"No Violence Was Had", He Says

Does this not look like violence

Over the past few days, it's become increasingly difficult not to pick on Jim Parrot. Your not-so-humble author is trying, but Parrot is begging on the thunder.

Over the past few days, Parrot has been giddily obsessive over the recent visit to Vancouver by Dick Cheney. Speaking at the Vancouver Club, Cheney attracted the usual -- and in this author's honest opinion, not-entirely-unjustifiable -- outrage from Canada's left. 250 people showed up to demand his arrest.

Jim Parrot was one of them. This would be largely innocuous if not for a rather intriguing passage in blog post about it:

"No violence was had, although one middle-aged woman guest with a 50's perm that could cut glass got her purse caught in a camera as she wormed through the crowd. She yanked the purse with a violence that could only come from fear. She took a wayward swing at the poor camera guy. That was all I saw."

As it turns out, this comment is flagrantly false. Stunningly false.

Local 9/11 "truth"er Darren Pearson, at some point during the inevitable frenzy, saw fit to seize a Vancouver Club employee around the neck and throttle him.

Not so much as a mention of the assault -- immortalized in the form of photo evidence -- at Let Freedom Rain.

For his own part, Darren Pearson feels absolutely no shame for his assault on the unnamed Vancouver Club employee, who reportedly suffered minor injuries. In fact, Pearson has publicly stated that it was "fun" for him.

At a time like this one would even see fit to question the tenor of the pre-speech coverage at LFR, and ask whether it's fair to take a page out of the left's play book and ask if Jim Parrot himself had any hand in encouraging the assault. a blog post originally entitled "Leah Costello is cancer on Vancouver" (the title was since changed). Looking at how liberally Parrot has proven to be willing to spread the blame for "words of hate", it seems to his own standard bill. Other mentions of the Vancouver Club on LFR are too vile to be reproduced here -- which is really saying something.

At best, Jim Parrot needs to account for his claims there were no violence when some of those present saw fit to assail not club manager Leah Costello, not Dick Cheney, but club staff.

At worst, Jim Parrot should apply his own rhetorical habits to himself and ask if he could be blamed for encouraging the violence.

Given past dealigns with the Let Freedom Rain proprietor, one should expect neither.


Although, credit where credit is due -- Jim Parrot is right about one thing: the banana-throwing incident involving Wayne Simmonds isn't just "a lapse in judgment", it seems inconceivable to consider it anything but pre-medidated, especially when one considers the typical shortage of fresh produce at hockey games.

And it's entirely justifiable to be outraged over a homophobic remark directed at Sean Avery... but let's not forget Avery's own foray into on-ice racism.

Oilers fans -- and especially Georges Larague -- won't forget anytime soon.

The Greatest Idea Whose Time Has Come

Britain must adopt Bill of Rights ASAP

Of all the facts about British politics not widely known to many outside of the UK -- and perhaps even to many within it -- is that the country lacks a comprehensive written constitution. It's the only democratic state that lacks such a document.

Britain has a constitution of sorts; in political science it's known as a British-style constitution, and they're commonplace throughout the Commonwealth. What this means is that the foundational law in Britain has written and unwritten components, formal and informal components.

It includes various statutes, privy council rulings, constitutional convention, and the rules of Parliament... among other components. But Britain's own constitution lacks what some would consider two key components: a formal bill of rights, and a formal written constitution -- which in the case of a British-style constitution basically amounts to an anchor law.

A formal bill of rights may finally be on the way. At the direction of the David Cameron-led coalition government, a commission considering the implementation of a bill of rights has been studying the subject.

As with so many things, it began amdist tensions with the European Union over the role of EU statutes within British law. In 2005, the European Union Court of Human Rights ruled that a British ban on prisoners voting was discriminatory. In February, British MPs voted to spurn that ruling.

This controversy has led to the formation of the commission, and the consideration of a bill of rights that would satisfy the European Convention on Human Rights, but would allow Britain the freedom to interpet that convention as it sees fit, rather than remain beholden to the EU court. In time, such a charter would be expected to replace the Human Rights Act.

Britain has long considered itself a leader in establishing the rights and freedoms of its citizens. The Magna Carta -- itself considered part of the anchorless British constitution -- was truly a milestone law in human civilization. That it has no formal bill of rights is a testament to the manner in which these rights and freedoms emerged in British law -- very slowly, over time -- but it's also been an egregious oversight.

The establishment of a British Bill of Rights is the greatest idea whose time came a long time ago. It's time for the UK to make it a formality by writing and passing a bill of rights as quickly as can be responsibly done.

Amnesty Still Playing Partisan Politics

Amnesty International continues to hector Candian government

Full disclosure: I write this post as a member of the University of Alberta chapter of Amnesty International, of which I have been a member since 2008.

Having failed to influence the outcome of the 2011 federal election, it seems that Amnesty International is settling for trying to invoke a feeling of buyer's remorse in the Canadian electorate.

Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International, has accused Canada of not being a strong enough guiding force in terms of human rights advocacy.

Oddly enough, Shetty's complaints largely seem to deal with things that have little, if anything, to do with Canada.

"The human rights revolution now stands on the threshold of historic change," Shetty announced. "But there is a serious fight-back from the forces of repression. The international community must seize the opportunity for change and ensure that 2011 is not a false dawn for human rights."

"A critical battle is underway for control of access to information, means of communication and networking technology as social media networks fuel a new activism that governments are struggling to control," he continued. "As seen in Tunisia and Egypt, government attempts to block Internet access or cut mobile phone networks can backfire — but governments are scrambling to regain the initiative or to use this technology against activists."

"In 2010 progress (in Canada) on key concerns was disappointing," Amnesty International Canada Secretary General Alex Neve said. "The year was marked by failing leadership by Canada on human rights issues."

Salil goes on to note Wikileaks revelations -- if one could call them that -- that the regimes of countries such as Tunisia tortured political detainees.

"Some of the documents made clear that countries around the world were aware of both the political repression and the lack of economic opportunity, but for the most part were not taking action to urge change," Shetty declared. "One leaked cable showed that the then-Canadian envoy, the US ambassador and the UK ambassador all acknowledged that the Tunisian security forces torture detainees; that diplomatic assurances that the government will not torture detainees sent back to Tunisia are 'of value' but unreliable; and that the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] does not have access to detention facilities run by the Ministry of Interior."

Of course, this seems to beg an important question: what does this have to do with Canada? The answer seems to be "not very much".

Canada has not been deeply involved with Tunisia. It has not transferred detainees to Tunisian prisons, nor to Libyan prisons.

In fact, when Libyan President Muammar al-Ghadafi resorted to strafing peaceful protesters with fighter jets, Canada rushed to respond by helping implement a no-fly zone with its fellow NATO partners. Nor has Canada acted blindly within this mission, aborting CF-18 airstrikes that posed unacceptable risks to civilians.

Frankly, Amnesty has too big a plank in its own eye to be complaining about the speck in Canada's. Their relationship with Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners -- who recently mocked up assassination photos of US President Barack Obama.

To be fair, Salil Shetty has likley considered very little of his comments very deeply. More likely, it's the work of Neve, who was a guest of then-Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff at his Canada 150 conference.

