Canadian Parliamentary Coalition for a New Battlefield

Avi Lewis interviews

MP Scott Reid, Chair, Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism;
Jonathan Kay, Editor, National Post;
Irwin Cotler, Chair, International Coalition for Combating Antisemitism; and
Amir Gissin, Israeli Consul General.

Excerpted from "Fault Lines - Canada-Israel: The other special relationship" December 2010

Lewis : "There's no wave of anti-Semitism in Canada?"

Reid :  "No no no, no, absolutely not. No, it's funny I've heard people who have criticized us, saying that we think this, but no, there is absolutely no spike in the kinds of anti-Semitic incidents that I think appall us."

Kay : "No I don't think anti-Semitism is a huge problem in Canada. In fact, as I've written, I think Canada is probably the least anti-Semitic country in the entire world - including Israel."

Cotler : "And I thought that this might appear as a kind of psychological disconnect because what we would be discussing would be global anti-Semitism but it would be taking place in the Canadian arena and people would look at it through the Canadian prism and say, you know, why are we doing this?"

Yes why are we doing this?

Lewis : "Here's how one senior Israeli diplomat views Canada."
Gissin : "The most important arena in the world for this new campaign, or rather new battlefield that, uh, on one hand have all those who want to delegitimize Israel, and on the other all those who want to present it in its full colours."

End of transcript.

Leave it to Steve to arrange for Canada to become an arena, a new battlefield for a new campaign on the new anti-Semitism, or as he put it to the international Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism in Ottawa last December : "the choice between good and evil", when even the Chair of the Parliamentary Committee to Combat Antisemitism says there's "no spike" in the regular old evil kind in Canada today.

Meanwhile Pogge and John Geddes at Macleans are still asking questions about that undisclosed anonymous CPCCA funding.
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Avi Lewis : The Canada-Israel special relationship

Avi Lewis : "There's no wave of anti-Semitism in Canada?"

Scott Reid : "No, no, no, no, absolutely not. It's funny I've heard people who have criticized us saying that we think this but there is absolutely no spike in the kinds of anti-Semitic incidents that I think appall us."

Con MP Scott Reid is Chair of Steering Committee of the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism and vice-chair of the CPCCA's inquiry panel on domestic anti-Semitism.

Thanks, Scott. Good to know. It seems the US Anti-Defamation League agrees with you on that.

Perhaps the misconception about the rise of, you know, actual recorded incidents of anti-Semitism in Canada has arisen from the original CPCCA mission statement put out by yourself and Lib MP Mario Silva in June last year :

"Recorded incidents of antisemitism have been on the rise both locally and globally."

Last week the phrase "rising tide of anti-Semitism" was used in the Ontario legislature to hysterically condemn a two year old MA thesis written by Jenny Peto, a Jewish Palestinian solidarity activist and one of the people interviewed in the vid above. Really reaching here, guys.

Meanwhile the World Zionist Organization is launching a new hasbara program targetting students and Canada was represented there :

"Dozens of students from 14 countries around the world joined together this weekend at a seminar in Paris that launched the World Zionist Organization’s new Global Network for Countering Anti-Semitism.

The students and others like them will be the soldiers on the ground who will report to the WZO about anti-Semitism in their countries and receive advice about how to tackle future incidents. To that end, the WZO launched a media room that will be in touch with activists around the world in several languages.

The global network’s media room will be ... in contact with students acting as antennas on campuses around the world. For instance, if there is a problem on a particular campus, the WZO can contact the university and ask for security or bring in other activists from close by to help counteract the problem.

Media room director Eitan Behar : "With the right work of all our activists around the world and if we are unified, we can win the battle that is going on around the world for Israel’s image."

Because clearly that's what all this is about : Israel's image.

What is less clear is why Canada is so determined to identify with it.

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The SPP is dead - Long live the SPP

Robert Pastor, chair of the 2005 Council on Foreign Relations task force "Building a North American Community" (now available in book form and co-authored by John Manley) and author of the book "Toward a North American Community" says the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America is dead.

It was killed, he tells us, by the timid incremental approach of its policy makers who tried to fly the SPP below the radar of public opinion, thereby arousing their deepest suspicions.
Right wing fears of Mexican immigrants and a North American Union combined with left wing fears of unfair labour practices to create 'a perfect storm' of public alarm that scuttled its chances of success.

So that's it then - it's been nailed to its perch pining for the fjords since last April. It's kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile.
THIS IS AN EX-SPP!!

