"Cutting the grass" in Gaza

Updated : Total number of declared civilian casualties via United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), as of Aug 10, 2014 

With one quarter of the total population of Gaza now *displaced*, Harper, Mulcair, and Trudeau continue to "Stand with Israel", insisting on the right of Israel to defend itself against the people they are illegally occupying.

Great letter via Kev :

Dear NDP : Stop apologizing for war crimes and breaches of human rights
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Harper vs. Harper ... vs. Mulcair

Yes, about that ...



It's peculiar that Harper keeps insisting he first heard about his chief of staff Nigel Wright's $90,000 payment to Duffy on May 15 following "speculation in the media", given that CTV's Robert Fife had contacted the PMO the previous day to confirm it and the PMO responded. 
And you gotta love Steve taking credit for it coming out to the public here.



Asked whether he had spoken with his former press secretary now Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen, seen at top shielding Steve from reporters and who successfully moved to whitewash the report on Duffy, Steve replied he had not but that he agreed with the Senate recommendations - which were, of course, whitewashed.

He answered subsequent questions with "The Senate committee report is the Senate committee report." Nothing to do with cabinet or government, says Steve.

OK, that would be the Senate committee report that according to its Harper-appointed chair David Tkachuk :

"... you’ve got to remember I would have been having a number of discussions with Nigel, I had a few of them. He didn’t tell me to do anything, really. We discussed Mike and the situation that he was in. I mean, the Prime Minister’s Office was very concerned about this. They don’t like this scandal going on. It was hurting us politically. 

I talked to people in the PMO ... " 

Q: Can you say though that any of the Prime Minister’s Office’s advice ended up impacting how that report was written? 

A: Well, I don’t know, I suppose. It’s hard for me to say. It’s hard for me to say. Only because I asked for advice from many, many people, so it’s all in the report.

Meanwhile the Senate has responded to having its rewrite outed by putting the deleted parts back in and handing the whole thing over to the RCMP. 
Will all RCMP communications still need to be vetted by Vic Toews as per his 2011 mandate? 
Will all subsequent questions from anyone else be greeted with the usual  'Can't talk about it because it's now under investigation' ?



ETA : From Kristy Kirkup, national affairs editor for Sun Media




On Duffy's email that after he was paid off,  he was "staying silent on orders from the Prime Minister's Office", Steve doesn't know anything about that : “Mr. Speaker, these are not matters that I am privy to” - a Privy Council reference, perhaps? - and besides "Mike Duffy is no longer a member of our caucus."

Was Duffy's non-cooperation with Deloitte after receiving payment from the PMO part of the deal?

Steve doesn't even try for that one : "Mr. Duffy received no money from the PMO or the taxpayers of Canada." 
No, Mr. Duffy is just the beneficiary of the extraordinary largesse of Steve's own chief of staff over an issue that "was hurting us politically." Duffy used the payoff to stop co-operating with auditors and that allowed an all too willing senate steering committee to use it as the excuse to whitewash their report.

Mulcair : "When the chief of staff of the Prime Minister, in the course of his functions from the Prime Minister's Office, gives $90,000 to shut up a sitting senator, that's out of the Prime Minister's Office."

Well done, Mulcair. Best question period ever.
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Libby Davies - in perspective

"Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"

~David Ben Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, to Nahum Goldmann, President of the World Jewish Congress, in 1956
The Jewish Paradox, p. 99. Grosset & Dunlap (1978).

"Uh ... '48. I mean, it's the longest occupation in the world but I'm not going to argue numbers - it's too long, right? This is the longest occupation in the world and people are suffering."

~ NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies to blogger/interviewer David Katz, answering the question : "When do you believe the occupation in Israel started - '48 or '67?" at a rally protesting Israel's assault on the aid flotilla to Gaza

"The central remark causing the uproar was that Israel had been occupying Palestinian territory since 1948. This is factually correct. In the 1948 Israeli War of Independence (known to the Palestinians as the ‘Nakba’) more than 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave what later became the State of Israel. They have never been allowed to return. Much of the land that these people left had been designated by the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 as Palestinian territory," IJV-C spokesperson Haiven explained.

But pointing out this fact is not tantamount to denying Israel’s right to exist. Says Haiven, "Historians (including Israeli scholars like Benny Morris), governments and individuals all over the world acknowledge that Israel seized Palestinian territory in 1948 (and again in 1967) and expelled the Palestinian residents. Nevertheless, the prevailing consensus is that Israel has the right to exist within the territory it was occupying at the end of its War of Independence (the so-called ‘Green Line’.) Even the PLO has conceded this point."

~Independent Jewish Voices Canada condemns what it calls a “feeding frenzy” around NDP Member of Parliament Libby Davies, June 16, 2010.

By comparison, the noosemedia coverage of Steve and Bob Rae and Thomas Mulcair - all three parties! - condemning Libby Davies has shifted its focus from lawfare to strawfare.
The greater point here is : do we want our parliamentarians speaking their minds, or do we want them carefully tailoring their remarks to conform to Steve's bizarre and bullying framing of contentious issues like Palestine? Because if we let Steve away with that, we have already lost.
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