Neve also committed Amnesty Canada as a signatory to the Voices/Voix petition, which complains about the government's cuts to various activist groups.

Apparently, Amnesty Canada has adopted the position that funding advocacy groups on an ideologically-preferential basis is some sort of human right. Which is, of course, complete and utter rubbish.

Perhaps Shetty and Neve are just confused about what their role should be in an increasingly complex, increasingly polarized political environment. Fortunately, your not-so-humble scribe can explain to them how Amnesty International should be budgeting their time:

Time spent promoting human rights -- actual human rights: 100%. Time spent engaging in partisan politics: 0%. Simple. Salil Shetty and Alex Neve had better figure this out for themselves very quickly, or they had better do something else altogether:

Resign.

Lies the Harper Haters Tell, Part 3

As the Shit Harper Did website continues to spew innuendo, half-truth and outright lies at the Canadian people, the Nexus is continuing its fact-checking mission into the claims made on the site.

The site previously lied in suggesting Harper was involved in police abuses during the 2010 G20 Summit, and ignoring net funding increases to science in Canada.

Today, we explore a far more insidious lie from the website:

The site reiterates claims that Harper and the Conservative Party were complicit in the torture of detainees in Afghanistan, and repreats the sensational claims of former Diplomat Richard Colvin.

Unsurprisingly, the site omits a few facts. Such as the fact that it was a Liberal government, under the leadership of Paul Martin, that actually signed a Prisoner Transfer Agreement that provided insufficient oversight of the treatment of prisoners after they were transferred from Canadian to Afghan custody.

Moreover, they had even been warned about the prevalence of torture in Afghan prisons by former diplomat Eileen Olexiuk. They ignored her.

This is very different from how Prime Minister Stephen Harper handled reports of torture. When revelations that Afghan prisoners transferred by Canadian soldiers were being tortured reached Harper, his government immediately re-negotiated the PTA.

But don't expect to hear that from the people behind Shit Harper Did. They're too busy lying to the Canadian public.

In China, Even Humanity Comes Separate to Power

The question of which society in human history has been the most totalitarian will forever be up for debate.

There is, however, little question about one thing: Communist China will rank close to the top of the list. China would likely be among the top five most totalitarian societies, if not the top three. If not number one.

The Communist Party of China has declared that every institution of the state essentially has one purpose: the perpetuation of the communist political order.

In the concluding chapter of BBC's China, some basic issues of legal equality and human rights are addressed. In the cases of religious freedom, political freedom, legal equality, and even the provision of basic medical care for AIDs victims, a startling fact becomes abundantly clear: in China, even basic, fundamental humanity comes separate to the aims of maintaining the power of the current regime.

Certainly, more and more Chinese are standing up and demanding their rights, and their freedom. But when the government is more concerned with maintaining its own power, this is too often for naught.

Amnesty International Needs to Butt Out

Amnesty becoming more interested in ideological politics than in human rights

Full disclosure: I write this post as a member of the University of Alberta chapter of Amnesty International, of which I have been a member since 2008.

Amnesty Internation used to be a wonderful organization, and a crucial voice for human rights. It once was, but is no longer necessarily so.

There has clearly been an ideological drift within Amnesty, as every group that believes they can link their specific agenda to human rights -- regardless of how peripherally -- have moved to colonize and capture the organization.

These ideological twists and turns are inevitably followed by partisan twists and turns, as seems to be the case with Amnesty's foray into the 2011 election campaign.

Denouncing the government's support for Israel, and complaining about funding cuts to various groups, Amnesty only declined to mention Prime Minister Stephen Harper by name. Yet it's clear that Amnesty is denouncing the policies of the current government.

"No longer the champion, more and more Canada is perceived to be a country that is reticent to take a consistently strong stand for human rights. Sometimes Canada now is also seen as part of the problem, not the solution," declared Amnesty Secretary General Salil Shetty. "There has been erosion of Canada's past policies, including a principled and non-partisan reputation in the Middle East."

Of course, principled and non-partisan stands on the Middle East isn't what Amnesty International is known for, either. In fact, Amnesty seems to increasingly be blatantly expressing a preference for terrorist organizations more and more often.

This was most eggregiously the case when Amnesty denounced the arrest of Amir Markhoul, a man who had been arrested for spying for Hezbollah.

Amnesty declared that Israel had arrested Marhoul for his human rights advocacy, but the facts presented at his trial showed differently. In a plea bargain, Marhoul admitted that he met with Hezbollah operatives, installed a coding program on his computer, and sent coded dispatches to Hezbollah during the 2006 Israel/Hezbollah war.

In his defence, Marhoul noted that he was reluctant to help Hezbollah, hesitated before he did, and regretted it after the fact.

Does Amnesty really expect anyone to believe that passing information along to terrorists is "human rights advocacy?" How about if the only people who get hurt by it are Israelis? Don't they have human rights?

"Serious violations committed by the Israeli government have on occasion been described as 'a measured response'," Shetty complained.

"Traditionally Canada approached those debates in a careful and principled manner and garnered a reputation as non-partisan," he continued. "That reputation has, however, been completely eroded in recent years as Canada has now adopted a policy of consistently voting against resolutions at both the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly that criticize Israel's human rights record."

Of course, whether Shetty and Amnesty care to admit or not, the UN Human Rights Council has been a joke with no punchline for a long time. The Council -- which features China, Saudi Arabia and Libya -- has had no problem at all criticizing Israel's human rights record, which is actually the best of any Middle Eastern country.

It also produced a report praising Libyan President Muammar al-Gadhaffi for human rights advancements in Libya. That report was eventually withdrawn when Libyan civilians began to die in fire raining from Libyan fighter jets.

The government of Canada has been entirely right in opposing the UN Human Rights Council being used as a stalking horse for the world's worst human rights abusers.

The report also complains that groups such as KAIROS have had their funding cut, claiming that "Canada's human rights movement feels under siege."

Amnesty and Shetty need to wake up to the fact that the government of Canada is not obligated, under any circumstances, to fund groups that promote an extreme ideological agenda under the guise of "human rights". Canada's government is slowly getting out of the business of funding fringe agendas. Amnesty and Shetty will simply have to get used to that.

In the meantime, Amnesty International needs to go back to its roots, and do what it was intended to do: promoting human rights, not political agendas. More importantly, it needs to live up to the standards it sets of others.

Does Amnesty want Canada to act as an "honest broker" in the Middle East? Maybe it should try a little honest brokerage of its own, rather than simply adding its voice to the shrill cacophony of the anti-Israel movement.

Most importantly, it needs to get its nose out of Canadian electoral politics.

Amnesty International was once a great organization. It can be again. But before it can be, it needs to get its priorities right.

Rambo and the Revisionist Cultural History of Human Rights

Like its predecessors, Rambo is unapologetically unrelenting in its brutality. The film opens with a jumbled collection of news clips documenting the unrest in Burma (formerly Myanmar), and the government's respose to civil dissent.

This is quickly followed by Burmese soldiers turning dissident villagers loose in a minefield and forcing them to run. Those who aren't killed by landmines -- which explode in their unrelentingly grisly fashion -- are slaughtered with machine gun fire.

The beginning of the film finds John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) living in Thailand, where he works capturing snakes for a snake-fighting ring.