Well ok then.

In other totally unrelated news just this week :

1) the U.S. is leaning on Mexico to privatize its state-owned oil consortium PEMEX

2) Saskatchewan has followed BC in introducing the Enhanced Driver's Licences demanded by Homeland Security for admission to the U.S.

3) U.S. Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs Daniel Sullivan is calling for greater energy integration and enhanced energy supply routes between the U.S. and Canada, praising the benefits of "benefits of market-based free trade agreements" to "enhance energy security throughout North America".

4)Avi Lewis and Linda Carlsen on Democracy Now discuss "re-armouring NAFTA" : Plan Mexico, the $400 million regional cooperation security initiative that introduces a greater US military presence into Mexico under the guise of lending aid for the war on drugs.

5) The U.S. Navy has reactivated gunboat patrols off the coasts of Latin America to "send a strong signal to all Navies operating in the region".

You see we don't care what you call it : SPP, deep integration, the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny. We don't care. Really. Call it whatever you like.

War... What is it good for?...Absolutely boatloads of money

The Globe and Mail has a four page excerpt from Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine :

"In December, 2006, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group fronted by James Baker issued its long-awaited report. It called for the U.S. to “assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise” and to “encourage investment in Iraq's oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies.”

The Bush administration immediately pushed ahead by helping to draft a radical new oil law for Iraq, which would allow companies like Shell and BP to sign 30-year contracts in which they could keep a large share of Iraq's oil profits, amounting to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars – unheard of in countries with as much easily accessible oil as Iraq, and a sentence to perpetual poverty in a country where 95 per cent of government revenues come from oil."

"Explaining why it was justified for such a large percentage of the profits to leave Iraq, the oil companies cited the security risks. In other words, it was the disaster that made the radical proposed law possible."

Naomi Klein's husband, Avi Lewis, interviewed James Baker for his CBC show On The Map. Only one in twenty Iraq MPs saw that oil law before it was passed. And then there are the profits to be made from the privatization of war. Klein :

"Associated Press put the number of contractors in Iraq at 120,000, almost equivalent to the number of U.S. troops. In scale, this kind of privatized warfare has already overshadowed the United Nations. The UN's budget for peacekeeping in 2006-2007 was $5.25-billion – that's less than a quarter of the $20-billion Halliburton got in Iraq contracts, and the latest estimates are that the mercenary industry alone is worth $4-billion."

In a book interview on CBC's TheCurrent this week, Klein remains obstinately hopeful. Canadians have been fighting "disaster capitalism" for decades, she says, with their continued support for public infrastructure and medicare. The best insurance against being "shocked" into accepting any colonialist corporate agenda is to be ready for it by being informed. Go, Naomi.

Immediately following Klein's CBC interview, Greg Palast and Aurel Braun from Trinity College heatedly discuss the book. Aurel Braun gets the phrase 'conspiracy theory' out a couple of times before Palast puts the ideological boots to him. It must really bite Brown's ass that Palast, who actually studied under Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys, can so easily one-up a Friedman apologist like Braun, who didn't.

Go on - treat yourself.

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SPP : Avi Lewis and Amy Goodman

on Democracy Now : Audio and transcript

Excerpts :
Avi on SPP and Maher Arar :
"The connection between the SPP and Maher Arar is a really deep one. Two weeks after 9/11, the head of the business lobby in Canada, a guy named Tom d’Aquino, called immediately for deep harmonization and integration of US and Canadian policies in order to keep the border open and the trade flowing. Two months later, without any debate or without any legislative debate or really public involvement, they announced this “smart border” initiative for harmonizing the border. And, well, you know, it was a piece of spin, the “smart border” initiative. Nine months later, they announced that they had synchronized and harmonized Canada and the US's approach to passenger screening of international passengers. And one year after 9/11, based on that precise harmonization, Maher Arar was taken and subjected to extraordinary rendition and began his yearlong odyssey in hell in a Syrian prison. So the connection between this mobilization that’s going on in ten days in Quebec around the SPP and the situation of Maher Arar is one that won't be made broadly in Canadian or US media. But for people who care about sovereignty of nations and civil liberties, it's at the heart of it all."

Avi on Conrad Black and media consolidation :
"we need to make the connection between the ideological interest of media barons and how they play out in our public discourse, if these -- in the same way that Enron needed to be seen as a policy and political phenomenon and not just a scandal. If we see them as just corruption trials, then all of a sudden they don't have political consequences. So we have to make those connections."