens raised the ire of the Libyan secret police when he started asking questions about Gaddafi’s involvement with neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and terrorists. (The notebooks Halens had been using all that week in Tripoli were never found.) He was murdered for doing his job as a journalist, in other words. That, certainly, is the view of his family, friends and colleagues.
Following an autopsy in Libya, Tripoli’s deputy district attorney responded to Canadian pressure by declaring that Halens had been “suffering from a psychological illness,” and therefore threw himself off the roof of the Zanzour Tourist Village. To its initial credit, the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney did not accept that absurd conclusion. The former secretary of state for external affairs, Joe Clark, told the House of Commons that the government was prepared to conduct a second autopsy. But eventually, Halens’ death slipped from the headlines and the government priority list. The mystery remains unsolved.
This would be a perfect time for Mr. Martin to demand the facts surrounding Halens’ death. But as far as any of us know, the issue does not form any part of the Prime Minister’s agenda. When asked about the purpose of the trip, one of Mr. Martin‘s chief spokesmen stated: “Given that he’s in the region, he wanted to meet with Gaddafi, as have so many other world leaders recently.”
Is that all it takes? We happen to be in the neighbourhood and decided to pop by? That’s not good enough.
If Canada is to enhance its stature in the international community as a defender of human rights, it should start by standing up for its own citizens. Mr. Martin must demand a full and frank accounting not only of Halens’ death, but also of the issue that brought him to Libya: the country’s support for terrorism and extremism.
Christoph Halens and his fellow Canadian citizens deserve at least that much.
[Warren Kinsella is a former Liberal party advisor and the author of a book investigating the death of Christoph Halens: Unholy Alliances: Terrorists, Extremists and the Libyan Connection in Canada.]
Long live Twitter and Facebook, the King and Queen!
The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.
Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.
Blogging started its rapid ascension about 10 years ago as services like Blogger and LiveJournal became popular. So many people began blogging – to share dieting stories, rant about politics and celebrate their love of cats – that Merriam-Webster declared “blog” the word of the year in 2004.”
Acupuncturegirl advised: “Scott, shut the hell up. You are gross.” Dutra1 noted: “OK, Scott, you get your free pity pills. Now examine the image you see in the mirror; is it a man?”
Evgeny Morozov, author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” told me Twitter creates a false intimacy and can “bring out the worst in people. You’re straining after eyeballs, not big thoughts. So you go for the shallow, funny, contrarian or cynical.”
Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” says technology amplifies everything, good instincts and base. While technology is amoral, he said, our brains may be rewired in disturbing ways.
“Researchers say that we need to be quiet and attentive if we want to tap into our deeper emotions,” he said. “If we’re constantly interrupted and distracted, we kind of short-circuit our empathy. If you dampen empathy and you encourage the immediate expression of whatever is in your mind, you get a lot of nastiness that wouldn’t have occurred before.”
Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, recalled that when he started his online book review he forbade comments, wary of high-tech sociopaths.
“I’m not interested in having the sewer appear on my site,” he said. “Why would I engage with people digitally whom I would never engage with actually? Why does the technology exonerate the kind of foul expression that you would not tolerate anywhere else?”
A local case in point: Canada’s most widely-read white supremacist. Why did TVO or the National Post or Maclean’s give her a platform/credibility? Why would the Canada Israel Committee junket her to Israel?
Good questions.
It’s never the break-in. It’s always the cover-up.
Voters are pretty reasonable, you see. There can be a guy running for mayor of Toronto, for example, and he can be linked to all sorts of malfeasance — drunk driving, drugs, you name it — and he can still end up getting elected in a landslide. As long as the politician confesses to his or her misdeeds early on (which Rob Ford did, sort of), people will forgive. They don’t get as worked up about these things as the media and the political chattering class do.
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