Rambo is approached by a group of missionaries hoping he'll guide them up the river into Burma, where they hope to put a stop to the fighting. They're going unarmed into a war zone. They don't stand a chance: of stopping the genocide taking place there, or even of surviving.

At first Rambo refuses to help them; he's attempting to put his days of fighting behind him. Following a passionate and idealistic appeal from Sarah (Julie Benz), Rambo eventually agrees.

If viewers have any doubt whether or not Rambo still has it, an encounter with a boatload of pirates erases any doubt.

Rambo's passengers are outraged by the casual alacrity with which he dispatches their assailants, even though he has saved their lives. He takes them the rest of the way up the river and leaves them to their task.

After Rambo departs, the village the missionaries are helping comes under attack by the Burmese army. Mortar and machine gun fire tear the villagers and missionaries alike to shreds, while flame throwers are used to burn the village out of existence.

The army spares no one. Men, women, children. The brutality of crimes against humanity is captured in what may be one of the most uncompromising and haunting portrayals in the history of Hollywood film.

After arriving back at his home in Thailand, Rambo already knows what happened to the missionaries. As he tries to sleep, his dreams are haunted with flashbacks to the things he has experienced during his life as a combat soldier.

Even now he knows he cannot "turn it off".

Days later, Rambo is approached by Reverend Arhur Marsh (Ken Howard), who asks Rambo to lead a group of hired mercenaries on a rescue mission.

Rambo is forced into battle once more, on a personal mission that will force him to confront the demons of his past, and finally bring him home.

As noted previously, popular theory holds that Rambo 2 represented a symbolic attempt to re-fight the Vietnam war so that the United States could emerge as the winner.

There's more to it than that, but there's also much in the film to support that interpretation.

In Rambo, however, this particular narrative takes a stark twist: now, instead of re-fighting wars the United States fought and lost, Rambo is confronting humanitarian abuses it chose never to fight in the first place.

It isn't merely the genocide in Burma that the film symbolically re-writes, it's also genocides in Rwanda and Darfur.

In this sense Rambo represents a revisionist cultural history in which the west is artificially granted reprieve for its failure to defend its own values abroad. After all, human rights are a western innovation that carries little weight in other parts of the world.

With a United Nations that allows countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and China (among others) to pay lip service to this concept in exchange for membership in the international community, there is little reason for countries like Burma or the Sudan to take them seriously; particularly when they realize that the progenitors of these ideas won't fight for them.

Until the west musters the will to fight in favour of human rights anywhere and everywhere it becomes necessary, revisionist films like Rambo will be the last remaining outlet for these values.

Awaiting Justice For Neda

On June 20, 2009, an Iranian woman by the name of Neda Agha-Soltan was participating in a protest against the blatantly-rigged Iranian Presidential election.

During that protester, Neda -- an unarmed woman -- was shot in the chest by a sniper and died within seconds.

A bystander filmed Neda's death on a celphone camera and smuggled the video out of the country. Everything since has been history.

A commentator in For Neda, an HBO documentary about Neda and about the state of women's rights in Iran, declared the Neda video to be the most successful viral video in history. Within hours of the video being published, it had been viewed by millions.

The video of Neda's passing went viral faster than the famous video of China's tank man at Tiananmen Square.

Yet, like the tank man, Neda shares a common tragic legacy. While each video drew attention to the true nature of oppression in the country they originated from, each has -- to date -- failed to force the regime in charge of each country to change its barbarous ways, or respect the human rights of its citizens.

Not only has the Iranian theocracy not changed its ways following the release of the Neda video, it targetted Zahra Soltani, a woman unfortunate enough to share the name "Neda" as a nickname, and eventually drove her into exile.

Neda's murderer has never been brought to justice. She is not alone.

On July 11, 2003, Zahra Kazemi, a dual Iranian-Canadian citizen, was beaten and raped to death in an Iranian prison. Her crime was to have taken a picture of Evin prison, where Iran keeps its political prisoners.

Prior to Kazemi's murder -- which, like the killing of Neda, the Iranian regime attempted to cover up -- little public attention had been paid to the treatment of Iranian nationals in Iranian prisons.

Like Neda Agha-Soltan, there has never been justice for Zahra Kazemi. If the regime in Tehran has its way, there never will be.

Michael Ignatieff's Sino-Cluelessness

Ignatieff fails to account for Chinese human rights record

Posting on the National Post's Full Comment blog, Ezra Levant has some choice words for Liberal leader Michaelf Ignatieff.

Ignatieff, Levant insists, has spoken "false praise to power".

In a speech delivered at China's Tsinghua University, Ignatieff embraced Jean Chretien's craven approach to China; all he needed to do to make it complete was swap the phrase "good governance and rule of law" for "human rights".

In fact, despite China's human rights record -- the Chinese Communist Party's legacy written in blood -- Ignatieff's greatest human rights-related barbs were reserved for Canada.

"I am a proud Canadian, proud of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the rights we accord religious and linguistic minorities, and the constitutional acknowledgement of our Aboriginal peoples," Ignatieff said. "I will defend these achievements everywhere, but I am not blind to the gap that exists between our ideals and reality for some of my fellow citizens. Indeed, I am in politics to narrow that gap."

Canada certainly hasn't always been perfect. But it's drawn the line at harvesting the organs of religious minorities to sell internationally, as China has done to practitioners of Falun Gong -- an abuse revealled internationally by Liberal Party icon Irwin Cotler.

In fact, Ignatieff spoke very softly about China's human rights record.

"In my classroom at Harvard, there were vigorous debates about China," Ignatieff continued. "My Chinese students did not always see eye to eye with other students on such issues as the death penalty, the rights of religious and ethnic minorities, access to the Internet and the largest issue of all, to what degree, to what extent, and at what level, economic liberalization should be followed by increased democratic rights."

"But I made it clear that the ultimate decision about these questions will be made, not by foreigners, but by the Chinese people themselves," he naively added.

Of course, the world remembers what happened the last time too many Chinese citizens tried to campaign for democratic freedoms in China. The state ran them down with tanks.

Many Chinese citizens today still do not know about the Tiananmen Square massacre. They are generally not taught that it took place, nor was it covered by the Chinese media of the day.

The farther away within China one lives from Beijing, the more unlikely one is to know about the events of June 4, 1989. Ignatieff, speaking just one month removed from the 20th anniversary of that atrocity, has no such excuse.

Perhaps some would see it as fitting that Michael Ignatieff, the grandson of a Russian diplomat who, by Ignatieff's own admission, once effectively bilked China out of some border provinces would try to make amends by so blatantly caving in to the Chinese phenomenon of "shame diplomacy" -- attempting to shame foreigners out of criticizing China's human rights policies.

An honest Canadian leader would broke no such pressure. Canadians who believe in human rights were rightly embarrassed by Jean Chretien's cowardly approach to this topic.

Michael Ignatieff has embarrassed us again -- but at least he hasn't embarrassed us as Prime Minister.

China: Destroying it's support one chunk at a time

Following their achievement in Copenhagen of being credited with stonewalling the conference, China has managed to now piss off Google.

After getting the agreement with Google that the company would censor it's searches for Chinese users, Google Announced it would be suspending it's policy of self censorship in China. Why would Google do this even though it knows this action could likely end it's contract in China. Because of consistent attacks by Chinese based hackers on the gmail accounts of Chinese Human Rights Activists.

For a while now, China has been scoring several important victories. It had managed to paint itself as a "Green Country" moving towards a non-carbon future. It had gotten Google to self-censor itself against anti-government material from China based users. Now it's own greed and need for control seem to be nixing these past victories.

The Politics of (Recognizing) Genocide

Produced by the BBC, The Betrayed is a documentary that examines the matter of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey, and the efforts to have that genocide recognized in other countries.

The Armenian Genocide, beginning in 1915, was actually the first of what was expected to be a three-pronged program of ethnic cleansing in the declining Ottoman Empire. The plan was to first eliminate the Armenians, then eliminate Kurds, and eventually even eliminate Turkey's Greek population.

Perversely, the Ottomans used their next target, the Kurds, to massacre the Armenians, coercing entire battalions of Kurds to act as death squads.

Just as Turkey continues to deny the Armenian genocide, they also continue to deny the national plight of the Kurds. Despite the fact that Turkey currently occupies a large portion of historical Kurdistan (Iraq, Iran and Syria, occupy the rest), Turkey continues to insist that the land ever existed.

Turkey's Kurds have coped with their complicity in the Armenian genocide by casting it as a far-off event, occurring far beyond the boundaries of the formerly-Armenian villages populated largely by Kurds today.

Turkey has historically treated efforts to recognize the genocide as a diplomatic outrage. On some occasions, foreign countries have cowed to the pressure, agreeing to not recognize the genocide officially.

We may not like to admit it, but there very much are political considerations to whether or not a country will recognize that a genocide has occurred in a foreign country.

Over the last several years, scarecely-reported diplomatic progress with Syria was facilitated by Turkey, as Turkey helped Syria in its attempts to negotiate Trade Associate status with the European Union.

The original deal -- which would have helped to pull Syria out of Iran's orbit of influence -- was scuttled when the United States moved to isolate Syria as a terrorism-supporting state.

Efforts to formalize such a deal have resumed, but seem much less promising than before the 2004 intervention.

Recognition of Turkish atrocities could potentially jeopardize Turkey's invaluable role as intermediary between the Middle East and the Western World.

No one likes this -- nor should like it. But it seems that pragmatic politics can often trump historical truth in the lands of realpolitic.

Michael Ignatieff: The Say Anything Liberal

Ignatieff makes misleading statements regarding Maher Arar

One sad trait that has become common of many politicians is the tendency to say anything to get elected.

In Canada, many people feel that politicians from the Liberal party are especially prone to this unfortunate affliction. After comments recently made by Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, this will likely become a more popular assessment of him.

Speaking to The Observer in September, Ignatieff suggested that Canada sent Arar to Syria to be tortured.

"Canada sent Maher Arar to Syria, and a court found that he had been subjected to extraordinary rendition, that his claims [of torture] were true and that he had delivered no intelligence to anybody," Ignatieff fumed. "It was a disgrace. So, we don't do it. Ever. Period. Off the table. We don't get other people to do our dirty work for us, and we don't do dirty work ever."

Those actually familiar with the Arar case will immediately recognize the problem with Ignatieff's statements. The problem is that they are categorically false.

Arar was not sent to Syria by Canada. In fact, Arar was sent to Syria by the United States as an act of "extraordinary rendition". They were, however, acting under false intelligence passed along by the RCMP.

Furthermore, no court of law has ever issued findings of fact in regards to Arar's case.

Ignatieff was making the statement in an effort to sweep away questions about The Lesser Evil, a book in which Ignatieff wrote on the topic of torture.

The essential theme of the book is torture as a moral evil. Ignatieff famously suggests that the western world may have to deal in evil in order to defeat the evil of terrorism, although Ignatieff noted the importance of understanding that torture is evil.

Ignatieff also seems to suggest that torture could be considered permissable if it were formally legalized.

Unsurprisingly, the controversy surrounding those comments has followed him ever since his entry into federal politics.

As Michael Byers notes, the Arar affair is a matter on which Ignatieff ought to be knowledgable enough to not make the kind of mistakes he's made in this case. "For him to get the facts wrong on the highest profile case of torture involving a Canadian citizen is deeply worrying," Byers said. "It suggests a certain lack of attention to detail, and perhaps even concern, on a matter that was engaging the Canadian public, a commission of inquiry, and courts in both Canada and the United States at the very same time that he was expressing opinions on torture in The New York Times."

Ignatieff indeed ought to full well know better about the Maher Arar case. On top of the flagrant errors made in his comments on the matter, there's one other thing that Ignatieff ought to have known.

When the United States deported Arar to Syria, the party that he now leads was in power, and governed during the entire time Arar was being held without charge in Syria.


Other bloggers writing about this:

Canadian Sentinel - "TS: Ignatieff Wrong Re Arar"

Victor Wong - "So, Did the Liberals Want Maher Arar Tortured, Mr Waffle?"

Hatrock's Cave - "Iggy the Wrong on Maher Arar"

Olympic Ceasefire a Nice, But Unfeasible, Idea

Taliban would stand to gain from spoiling Canada's Olympic party

As much as they are said to be a symbol of peace, the Olympics have actually had an uneasy relationship with war for much of the past century.

In 1936, the Summer Olympics were held in Berlin. At the time it was widely known that Nazi Germany was preparing for war. In 1980, the Soviet Union hosted the Summer Games while attempting to stamp out an Islamic uprising in Afghanistan. In 2002, Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Olympics while the United States was already fighting in Afghanistan, and preparing to invade Iraq.

In 1972, terrorists murdered Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics in Munich. In 1996, the Atlanta games were marred by a bomb explosion that killed two people in Centennial Olympic Park.

Yet despite this uncomfortable relationship with various forms of armed conflict, the Olympic Ceasefire has become something of an Olympic tradition.

The organizers of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics seem to have embraced this particular notion, as an Olympic ceasfire resolution is set to be presented before the United Nations.

Certainly, nobody expects Canadian soldiers to lay down their arms so Taliban insurgents can have their way with them. But this is one time when Canada actually may be better off following the example of former US President George W Bush, who refused to seriously entertain the notion of an Olympic ceasefire in 2002.

In fact, Canadians can expect the Taliban to redouble their efforts to harm NATO soldiers (and Canadians in particular) during the 2010 Olympics, just as they did during the recent Afghan elections.

To cast a dark cloud over the Olympics would be nothing short of a propaganda triumph for the Taliban.

Some may recall the story of Mehboba Ahdyar, the Afghan sprinter who was scheduled to participate in the Beijing games. Despite the numerous social obstacles she had to overcome in order to compete in the Olympics -- obstacles not limited to the Taliban alone -- Ahdyar promised to be a powerful symbol of the progress being made in Afghanistan on issues such as women's rights.

Even though the Afghan Parliament frequently kowtows to the regressive attitudes of many Afghans -- various outrageous pieces of legislation have threatened to legalize rape within marriage, among other atrocities -- Ahdyar was already a symbol of how far Afghan women had come since the removal of the Taliban from power, as she had participated in and won several competitions in Afghanistan. Such competitions were entirely unheard of under the Taliban, who forbade women from participating in athletic competition.

Ahdyar's story, however, took a disappointing turn when she fled to Norway to seek asylum.

Ahdyar's story failed to turn out to be the feel-good tale about the advancement of women's rights in Afghanistan that it could have been. However, it continues to teach lessons about precisely how regressive the Taliban truly is, and why it cannot be allowed to re-assume power in Afghanistan.

Having already marred one Olympic story with death threats and intimidation, the Taliban will certainly be eager to seize the opportunity to further marr an event that stands for everything they stand against.

But as powerful as the symbolism of killing a mass of Canadian soldiers during the Vancouver Olympics could be for the Taliban, continuing to fight the Taliban in the name of democratic freedom and human rights would be a much, much stronger symbol for Canadians.

That alone makes the idea of an Olympic ceasefire a little absurd. As nice as the idea is, one simply doesn't extent courtesies to an enemy that they know the enemy will not return.

"Basically, I think it's ridiculous - if there were any sense of self-respect or realism, [Defence Minister Peter MacKay] would say, 'Don't be absurd,'" says University of Calgary Political Scientist Barry Cooper. "It's the sort of thing that only a bureaucrat would think was meaningful."

It's a nice enough idea in practice. But Canada stands to gain too much by continuing to fight the Taliban during the Olympics, and stands to lose too much by relenting.

The Internet: The Great Equal (And Global) -izer

In a speech featured as a recent TED Talk, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown shows us the power of images to open the human eye to some of the most atrocious tragedies unfolding in the world around us.

There are many images that have, as Brown insists, "awakened the human conscience".

They bring us scenes of political repression, such as the massacre at Tienanmen Square or the murder of Neda by Iranian police.

They bring us scenes of poverty.

They bring us scenes of war.

As Brown tells us, the global reaction to these images demonstrates to us that, in the very spirit of monism, there are central principles that people all around the world can share, regardless of race, creed, culture or religion.

As the internet becomes more and more prevalent in global society, there is no question that these images can traverse the globe faster than ever before, reminding people about the injustices and atrocities taking place in the world, and spurring people to take action.

The internet has brought the injustices and atrocities suffered by even the poorest people in the world to the immediate attention to the rest of us. Not only has the internet proven to be the great globalizer -- with ideas and information crossing the world regardless of the existence of international boundaries -- it has also proven to be a great equalizer.

The emergence of this great ability to mix global communications with a global ethic will almost certainly lead to new pressures on the United Nations to, for nearly the first time since its existence, move beyond petty international politics and move toward addressing the injustices and atrocities that can no longer be hidden from view.

All we need are global leaders who are perceptive and visionary enough to make this a reality.

Michael Ignatieff Gets It

Michael Byers probably never will

As the world is momentarily distracted from the events occuring in Iran by the death of Michael Jackson, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff took some time to address a rally in support of the Iranian protesters and protesting the Iranian theocracy's treatment of them.

"The Iranian regime did not anticipate you," Ignatieff told the assembled crowd.

"They thought they could suppress democratic rights and bully, beat and intimidate the people of Iran and the world would not care, the world would not watch," he continued. "They did not anticipate you."

"I'm proud of Canadians who understand that when others cannot stand up we must stand up for them, and when they cannot speak we have to speak for them."

"Canada has known for a long time this was a regime with which we could not have normal relations," Ignatieff announced.

"This is a regime that allowed Zahra Kazemi to be beaten to death in prison. This is a regime that has denied the reality of the Holocaust, that's attempted to develop nuclear weapons, Long before the election we knew this was a regime with which we could not have normal relations."

Ignatieff spoke volumes about the wisdom of Canadians. Indeed, Canadians have long known that we cannot afford our full respect to the Iranian regime.

Well, not all Canadians know this. University of British Columbia Political Scientist and erstwhile NDP candidate Michael Byers doesn't know this.

Some may recall Byers' January 1, 2008 op/ed article in the Toronto Star, in which he criticized Prime Minister Stephen Harper for recalling Canada's ambassador to Iran.

The reason for the recall was Iran's incredibly malfeasant handling of the Kazemi case. Zahra Kazemi, as many Canadians will recall, as a Canadian-Iranian dual citizen who was beaten and raped to death in an Iranian prison for the grievous crime of photographing a political protest.

Michael Ignatieff gets it. He knows that Canada cannot have a regular diplomatic relationship with this country.

But Michael Byers doesn't. Michael Byers believes Iran should be able to rape and beat Canadian citizens to death, develop nuclear weapons for the purpose of threatening its neighbours, hold Holocaust denial conferences, whip homosexuals while insisting they don't exist, and brutally stamp out political dissent without so much as a hiccup in diplomatic relations between our two countries.

Michael Ignatieff knows better. Michael Ignatieff gets it. Michael Byers probably never will.

World Shouldn't Hold Its Breath Over Tiananmen Square

Lawrence Cannon calls for "public accounting"

In a statement on the eve of today's 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon joined the chorus of voices calling for a public accounting of the massacre.

"The 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square tragedy provides an opportunity for China to remember those who lost their lives at that time while calling for political and economic reforms in China," Cannon said. "Twenty years later, we hope that they will be able to examine these events in an open and transparent fashion -- including the public accounting of those killed, detained or missing."

Cannon shouldn't hold his breath -- nor should anyone else in the world.

The Communist Party regime in China will certainly not hold any kind of public accounting into Tiananmen Square unless they need to do so in order to hold on to power. As sad as it may be to realize this, they simply don't.

In Mediapolitik, Lee Edwards outlined how the Chinese government micro-managed coverage of the massacre. In 1989 China was a very different country than it is today. While today the amount of coverage that the massacre received in the international media -- partially through the efforts of Canada's own Jan Wong, who witnessed the massacre from the relative safety of her nearby hotel room -- would almost assure that Tiananmen Square would be common knowledge throughout China, the average Chinese citizen didn't have satellite television or the internet in 1989.

Instead, the Chinese government repressed coverage of Tiananmen Square within China's borders. Even today when many Chinese citizens learn about the massacre it's in the history books published in other countries.

Even when the Chinese government acknowledged -- on a very limited basis -- the occurrence of the massacre, they played it off as necessary to contain "violent militant anti-revolutionaries".

Yet Wong's own reflection of the event, as told in Red China Blues, tells a different story. Rather, much of the Chinese student movement's fervour was staged for international cameras. Wong recounts witnessing one student in particular furiously waving a pro-democracy banner when television cameras were on him, then slumping over and smoking a cigarette when they had moved on.

Whatever the Chinese student movement had planned to accomplish at Tiananmen Square, taking up arms against the communist government wasn't one of their goals.

To make matters worse, comparatively few foreign leaders are willing to hold the Chinese government responsible for what occurred at Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989. When former Prime Minister Jean Chretien toured China in the 1990s he refused to so much as utter the words "human rights" and instead referred to "good governance and the rule of law".

When the rule of law allows the government to run over its citizens with tanks, there's little question that whatever governance exists in that country is not "good".

Yet even Cannon is willing to to echo similar statements when he refers to China's economic development -- achieved at the direct expense of more than 100 million Chinese citizens who were dislocated from their homes in order to serve as a mobile labour force -- as an advance for human rights.

Anyone expecting the Chinese government to suddenly be forthcoming about the events of June 5, 1989 shouldn't hold their breath.

A Foolish Assumption

There's nothing rational about discrimination

Writing in an op/ed column in the Globe and Mail, Tom Flanagan attempts to make the case that the Canadian Human Rights Commission is, essentially, obsolete and should be abolished.

In many ways, as Flanagan notes, Canada's Human Rights Commissions are largely responsible for their own current predicament -- that of a lack of public credibility:

"For the first time in a long time, human-rights commissions are on the defensive. The Harper government is taking away pay equity from the Canadian commission and University of Windsor law professor Richard Moon's report has recommended repeal of the commission's right to interfere with free speech.

Both federal and provincial commissions are suffering blowback from their unsuccessful attempts to muzzle media gadflies Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant. Mr. Levant, in particular, has declared a jihad against the commissions, drawing attention to the one-sided nature of the legislation under which they operate. For example, commissions pay expenses for complainants but not respondents; successful respondents cannot sue complainants to recover costs; commissions allow complaints for the same alleged offence to be lodged in multiple jurisdictions, amounting to double jeopardy."

There's certainly a case to made for this. The extremely self-destructive behaviour of many of the CHRC's investigators, including the one who was unscrupulous enough to hack the wireless internet connection of a private citizen, has made the CHRC extremely suspect in the eyes of many Canadian citizens.

The toll taken on the commissions by Levant alone has left the CHRC struggling to maintain its public sense of credibility.

But continuing Flanagan's analysis of the predicament confronting the CHRC hits an incredibly fatal flaw, when he attempts to analyze the phenomenon of discrimination -- with the CHRC is meant to combat -- in the same manner as would an economist:

"In a competitive market, discrimination is costly to the discriminator. An employer who refuses to hire workers because of race, religion or ethnicity restricts his own choices and imposes a disadvantage on his firm. Meanwhile, his competitors gain by being able to hire from a larger pool. The same logic applies to restaurateurs turning away potential customers, or landlords refusing to lease to people of particular categories. (I'll never forget the experience of owning rental property in the recession of the 1980s; I would have rented to Martians if they had showed up with a damage deposit.)

The argument applies no matter how rampant prejudice and discrimination may be. Those who discriminate impose burdens on themselves and confer advantages on their competitors. Competitive markets don't immediately abolish discriminatory practices, but they tend to erode them, not by trying to enlighten bigoted people, but by making discrimination unprofitable."

Flanagan overlooks two basic truths: one of economics, and one of discrimination.

Economics proceeds from the assumption that most people make rational choices. In any particular situation, they will make the decision that benefits them most fully -- or at least believes will benefit them the most.

Discrimination, meanwhile, is not rational. And although Flanagan's argument that discrimination is self-defeating and thus unsustainable in a competitive environment is an elegant argument, it overlooks the fact that discrimination has often taken place in some extremely competitive environments.

In Canada, few things have ever been as competitive as the sport of hockey. Yet the disadvantage of discriminating against the most talented or hard-working players on the basis of race or ethnicity has often proven to be a less-than-convincing incentive to not discriminate.

Canadian hockey offers numerous examples of this.

Perhaps the most little-known is the discrimination against the Winnipeg Falcons, the Canadian team that won the first Olympic Hockey Championship in 1920. The Falcons had won the Allan Cup as the champions of a league in Winnipeg staffed entirely by players of Icelandic descent. Players of Icelandic descent in Winnipeg had to start this league because other leagues wouldn't allow them to play because of their Icelandic heritage.

Their triumph at the Olympics -- which also won them a World Championship, as the World Championship was awarded to the winner of the Olympic tournament -- eventually won them a warm, if uncomfortable, welcome back in Winnipeg.

Players like Herb Carnegie -- who played excellently in training camps for the New York Rangers but were never allowed an opportunity to play for the club -- were discriminated against for the colour of their skin. Carnegie won MVP honours in the Quebec Provincial League in 1946, '47 and '48. The New York Rangers had won a Stanley Cup in 1940, but could have well won another with a player like Carnegie, whose skills were often considered comparable to those of Canadiens legend Jean Beliveau.

If discrimination could be defeated by the self-interested rationality of those who need top-caliber talents to excel in highly competitive environments, as Flanagan insists, one would have to imagine that such historical episodes never would have happened.

The truth is that there is nothing rational about discrimination. It's predicated on emotional responses to evident differences between people, and in cases of racism doesn't even necessarily rely on differently-coloured skin.

Discrimination proves to be one of those instances where the free market isn't enough to ensure justice for those involved.

Flanagan is eager to argue that cases wherein discrimination turns out to be profitable are so because of government interference in the free market:

"Government can use its coercive powers, however, to protect discriminatory practices in the private sector from being undermined by competition.

There is a long and dishonourable history of propping up discrimination in the private sector - refusing to enforce laws against violence (lynching), passing discriminatory legislation (Jim Crow laws in the American South) and authorizing business cartels (sports leagues) and labour cartels (trade unions). Satchel Paige would have been pitching against Babe Ruth if professional baseball had been a competitive industry.

Government, using its monopoly of coercion, imposes the costs of discrimination on its hapless targets. Think of the episodes in our history that make Canadians feel ashamed and for which our governments have been busy apologizing: disregard of aboriginal property rights; sending Indian children to residential schools; closing the doors to Jewish refugees; keeping out Chinese and Sikh immigrants; relocating the Japanese during the Second World War; interning Ukrainians during the First World War and Italians during the Second World War; eugenic sterilization of the mentally and physically handicapped.

Every one of these was an exercise of governmental power. Political majorities undoubtedly approved at the time, but public opinion did not relocate the Japanese or send Indian children to residential schools. Governmental authority did, backed up by the coercive monopoly of the state. Authorizing a government agency to stamp out discrimination in the private sector is truly setting the fox to guard the henhouse."

Yet the Winnipeg Falcons were the victim of discrimination within an amateur league, unprotected by government legislation, and that Carnegie actually excelled within a Quebec league that was.

As Flanagan notes, discrimination in the private sector may well be self-liquidating over time, as those who very much do disadvantage themselves by discriminating against those with valuable talents inevitably lose out.

But that does absolutely nothing for those being discriminated against today. That is where Human Rights Commissions come in handy, and that is a valuable role that they fill.

While few Canadians will pretend that Human Rights Commissions are perfect, fewer still would pretend that those imperfections couldn't be rectified with a program of reform, not abolition.




Other bloggers writing about this topic:

George Young - "World According to Flanagan (And Harper)"

Cracked Crystal Ball - "Tom Flanagan: It's All About Social Darwinism"

To Boldly Commit Genocide...

Warning: the following post contains significant spoilers about the film Star Trek. Those still interested in seeing this film should consider themselves forewarned.


Dark historical overtones at heart of Star Trek film

Franchise re-boots are all the range recently, with film franchises like Batman scoring big hits at the box office in the wake of previous disappointing film releases.

It's in this particular vein that it should be less than surprising that Paramount films would re-boot Star Trek. What should be even less surprising -- to those intimately familiar with the franchise -- is that JJ Abrams, the man behind the Trek re-boot, would fashion a Star Trek that resembles human history a little more closely than Gene Roddenberry's original series.

Yet the film retains the general theme of Roddenberry's original -- the triumph of the human spirit.

The film daringly and decisively re-shapes the Star Trek universe when Nero (Eric Bana), a revenge-seeking Romulan, destroys the planet Vulcan -- one of the backbones of the United Federation of Planets -- in order to take revenge on Ambassador Spock for failing to save planet Romulus.

Spock -- who appears both in younger and older forms (played by Zachary Quinto and Leonard Nimoy, respectively) -- speculates that as few as 10,000 Vulcans may have survived the destruction of the planet.

Genocide is a theme that Star Trek has previously addressed, but rarely in terms so horrifically similar to human history.

As those intimately familiar with Star Trek are doubtlessly aware, Vulcans and Romulans look very similar to one another for important reason -- they share a common heritage on the planet Vulcan. As revealed in the Next Generation episode "Unification" -- in which Spock is targeted by Romulan assassins for his efforts to reveal this common heritage to citizens of the Romulan Star Empire -- Romulans were Vulcans who left the planet to follow a different path, and forge a militaristic empire.

It's in this vein, considering that Vulcans and Romulans are actually the same species, that the destruction of Vulcan isn't merely a genocide -- it's actually a fratricide as well.

Naturally, this will beg comparisons to Adolph Hitler -- who is believed by many to have had a Jewish heritage -- and to the genocide in Rwanda, where Hutus and Tutsis were not only virtually indistinguishable to most visitors to that country, but had on many occasions inter-married, making it incredibly likely that many of those participating in the Rwandan genocide were actually killing their own family members.

As Bruce Wilshire theorizes, many genocides are motivated by a mortal terror -- the belief that the existence of an ethnic rival poses a threat to the survival of one's own ethnicity or race.

Nero seems to embody this particular motivation, as he intends to continue on to destroy every Federation planet -- including Earth -- believing that is the only way he can ensure the survival of Romulus.

(Then again, considering that Romulus was destroyed when its sun went supernova, one can certainly find fault in the reasoning of this particular madman.)

Human history is full of all kinds of instances in which genocidal leaders went to shocking lengths in order to defend otherwise inconsequential ethnic differences. Wherever the Star Trek franchise may now go, one can imagine that it will very closely resemble human history.

Some may question if this remains true to Gene Roddenberry's original optimistic vision of human history, and its message that the human triumph can triumph over petty greed and racism.

By the same token, however, one would have to agree that a triumph without a challenge is hardly a triumph at all.

A Sobering Reminder

Rwandan immigrant shares his stories of the 1994 genocide

When the Rwandan genocide began in earnest on April 17, 1994, Eugene Mbonyinshuti was just two days shy of his fifth birthday.

If Rwanda's Hutu militias and Interhamwe had gotten their way, he wouldn't have survived to see it.

Speaking recently about the genocide to his classmates at Welland Ontario's Notre Dame College, Mbonyinshuti provided a sobering reminder of the atrocity that unfolded in that country, much to the indifference of the so-called developed world and the United Nations.

“Local print and radio media fuelled the killings, while the international media either ignored or seriously misinterpreted events that were really happening,” Mbonyinshuti explained. “The local media used names such as exterminate all the cockroaches or kill all the snakes. A baby snake is still a snake. Kill them all.”

The Rwandan genocide was precipitated over ethnic differences that were largely inflated by Belgian colonists, who favoured Tutsis over Hutus because of their moderately lighter skin.

Prior to the arrival of Belgian -- and, previously, German -- colonists, it's generally believed that the Hutus and Tutsis were one people, and that the minor differences between them were exploited so the Tutsis could be used to control the Hutus.

“The two ethnic groups are actually very similar,” Mbonyinshuti continued. “They speak the same language and share the same culture, eat the same foods, worship in the same churches, study in the same classrooms and living in the same neighbourhoods.”

Indeed they did. And when the genocide turned really ugly, Tutsis were butchered in the very churches in which they worshipped alongside Hutus. Alongside the foreign governments and United Nations agencies that failed to substantively intervene in the atrocity was the Catholic Church, who failed to issue an edict condemning the carnage and those perpetrating it.

The general public consensus surrounding the genocide holds that it was largely the result of a mob mentality mobilized by inflammatory radio broadcasts which mixed Rwandan rock and roll music with hate propaganda.

According to Mboyinshuti, the truth is very different.

“The actual genocide was planned for many years, much like Hitler planned the killing of all the Jewish people. It was well planned,” he explained.

And, indeed, it had to be. Hutu militias and Interhamwe had brought weapons into the country and stored them in convenient caches. These weapons varied as widely as semi-automatic assault rifles to machetes.

Furthermore, these weapons were no secret. When UNAMIR commander Lt General (ret) Romeo Dallaire planned a raid to seize some of these weapons stocks, he was ordered to stand down by UN commanders.

Mboyinshuti expressed his admiration for Dallaire's commitment to trying to halt the carnage. When told to leave the country, Dallaire would not. "He refused. He stayed."

He also paid a tremendously deep personal price for doing what no western government would do: the right thing.

“There were unspeakable horrors,” Mbonyishuti said. “Little babies suffered the most, some of them were my little cousins. The babies were tossed against walls, others barbecued alive ... I know it is hard to believe, but what I don’t understand is why?”

It's difficult to understand how and why a genocide takes place. In his book Get 'Em All! Kill 'Em!, Bruce Wilshire offers a theorem of cultural mortal terror as justification for genocide -- explaining that, in many cases, an ethnic group perpetrating ethnic cleansing or a genocide do so because they perceive their victims as threatening to the ongoing survival of their culture.

Sometimes this kind of terror leads to distinctly irrational actions. In Rwanda, Interhamwe and Hutu mobs attempted to kill Tutsis on their way to being evacuated from the country.

If the genocide were being carried out under rational conditions, one would have expected that Tutsis leaving the country would have served Hutu purposes just as well as annhiliating them. Then again, genocides are rarely carried out under rational pretenses.

Even under the fear of extinction a genocide is difficult to justiy -- one has to remember that justification rests on a foundation of opinion, and thus cannot be accomplished objectively.

Eugene Mbonyishuti and his family arrived in Canada in 2008. It's unlikely that any of them will ever fully leave the Rwandan genocide behind them.

This is unfortunate for them, but very important for the rest of the world. The best way to ensure that horrors such as that which began in Rwanda 15 years ago today is to allow them to be forgotten.

The world needs these sobering reminders.

Witness the New Holocaust Denial

Black Star News denies Rwandan genocide

15 years ago, the Rwandan genocide slowly began to unfold.

The events began on April 6, 1994, and by April 17, 1994 had escalated into the wholesale slaughter of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

The atrocities that unfolded during the Rwandan genocide have long stood as an example of why the western world needs to be prepared to intervene in order to prevent such human catastrophes.

But not to individuals like Keith Harmon Snow. Like the various loons who deny -- or at least conflate -- the Holocaust, Snow has a political agenda that is ill-served by the Rwandan genocide. Like Holocaust deniers (and 9/11 "truth"ers), Snow is so intent upon pushing that agenda that he's prepared to revise the history of the Rwandan genocide.

In an article appearing in Black Star News, Snow strings together a convoluted conspiracy theory in which human rights activists colluded against Hutus.

"The genocide label applied by Alison Des Forges and certain human rights bodies in May of 1994 was misdirected, used to accuse and criminalize only the majority Hutu people and the remnants of the decapitated Habyarimana government," Snow writes, "much as the genocide and war crimes accusations have been selectively applied against President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan."

According to Snow, not only did no genocide take place in Rwanda, but no genocide is currently taking place in the Sudan. Instead, as it turns out, these genocide charges are part of an American imperialist plot.

"The Clinton Administration refused to apply the genocide label," Snow explains. "To do so might have compromised an ongoing US-backed covert operation: the invasion of Rwanda by the Pentagon’s proxy force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front."

Interestingly, Snow has very little to say about the French involvement in the genocide. France had supplied weapons to the Rwandan government before and during the civil war that took place in accordance with the genocide. Many of those weapons were passed on to the Interhamwe by sympathizers within the Rwandan military's Hutu militias.

Moreover, Snow suggests that the plane crash taht killed Alison Des Forges may have been the work of Paul Kagame.

"According to U.S. intelligence insider Wayne Madsen, Des Forges’ criticisms of the US-brokered pact between Rwanda's President Paul Kagame and the Democratic Republic of Congo's President Joseph Kabila in December 2008 'earned her some powerful enemies ranging from the murderous Kagame, who will not think twice about sending his agents to silence critics abroad, and international interests who want nothing to prevent them from looting the DRC’s vast mineral and energy resources.'"

But Snow's conspiracy theory makes little sense. Although Des Forges' criticisms of Kagame's deal with Kabila -- -- was damaging, Des Forges' invokation of the genocide label marshalled a surplus of international sympathy for Kagame and the RPF.

Furthermore, Snow accuses Des Forges of helping unjustly indict the Habyanmara government.

"Billed as a 'tireless champion' and 'leading light in African human rights,' there is much more to this story than the western propaganda system has revealed," Snow muses. "Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch (HRW) provided intelligence to the US government at the time of the 1994 crises, and they have continued in this role to the present. Des Forges also supported the show trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), institutionalizing victor’s justice and shielding the Kagame regime."

"Alison Des Forges came across to many people as a wonderful human being with great compassion and impeccable integrity," Snow writes. "In the recent past, Alison Des Forges spoke—to some limited degree—against the war crimes of the Kagame regime."

"In life she did not speak about the deeper realities of 'genocide in Rwanda', and she had plenty of chances. In fact, she is the primary purveyor of the inversion of truth that covered up the deeper US role in the Rwanda 'genocide', and she spent the past 10 years of her life explaining away the inconsistencies, covering up the facts, revising her own story when necessary, and manipulating public opinion about war crimes in the Great Lakes of Africa—in service to the US government and powerful corporations involved in the plunder and depopulation of the region."

All of this, of course, is submitted without evidence.

"Kagame, Rwanda’s one-party president 'elected' through rigged elections, sued Charles Onana for defamation in a French court in 2002; Kagame lost the original trial and the appeal," Snow continues. "Kagame was the commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and a leading agent—with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and their US, UK, Belgian and Israeli backers—behind the massive bloodshed and ongoing terrorism in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan and Somalia."

Snow insists that the events of the Rwandan genocide -- which were not a genocide, despite the perpetrators' intent to kill every single living Tutsi -- were a conspiracy between human rights organizations, the United States, Britain, Begium and Israel.

"In his book, Onana accused Kagame of being the principle instigator of the missile attack of April 6, 1994 that brought down the plane carrying Rwanda's President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi's Cyprien Ntaryamira," Snow continues. "Unlike the UN's ongoing high-profile investigation of the murder of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik Hariri, no major power has pushed for a similar probe into the murder of the two African presidents."

Yet much of the evidence that Kagame was responsible for shooting down Habyanmara's plane was actually rejected by a French parliamentary inquiry -- and considering France's bloody hands in relation to the genocide, the French had every motive to point the finger of blame at somebody else.

"But the U.S. military was heavily backing the RPF tactically and strategically already," Snow continues. "Key to the operation were 'former' Special Operations Forces (Ronco Company) providing military equipment and ferrying RPA troops from Uganda to Rwanda; the Pentagon's logistical and communications support; Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA operatives. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), was also collaborating with the RPF, serving the Pentagon interest."

Snow would have done well to look into the circumstance Dallaire and UNAMIR found themselves in during the genocide. If UNAMIR were really a proxy force acting on behalf of the United States in support of the RPF, it was the smallest and most poorly-equipped proxy force in the history of proxy warfare.

Dallaire spent the bulk of his time convening between Rwandan political leaders while attempting to keep himself, his troops, and as many Tutsi refugees as possible, alive.

That meets a very odd definition of outright collaboration.

According to Snow even the news media were part of the conspiracy.

"Genocide in Rwanda became a massive psychological operation directed against media consumers using ghastly images—produced by RPA-embedded photographers like James Nachtwey and Gilles Peres—to infer that all cadavers were Tutsi victims of an orchestrated Hutu genocide," Snow insists, "meanwhile the text was racist disinformation produced by Joshua Hammer."

This despite the fact that journalists operating in the region secured footage of Hutu militias slaughtering Tutsis, and Red Cross workers active throughout the region shared many of the same stories.

According to Snow, Des Forges was central to the media conspiracy.

"Des Forges constantly influenced the US media through special briefings to the editorial boards and reporters of the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and Associated Press, and she was frequently presented as an 'expert' on genocide in Rwanda for CNN, 60 Minutes, Nightline, All Things Considered, BBC, Radio France Internationale, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company."

"Such relations explain the mass media’s consistency in producing the monolithic disinformation about Rwanda that shielded the illegal U.S.-backed and covert RPF- Ugandan guerrilla insurgency," Snow continues. "The blanket media coverage falsely situated the 'Rwanda genocide' as it is now widely misunderstood: 100 days of genocide, 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed with machetes; the 'highly disciplined' RPF stopping the genocide."

Even on the basis of its most basic arguments -- that the Rwandan Patriotic Front was an external invader -- falls flat in the face of the fact that Paul Kagame and the other members of the RPF were all natives of Rwanda, and were acting against a government that was actively oppressing Tutsis.

Like Holocaust deniers, Snow plays fast and loose with the truth in the course of spinning a conspiracy theory that essentially "invented" the Rwandan genocide, despite the existence of nearly 1,000,000 Rwandans, the vast majority of them Tutsis.

Like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide is most effectively commemorated by the mass graves of its victims. Anyone who cares to examine the evidence of the genocide first-hand can travel to Rwanda and tour the killing fields. In many cases, the bones of the victims remain where they were piled.

Like Holocaust deniers, Rwandan genocide deniers like Keith Harmon Snow have to ignore the strongest evidence for the events -- the corpses of its victims, and the nearly 1,000,000 Rwandans who, in the course of a media-broadcast 100-day slaughter, ceased to be.

One wonders how individuals like Keith Harmon Snow can look themselves in a mirror.